Fifty Miler Memories, Part 2: Lassen Volcanic National ParkIn 1994 or 1995 or something like that, when I was an early teenager, I went on my second and final 50 mile hike Boy Scouts trip. I did not get lost overnight on this one. The most memorable part of this one was the hike up the Cinder Cone, an aerial view of which is above.
I was still too young and dumb to appreciate properly the scenery. Above you can see Mount Lassen off in the distance. It erupted in 1915 to some great carnage, I believe. I was also still closer to a pudgy elementary school kid than to a big high school athlete, so I bemoaned the all day week-long hiking.

This "ramp" is the start of the unique hike up the Cinder Cone. The top of this volcano, this pile of leftover ash, is 700 feet higher than the surrounding ground. There is some debate as to when it was created, I think they established it was around 1635.

The trail winds up pretty steep, the biggest challenge to the hike is that you are stepping on volcanic ash, basically, and you slide down about 6 inches for every foot you step forward. It is challenging but short and worthwhile.

The above picture shows what it looks like when you look sideways halfway up the hike.

Above, an aerial shot. Below, 2 random unknown kids- the key is, that is what it looks like when you get on top and look down inside the volcano. We went all the way down into the middle of it.

Fifty Miler Memories, Part 1, Mount Langley & Mount Whitney In about 1993, when I was about 12 years old, I went on my first of two fifty milers. These were the highlights of my failed Boy Scouts career. This trip was to the highest places in the continental United States, in central California.
Being an idiot little 12 year old, I didn't appreciate the scenery half so much as I bitched about the hike. We hiked for 7 days straight, for the full day, carrying our heavy backpacks, and camped at night. We took New Army Pass on the worst day of those hikes, ascending up to over 13,000 feet in elevation. The trail is 13 miles long and rises 6100 feet in elevation, apparently, so it wasn't easy. I have some old printed photos somewhere from that trip, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can get better quality and better shots to help tell the story.

I got lost overnight along with Greg Schindler (who later was an All-Pac-10 Offensive Lineman at Stanford and played for the 49ers, but bawled like a baby that night) and Doug Dickey (who did not cry) on one of those nights. They sent a helicopter for us the next morning. My parents are probably glad that happened in the days before cell phones.

Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet, is the highest point in the continental US. Interestingly, it is only 76 miles away from the lowest point in the United States, which is 282 feet below sea level, in Death Valley. In his book 'Age of Gold' about the California Gold Rush, Texas History professor HW Brands described the geological cause of such crumpling of that part of the Earth, like 2 pieces of paper hitting each other. Brands also tells of the people who tried to go to California this way instead of over Donner Pass to reach the gold fields in 1849. They didn't fare any better than the Donner Party- as you could imagine, if you had to go up and down such dramatic distances repeatedly in the 19th Century.

We went to Mount Langley, which, as you can see here, is on the same big formation with Mount Whitney and Mount Muir.

If I Were A Senator, I Would Vote Against Sotomayor

One factor that always pushes me towards voting for the Republicans is in judicial appointments. I don't see anything good about J. Sotomayor. Not that she is the devil or anything like that, but there is nothing to speak for her. Great, so she is Latina and female (I guess that is redundant, so I can just say "Great, she is Latina" or even "Great-Latina.")

What else is there? She is a rags to riches Bronx story. That is nice. She has been overturned a ton. She thinks she is a better judge because she is female and latin, as she said in 2001 “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She was part of that stupid firefighter ruling that is about to be overturned by the Supreme Court. She has gone around telling law students that "the federal appeals courts are where policy is made in America."

Well, it shouldn't be.

Why Vote For This Man?

Seriously, unless you put party blinding glasses on, you don't see Teddy Roosevelt anymore, you see obnoxious, self-righteous, drunken sailor tough guy. He has, as George Will says, been running for President for 10 years now. He has said nothing positive about the 8 or 25 years of Republican rule since Minnesota. He has been running against Barack Obama so ineffectively that Obama is about to absolutely clean his clock on election day. He does not defend capitalism at all, merely defending his own bizarre tax and health insurance schemes. He has somehow managed not to talk about foreign policy for 6 months now. I think the polls which presume a 2 way race will be surprised to see 2, 3, maybe 5% of voters on the right go for 3rd party guys like Bob Barr and write ins for Ron Paul. 

Snow


This delightful piece of furniture I got Brittany when we went to Gardner Village for her birthday yesterday. Gardner Village is wonderful this time if year. The cushions on "The Delightful Thing" flip over as needed and function like a coffee table!
As Jerry Seinfeld said "The Ottoman. An entire empire based on the concept of putting your feet up!"
Then, to make sure I never have to go upstairs, and so that I can spend many happy moments perusing the collection from my spot, I got permission to move my bookcases (well, the 4 that match anyway) into the living room.
The Delightful Thing (that is its name) holds remote controls, blankets, XBox 360 wireless controllers, Rock Star microphones, pens, books, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Lord of the Rings, and Madden 2008 XBox games, and lots of other stuff under the cushions! Convenient, clean, nice.

BREAKING NEWS (October 10, 2008- SLC, UT)- Tim News Services, Inc. Has Called the Election in Favor of Barack Obama, in the biggest landslide in 2 decades.

I used to think there was a chance that once Obama would become President- then the economy would go south, maybe the foreign threats to the US would become more menacing because he was a "sing kumbaya" liberal who didn't know how to call something evil and bomb it, etc.

But I would like to say, right now, that it is now literally impossible for Obama to fail as President. He is starting with America at the bottom of the Ocean. The stock market is in absolute free fall like hasn't been seen in any of our lifetimes. The S&P 500 is down 46% and counting in the past 366 days. If you put $1 in the S&P 500, less risky that many investment choices, on October 9, 2007- it is worth 54 cents today. Less than 50 cents if you count inflation. There have been 10 Bear Markets (down 20% at least in the S&P 500) since the Depression. Only 2 of them approached 50%, and those were 2000-02 and 1973-74. Both of those were due to 1 big event and 1 cycle (9/11 and the Tech Bubblle deflating, and OPEC basically) and both of which were receovered from relatively quickly. This is different.

When Obama takes over, in the midst of a Depression, in the midst of an 8 year war in Afghanistan that hasn't made progress I can name in 7 years, and in the midst of a 6 year war in Iraq that is waiting for Iraqi 3 year olds to stand up and start taking care of themselves by age 40, with a government that has debt of 11 trillions, in a country that is "out of ammunition" in every single sense- tiny military that is trying to be a global empire, negative savings rate, unemployment heading towards at least 12% as the latest consensus, what can he possibly do to fail?

Seriously, unless Pakistan conquers America, an Obama Presidency cannot fail. There is nowhere to go but up. And he will have a huge mandate, and a unified Congress, and something akin to emergency powers in the atmosphere- especially after the Republicans just socialized America's capital.

And where is the reasonable voice of conservatism? Not with McCain, who is running to Obama's left on economic issues with class warfare righteous rhetoric to make one cringe. Not with Wall Street, which is acting like one gigantic corporate lobbyist. Not with Bush, who is still certain that a marginal tax rate of 35% on the super rich, as opposed to 40% on the super rich, is what makes an economy go. Not with Bush, who resembles Woodrow Wilson in Iraq and Afghanistan and in his '04 inauguration speech, and who encouraged us to run up credit card debt after 9/11. Not with Bush, who tripled the national debt to test out John Maynard Keyes statement many decades ago that, in the long run, we'd all be dead.

OPEC will try to see that we are all dead, when they meet in Europe next month to try to stop this recent "drop" in oil prices.

I guess it helps that Iraq isn't in OPEC anymore and has no quota??

A Bubble Bursts

As you know, I work in school trust lands, and so a lot of what I do has to do with Utah real estate development- joint ventures with Ivory Homes, that kind of thing. I have been working through some projections and historical data, as this whole housing crisis seems to finally be arriving here, and some of it was kind of interesting.

Between 1963 and 2004, the median price of a home has risen by 6.6% per year. That means that the average home price doubles every 11 years.

But, keep in mind, that doesn’t mean that a given house, if you follow it for decades, appreciates so rapidly. What happens is that builders add to the top end almost exclusively, they have built newer, bigger, better homes for decades now, and as more and more of those are built, it stretches the median price up. The ordinary house in the ordinary city, say an average home in Murray, Utah, built in 1960, for example; it hasn’t appreciated as much, it probably has risen 3 or 4% a year, doubling maybe every 25 years- maybe almost keeping up with inflation. Something that was mid to high end in 1995 is not mid to high end anymore by a long shot.

Utah real estate has tended to be at or above the national average, but 2 years behind on trends. So, for example, when my parents bought a house in Utah in 1996, the nationwide median home sale price that year was $115,800. In Utah, the median that year was also $115.

By 1998, the national average was $128K, but in Utah it was $150K.

Around the time I finished at Westminster, Utah was in a real economic slump, and prices here- median $175- were below the national- median $185. In 2005, Utah’s median was down to $173- and the national median was up to $219.

Then Utah real estate shot up, to a median of $232 in 2007, above the national average of $217.

The real estate bubble has burst pretty bad the last couple years. Sacramento has taken it worse than anywhere else in the nation, down 40% in 2 years. Ouch! I have family there, and that is awful. Sacramento’s median was $356K in the 2nd quarter of 2007, and it was $229K in the 2nd quarter of 2008. In other words, a hypothetical person who bought for $400K in Sacramento 2 years ago, or who could’ve got an appraisal of $400K 2 years ago, their house is now worth $240K. 2/3 of Sacramento home sales are foreclosures right now.

For most of the country, housing is down 20% in 2 years. Texas has pretty much been immune, because Texas real estate is practically free to begin with, which is why I decided it was a better place to do law school than LA (down from $593K to $417K, wow, in case you are wondering).

This is going to be coming to the Salt Lake Valley, maybe as bad as Sacramento. The first sign was the insane climb it made in 2 or 3 years there. The second sign was the fact that there are zillions of $300-$500K houses, nothing but brand new 3000-5000 square foot things, all over the place- in this state of low wages, an average household income of $53,000, lots of kids, and tithing. Then, the 3rd sign, this Summer, was for sale signs on about 2/3 of the houses in the state- with absurd asking prices. The 4th sign was that none of them sold.

For the next 2 years, if anyone actually wants to sell their house, they will have to start lowering prices, fairly dramatically.

And consider this- houses aren't going to be an average of 7000 square feet in 2042. The marginal utility of square footage starts dramatically falling at a given point- depending on family size I'd bet. For 2-4 people, maybe it is 2500 square feet. For 6-9 people, maybe it is 3500 or 4000 square feet.

I think residential real estate as an investment is vastly overrated. People should buy houses if they want for stability, for retirement savings, for the tax benefits that the government has no business giving, because they like to play Bob the Builder on it, etc. They should not be bought as investments.

A Saturday Picnic and Hike in Provo Canyon