Yes, you read that right. 17 years. That is like a light murder sentence, not a hockey contract.

1) Inactive blogs. No point in linking to a blog that hasn’t had a meaningful post in months.
2) People who have stopped linking to me.

I left everyone else. If you have a good poker blog that is not on blogspot.com or wordpress.com and you want to swap links, feel free to get in touch at natarem@gmail.com. I can’t guarantee that I’ll agree to a swap with everyone but I have plenty of room on the sidebar and not a ton of blogs there.

So I’m really just recovering from a really tiring June and July. I went on a family trip to a few national parks (Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon) in late June. We went with a company called Backroads which leads active group trips all over the world and the focus of our trip was hiking and biking. We made up four of about twenty people in the group so it was a pretty big group. This wasn’t our first Backroads trip: back in 2006 I went to the Canadian rockies with my family and Backroads. And my family has done a bunch of other trips with them. So we’re obviously happy with the job they do. It’s really nice because they organize and book everything and they make it easy to just focus on the hiking, biking and sightseeing. Everything else is taken care of.

Our trip started out in St George, UT where we met up with the guides and the rest of the group. We then drove up to Zion National Park which looks like this:

We did our first hike in the afternoon in a river canyon called “The Narrows”. It mostly consisted of walking up a river that ranged from ankle depth to above waist depth. At certain points the current was somewhat strong so they gave us a walking stick to help stabilize. Here’s a picture of me walking in the narrows:

It was a great hike because Zion is quite hot in late June and the water was the perfect thing to keep you cool. We went a few miles up and back but it was slow going because of the water and slippery rocks. I would recommend it although for me it was one of the not-so-exciting hikes on the trip.

For me, the best hike was the next one: Angel’s Landing. It’s a very well-known hike both in Zion and throughout the National Parks system. It is one of the deadliest trails in all of the US National Parks but it also offers some amazing views. Not to mention a nice sense of accomplishment at the top. So I decided to go up it. Here’s a view on the way up:

You can see the road below snaking through the Canyon. I’m not sure of the elevation at this point but I believe it was about 800 feet down to the valley floor. And it was a sheer drop off of the edge.

This kind of gives you an idea of what the last part of the hike was like. It was “chain assisted” with no guardrail and a very very long fall down. The goal was to get to the top of the hill you see in this picture:

And it was 800 feet down on one side, 1200 feet down on the other. The natural land bridge to get over to the summit was not wide at all and the rock was a bit sandy which made it kind of slippery at points. Here’s a shot looking back across the land bridge:

That picture is a little deceiving because it’s hard to tell what is part of the land bridge and what is part of the opposing cliff wall. The land bridge is actually hundreds of feet away from the cliff wall to the left until, towards the back, it starts to come together a bit more. If you look really closely you can see some specks on the cliff — those are people making their way to the top of Angel’s Landing.

And here I am, at the top.

In total, it’s about a 1.5-2 hour hike from the road to the top. I would recommend a lot of water if you do this hike and even more when it’s hot out. But you certainly don’t need to be an experienced hiker to make it to the top (I never hike anywhere, unless walking from a Vegas casino self-park counts). One of the cool things about this hike is that you can leave Vegas in the morning, get to Zion, do the hike and be back in Vegas that night (shaniac did this exact thing a few weeks ago). It’s a long day but it’s a fun way to do an awesome hike.

After Zion (we did some more stuff there, including some biking, but no point going over every little thing), we headed to the Grand Canyon. This was my first time seeing the Grand Canyon from the ground so I was pretty excited. I’d seen it from planes at least five times but that really isn’t the same. Here’s a shot I took from the front of the van on the road. The van in front of us is the other Backroads vehicle with the bikes on top:

The total ride was about 3.5 hours but we broke it up with a lunch stop so it went pretty quickly. We did a short intro hike, saw the Canyon and then the next day actually hiked a bit into the Canyon. It is a full day process to get to the bottom (and obviously to get back out too) so we only went really a small fraction in. We used the North Kaibab trail (the only trail on the North Rim into the Canyon) and we went about two miles out of a total of fourteen to reach the Colorado river. But two miles in and two miles out managed to occupy a good portion of the morning. Here’s a picture of myself and my mom at the lowest point we made it to:

The hike back up from there was kind of rough given the heat and all but I enjoyed the challenge. I want to go back and do a rim-to-rim hike (usually about three days if you aren’t rushing) so now I just need to find some people to go with. I’d do it with a group but I don’t want to be the only person that I know in the group. Unfortunately most poker players consider walking around the Amazon room to be a lot of exercise so I probably need to find hiking people from a different area of my social network. We’ll see how that goes.

The next day we did another hike, this time along the rim. Here’s a picture of me about a foot away from a 3000 foot drop. I know it looks far in the pic but I really did not have any interest in getting any closer when I was out on the ledge.

And after our Grand Canyon tour, we headed back up to Utah to see Bryce Canyon. I’d heard amazing things about Bryce so I was expecting some awesome stuff. It didn’t disappoint. It was formed by some process involving erosion, stronger/weaker rocks, etc. I didn’t really pay much attention to the how. But the place was awesome. It is made up of a bunch of rock towers called Hoodoos. Hundreds or thousands of them. Here’s one of the funnier looking ones:

As you might imagine, that hoodoo is frequently compared to ET. The park itself looks like this:

There are just tons of hoodoos and various ridges carved away by erosion over a very long period of time. At one point, this was part of a sea that divided what is now the United States and I guess this is the eroded former sea floor (or at least that’s how it was explained to me).

Lastly, this is the path that I took back out of Bryce Canyon when I was finishing up my hike in the Canyon. A lot of switchbacks at high elevation leads to a ton of out of breath people. I passed a ton of people who were huffing and puffing pretty hard on their way up. CrossFit actually prepared me pretty well for the hiking and biking. I was never strained, sore or in trouble at any point during the whole trip.

Anyway, after a bike ride the following day, we went back to St George and I drove back to Vegas. It was a great trip and even though I only gave you the brief highlights I highly recommend checking out all three parks if you ever have a chance.

The PocketFives party trip report is next.

For a short trip report, yesterday was yellowsub’s birthday (happy 24) so I spent part of the day hanging out at sub’s house for the last time. He is moving out of his sick mansion today. Ozzy was over there with us as well. We basically just sat around at the pool, drank champagne and relaxed. Then, after a shower, we went to the Hard Rock to have dinner at Nobu. My business partner Mike and his wife Michele joined us, along with a number of other poker players. The CCR ended up being interesting. There were something like 11 cards in it (I bought out because I get much cheaper stuff at Nobu than those guys). Mike and sub both had two cards in the mix because of their wife and girlfriend. Mike and sub are both pretty convinced that they are very unlucky at flipping. As we went through, everyone was getting their cards back except for Mike. Finally it was down to three cards: Mike’s two cards and this guy named Tom. Tom is a british poker player who was in the sub mansion for the summer and the bill was actually a bit more than he’s comfortable gambling for. And while Mike definitely has the money to stomach the loss, he rarely CCRs and he was sweating the bill pretty hard. I’m pretty sure this was the biggest bill he’s ever CCRed for. So Mike’s card gets picked with three left and they’re down to heads up. Then it’s my turn to pick the last card and after sub separates the cards under the table into each hand, I do the ever-tricky “right hand… [pause] does NOT pay”. Mike’s second card was in sub’s right hand. So after getting his two cards to last into the final three, Mike sucked out to not pay the bill. He was, to say the least, relieved.

So after that we went to get some ice cream. It only took us four tries to find an open place but we ended up at the Coldstone by Sunset Station. Here’s a picture of sub at the Coldstone:

After that we went back to the mansion, hung out in the hot tub for a bit and then I went home. Fun day.

And like I said above, some trip reports coming soon, I think.