View From the Bushes

Saturday I went back up Millcreek canyon; this time I did it with a friend and I started at the bottom of the canyon rather than the bottom of the valley. My friend is in better shape than I am and shortly after we started I told him to pass me. He took off up the road with an impressive amount of speed. As it turns out, since this was his first canyon he didn't gauge his effort very well and I found him stopped halfway up the first real steep part. After that he followed me for awhile trying to recover, but eventually he did and took off again. It became apparent fairly early on that I hadn't fully recovered from Tuesday's ride and so I figured I'd turn around at the gate, where I assumed my friend would wait for me -- that was a mistake.

As it turns out, he had stopped to take a nature break and while he was doing it he heard someone go by, their HRM beeping, and figured it had to be me, so he spent the time trying to catch up to me, which forced me to go all the way to the top (just over 7600 feet). This was not a pleasant experience. I don't know that I've ever gone slower up a hill then I did up some of the final steep sections of the canyon. I'm reasonably certain there were a couple of times when I could have walked my bike faster. Looking around the internet a little I found an account of someone who had done all four of the Salt Lake Canyons in a single day. You can compare his experience with Millcreek to mine.

Changing tracks, Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. There has been a lot of revisionist history since that time and I would venture to opine that the prevailing opinion, at least in academia, is that it was a mistake. I came across this article in the Weekly Standard which does a very good idea of going through all of the declassified intelligence and dissecting exactly what the principals were thinking. One of the conclusions is that the reason Truman didn't do more to justify dropping the bomb is that it would mean revealing that the plan for a ground invasion of Japan had completely fallen apart. An interesting read.

Walking funny
Ross