Nasim Mansurov

11/26/2008

I have been so busy lately that I haven’t had a chance to add anything to my blog. Things are quite hectic at work and looks like it will stay that way until February or March of next year… Implementing SAP payroll is not easy and we are going live on December 16th of this year! So far things are looking pretty good. We still have a couple of bugs to fix before starting the data extraction, which we hope will be taken care of next week.

I haven’t been doing any photography lately, but did have a chance to go to the Rocky Mountain National Park last week (yes, I’m addicted to this park). Well, one thing for sure, the park looked pretty dead to me. Unfortunately, RMNP is not Yellowstone or Denali, so winter here is kind of boring. I got to the park right at sunrise and did not find anything to take a picture of. I drove around for an hour trying to find any wildlife and there was absolutely nothing! The morning temperatures weren’t that bad - around 25-30 degrees, so I know the weather was not the reason.

Anyway, after an hour or so I had my breakfast and then took a nap in the car. I woke up at around 11 am, parked the car by the Glacier Gorge trailhead and started preparing for a hike to Alberta Falls. The hike to Alberta Falls is relatively short (around 0.6 miles) and knowing that I would be going further than that, I got into my warm skiing clothes + waterproof hiking shoes. It wasn’t snowing, but snow from the previous storm was still on the ground and it was very windy. Stupid me, I put a lot of heavy photography equipment into my backpack, including a tripod (I don’t know what the hell I was thinking - probably the 10K elevation affected my brain :)).

Altogether, I hiked about 10 miles that day. Alberta Falls was too easy and I decided to get to the Mills Lake, around 2.2 miles away from the falls. Then, I got back to the trail that leads back to the trailhead and decided to check out the Loch lake as well, which was further away than Mills Lake. Then I enjoyed a long hike back to the car… By the time I got back, the time was about 4:30 PM, so it was a good 5 hour hike. Pictures came out badly because the light was horrible and there was nothing interesting to take a picture of. In addition, both the falls and the lakes were completely frozen. Despite bad pictures, the overall hike was superb though and I absolutely enjoyed it! :)

Here is a photo of the frozen Mills Lake:

11/19/2008

I first thought these were Bell Flowers, but after looking at some images on Google, I discovered that they look different. Any ideas on what these are?

11/17/2008

Captured in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

11/15/2008

Captured in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO

11/14/2008

Captured in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

11/13/2008

Captured in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

11/12/2008

11/11/2008

11/09/2008