Aspen 2015
Last year I spent two weeks at the Aspen Center for Physics, a small guest institute that exists partly as a fluke when in the 1960's a couple of fishing-enthusiast physicsts purchased a small plot of land in an obscure, decaying post-mining town that over the following decades transformed into one of the most famous skiing/summer resort destinations in the world. These days the Center hosts winter conferences during ski season and informal topic-focused visits during the summer, when 20-30 astronomers/physicists of common interest gather in a common location with a minimal agenda to hash out problems and discuss topical issues.
I attended one of these sessions last year and found it quite useful (and perhaps more importantly, enormously lovely to be in the high mountains of Colorado for two weeks) so when another session presented itself this year - of more limited interest to me, but with some relevance and a lot of relevant people attending - I took the opportunity to sign up. It fell almost immediately after the official end of my Caltech appointment - which meant that I had no travel budget and would have to finance everything out of pocket, but since I'm not paying rent at the moment anyway, that more or less cancels out most of the expense anyway. Hence, Stage 1 of the roadtrip ended here, an I've been hanging out in town for the past two weeks. (Tomorrow I'll be heading out in the morning for my next destination.)
Snow conceals the photogenic Maroon Bells
on a hike during the first week
It's been nice, although not quite as nice as last year. The fact that it's one month earlier has certainly made a tremendous difference: the wet, cold, and even (at high elevations) snowy weather in late May persisted throughout the first week. It rained every day, putting a damper on any hiking/exploration plans. But, starting over the weekend things began to clear up and warm up, and within the span of a couple day the weather transformed to summerlike warm days and clear skies. Still, any hike beyond the confines of the valley quickly runs into remnant snowpack on the trails, so any attempt to do something like the amazing high-elevation hikes I accomplished last year certainly isn't possible, and the weekend hikes have been relatively modest explorations of the valley floors. Back in town, it's clearly "off season" - many of the restaurants are closed, and the ones that are open (still quite a few, since the town is packed with them) are often nearly empty.
As for the meeting itself, while ideally there had been hopes of getting research done, in reality a significant chunk of the time has been occupied by other things - figuring out health insurance before my move, actually buying the flights and other travel plans for the rest of this complicated summer (including the move to Europe itself), and other paperwork. And on the academic side, the largest task has been writing a chapter for a textbook: there is a movement afoot to create an "open source", freely-available astronomy textbook (an idea I very much support, given the obscene prices undergraduates are charged for physical texts), and I was recruited to write the GRB section. I agreed, and then they handed me a deadline of basically the end of this conference (which I had no time meeting, although it did take time away from actual research.)
Still, all in all, it's been a lovely couple of weeks, and it'll be a shame to leave tomorrow - even if this much-needed fun and/or relaxing phase of the summer is going to last for another month yet before I finally move to Denmark (an event that is now set for June 29/30).
I attended one of these sessions last year and found it quite useful (and perhaps more importantly, enormously lovely to be in the high mountains of Colorado for two weeks) so when another session presented itself this year - of more limited interest to me, but with some relevance and a lot of relevant people attending - I took the opportunity to sign up. It fell almost immediately after the official end of my Caltech appointment - which meant that I had no travel budget and would have to finance everything out of pocket, but since I'm not paying rent at the moment anyway, that more or less cancels out most of the expense anyway. Hence, Stage 1 of the roadtrip ended here, an I've been hanging out in town for the past two weeks. (Tomorrow I'll be heading out in the morning for my next destination.)
Snow conceals the photogenic Maroon Bells
on a hike during the first week
It's been nice, although not quite as nice as last year. The fact that it's one month earlier has certainly made a tremendous difference: the wet, cold, and even (at high elevations) snowy weather in late May persisted throughout the first week. It rained every day, putting a damper on any hiking/exploration plans. But, starting over the weekend things began to clear up and warm up, and within the span of a couple day the weather transformed to summerlike warm days and clear skies. Still, any hike beyond the confines of the valley quickly runs into remnant snowpack on the trails, so any attempt to do something like the amazing high-elevation hikes I accomplished last year certainly isn't possible, and the weekend hikes have been relatively modest explorations of the valley floors. Back in town, it's clearly "off season" - many of the restaurants are closed, and the ones that are open (still quite a few, since the town is packed with them) are often nearly empty.
As for the meeting itself, while ideally there had been hopes of getting research done, in reality a significant chunk of the time has been occupied by other things - figuring out health insurance before my move, actually buying the flights and other travel plans for the rest of this complicated summer (including the move to Europe itself), and other paperwork. And on the academic side, the largest task has been writing a chapter for a textbook: there is a movement afoot to create an "open source", freely-available astronomy textbook (an idea I very much support, given the obscene prices undergraduates are charged for physical texts), and I was recruited to write the GRB section. I agreed, and then they handed me a deadline of basically the end of this conference (which I had no time meeting, although it did take time away from actual research.)
Still, all in all, it's been a lovely couple of weeks, and it'll be a shame to leave tomorrow - even if this much-needed fun and/or relaxing phase of the summer is going to last for another month yet before I finally move to Denmark (an event that is now set for June 29/30).