Honestly sounds like you are pushing too hard.

Ski resorts are highly controlled, basically unnatural environments where you can act like a hyperactive kid at the water park. The backcountry is different, but modern skiers really don’t seem to get it. They think it’s just a resort with more powder.

On the positive side, you do seem to be paying attention and noticing hazards around you, though not always before it’s too late. Maybe slow it down so you can react to surprises like branches and cliffs; anticipate what issues might appear on your line and have a plan if they do; stick close to the guide’s track rather than jetting off looking for trouble (if it worked once…); use the buddy system with someone trustworthy to keep an eye on you; maintain spacing; and go home if the conditions are skeevy.

This is how to have a long backcountry career.

Well, in fairness, Flaine has fantastic views of the Mont Blanc area.

Thanks! Yes, it’s like the flower is cleistogamous (closed and self-pollinating). So why be showy?

The patterning and frilly structure are almost like the modified leaves of a pitcher plant rather than a flower. And the stem is so featureless, like a lily, but there are too many tepals (lilies are three-merous).

Your point about regularity being “easier” is very helpful.

What does that have to do with our food supply? Oh yeah, nothing.

This also ignores the dangers of monoculture and loss of genetic diversity in our food supply. Remember the Irish potato famine?

You know, this is facile thinking.

If anyone actually cared about feeding the hungry, we wouldn’t be using a huge percentage of those GMOs to feed livestock, wasting massive calories in the conversion from perfectly edible plants to animal meat.

Take soy: 75% goes to livestock feed, and 19% to biodiesel. Meat makes more money, so no one gives a s$!t about “the hungry”.

Go pack sand, you shill.

If that happens, there are tons of excellent alternatives near Moab: like, drive the Lasal Mountain Loop Road. Or go check out Dinosaur tracks and exhibits. Or rent some boats and paddle the Moab Daily. Or spend an extra day in Canyonlands. Or, or, or!

You can also drive into Arches via a couple of backroads if you are into real 4-wheeling. Still need your pass, but no line.

But it’s not as obvious. Nor as easy without 4x4.

Is that Magic Mike?

Looks like he’s not even in the boat!

Bike rides.

Like, visit Alcatraz Island then pedal over the Golden Gate and ferry back. Or ferry over to Angel Island and ride. Or ferry over to pedal around Marin Headlands or out to Muir Woods. Or lots of rides around San Francisco.

Canyonlands, Arches, Zion, Capitol Reef: tons of mountain and gravel biking in the area. Actually, basically any Utah National Park, National Monument, or State Park is like that.

Riding in Yosemite gets you to a lot of places that cars aren’t allowed to go, faster than walking or taking the bus.

Etc.

Haha! My Houdini lives in my pack, no matter the season.

There are definitely two kinds of people out there: those that destroy everything and those who don’t. If you are the former, you shouldn’t buy lightweight gear. And if you do anyway, no whining when it breaks.

It’s fortunate that the rest of us have options now and everything isn’t wildly overbuilt anymore because of that one guy…well, except mountain bikes. They are clearly overbuilt. It just takes one YouTube video of a frame failure to tank a brand, even if the idiot flat-landed off a three-story building /eyeroll

Mostly the delays are once you hit the Wasatch Front. Traffic through the cities on the way to the airport can be tough.

January is gray in Moab. The town can get socked in with inversion. And daylight is short.

If you get a sunny spell, snow on the red rocks is lovely. But is just looking at scenery enough for you? Though there’s not a lot of snow, it lingers as ice on shady aspects, so hiking can be a challenge and biking is a terrible idea. The river can freeze, and there are no outfitters offering trips in the winter anyway.

It’s becoming more apparent that many ore deposits are the result of biological activity. Banded iron deposits, famously, but many others as well. There are even bacteria that concentrate gold.

What are you guys doing? I did multi-day ski-mountaineering in the Alps for years on Golite packs. I never once had a ski cut my bag.

Yep. I am aware. But it is literally the only effort ever made to use GMOs to actually improve our food supply rather than just profit from degrading it.

I imagine the people not downsizing still have mortgages?

Switzerland has 100-year mortgages! I guess you still get to keep any appreciation, but you’ll never actually own your home.

Yeah, but not all of them like GMOs. And so what? That makes it okay? This is such lazy thinking. It’s a problem no matter who does it, not an excuse.

This. Use a poncho if you need that much air. Otherwise, use a real Gore-Tex jacket when it’s raining and take it off when it isn’t. +1 for ShakeDry, if you can find it: the cycling-specific jackets are lightweight and minimalist.

I see no point in paying for Infinitum. Wear a Patagonia Houdini for light sprinkles when you are working hard. It dries so fast it will keep up with light precip.

Why, why, why do we all have to be plagued with heavy, uncomfortable pit zips in virtually everything?

If you aren’t using Van Life to sock away money, then you are going backwards. May not feel like it in your early 20’s. But like a lot of things, you don’t want to be staring down 50 and still doing it.

And Van Life isn’t exactly cheap anymore. There’s not much free camping left anywhere you actually want to be, plus dumping $100k into a build is insane—and it never ends. Maintenance on underpowered RVs (the unfashionable name for “Vans”) is expensive. Unlike a house, you won’t get most of that back.

If you are willing to suffer, a FAR better play is to get your hands on a piece of land and live rough on it while saving for some kind of house to put on it. Since you can’t generally borrow money to buy land, it doesn’t appreciate the way housing does and you can find affordable land, though maybe not where you’d prefer it to be.

NTA. If they keep at it, show them the tiny room in your basement that they will be living in after they blow through everything they have and come to you with nothing.

Should make downsizing now look much more appealing ;)

Not having kids makes it possible.

True. However, people are kinda stupid. They don’t buy a house, they buy a payment. When interest rates go up, those payments obviously get higher. So to get the same level of house with the same payments, your mortgage term has to get longer.

Then there’s the whole Air BnB effect: property is worth what you can earn on it, so people stupidly jumped on board thinking it was free money and sky-rocketed the price of homes. Now it’s all controlled by businesses anyway, so whatever bonus/bribe people initially got is gone.

It’s hard not to have to play the game when everyone else does. If everyone would refuse to keep playing the sucker, prices would come down. But since interest rates were nothing for so long, the prices climbed to whatever payment people could afford. Which is often near $1m. It will take a loooong time for wages to rise to meet that payment at today’s interest rates (which aren’t actually that high, despite all the whining).

Retirement age folks seem to get all this. Ideally they’d downsize, but they think they need all the equity of their now-valuable house, and want to pay the old lower price for a smaller one. I’m not sure that makes any sense—the ratio hasn’t changed (assuming you’ve paid off your house, that is). They wouldn’t actually be losing anything, but it’s hard to look at all that cash and not want to keep it all.

Well, that’s the pretty story they tell. GMOs could just as easily have targeted increased nutrition and flavor in food “to keep people fed and alive”, but they didn’t.