Category Archives: Hiking

Mt Princeton

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Dan and Courtney on the Summit of Mt. Princeton

Courtney and I are vacationing in Colorado, and yesterday we climbed Mt. Princeton (14,197′), a 14er in the Sawatch Range.  We hiked ~4200′ of vertical, which took us about 8 hours.  We underestimated the effect of the altitude, even though we have hiked at higher altitudes before.  Headaches and lots of huffing and puffing – coming from sea level a few days earlier did not help.  We both agreed it was one of the toughest hikes we’ve done.  We took a well-deserved soak in the Mt. Princeton Hot Springs afterward.

The most difficult part was the drive up the Mt. Princeton Road.  We took on the Mt Princeton Road in a 2WD Ford Focus and survived, but I wouldn‘t try it again. We had to go extremely slowly to avoid bottoming out on the many large rollers. We scraped several times and spun our tires, but escaped without getting stuck. The road is very narrow and there is no room to pass or turn around – 4WD vehicles were catching up to us and adding to the stress. We parked at a pullout below the radio towers not knowing what was ahead. The whole thing was funny in retrospect once we were safely back at the bottom.  We wished we had taken some pictures or a video, but it was too stressful at the time.

The panoramic view from the top of Mt. Princeton was spectacular!

The last 8 months

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I haven’t posted much here in a while. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to write about. I’ve had too much to write about. Now that the stress of the wedding is over, I’m to just focusing on enjoying marriage and writing my thesis. Here’s a list of the major things I’ve done in the last 8 months:

  • Got engaged
  • Planned a wedding and got married
  • Planned and went on a Honeymoon to Chile
  • Moved twice
  • Ran 2 marathons
  • Started writing my thesis
  • Took 2 economics classes
  • Went backpacking in CA for a week

On the move…

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This weekend I’m moving out of MIT grad housing to an apartment in Davis Square.  I think I would have liked to stay longer in Ashdown House but I’m also becoming disgruntled at the way MIT treats its graduate students. I’m moving out of Ashdown because MIT housing is closing it for renovations and moving all the grad students to a new Ashdown. This way they can pack the old Ashdown full of undergrads and charge the grad students $$$ to live in tiny dorm-sized rooms in the new Ashdown. It’s part of MIT’s larger goal of profiting off grad students as much as possible. Why graduate students want to move to the new building is equally baffling. I’m moving to a much nicer apartment with much lower rent.

Anyway, after I move I’m turning around and leaving on Tuesday to go backpacking in the Sierra-Nevadas for two weeks with Courtney and my family! We’ll try to make blog posts whenever we get the chance. We’re doing a 6 day trip in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, spending a few days in San Francisco, climbing Half Dome in Yosemite, and possibly attempting to climb Mt. Tyndall, one of the 14,000 ft peaks near Mt. Whitney.

I have to shut down my old web server for the move, so I’ve moved this website to my office computer. One downside of living off campus is the lack of high speed internet access.