Skiing is one of my favorite activities. Now that I live in the Bay Area, I will surely be visiting Tahoe quite a bit more. I've been around quite a few places but I think the place that sticks in my mind the clearest has to be Taos, New Mexico. The amount of advanced terraine there is amazing and the views are stunning.

I've mostly skiied at Mammoth Mt, which is primarily a Los Angeles destination. Mammoth, though it has its detractors, can be quite a challenging mountain. It is also very large. The picture you see here is one I took about 15 years ago of a friend of mine going off the top (at Wipeout) in the buff.

It really was a fun day in about 1980, or so. My friends almost stupidly gave me their clothes to keep. I could barely contain my laughter, but alas they eventually figuered out what would have happened :-(.

Click here for the whole view of Mammoth that day.

This was taken at Aspen's Gay Ski Week last year. I cooked quite a bit on that trip, and they chipped in and bought me this cool apron with wine stains on it.

I'm not much of cross country skier. It had really snowed at my folks place up in Oregon, and we could ski right off the deck.

This is a real picture of me skiing. Yeah, yeah, I look like a dork, I know but what can I say? I look better in the bumps, honest.

Sailing

I've been sailing for over 10 years now. I've raced the entire time doing many functions on the boats I've crewed on. My main function, however, has been running bow. I and my lover Todd normally work together as a team, he running mast and I on the pointy end.

I love sailing. It is one of the few things that I know of that completely absolves my mind of worrying about day to day stuff and concentrate only on the water, the wind, the day, and the feeling of being both at one and at the utter mercy of nature. Sailing is interesting also because it is such a game of smarts. It is one thing to get the technical aspects of actually running a boat down (which is no small feat), but the elements of tactics and strategy, both completely games of the mind, are so important that they can take a mediocre job of crewing to first place. And visa-versa.

Bow, next to driving the boat, is probably the most challenging job, both physically and in the number of things one has to keep straight in one's mind. The best run bow is one that nobody notices. If the cockpit is worrying about it, you're already in trouble. It also requires the greatest amount of coordination amongst the entire crew. Everybody must be in synch and working together to perform the necessary pieces of sets, jibes and douses. This primarily lands on the shoulders of the bowman to make certain it happens.

Although the bowman typically has nothing to say about tactics, a good one needs to anticipate the calls well before they are made -- or at least realize what the possibilities are and make guestimates as to their likelyhood. It is always better to have anticipated rather than being surprised. However surprises will and do happen so an integral part of doing bow is having a heads up attitude, and not get too flustered when bad things occur.

I think this picture was taken on my friend Glen's boat, Medicine Man off of Catalina Island.

Camping and Fishing

This is a salmon that I caught right off the Golden Gate Bridge last fall. It was 24 pounds, the biggest on the boat that day.

The Metolius River in Oregon is one of the most beautiful rivers that I've ever seen. The water really looks this blue. It is a spring fed river that pops up out of the ground full size. It feeds the Deschutes River at Lake Billy Chinook.

Here I'm flyfishing on the Metolius. That water is Cccccccccoooold.

Another picture of me fly fishing. My mom got this while I was completely unaware. It's taken on the Fall River in central Oregon, very close to where they live. The Fall River is another spring fed stream, but the fishing is really good. Thank goodness Ed my stepfather ties my flies.

We go up to my folks for Christmas every year. They make me go into the back woods to chop down our tree myself. This one was about 12 feet tall, I'd say.

A pretty picture of a field of Lupin somewhere in the Sierra.

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