Dave & Alisha: The End of Summer

Friday, September 7, 2012

The End of Summer

Dave says: I have neglected the blog for awhile but it is time to return and provide an update for the last couple of months. This summer I spent most of my time working on research and was able to make some progress on a few different papers. At the beginning of August, I traveled to the Academy of Management for the yearly conference. It was fun to see all my favorite people including former Arizona students and Utah students and faculty. I'm not a big city person but Boston is a pretty nice big city with clean streets and buildings with interesting architecture. When not at the conference, Sam and I walked the Freedom Trail and went kayaking in the river.

I started school near the end of August. However, this semester I only have two classes and am spending most of my time doing research. Over the summer, I moved out of the large student office into a smaller shared office with Sam. The new PhD students have arrived (Daphna and Eugene) and we did a big back to school dinner at Blanco.

Alisha finished up her last race of the season in Aspen and somehow was able to spend 7 days in Colorado for only a single day of racing. Now that her season has finished, we have been doing some new adventures. Alisha and I hiked Lower Tanque Verde Falls one evening right after a monsoon. Later, Sam and Alex and I hiked the Upper Falls and did some good scrambling along the way. It is pretty cool to see giant waterfalls in the middle of the desert and scramble-hikes with lots of big boulders are my favorite type.

Emily and Alisha at the top of Independence Pass. They rode up and watched the pro men come by.

Tanque Verde Falls

Alisha and I have also been doing some trail running. I have found that trail running is much more fun than running on asphalt and we live close to lots of trails. Some of the best are over at Sabino Canyon and I recently saw a huge rattlesnake down by the dam (but fortunately a bit off the trail).

Over Labor Day, we did a big adventure up north. The first day, we traveled to Sedona and did a hike up the west fork of Oak Creek Canyon which is a very pretty hike in a canyon along a stream. The second day, we did a huge all-day mountain bike ride in Sedona on the HT 29ers. We started south of Sedona and made our way up to the north and west on trails, dirt roads, and pavement. We also managed both to get lost a couple of times and to get on some crazy technical trails but it was fun nevertheless. That evening, we drove up to Flagstaff and camped out in the wilderness by Walnut Canyon. The next morning, we embarked on another huge mountain bike ride first on Campbell Mesa, then on the Flagstaff Urban Trail System, then around on the Arizona Trail, and finally back on a bunch of dirt roads. Our rides both days ended with quick rides back to the car just as thunderstorms were starting to hit. We packed up the car about 5 minutes before the rain started dumping and made it to 1 pm church in Flagstaff with 1 minute to spare. After all this adventure, we headed south to Phoenix and had a nice time hanging out with my family.