#FriFotos - Steps

In January, I got to photograph the UCI Cyclo-Cross World Championships. It was my first cyclo-cross event, and the first time I got to shoot something like this. I spent the day running around the course at Eva Bandman Park, trying to find the designated photographers' areas. I figured out early on how to get to the various areas around these steps. 

I was so impressed by these athletes. I can walk up stairs. And I can bike. And I can carry my bike up and down the eight steps from our basement -- but to ride miles on an insane course in snow, sand, mud, then run your bike up and down steps requires a special kind of madness. 

Friday Photos: Climbing the Schilthorn in Switzerland

​About two years ago, my brother, dad and I hiked from Stechelberg, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, to the peak of the Schilthorn, a 2000 meter hike. You start in the valley, immediately begin climbing, and six to eight hours later, you arrive at the summit, where you can take the cable car back to Stechelberg and catch the bus home.

The hike begins below the treeline, plateaus briefly in alpen meadows where grazing cows provide distraction (and sometimes obstacles), and then you start clambering over large boulders until you reach this path through shale. Depending on how many breaks you need, there’s only about an hour of hiking left from this point (there’s more boulder clambering, and a stretch of path where you can look over the edge into the other valley and imagine yourself falling, if not to your death, then at least to your serious injury. Better to just look ahead).

My brother and I have conquered this mountain twice. I plan to do it at least once more, knees permitting.

Happy Friday. May bad knees not get in the way of any weekend plans.

Friday Photos - Swiss Cows

This blog is very quickly becoming a Friday photo blog, but we’re at three business days until unemployment and I hope for at least one update a week to break up the “Friday photo, Friday photo, Friday photo” pattern.

Today, I give you Swiss cows.

Matador editor Carlo Alcos (@vagab0nderz on Twitter) asked about favorite sounds while traveling. Mine? Cow bells in the Alps. That sound reminds me of summer, hiking, sausage cooking over open fire (while I eat a cheese sandwich), Alpine wildflowers, cold, blue-green lakes and parasailers gliding high above valleys.

Happy weekend — I’m going to a bourbon distillery. Anyone else got good plans (like going to Costa Rica for the weekend)?

Friday Photos: Winter Sunsets

If you haven’t gathered from all my whining and complaining here and on Twitter, I don’t do so well in winter. But one thing I enjoy about this frigid, monochrome season is the sunsets. I don’t know if their timing just coincides with my walk home from work or if sunsets really are more vivid this time of year. Maybe it’s the bare trees letting through more of the sky. I do a lot of tree-gazing, and I like the way the silhouetted branches create stained glass windows of yellows, blues and reds with the sun’s fading light.

Way to go, nature, providing something to distract me from my frostbitten nose.

Friday Photo

​Happy Friday! 

Is it spring yet? Can it be? The forecast says snow in Louisville, so... no. ​