I'm Done!

Well, it's been a long and rewarding six weeks, but I've finally completed my Craftsmanship Program at the Inside Passage School of Fine Cabinetmaking! I've learned a lot, scraped two-year-old rust from my neglected skills, gained a new appreciation for the fine art of woodworking, and met a bunch a cool people to boot!

Here's the stuff that I made during the course. Just in case you're wondering where the cabinets and bookcases and tables and boxes are: this was a course based around woodworking skills and ways of doing things; actually building objects wasn't the goal, although I did come out with a bunch of cool tools.

So what's next? I'll spend the next week or so wandering around the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island, and then head inland towards the Kootenays, where I'll be volunteering at Raid the North Extreme. After that...? :-)

The fruits of my labor

Handmade chisels and knife

New plane family: smoother, jointer, and coopering planes from left to right

Cabinet model with drawer

Drawer detail with dovetails and handmade pull

Curved panel

Curved panel marquetry detail

Making Shavings

*Finally* finished my jointer plane, and the coopering plane is coming along nicely. For the dovetail exercise I thought I'd add an extra bit of challenge, so I cut them as "houndstooth" dovetails - as I did them, basically a dovetail-within-a-dovetail. They ended up being a pain in the a** to take apart and re-assemble so I didn't use them in the drawer cabinet we're making in class, but they were fun to do!

Working Wood

Welcome!

Week two of my 6-week Artisan Program at the Inside Passage School of Fine Woodworking: complete! Also complete: a smoothing plane and a "Gumby" table leg. Didn't get around to finishing the coopering plane or the jointer plane though... Oh well, there's always Monday morning at 7:00am!  Sigh... Too bad I'm not a morning person.

I *have* managed to get out on a few mountain bike rides on the trails here in the Sunshine Coast. All I can say is: *WOW!* These trails are a blast! Not really what I'm used to though, what with a whole lot of uphill and subsequent long descent. On one ride near Gibsons, I climbed for about 90 minutes straight up a mountain, and the trail took me straight back down in 10 minutes. Probably one of the hairier descents I've ever done, I could smell my brake pads burning when I got to the bottom. Can't wait to do it again...


Unfortunately, long days perfecting skills and making piles of shavings haven't left much time for adventuring outside the classroom or for taking pictures. I've met some cool and like-minded folks and am learning a lot though, so I'm definitely having a good time!

Making shavings

I missed the trees

Big Sitka Spruce

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was getting a bit road-weary at this point in my trip, and I was looking forward to just staying put for a while. My last stop - Olympic National Park in Washington - rejuvenated me somewhat, and of all the places that I'd seen along the way, this is where I wanted to stay the longest. All this despite it being an unplanned stop. Leaving Yellowstone a couple of days early, I had a bit of time to kill before getting to my final destination.

The first thing that entered my mind when I crossed the park's border was, "Oh wow...!" And then I realized what I'd been missing all this time. I've lived near the forests of south and eastern Ontario, and of New York State, northwest New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. As spectacular as Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming were, they just didn't have the same lush green-ness that I'm accustomed to seeing at this time of year. Utah, being mostly desert, had almost no greenery to speak of, and Colorado and Wyoming featured these odd scrubby sage bushes. What a difference I saw when entering Washington State.

Morning Dew

Of all the National Parks I've visited, I've enjoyed my time at Olympic National Park the most. Of course, there's the aforementioned tree-ness of this area, but more than that, the pace of life seemed to be much slower than elsewhere. For one thing, this place is really, really remote - I had no internet or cell phone access for days - and there were far fewer visitors than I saw at the other parks. My campsite in the Mora campground was spectacular, and of the 94 available sites, maybe only 6 or 7 were occupied. No "competitive camping" here! I definitely want to return with more time at my disposal - there's a number of hiking and backpacking trips I want to do, and many, many more waterfalls, seascapes, and mountains to photograph.

Falls near the Sol Duc River

As always, more pictures are posted on Flickr...

In the land of The Beachcombers

The Persephone

I watched The Beachcombers a long time ago when I was a kid, so I did a double-take when I drove by Gibson's Landing BC, which was the setting for the show. And of course, I had to have dinner at Molly's Reach. Mind you, it was such a long time ago and I remember almost nothing of the show, but I still felt a twinge of nostalgia when I saw the Persephone up on display.

Now to find the set of Danger Bay...

I was in a vampire town

Bella's truck

Bella's truck too

Vampire love

So I know absolutely nothing about the "Twilight Saga", but apparently the town of Forks, Washington is kind of important, as are these two trucks. I was quite surprised to find a couple of middle-aged women at a Ranger station in Olympic National Park had come all the way from Germany to see this little town, and when I got to the Forks Chamber of Commerce, a couple of minivans had pulled up and these families were eagerly taking pictures of these two trucks, which I had thought to be junk yard refugees. According to the ranger, in previous years an average of 12,000 people had signed the guestbook annually at the Forks Chamber of Commerce; since the Twilight books and the movies came out, that number had jumped up to ~68,000. Huh, go figure...

Vampire info

Be careful of what you wish for...

Yellowstone Lake

...Because you may actually get it.

Moab was fun and all, and it's justifiably known as "The Mecca of Mountain Biking", but after a few days I got seriously tired of it. Tired of the desiccating heat, tired of the noisy campground (I swear, the guy two sites down must have been half-chainsaw!), tired of the crowds, and tired of all the red. The intense red of the rocks, cliffs, arches and sand is fantastically and spectacularly scenic and is absolutely breathtaking when you first see it, but I found that after a while I just found it agitating. So three days into my Moab stay, I started looking forward to cool, green, and water, which I hoped to find in Wyoming, my next stop. Oh boy did I ever find it... On my way into Jackson, Wyoming - the main town servicing the Grand Teton National Park and the south end of Yellowstone National Park - I was greeted by road barriers and a helpful sign that said that the highway was closed due to mudslides. Yup, they'd had a bad winter... The snow that was supposed to have melted a month previous was still on the ground, and the torrential rainstorms from the previous week had conspired to send a mountainside into my path. Since night had just fallen when I made this discovery and I didn't feel like wandering around backcountry Wyoming in the dark trying to find the detour, I spent the night in a far-too-expensive motel and continued on my way in the morning. It's a good thing I didn't continue that night - the detour added two hours to the trip, and took me waaaaayyyy up into the mountains, into Teton Pass, which was a bit nerve-wracking to drive in the daylight.

Jackson Lake

Yellowstone Bison

Cloudy skies and cold pretty much summed up my Wyoming experience. Tried to do a hike in the Tetons but was thwarted by the snow cover. Renting snowshoes wouldn't have done any good because the trails weren't marked, and it didn't appear that any hardy souls had blazed the way. The one good thing about all the snow is that it concentrated all the wildlife down by the roads; I saw more elk and bison and moose than I'd ever thought to see in my lifetime, and I even saw a bear. There were hawks and eagles aplenty, and I caught a glimpse of an owl on a telephone pole as I drove by the highway.

Yellowstone Tourists

What really ended the Wyoming segment of my journey for me was the poop. The sheer number of elk and bison made it almost impossible to take a step without putting your foot in something. Well, truth be told, the cold and the wet and the generally poor weather played a role in my decision to leave a day earlier than I had scheduled - without even seeing many of the hot springs and geysers - but the poop put me over the edge.

At this point, I was ready to stop traveling and just stay put for a while.