Nancy recovers at Tahoe-Forest Hospital after nasal surgery to correct a deviated septum.

She’s never been able to breathe much through her nose, and finally decided to get it fixed.

Nancy is doing well, with no complications so far. It hurts a lot more than she thought it would: she says it feels like someone is stabbing her in the nose.

Well, that’s because someone did.

Here I am on the 500 road on our nightly gates check, on the new ski run that has been clear-cut for the new chairlift.

The end of two nights—13 and 14 hour shifts—watching vendor sites at mid-mountain. Anything for overtime.

Toward, the end, I met this really friendly guy. We got to talking, mostly about honey bees and pic-a-nic baskets, super nice dude…, zz… comfy too… zzz… zzzz…

No days off this week—I picked up two nights of overtime by spending all night at mid-mountain watching vendor sites for a weekend of Pro Gravity Tour mountain bike races.

It’s Michael! Woo-hoo!! Looks like there’s two of him, which means two studly slices of Heaven. His concert went well, despite selling few tickets.

As far as his behavior toward Northstar employees before and after the concert, well...

Nancy concluded her XC Mountain Bike Race series with another second place, as a 20-something ringer showed up and beat her by about ten minutes. However, Nancy won the series in her division by getting the most points with three firsts and five seconds.

Her reward for winning? Free entry into next year’s races, so she has to do it all over again.

I rescued another load of rounds off of a slash pile. There’s a lot of wood out there from defensible space work, it’s just a matter of getting to it.

Riding home at midnight, trying to charge through a rocky section. Sometimes I make it, sometimes I don’t.

I felt good riding out to work, but my legs were dead coming home. I get this weird feeling sometimes where my legs don’t feel tired, but I keep checking my rear tire to see if it’s losing air because the bike feels sluggish.

Construction is proceeding for the new lodge at the top of Zephyr.

I was out checking the access gates and got up top right at sunset.

We finally got some time off to do a little work in our own yard. So much to do, so little inclination to do it.

I took Ryder to Boca Reservoir to see if he could stay on a paddleboard. He did, kind of, with a lot of coaxing. I could paddle around with him as long as I was seated, but standing up proved to be too unstable.

After Ryder had enough, I paddled over the other side of the lake and back. Ho hum, another cloudless day in the mid-80s.

Here’s the result of my bear trap the other night: an adult female black bear.

We’re getting ready to release it while chasing it with dogs and shooting it with a paintball gun and shotgun sandbags. This is to try to create a bad memory for the bear so it doesn’t come back to this location.

Nancy taking off on a short course race, the seventh of eight races in the Thursday XC series.

The last six rounds from the tree at the golf course were too heavy to lift, so I rolled them into my truck using a 2x4 as a ramp.

I split them in half when I got home so I could move them around without hurting myself.

I set up a bear trap at the request of Mario Klip of California Dept. of Fish & Game. The trap is at Ski Trails, one of the condos at Northstar that are frequently visited by the bears.

Setting the trap is pretty simple, it’s just a little disgusting crawling inside and cleaning out the old bait.

This bucket is one of the machines clear-cutting a couple of new ski runs for a new chairlift on the backside of Northstar.

We check several access gates every night on the back of the mountain and then drive down 4x4 roads on the frontside.

I got an extra special assignment—guarding Michael Bolton before his concert here in a couple of weeks.

He’s such a great guy, always smiling, always upbeat, forever tan, and he always seems to have a guitar in his hands.

Maybe he can teach me some chords.

One year, I went to ridiculous lengths to get our wood for the winter—combing through slash piles on a steep hill, cutting rounds off whatever I could find, throwing the rounds down the hill, and then pushing them in a wheelbarrow to the truck.

As a result, whenever I find some wood that’s easy to grab, I grab it, regardless of how much wood I already have.

You can never have too many rounds, especially when they’re easy to come by. I found a felled tree that amounts to three or four truckloads.

Not another hill! Nancy charges out at the start of her XC race.

Yeah! First place!

And she won a pair of socks! Woo-hoo!

Every night at 10:00 we turn off all the fire pits in the village, sending all the s’more-addled guests wandering off into the night.

We spent a half-day in Reno experiencing the excitement of “The Biggest Little City in the World.”

For most people, this means hitting the casinos. For the Barkers, it means hitting the thrift stores.

All-you-can-eat sushi = heaven-on-earth.

After waiting several hours for the sushi to digest, we had a paddleboarding session in the evening, this time at Donner Lake, using the Nelsons’ house as a launch point.

We paddled down to the west beach, rescued a stuck hook for a fisherman, and did a loop over to the south shore and back.

Afterwards, Bryn took off for Sacramento to hook up with the Perreras/Whigam crew.

Bryn, if you’re reading this, you forgot your book.

I took Bryn to the Northstar Bike Park so he could see what downhill mountain biking is all about. I took him down Flame Out, one of the easier black diamond runs, since I figured with his background of dirt-biking and bicycling, and being on a plush 8” bike, it would be no problem.

Uh, problems.

He went over the handlebars twice, broke a bolt on the rear brake mount, cut a finger, and experienced repeated bouts of dizzyness because he was too gripped to breathe.

Here he is about to negotiate a loose hairpin turn (unsuccessfully) on Deerpath, a lower, easier trail.

Nancy came out after work to get in a couple of runs. She just got a new full-face DH bike helmet (thank you eBay!).

We took a second run up Vista, and Bryn started to get the hang of it and figure out what the bike can handle. Nancy led us down some smoother trails with lots of whoop-de-doos and banked turns.

Here he is on the Playground trail.

Bryn makes the Big Red Pig (our Santa Cruz VP-Free) look like the Little Red Piglet. I guess a bike that’s the right size would help things a bit.

Looking at Martis Valley from the Tryumph trail. You can barely see Boca Reservoir in the trees directly above his right hand.

After surviving the bike park, we squeezed in nine holes of golf at the Ponderosa Golf Course in Truckee.

Bryn came down from Canada eh to visit for a few days, and brought a couple of paddleboards for us to try out.

We drove down to Boca Reservoir and splashed around for a couple of hours. It was fun trying a new sport and going for a swim on a typical Tahoe summer day in the mid 80s.

After lunch, Nancy came out with us to Northstar for some golf. Here, Bryn tees off on the signature par 3 15th.

Gotta fix that yank.

We hooked up with some of the guys from TTSA to do a shuttle ride from Summit Lake down to Negro Canyon. This is a really fun ride with a little bit of everything—technical granite, rolling downhills, and an optional 800’ climb.

Here, Nancy is in the thick bushes at the top of Negro Canyon.

After descending a bit, the trail opens up with lots of wildflowers.

Nancy, Rich, Vince and Mike stop on the rolling downhill amidst the mule’s ears.

There’s an optional 20 minute uphill grind in your lowest gears that takes you to the top of the Tahoe Donner XC trail system.

Mike is chugging up the last little bit, with Donner Lake and I-80 far below.

I worked straight through from 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m., first my normal swing shift, then picking up a graveyard shift at 11:30 to watch the sound equipment in the village being used for a concert this evening.

I got overtime and doubletime to do basically nothing but stay awake, and pass the time doing computer stuff and picking latex out of my bike tire.

Andy Grammer (who?) and Colby Caillat (WHO?) are playing.

Nancy rode to Summit Lake by herself to check out the trail conditions. She found a few snow drifts still on the trail and some debris and blowdown, but otherwise good conditions.

The trail isn’t that high—about 7500’—but the huge snowpack is still lingering into August.

I tried adding sealant to my tire to fix the leak, but there was a pinhole leak that refused to seal. The sealant was also clogging the valve, so I just took the whole thing apart.

Unfortunately, this means cleaning all the old latex out of the tire and starting from scratch, a lengthy process.