Off Piste

Imagine my surprise when I sat in my living room a quarter mile from the heart of downtown this past Saturday night and could distinctly hear every note and every word of the fest (whichever one of the many this one was) music. The music was so clear it was if the performance stage was set up just down the street and the volume level equal to that of the garage band that occasionally practices across the street.

When I was a kid growing up in Colorado Springs, Colorado it was almost paradise. The town was small (some 29,000 inhabitants) with plenty of wide-open spaces surrounding a well laid out downtown grid, a wonderful parks system, great weather and plenty of outdoor recreational activities close by.

A year ago the annual Sisters Folk Festival (SFF) appeared to veer off mission in its pursuit of a younger audience (the current audience average age has to be in the late fifties) booking indie music bands and one group that sounded like they'd be more at home playing a frat party at OSU than at a folk festival.
Of course, there were some great folk singing staples mixed in and plenty of not overly amped music, but the trend to new music grated and didn't bode well for the venerable festival.

At this time of year we're told that most red-blooded American males are gaga over Major League Baseball's impending playoffs. The pennant races have tightened races in several of baseball's divisions. Will the Phillies once again come through for the National league or are those Reds going to surprise them? And don't forget about the heavily under-publicized and seldom-seen-on- tv, San Diego Padres.
Over on the American League side, can anyone stop the Yankees? Love the Rays and the Twins for their lack of overpaid stars but it looks like the Bronx juggernaut will again conquer all in the AL and win the World Series with no matter who comes out of the NL.

Twice in the past three years, I've opted to walk around a dangerous looking section of mountain bike trail only to end up in the ER. Call it clumsiness, call it good intentions gone awry, call it bad luck- it happened.

During his long tenure as head of the Bend Metro Parks and Recreation District, it was said of the late Vince Genna that he, “never met a ballfield he didn't like.” But Genna was more than just a ball sports guy as he held a long term vision for a walking/biking trail that would go along the Deschutes River from south of Bend through town and then north to Tumalo.

In the past two weeks, two legends in their respective fields (photography and track and field) passed away without much notice unless you happen to read the major metro newspapers online.
For those who take or admire photos of musicians at work, Herman Leonard's images are the cornerstone of popular music photography.

It was a mixed group, a few longtime Bend residents and some more recent arrivals. As the conversation turned to the pluses and minuses of living in our fair city, the longtime residents seemed a bit jaded in their outlook; the newer residents were more of the Bend as paradise-on-earth mindset.

 
 
Take Yosemite National Park around Tuolumne Meadows and environs, combine it with the best of the mountains of southern Colorado and you have Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. Yosemite for the granite rock and southern Colorado for the high alpine valleys cut by meandering crystal clear streams.

In his self-published book The Meanderings of A Fisherman, the late financier Dean Witter mused how one very popular Oregon stream looked like a flyfisher’s paradise when, in fact, it was quite the opposite.
Now I know the “looks good but isn't” Witter spoke of, as this past Sunday's flyfishing expedition turned out to be one of beautiful but unproductive waters.