A couple weeks ago I made a great discovery - the UTS Outdoor Adventure Club, which runs bushwalking (in American, "hiking"), camping, rock climbing, and various other outdoorsy type trips. The first trip I joined was a bushwalk into the Blue Mountains (we started from the town of Blackheath, a two hour train ride west of Sydney). The weather forecast was for sunny skies and nice, 20 degree (Celsius) hiking weather.... until the morning of, when it decided to rain. We decided to go on with it however, and had a fantastic day hiking down into, through, and back up out of the canyon there, stopping for lunch during our convenient two hours of clear skies around noon, before hiking back to Blackheath along the rim of the canyon.
The canyon was not a "canyon" as I imagine the word - more like a jungle
Looking up
Looking down...
A small stream runs through it at the bottom
The view from Evan's Lookout
The wind picked up at just the right moment for this picture
The waterfall, turned into mist by the wind, sustains a thick layer of moss on the adjacent rock face. According to the guide book, this moss sometimes becomes too heavy and falls to the valley floor below, adding to the supply of nutrient-rich soil below.
The Long and Winding Road...
The weather in Sydney has started to warm up, though it's a bit rainy again today. Pretty soon I think it will be great beach weather - the water is still freezing though.
Unfortunately, with this increased desire to go to the beach comes and increased workload... Last week I had to write a paper for my Introduction to Innovation describing an emerging technology. I chose carbon nanotube field emission displays (I didn't even know such a thing existed before I started poking through some books about carbon nanotubes). It's a pretty incredible technology, with the potential for very high definition flatscreen displays with great energy efficiency benefits over LCDs. I wouldn't be surprised if FEDs using carbon nanotubes start to appear as laptop displays within the next decade - they could offer great battery life.
One thing that I noticed while researching was the extent to which Rice is on the cutting edge of nanotechnology research. References to work done at Rice were scattered all through the books I read, and it really makes me proud to be able to go to a school like Rice.
Great pictures - sounds like a ton of fun! Too bad Mom is out of the country right now and can't check the internet... she'd be thrilled to hear you actually mentioning school-work in your blog. Makes her feel like you're actually doing some.
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