Snowshoeing in the Sierras

A few weeks ago I bought a new pair of snowshoes on sale at REI and on Sunday I finally got to try them out. It is a bit late in the season, and the snow was not at its best, but, nevertheless, it was a nice hike in the snow and the shoes worked very well indeed. My friend Sheilah and I went up to Matrimony Ridge, a ridgeline to the west near Donner Summit with a great view across the Sierra’s towards the Summit and the Desolation Wilderness to the South.


The location, Matrimony Ridge, is so called because the great view and the wonderful old weather-beaten Jeffrey Pine trees on the top make it an ideal place for those more adventurous couples to get married . Well today, the view was great but the wind was howling and it was not a place to hang around for too long. No one getting married today either.

Bees take up residence again...

As you might know, it has been a terrible time for bees here in the U.S. of late. I have been unable to keep a healthy hive going this past couple of years despite my best intentions. Nevertheless, I am determined to keep trying.

I had an empty hive in the back of my yard, just a couple of empty boxes, ready for my bees which I ordered recently and which should be arriving in April. Well this week I noticed some activity around the hive and at first I thought it was just the odd wandering bee that was looking around inside for perhaps some old honey. But the activity was sustained and today I took the lid off to find a more than just a few bees. Although I didn't see the queen, it looks like a swarm has taken up residence. How nice is that. Of course I just ordered two packages of bees (a package is a queen and 3 pounds of bees) that will be arriving in April, so now I might have 3 hives in the back yard - feast or famine.

Incidentlally, a truck carrying bees hives up the Sacramento Valley overturned just south of here last weekend and caused quite a stir. As you can imagine some 400+ hives tipped over on the side of the road would be quite a big deal - not your usual clean up job. I wonder if my bees are refugees from the overturned truck - who knows.

A pair of bridges

This week I made a couple of bridges for Nancy and Jeff's back yard. Not anything elaborate, just backyard landscape bridges but they turned out pretty good in the end so I thought I might show off the fruits of my labour.


It has been ages since I did any woodworking projects and I really enjoyed it. I ended up using some tropical hardwood - something called Ipe (I had never heard of it before) but it was beatiful wood and not much more expensive than the more typical local Redwood. According to the sales website, Ipe is sustainably grown so no Amazon rainforest was destroyed in the making of these bridges.

A pair of Steve White's

This weekend I ran in the Shamrock Half Marathon in Sacramento. It was a chance to meet up with my running namesake, Steve White – a much younger and much faster runner than I. The other Steve started running seriously a while ago and keeps getting confused with me and me with him. Since I am slower, I was always getting credit for his much faster times (I will take the credit any way I can get it), while he was always receiving the dubious attributes of my slower pace. Of course, anyone who looked at the ages could tell the difference but people don’t always do that.

So at the weekend, the other White Steve, was running as the 2hr pacer for the race (that means he runs with a sign saying 2:00 hours and he is supposed to keep to an even pace that will cross the finish line in exactly 2 hrs). This made him easily identifiable and I was able to meet him and thank him for improving my performance. Also, since he was slowing down to 2 hours in his role as pacer, I was able to run with him, and we crossed the finish line together – me a fraction of a second ahead of him, for the first and likely only time.

There is also a Steve White who was District Attorney in Sacramento and is now a judge. This lead to some confusion and misguided estimations of my position in the community. There’s also, what looks like a cheesy author called Steve White, even a black actor, and a British musician, a drummer. It’s apparently a very common name. A Google vanity search does nothing to uncover anything about me – thank goodness.