Neil Gaiman. Can you say "derivative" and "nearly plagiarism"? I knew you could! I mean, it was fun, but unlike with Cloud Atlas, which is also fun and relies heavily on previous texts, my noticing the man behind the curtain didn't add to my pleasure. This might be an anti-sff bias, but I don't think so: I liked his Coraline fine and my not getting into Sandman from its first volume probably has more to do with my not having read all the subsequent volumes than with any failing on its part.
For its reliance on archetype and myth, I was reminded again and again of Summerland. Michael Chabon managed to use Norse and First Nation and American myths of the Tree of Life and Raven and baseball, none of which he invented, in his own fresh way. When Gaiman used Raven and Remus, I thought not of what I was reading but what he read first.
Also, and this is the worst, stop smoking the Douglas Adams weed, Neil! Adams was Adams, and he was great, and he is dead, and you are not he. Gaiman aped Adams's style of humor to the point of directly copying two of his jokes--a meaning of the word "similar" previously unknown, and "smiling in the way striking cobras tend not to." The first is something Arthur says when Ford first brings him to the Vogon ship (with "safe"), and while I can't quite place the second, I know it occurs somewhere in the Hitchhiker's trilogy, early on, along the lines of something hanging in the air much in the way anvils don't. Perhaps the whale? It's not just the five Hitchhiker books, either: there's a lot of both Dirk Gently books too. And Spider is Zaphod Beeblebrox to an unfunny degree. Besides having to wave his hand at his featureless black sound system, he embodies Zaphod's mantra, "If there's anything more important than my ego, I want it caught and shot now."
Whatever. Fast and mostly harmless [snork] and I possibly have more reason to read American Gods now, except I can find it only in pulp.
Eight miles. Up, down, around and around, from Glacier Gorge trailhead to Mills Lake. Buttclenchingly unnecessarily cold.
Also, very pretty. We passed wapiti in Moraine Park, leading me to say "wapiti wapiti" since I am incapable of saying only "wapiti." The parking lot at Glacier Gorge trailhead has been moved and the original is being restored closer to a natural state, for a grand total of the same number of spaces. The NPS is promoting, I hope, more shuttle bussing by not increasing the uphill parking. The massive pasturage for cars downhill is big enough.
I have more to say about Mr. Stanley of the Stanley Steamer car and the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, but for now, I'll just say I hope he's happy. He is credited, at least in his own hotel, with beginning the idea of automobile touring in the United States.
And I'm part of the problem! Hooray! Just after 10, we put Cassidy into one of the last spaces and starting bundling up. The temperature was no lower than 20, fine, but the wind howled at gale force, damn. Smartwool socks, titanium bra, polypropylene underwear, turtleneck, Gore-Tex pants and parka, gaiters strapped under boots and hooked to laces, gloves with sleeves, hat, hood up. Contacts in case I needed goggles. Backpack full of fleece pants, running pants, heavy fleece jacket, lighter fleece vest, spare socks, face mask, Clif and Balance bars, two liters of water, camera, wallet, glasses, matches, compass, walkie-talkie, mylar topographical map. Snowshoes and poles.
And away! As soon as we got into the trees, the wind tunnel effect of the straightaway calmed somewhat. Somewhat.
Pretty! Snow! Boulders! Frozen creeks! Pretty! Up we clomped. Cliffs! Halves of mountains! Pretty!
I have read that 90% of Rocky Mountain National Park's visitors see the park only from their cars. On the trail today were a friendly number of people, not constantly in sight as has happened on the Bierstadt trail and as usually happens on the more popular trails in the summer. We met three women who had to be in their 70s as far up-trail as we were and whom I aspire to.
Because we overshot toward the Loch and backtracked to Mills, and because on the way down, we backtracked again because we didn't recognize the trail, we wound up doing about eight miles instead of over six. We didn't recognize the trail downhill because we followed the signs and therefore the marked, summer trail, rather than the haphazard winter trail people improvise. There were snowshoe and ski tracks, and it was marked, so we returned to it, but we knew it wasn't right. Were we going to end up on Bear Lake Road far downstream? Or where, exactly? Sighting the road about halfway through was reassuring.
I'm supposed to have a sense of direction, and RDC too. But snow is disorienting!