rick's another year closer to death

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On monday Joe and I (Mad) left really early to meet Shawn in Seward. Shawn, who owns a DJ business, has a boat and fishing gear. We went out into the sea to catch some silvers and rockfish. it was an amazing day. we were really tiered when we finally got home at 4 in the morning.

5 years!!!

i feel like i wrote the same thing last year, but i can't believe that it's already another year. shit. 5 years has FLOWN by. i had a wedding yesterday and was reminiscent the whole time of what we were doing 5 years ago. that day was perfect. after seeing many, many weddings there is still NOTHING that i would change about it.

crazy coincidence!!!

how crazy.

as we were riding in the other day to go climbing we saw some campers. we thought nothing of it and just went climbing for the day. then this morning mad was reading some blogs and stumbled onto the blog of the people that were camping. they made mention of watching three climbers go up south suicide and the day was right. since we knew that there were no others that day on that peak we knew that it was us that they were talking about.

we replied with a link to our post and they then responded with another post with cool pictures of us. check it out. this is a crazy coincidence.

first post (third paragraph)
second post (this one has cool pics of us)


this is a small place.

US House Debate

Nick here: Last night I was invited to photograph the US House debate at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The people at the Gabriel LeDoux campaign asked if I would come by and take some pictures of the debate. It was very interesting and definitely showed a little more of each of the candidates. Here are some of my favorites from last night.

off roading up near denali highway

south suicide peak

yesterday joe, mad and i climbed a peak near anchorage. here is a little video.

the Monkey has arrived

so my new bike is here. it is the coolest bike that i've ever ridden. it's basically the bike that you wanted when you were a kid... but a bigger version. the only thing that is missing is the pegs. ;)

it really is as simple and functional as a bmx bike, but much more bad ass to take on the alaskan winter and anchorage traffic.

i won't go into extreme detail because i know that no one that reads this blog wants to hear about what kind of bottom bracket i decided to go with and what kind of hubs. none of that really matters anyways. i built this bike up to be functional and extremely sturdy. i knew that i would be going up and over curbs and putting it through a lot of abuse. so i made it with that in mind and it turned out like a tank.

it's a single speed; which means that there are no gears or Derailleurs to shift gears. the main advantage of this is that there are less moving parts to get clogged full of ice and snow. i did get a funny little thing in the back that will allow me to have two gears. it is a process, though, to change gears. it basically is a way for me to ride in the snow with an easier gear (32x18) and without snow with a harder gear (32x16).

it also has disc brakes. this is so i can stop the bike when it's all wet and icy. and it has pedals that i can clip into on one side and then put my winter boots on top of on the other.

ok. no more details. sorry if that was too much. here are some pictures.