Baylor's WRIT 340

There's a reason this first random post for our class is late, my apologies. Hopefully you'll understand why after reading. On February 1st, my friend from high school called me out of the blue. I hadn't talked to her since my freshman year of college and I was wondering what she wanted to ask me. Tule is this awesome girl who I was close friends with in high school - we were in the same acoustic band, both loved to surf and ski, and would often go on outdoor adventures together - she's now a junior at Stanford, one year behind me after taking a gap year. Tule called to ask if I'd want to meet her and a group of friends in Costa Rica for the rest of February. She had just arrived to their cabin on the beach and thought about how I'm someone who could appreciate the adventure and lifestyle they were experiencing. It was such a crazy phone call to receive, but I've been on the road recently and loved the idea of traveling to Costa Rica. Within a few hours, I b...

I finished reading How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming over the weekend, and I've learned so many small bits of information about the astronomy world. Did you know that every telescope in the world is scheduled to be used every day, except Christmas? Michael Brown's memoir takes us through his life while at Caltech, one of the world's best institutions studying astronomy and makes his world of academia seem very casual. Brown's process of searching for new planets meant every day, he would take photos of a tiny portion of the sky, stitching it all together week by week to make progress on his search for another planet. At one point in the book, after sifting through more than 8,000 planet candidates, Brown found 27 that might be a planet and not a single one that was definitely a new planet. My curiosity peaked in this book when Brown talked about Object X. Still not discovered, Object X or Planet X is the theory that there is one large planet that we haven'...

  How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming  is a fascinating memoir from Mike Brown, a leading astronomer and scientist responsible for Pluto's descension to a dwarf planet. Brown walks the reader through his life as a young kid learning about Pluto up to the point of a conference held to determine Pluto's fate as a planet. In the beginning of the book, Brown shares many memories of him being a child and new discoveries of stars as turning points in his life along with the evolution of astronomy and how our ideas of space changed. I've loved looking up into the stars since I was a kid. How enormous our universe is, and paired with it, how our small and insignificant our human lives are were puzzling to me growing up. I would frequent the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco just to see the new planetarium shows they offered. Like Brown, I found myself getting older at turning points in my life as I learned more about the structure of our universe and how every...

Once you catch the bug for skiing, it’s hard to keep yourself from wanting deeper powder, steeper lines, and untouched snow. Skiing is one of the most beautiful sports created, a fine balance of work and reward in the pristine alpine environment. After you ski your whole life at ski resorts and small mountains controlled by lifts open and runs patrolled, you begin to seek more from nature. It’s tempting to ask yourself what lies behind the “SKI BOUNDARY - CLOSED AREA” signs – it’s part of human nature to seek the uncharted. Luckily, anything more you have ever wanted can be found backcountry skiing.    What is backcountry skiing?   The backcountry is defined by what it is not: part of a ski resort. Backcountry skiing opens the skier to, quite literally, the whole world of uncharted snow country. Thousands and thousands of miles of untouched, perfect snow wait for you just beyond the red roped boundaries.    When you ski at a resort, all trails and runs are skied...