Author Archives: Jeff C

Scotland 2014: Oban, Staffa and Iona

September 28, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off
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Dunollie Castle, at the north end of Oban Bay

Scotland’s odd little Inner Hebrides island of Staffa is famous for more than sightseeing.  The 19th Century composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote a now-famous overture about it:  the Hebrides Overture (a.k.a. “Fingal’s Cave”).  Too bad there was no orchestra around to play it when I went to visit.  (You can listen to it here if it’s not playing automatically:  http://www.vicenzapuericantores.it/mp3/mendelssohn_hebrides.mp3 ).  The Isle of Staffa is just a few hundred yards across, and is a geological fluke.  It’s a volcanic island with a huge layer of crystalized basalt columns.  Its most famous feature is that sea cave Mendelssohn focused on, now called Fingal’s Cave. It’s about 200 feet deep.

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Staffa

 

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The trip back from Staffa consists of an ferry ride to the Isle of Iona, another ferry to the Isle of Mull, a car ride to catch the ferry back to Oban on the mainland.  The church in the pictures is the Iona Abbey, established in 563 A.D. by now-Saint Columba and now a busy pilgrimage destination for folks who (for some reason) want to visit Columba’s grave.  That prominent stone cross, St. Martin’s Cross, is over 1200 years old.  The pretty pictures of the bay and from the ferry are Oban Bay.

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I was lucky to be able to travel Scotland with Jim Richardson and a couple of Scotch natives as guides. Jim is a long-time National Geographic photographer and is their go-to guy for Scotland; he’s been there dozens of times. In fact, the August 2014 edition of NatGeo has one of Jim’s photo essays from Scotland as its cover story. Great to have Jim to show about a dozen of us around  Scotland. That’s Jim in the red jacket waiting on the dock in the picture above (apparently someone from the group was late getting back to the boat . . .)

Scotland 2014: Gylen Castle

September 20, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

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The Scottish Isle of Kerrera is just a few hundred yards off the mainland west coast, near the town of Oban in the southern part of the Inner Hebrides.  A few dozen people (one of whom tends to 100 or so pet parrots) live there.  The sightseeing highlight is Gylen Castle, built on the south end of the island in about 1582.

To get to Gylen, you take a short ferry from Oban, then walk about three miles.  The ferry is a small one-car ferry, so you just stand where the one car would normally be.   When you get out near the castle, there’s no visitor center, no admission charge, no security guards or park rangers.  It’s just out there by itself like it has been for the last 500 years.

The castle was built by the MacDougall Clan and used in support of James I – then the king of a united England, Ireland and Scotland.   In the mid 1600s, he was at war with the “Covenanters” (crazy Presbyterians, apparently).  They laid siege to the MacDougall Clan soldiers at Gylen.  Apparently the castle’s defense systems had one big flaw – access to fresh water.  The very thirsty soldiers holed up inside were eventually coaxed into coming out voluntarily, only to be promptly killed by their surrounding attackers.

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Gylen wasn’t a true “castle,” but was more of a small watchtower or fort.  Its perch above the waters  was a perfect vantage point to watch for threatening ships entering the Firth of Lorn near Oban.  Now that same perch makes modest Gylen one of Scotland’s most picturesque spots.

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Scotland 2014 Independence Referendum: God Save the King(dom)?

September 16, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

One thing at stake in the Scottish Independence referendum is the iconic flag of Great Britain – the Union Jack.  They call it the Union Jack because it was the combination — “union” – of the old English and Irish red crosses, and the old Scottish blue flag with a white diagonal cross.  No more union could mean no more Union Jack!

I ran across these three Scottish Independence supporters on the hike up to Ben A'an in Scotland's Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, just days before the Indpendence Referendum

I ran across these three Scottish Independence supporters on a weekend hike up to the tiny peak of Ben A’an in Scotland’s Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, just days before the Independence Referendum.   That’s Loch Katrine in the background.

Since at least the 13th Century times of the real Braveheart, William Wallace, the Scots have variously, vigorously, and repeatedly fought for, gained, and relinquished their independence from England.  In 1707, the Scottish parliament ended (mostly) the centuries of bloody battles, and voluntarily entered an economic union with England, making Scotland officially part of Great Britain, and giving up its separate currency, parliament, and military.

In recent decades, a new movement for Scottish independence has taken root.  The Scots re-formed their own parliament in 1999.  This week, the Scots take to the polls for a referendum on independence from England.

The “Yes” Independence movement has lots of momentum and its rallying cries sound sympathetic – perhaps especially to Americans (and Australians and Canadians and half the planet) who now love the Brits as dear allies, but appreciate having gained our own independence from them all the same.  Beyond the need for new flags, a “Yes” vote (for independence) would surely raise lots of complications.  Would Scotland join NATO (and how would its army be formed)?  The E.U.?  Would it have to start its own currency?  Who can tax the oil revenues from the North Sea?  Who’ll get custody of Queen Elizabeth?  There are lots of predictions of economic and political chaos.

The independence movement makes lots of semi-socialist-sounding promises of government care-taking.  The Economist magazine mocks it gently as offering a “dreamier” vision of Scotland’s future, “promising Scandinavian-style public services supported by taxation closer to American levels,” and concludes that the plan being pitched by the “Yes” men is “fantasy.”   Still, I guess the Economist would have scoffed at Washington and Jefferson if that magazine had been invented 250 years back.

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Either way, it’s an interesting time to be visiting Scotland.  While hiking up Ben A’an (Gaelic for “small pointed peak”) just four days before the independence referendum election, I ran across the three ladies you see in the picture above.  They carried their blue “Yes” For Independence balloon all the way to the top, and were intent on somehow planting that yellow Scottish flag (actually a bath towel, but whatever) at the top.  They were glad to pose and share a few thoughts about their plans for the future in an old, old country that might be born anew in the days or years to come.

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A “Yes” vote is a vote for independence; “No” is a vote to keep the Union together.  At least in Edinburgh and the Highlands, there are a lot more “Yes” signs visible on the streets.  It may be telling that the biggest anti-independence sign I saw was the one one strapped to the iron fence of a very nice, aristocratic-looking home.  The word “bairns” (on the “Yes” sticker) means baby in Scottish and Northern English. 

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Leadville 100 Trail Run – A View from the Sidelines

August 19, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

As a spectator watching the 30-hour Leadville Trail 100 Run last weekend, I watched the 4 a.m. pre-dawn start on Saturday, put in a very long day along the course, got a nice dinner and a full night’s sleep, then woke up , had breakfast, and headed down to watch most of the runners cross the finish line mid-morning on Sunday.

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The Leadville Trail 100 Run starts in the dark, at 4 a.m. in downtown Leadville

About half of the 700 or so amazingly fit and marginally insane runners who crossed the start line at 4am last Saturday made it back to finish in downtown Leadville — after an almost unbelievable 100-mile trail run — before the 30-hour time cutoff.  One hundred miles.  On foot.  All of it between 9200 and 12,600 feet elevation, and doing more climbing than an ascent of Kilimanjaro.

Even for someone who’s done several “ultra” endurance events (on foot, bike, and otherwise, and including some in Leadville‘s thin air), the 100 mile mountain trail run is hard to get your head around.  Of the lucky half that do finish, the vast majority take over 24 hours — most watching two days’ sunrises during the same race.  They don’t sleep — they barely even stop moving.  I was eager to get some pictures of the event, but a major motive for my spontaneous trip to Colorado was to see if the Run was something I might conceivably do someday.  The verdict?  I’m not so sure.

A few miles into the race, before sunrise on the first morning, the racers start a trail that skirts the edge of Turquoise Lake, west of Leadville.  You can see the runners spread out for miles along the lakeshore, their headlamps and flashlights twinkling through the trees and outlining the edge of the lake with bluish light.

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A three-mile-long string of runners makes its way along the trail at the edge of Turquoise Lake during the first hours of the LT100 Trail Run.

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The signature features of the Leadville course are its two separate ascents of  12,600-foot-high Hope Pass — once in each direction at mile 45 and mile 55 of the run.  The aid station near the top was a great place to watch a few hours of the race mid-afternoon on Saturday.  It took well over two hours to hike up to the top, so there were hardly any other spectators and only a small squad of volunteers up there handing out water and food.  There were 20 llamas hanging out — they’d carried all the supplies up there because the trails up are too high, steep, narrow and rocky for any vehicles.  We watched the leaders coming back over the pass on the inbound leg, and watched most of the more mortal racers hiking up the mountain — still less than halfway through the race after nearly 12 hours.

The guy in the yellow shorts is Robert Krar — flying down the mountain after his second ascent of Hope Pass.  He went on to win the race that night with a time of just 16 hours and 9 minutes.

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We cheered for and chatted with dozens of runners, often the same faces several times in different locations.  Dramas unfolded, and faces became familiar.  Inevitably, we remembered them with descriptive nicknames.  There was British Guy.  Sandals.  Bathroom Guy.  Peeing Girl.  Elmo.  Duck Dynasty.  As we descended from Hope Pass, we found Air Force Dave still only halfway up on his first ascent at 4:15pm — the deadline to get over the pass.  We offered him some food and water and tried to buoy his spirits as he turned around and walked back downhill with us.    I saw him quietly remove his race number in a symbolic personal ceremony recognizing that his race had ended early with a “DNF” (Did Not Finish).   “Puker Guy” had a happier ending:  we first saw him in trouble at mile 43,  doubled over, nauseous and struggling, but happily we saw him crossing the finish line 57 miles (and about 17 hours) later, flanked by his celebrating friends and family.

Ken Chlouber, the founder of the Leadville Race Series, famously tells every 100-mile racer, “You are better than you think you are; you can do more than you think you can!”  I don’t think that’s true for everyone — certainly some folks aren’t even as good as they think they are or can’t actually do what they think they can.  Most people are afraid to ever find out; Leadville is one of the places you go to do that.  Somehow, every racer can and should be both proud and humbled, no matter how their race ends.  Win or lose, finish or fail, these were the folks who weren’t afraid learn whether Ken was right — about them.

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#674 Trevor Teeselink (center) was the “Last Ass Over the Pass” — the last finisher to reach the finish — just four minutes ahead of the 30 hour deadline.

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Two new friends I met and ran with some this summer in Leadville were among the 100-mile finishers.  Somehow I saw Stephanie Lefferts (in green and white) over and over during the race — both directions at Turquoise Lake, at Hope Pass and at the finish.  Her boyfriend Mike Ambrose was so fast (he finished in the top 20 despite a nasty fall that almost ended his race) I barely saw him during the race and missed his midnight finish.  After a nap and shower, he was back at the finish line to celebrate with Stephanie and her dad at 9:25 a.m. Sunday morning.  Congrats to them both.

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Leadville Silver Rush 50 Trail Run

July 27, 2014 by Jeff C | Comments Off

I wasn’t really surprised to learn that running 50 miles in a day is hard.  Especially if it’s on rocky, high-mountain trails.  

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My Mom and Dad came up from Oklahoma to watch and cheer — and to hold me up for a minute after the finish!   (Thanks to Mike Short for most of these pictures!)

A dirty little secret about the Leadville Silver Rush 50 Trail Run is that it isn’t really 50 miles – it’s more like 47.  Maybe they’re counting the fact that there was a vertical mile and a half of climb (7,400 ft) and the same amount of descent.  Most of the race was on  “jeep” or fire-service roads, and most of it was between 11,000 and 12,000 feet in elevation – up where the air gets really thin and trees can’t survive on the mountainsides.  That amount of climb is the rough equivalent of climbing up and down a 12-storey building during each mile – or of scaling the Empire State Building six times during the race.

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The race starts at the bottom of the local ski slope and heads right straight up.

The absolute highlight of the race was my support “crew.”  At least 20 times over the fifty-mile course I was greeted by a group of my friends and family – sometimes as many as nine of them, all of whom had somehow found their way to Leadville that weekend and spent their day cheering and helping me.  Mike Short was my personal photographer (taking most of the pictures on this page).  My top supporters for the last 48 years (my Mom and Dad) chased me on their ATV.  Bjorn Hegelman (there with wife Jodie) was my biggest (literally) supporter (see photo below if you don’t get this joke).  Dr. Don Wilsey (a friend I met during my Bolivia experience) drove over from Colorado Springs.

Shane and Michele Merz and Scott Humphries were my roving pit crew — chasing me on ATVs with Gatorade and food and going above and beyond my imaginings even for SuperFans.  When I caught sight of them up the trail (or heard their cowbells through the woods), I could yell, “I need sunscreen, baby wipes, and crackers!”  No problem.  “Chapstick, and bug spray!?”  Here you go.  “Diet coke and cookies?”  Coming right up.  They were so great it was absurd.  I might – MIGHT – have been able to finish without all that support, but it surely wouldn’t have been as happy, fast, or fun.

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My support crew at 5:30a.m.! (Not shown: Mike Short, who took most of these pictures).

Spending a summer in Leadville demonstrates a persistent fact of life:  no matter what you do — there’s always somebody doing twice as well,  going twice as far, twice as fast, twice as tough or as often . . . something.  Several hundred great mountain bikers do the fifty-mile race, only to have hundreds of runners cover exactly the same course the next day without the benefit of a bicycle.  Celebrate your fifty-mile run and you’ll still be consigned to a backseat behind the folks who’ll run a HUNDRED miles here over even-tougher terrain in August.  Seriously.  Running “just” the 50 mile race gets only modest respect in Leadville.

Before last weekend, I’d never run more than 26.2 miles in a day, so committing to run 50 – especially in Leadville — was a big leap.  I was emboldened by the fact that I’ve done several events in the past that took 11 to 13 hours each (Ironman triathlons and 100-mile mountain bike races).  I’d done an Ironman triathlon just a month before, so I thought I could get away with minimal extra training.  My theories mostly panned out fine, with the possible exception that I didn’t fully realize how hard a rocky Rocky Mountain mountain trail can be on your feet and ankles.

 I’m never going to be among the fastest at an event like this.  I finished in 11 hours and 30 minutes — far behind the winners, in about the middle third of runners.  In fact, given my slow-but-steady pace, I hesitate to call it a “run.”  Still, often there’s a good chance I’m among those having the most fun.  On crazy, long events like this, my reflex when I see friends or family is usually to raise my hands over my head in a celebratory pose, to whoop and smile and run just a little bit faster.  I’m smiling in almost every picture.  In the setting of a fifty-mile run, I can’t pretend it was easy, but I really did have as much fun as it looks like I did.

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Already above the tree line, with a long ways to go, this was one of four separate climbs up to 12,000 ft. (This is one of just a couple of pictures I took myself with a tiny camera I carried on part of the trip.)