Road Trip / Fishing Trip – Reno, Nevada – Rigby, Idaho – Billings, Montana

Duke and I are on a road trip / fishing trip. We are driving to Fort Francis, Ontario and then flying to  a remote lake for a week of fishing with some of Duke's family.

We left on July 4 and drove 660 miles from Reno to Rigby Idaho. We stayed in a wonderful Bed and Breakfast that we stayed in on our road trip last year. The Blue Heron Bed and Breakfast is right on the Snake River. We sat outside on the balcony and had wine and cheese and crackers for dinner.
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On our drive on the fourth we stopped in Elko and caught the last of the Independence day parade.
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Nevada, Montana and Idaho have had a lot of rain this year and everything is green.

On the 5th, Sunday, we drove from Rigby, Idaho to Billings, Montana. North of Rigby we saw the Tetons in the east and drove through the far western edge of Yellowstone National Park.
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Today, July 6 we are driving from Billings to Bismarck, North Dakota.

I am uploading my trip pictures to Flickr here.

Tahoe Rim Trail – Spooner Summit to Tunnel Creek Road

Last Sunday and Monday, June 28-29 Duke and I hiked the 17 mile section of the Tahoe Rim Trail from Spooner Summit on Highway 50 to Tunnel Creek Road. The last three miles were off the trail down to the lake. The same road we took at the end of the Mount Rose to Tunnel Creek Road section. We did the hike it in two days and camped out seven miles from the beginning of the trail. Given how much rain we have had and the fact that we still saw some snow it was surprising to me that we only saw water once on the trail. It was at about 10 miles in. Here is a picture of Duke filtering water and refilling our water bottles.
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Here are a couple more scenery pictures. If you would like to see all the pictures from the hike you can see them on Flickr here. We only have one more section to do to comnplete the Tahoe Rim Trail. It is the 32.5 Echo Lake to Barker Pass section through the Desolation Wilderness. I think we will do it as a four day back packing trip in August.
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Todd Jonz – Musician and Man of Many Interests – Episode 3 of the Marion Vermazen Podcast

Todd Jonz – Musician and Man of Many Interests – Episode 3 of the Marion Vermazen Podcast

My goal for this podcast is to have interesting conversations with interesting people and to have fun doing it. In this show I interview an old friend, Todd Jonz about his life in rural Vermont and Prince Edward Island, Canada. I think you will enjoy listening to our conversation.

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Here are some links to some of the things we discussed

Castleton State College Music Ensembles

Green Mountain College Music

The Trombone Forum

Todd's profile and picture on the Trombone Forum

The Book What Color is Your Parachute

Card-enrjazz  

News sites mentioned

The Daily Beast

The New York Times

The Wall Street Journal

AppleInsider

Ed Felton's Freedom to Tinker

Groklaw

You should be able to subscribe to my podcast by clicking on the
link at
the top of the column to the right. To subscribe in iTunes,
from the iTunes Advanced menu select Subscribe to Podcast and copy the
feed URL.

"  http://marionvermazen.blogs.com/mv-podcast/rss.xml  "

Tahoe Rim Trail – Barker Pass to Ward Creek Road

Yesterday Duke and I hiked the section of the Tahoe Rim Trail from Barker Pass to Ward Creek Road. I think it is one of the prettiest sections of the trail. The views were fantastic.
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It was a total of 11.8 miles and though my feet hurt at the end it didn't seem as hard as last week so I must be getting in a little bit better shape. The hardest thing about the hike was that there were sections of the trail still covered with a lot of snow so that we couldn't always find the trail. We just headed in the right direction and eventually the trail would show up again. Walking over snow does slow us down so the hike took 6.5 hours.

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If you would like to see all of my pictures from the hike they are available here.

 I think next week we will hike a section on the west side of Lake Tahoe that is about 17 miles. We are planning to do it as a one night back pack.

Tahoe Rim Trail – Tahoe Meadows to Tunnel Creek Road

We hiked another part of the Tahoe Rim Trail yesterday. This time we hiked on the east side of the lake. Duke and I started at Tahoe Meadows on the Mount Rose Highway and hiked 9 miles south on the Tahoe Rim Trail to Tunnel Creek Road. Tunnel Creek Road is also called the Flume Trail and is very popular with mountain bikers.  We hiked down three miles from the TRT to highway 28 which is on the shore of the shore of the lake. So we did 9 miles on the TRT and 3 miles down to where we parked the truck.

It was a beautiful day. It started out with completely blue sky but by the time we were finished thunder clouds were rolling in. The views from this part of the trail are fantastic.

Here is a list of all the parts of the trail we have done so far.

Here are a few of the pictures from the hike yesterday. You can see all my pictures on Flickr here.

002 The only snow we saw was at Tahoe Meadows where we started the hike.

036 There were lots of wonderful views. This is the east shore of Lake Tahoe