Dragontail

Before leaving for Vancouver, I just bough this pair of Garmont dragontail approach shoes. They will hopefully prove useful in the approach walk to the Smoke Bluffs in Squamish today, where I plan to go climbing with Julien (once again with a brand new 10mm Mammut rope), weather and shape (15 hours of travelling) permitting… And later on the trails in Yosemite (no climbing there, I am afraid!).

Actually, the flight to Vancouver was packed, which means I could not even open my macbook… So I looked instead at the translation of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R into French, read the Economist from start till end (with an interesting discussion on the impact of fast-speed trains on freight transportation!), slept, watched the incredible landscape of Greenland with its immense icefields and deep red striated rock formations, and started an Icelandic crime novel. Plus talked with my neighbour of arithmetic Monte Carlo as  I saw him proving a theorem about commutative algebra: he happened to be a professor in computer science at the University of Victoria. The Bose earphones did marvel to cancel the engine noise in the plane, if not the screams of the kids in the next row…