Also, your insane brother avoids hiking in the desert for the three or four hottest months of the year, at least, that is in what people traditionally think of as the dessert. Zion National Park and Mt Charleston are fair game in the summer.

I'm still rooting for Portland. Some of my favorite people live up in that corner of the country, and the only real negative I've heard about it is the weather, which, after fifteen years in the desert doesn't sound like a negative to me at all.