Wyoming - Stough Creek Basin

Distance: 6.8 miles. One way

Hiking time: Roughly 5 hours

Elevation gain: 2,250 feet, tops out at 10,550 feet

Season: Late June through September

My youngest son Joshua and I decided to take a little camping trip to the Shoshone National Forest as a last summertime hurrah before Joshua was scheduled to go back to school. We scheduled our trip for the last week in July because being from Arizona school starts on the 9th of Aug. Lastly we needed a destination. After a short conversation with my uncle Cale Case (more of a brother than an uncle) it was determined that Stough Creek Basin would be a great father/son pack trip and Cale was going to ask his son George to come along.

Ok a short history: Lander, Wy is my home town and where I grew up the first 18 years of my life. The Shoshone National Forest was what we considered our backyard and like most kids growing up in that area we spent a lot of time up in those mountains. Worthen Meadow Reservoir located inside of the Shoshone National Forest is about 45 minutes from Lander. Our goal on this trip was to go to the Stough Creek Basin, which was named after Charley Stough a tough as nails local sheriff in Lander back in the early 1900's and best remember for the hanging of a horse thief named James Keefer in 1903. Keefer was so popular no one wanted to be the executioner, so special arrangements where made by the sheriff (Stough) so that a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom would activate the trapdoor when the bucket drained. It was a great idea; however, the audience started using the bucket as a spittoon and tobacco plugged up the hole. Keefer eventually got tired of waiting and finally said to the sheriff "Charlie, for God's sake, cut the string!"

We arrived at a beautiful Worthen Meadow Reservoir early so we would be able to find a good place to park. Trust me, you may not think it; but Worthen in the summer time is a very popular place for the locals and tourists alike and there are days that traffic on that one small road going in and out of Worthen Meadows almost feels like a monday morning I5 in LA. So if your backpacking over a long weekend go early if you want the good long term parking spots along the tree line.

The trip into Stough Creek starts with signing the register at the Roaring Fork trail head, just slightly to the southeast of the parking lot. Once signed in it is only about a 1/2 mile hike to the Roaring Fork Lake. The trail will fork as you get to the lake so stay to the right. At the northwestern corner of the lake you will find your first main obstacle, the Roaring Fork river and No Bridge. Yes you will have to wade across it and as Joshua and I found out, a set of light weight water proof Crocs are a life saver on the feet. Now if they could just do something about the ice water flowing down the river. Special note: occasionally you can find a make shift log bridge just a little ways down stream from the lake; however, removing the boots and walking through is not bad as the water is only about knee deep and the rocks are all nice and smooth.

From the river you will climb west on a rocky single-lane path for about 0.9 miles till you reach a large walking platform spanning a marsh. After the marsh the trail swings to the left (west) and starts it's gradual climb. If your resolve is to be tested on this trail it is either here or with the mosquitoes. My youngest son Joshua went with me on this trip and spent the entire assent up to the saddle saying "Are we there yet?" "Are we there yet?" "Are we there yet?" "Are we there yet?" "Are we there yet?"

This is what the next roughly 1.7 miles looks like as you make your way to a series of switchbacks on the way to the top of the saddle.

As we got to the top of the Saddle (the northern end of Roaring Fork Mountain) Behind us we could see where the car was parked back at Worthen Meadow Reservoir.

And ahead of us the Wind River Peak rose up imposingly to the highest point inside the 101,000 acre Popo Agie Wilderness section of the Shoshone National Forest.

From the top of the saddle there is about 3.2 miles left of pretty easy going trail as the path turns south and drops into Stough Creek Basin.

Overall Stough Creek Basin was great and highly recommended; however, mid august till the area closes for the winter is best, if being a blood donor to half a billion mosquitoes bothers you. Else grab a few gallons of Deet and the mosquito nets and have a great time.

Joshua and I taking a mosquito break while Cale and George go fishing.

Cale and George Fishing.

Business Social Networking and BuDuRu

Today I was following a conversation on LinkedIn about Business Social Networking and wanted to comment. Social Networking in Business happens to be one of my favorite subjects. Personally I love LinkedIn and what it has attempted to do and the technology behind Facebook is really cool; however, being first a businessmen and second a professional technologist I realized pretty early in these social networks product lifecycles that there was a few crucial drawbacks that made them impractical for use in daily business outside of Hiring, Marketing and general networking. Here is my list of issues I have with pretty much all the social networks when it comes to trying to marry our business requirements with the mostly open nature of Social Networks in general.

• People spend too much time on these sites. - Let's face it they can be addicting and in business that time is real money. Want to play Mobster, do it on your time.
• Profiles for self-promotion. - Other than being mostly tacky the question is what are we trying to sell here, my products or your moonlighting services.
• Old friends. - Specially the ones you were glad to be rid of. Are your old friends going to help our bottom line? (maybe) However, I don’t need my employees compromising our company by have their personal friends linking up with my employees “Business” account (they can see your customers).
• Bullying. - Lying, Rumors and fictitious accounts. At least I have some control over the break room or smoking area.
• Identity theft. - Let's face it people are posting entirely too much of their personal information and for some reason they honestly believe that they can trust the people in their online groups.
• Security. - There really isn't any, from a business perspective try and get a Sarbanes-Oxley or ISO Compliance on your Facebook content.

These along with a few other pet peeves are the primary reason I because involved in the BuDuRu Network http://buduru.net, BuDuRu is a private network that applies the demands of businesses with the principles of a LinkedIn or Facebook. Technically anyone can join BuDuRu; however, there is no such thing as open networking outside of the companies you do business with, so without a formal request from another member you will get really board quickly. Also BuDuRu is in it's infancy so the occasional "undocumented feature" is to be expected. Just my 2 cents, enjoy.

My Geek IQ

Ok I'm a 15 year veteran of the IT industry and I architected some of the worlds largest EDI data processors; however, even with my back ground I have to wonder exactly how long will the information I have in my head be applicable to the industry and to business in general. For me that is a rather large paradox because I am somewhat of a visionary and like to think thoughts on a larger scale. Like with BuDuRu, where the question was how could we streamline the communications between businesses on a global scale? So the other day while out doing industry research I came a cross a link to test my Geek IQ at InfoWorld. Naturally being the old geek that I am I figured that the test would be fun; and considering that I remember working my way around the original ARPANET from a terminal I should naturally score rather well. Boy was I wrong, I scored a 35% :). Do the word "You Sucked" come to mind? The funny part was the test actually recommended that I stop by the Men's Warehouse while I quickly and quietly left the IT Department. I have to ask, how many other professionals have taken this or similare tests? And secondly, how did you do? Come on man, I would like to see if the CIO at the White House knows how many ports a single IP address can have without a Google search.

Touching the Past

2009 seems to be turning into the year I will get back in touch with all those friends and family I had all but forgotten about over the years. So far it is turning out to be one weird and awkward year; however, I'm not complaining, it just wasn't what I expected when I sat down and said this will be my year. So far during this year I have managed to met up (on-line) with Morgan Gillette and Ray Knouse, both were friends from Grade School and Junior High School. I must admit I really have missed these two over the years. Eli (my brother I haven't seen in almost 15 years), and Michael (the apparent son I never really knew I had other than the occasional small town rumors from a place I haven't see in over 20 years) The good news is that everyone appears to be doing well, Morgan and Ray are both married, Eli is on the rebound and has a positive attitude about the future and Michael is living with his Grandfather and doing what all 23 year old boys (and girls) do (day dream about the future).

Let’s end this economy

Ok this has been an interesting few weeks since my last post. A lot of things moving and to be honest I'm just not sure yet which way they are moving.


I guess I should start with the sad news and get that out of the way first. Our neighbors whose 5 year old boy is best friends with our 5 year old son Joshua, the father has been battling cancer (in the brain) for most of the year and has lost a large percentage of his vision, and apparently is also loosing the battle. Last week as an ambulance was carrying him to the hospital we learned that the husband (36) is dieing and has only been given about 30 days or so to live. I don't even know what to say to that. Normally I'm pretty composed, but this almost brought me to tears, their son has been over at our house almost every weekend over of the past 2 years and is like a second son to me. And now the thought of this child being without a father is gut wrenching to say the least. Every time I look out the back window I hope to see the boy playing. After my wife's fight with cancer 3 years ago the subject is very personal to be.


BuDuRu: A few weeks ago I updated everyone about my first encounter with Todd who was visiting Portland for “VAN Summit 2009”, well I demoed BuDuRu for him which he absolutely loved and appears to be pushing for me to demo it again (after a few bug patches ;) ) but this time to a few of his partners. The cool thing is when Todd (being the visionary type also) and I start to brain storm, some really cool things come out and one of them will potentially change how the internet works. Only time will tell. As far as a product update goes, we are patching our butts off to try and bring this product to market. The good news is that our mail server has been setup and now I'm just waiting on the MX information to take affect.


Economy: Ok I'm tired of watching my friends and business associates loose their jobs and their homes because of this economy. As a consultant, I'm always out of work and hunting for the next gig. So just like the past 200 other times I've been without a job, I take a few hours to gather my thoughts and then get on the phone and start creating my own economy by dialing for dollars. However, this time I don't need the job, my friends do. And in a strange twist of fate two business associates (Reha and Michale) both lost their jobs within one day of each other. Reha and Michale are what we in the industry call professional head hunters and both are really good at their jobs.


So in light of this strange twist I offered to let Reha and Michale utilize my company EDI Associates, my network and computer system to start making placements. Here's the deal, most major placement company's such as Oxford, Oracle, SAP, etc generally have a 70% – 100% markup or more on their consulting services. Sterling Commerce once paid me $60 per hour on a contract I later learned was billed at $220 per hour. Our goal is simply, just get people working again. If our markup is only 1% then so be it, the larger picture of getting people back to work and keeping a roof over their heads is much more important than the bottom line at this point. So with that in mind I hit a few of the larger users groups on Yahoo today and started asking for resumes for all things technical (EDI, SAP, Oracle, i2, developers, analysts, etc), basically everyone under the sun and so far it's 10:30pm on a Friday night and just about 6 hours after I started all this and so far I have received about 15 resumes. Not a bad start; however, considering the doom and gloom the TV keeps broadcasting I was actually expecting to see worse. I will see what happens over the weekend.


Texas: Monday I'm off to Texas to sit in on an SAP upgrade planning meeting to be held on Tuesday morning. I'm already pretty certain I have the contract for the EDI segment of the project, which based on the scope, should employ 2 or 3 people for about 3 months. Basically I've been working with this company for many years and I'm really hoping to be able to secure an additional requirement or two in the hopes of getting another professional off the bench and out on a project.

VAN Summit 2009 and BuDuRu

Ok this week was VAN Summit 2009 here in Portland, OR and for those of you not into this type of thing VAN stands for "Value Added Network" and this week was a meeting of the minds that keep the industry ticking along. For those of you that know me I have managed my own boutique VAN service for the better part of the past 5 years and have consulted to the industry for over 10 years. So as you can imagine I really wanted to go, you know the opportunity of a lifetime to rub elbows with the who’s who of an industry I really have grown to love over the years. So as you can also imagine how upset I was when I found out it was over $150 per ticket and I was broke.

God bless webinars, as it happens I heard through the grape vine that Todd Gould (CEO, Loren Data) would be broadcasting the Summit on Webinar and anyone interested could connect up and listen in. So I sat at my desk, worked and listened to Todd and a few other presenters give a presentation about a VAN service for VAN services, or a central command and control structure that would allow just about any VAN to lookup on the fly almost any Receiver ID from a central database and see which VAN Service they are on and the route needed to get the data to them. The cool thing is that a lot of the stuff they were asking for sounded a lot like BuDuRu, my pet project over the past 3 years.

After hearing the entire webinar and hearing the presenters come out on stage asking people to start thinking of ways to correct the issues of the industry I decided I would at least tell them what I have created and see what they think about it. So I did a little research and came up with Todd’s email address and sent him a short note thanking him for the webinar and inviting him to coffee while he was still in Portland. Todd agreed to meet me at Powell’s World of Books on Wednesday afternoon. So on Wednesday I dug into my change cup and got enough money for the bus fare to Powell’s and jumped the bus.

In short I learned many years ago, getting your foot in the door is almost always about who you know, so never pass up an opportunity to meet with someone new and especially someone that has influence in your chosen industry. In short I wanted to hear what Todd had been developing and then fill him in about BuDuRu and see what he says. After giving Todd my BuDuRu spiel it seemed like Todd was about to fall out of his chair. The rest of our meeting was great, talk about a brain storming session of like minds. Todd would toss out ideas and issues and I’d through out potential ways of doing it in BuDuRu. The cool thing was at the end Todd asked if I was interested in taking on equity partners, if so how much would I need and when would we be ready.

At this point all I can say is I’m excited and a little apprehensive, basically I’m not sure what to think. Next week I’m to demo the product for Todd. It’s not the money; BuDuRu is going to go live in February anyway with or without it. For me it has more to do with the fact that a major player and a visionary to the industry has accepted my idea as valid and has taken an interest in seeing it progress. However the investor side I liken to a car. I have this car; it runs and barely will seat 2 people legally. I’m standing at the fuel pump and it’s about 80% full of fuel and we are about ready to go. Sure the car could use tires, tune-up, alignment, some working seatbelts and a really good cleaning; however, that doesn’t stop me from leaving on my trip. I’ve heard way to many horror stories about VC and Angle Investors just walking in an demanding the world. What I’m afraid of is someone just running in thinking they can just snatch up 80% of my company and product and then just coast their way across the finish line on our effort alone. I’m not a greedy guy and I have offered to share anything that comes of my idea with some 15 people over the years; however, I have one barrier for entry, you have to show up and you have to contribute and based on that alone the team consists of only three (David, Alex and I) people. There will be more to follow as next week progresses.

HID and my trip to Irvine

Ok, this last week I was in Irvine, California on an eCommerce project for HID. Pretty low key stuff actually and unofficially this project could go on for a few months. My part in this project is minor I’m just setting up and mapping their customer connection with Siemens in and out of Oracle. No real secrete really when you go to Siemens website your able to order HID card readers and cards, my work allow them to pretty much integrate that order into a rather seamless process which can save both companies $100k’s per year in manual processing and error correction time and costs. My favorite story has to do with a major pharma company in Illinois where we were able to boost their electronic processing of orders and invoices to over $30M per day. This allowed the company to restructure and reallocate from 80+ call center employees to 20.

Ok back to Irvine, if you don’t know HID I’m sure you are familiar with their products. HID makes the security cards and readers that most companies use to control access to entry ways and data centers. For me because I do have a data center, personally I think the idea of doing a project for the company is really cool, as I do with any company whose products I use almost daily. Historically I’ve done projects with Justin Boots, Linksys, Nike, Oakley and Gateway; all companies whose products I use. Now by far the best tasting project was the Lindt & Sprungli Chocolate factory in New Hampshire; I walked out of there with over $200 in Truffles and that was with the employee discount. I was giving chocolate gifts away for months after that project and I don’t think I’ve eaten a single Truffle since.

On this trip I met with a number of really good friends whose friendships I have come to cherish over the years. If it wasn’t in part for their efforts I would not be nearly as successful as I have been over the years. Friends like Reha Duzel, Steve Rockey, Sean Chawla and Manoj Dhruve just to name a few. Being rather a business fanatic by far my favorite meeting was breakfast with Rockey and Reha at the Knowlwood restaurant.

Sean is an entrepreneur and a very strong and ethical business man that has build a technology company worth over a $100M, I truely value his opinion because I know he as been down a lot of the roads I still have to travel as I look to also build my own.

Rockey has a girth of business knowledge that comes from his many years of building businesses up for people and then helping them sell them. I only hope to be able to master even a small percentage of that some day and as I suspected I was not disappointed. After hearing me out it quickly became obvious why he makes the big money. Rockey's true colors came out in about 3 very specific bullet points, which will be the subject for a future post and I will be pursuing for BuDuRu in the very near future now that I'm back in Portland.

Reha is hands down like a brother to me and the amount of grief he has had to endure over the past few years in reference to a shady real estate deal he got involved in really pains me. In short the builder got his money and walked before the job was finished, now Reha is stuck with a house he can’t live in a rapidly declining real estate market. And in an effort to avoid a foreclosure they have been forced to rely on the generosity of others just to survive. Last I heard was that the home was to potentially short sale, it’s a hard way to go; however, the stress of the past few years will finally be over. Meeting with Reha is always a pleasure and I wish him and his loved ones nothing but the very best.

Dinner with Manoj and his family was great; however, he really needs to reset the clock on his DVD player. It’s the only clock in the room and I kept looking at it to see what time it was, turns out that the clock was almost an hour and a half to slow. I thought I was getting out of there around 9:30, turned out to be almost 10:45, no wonder they seemed to be in a hurry to get me out the door. :) Thanks bud. The curry was great, but boy did I pay for it the next morning.