Cathedral casts its shadow on Tuolumne

Almost 142 years ago to the day John Muir completed the first documented ascent of Cathedral Peak in Tuolumne. Writing about this experience Muir stated:

This I may say is the first time I have been at church in California, led here at last, every door graciously opened… the sweetest church music I ever enjoyed.

I can’t say that my experience ascending Cathedral Peak for the second time was on par with Muir’s first. For starters I didn’t do it in cowboy boots. But I can say that I’ve never been to an actual church in California. I can also say that years of fortunate experiences have allowed me to enjoy being on top of such spectacular summits. However, it’s the music and the company that made this trip especially enjoyable.

The day after Ben and I linked up Royal Arches and North Dome we wanted to repay Linda, Marzena and Jill for graciously picking us up at the end of that adventure. Marzena and Jill had never been up Cathedral Peak so the prospect of sharing such a special climb with them was highly appealing. However, we awoke to a rather cloudy morning and this made for a pretty lazy start to the day so it’s not surprising that we found ourselves at the trailhead organizing gear and getting ready to hike to the base around noon.

By this point the clouds had started to break and the sky was mostly blue during the approach. I think everyone (except for Marzena) was feeling a bit tired so it was roughly 2 when we reached the leftmost route up the face. Just as we started to flake the ropes a brief period of rain struck. It only lasted for a few moments and by the time we got our rain gear on it had past. But the event was enough to make us consider if it was wise to start the route. A bit of deliberation later Linda decided that since she’d been on the route before the prospect of doing it again and potentially getting rained on wasn’t too appealing.

Feeling (perhaps foolishly hoping) that the weather would hold and seeing the desire that Marzena and Jill had to do the climb I decided that I was game to lead the first pitch. We were initially going to ascend with me leading and Jill seconding on my rope while Ben would lead on doubles for Linda and Marzena to follow. But now that we were a party of 4, we decided that just having one leader would be the easiest way to go.

Racked up with a set of nuts, a single set of cams from #0.5 to #2 and 4 tri-cams I picked a line for the first pitch and ran up it until I was out of rope. Ben followed trailing the two doubles for Marzena and Jill. Ben lead the next pitch and aside from managing three ropes at the belay the climb was going well, especially because the rain hadn’t returned.

For the start of the third pitch we were just below the chimney section. This is typically where the many routes up the face meet and get funneled into a single stream of climbers. So I wasn’t surprised to see at least one party waiting to get through the section. However, Cathedral Peak is very featured and we’d read of variations to the left and right of the chimney that can be used to alleviate the congestion. No better time than now to try them.

Here’s the variation that we took. On the very lefthand side of the ledge below the chimney pitch (typically the ledge that people belay from for the chimney pitch), go straight up for around 15-20 feet of very easy climbing. You’ll find yourself in a bit of a small corner with a fantastic hole in the granite that can be girth hitched. Up and left of the girth hitch there is a finger sized crack that leads out to an arête on the left. Keep your hands in this crack and move out to the very well featured and protectable arête. It isn’t obvious that there is anything out to the left to climb, but trust me, there is and the mysterious feeling adds to the adventure. From here you can continue straight up towards the summit, bypassing all the groaning and struggling parties in the chimney. At a rating of 5.7 and featuring some fantastic exposure, I can’t recommend it enough.

After that section the rest of our route was pretty typical climbing for an afternoon on Cathedral. I got to the summit blocks and waited for some traffic to clear before making the final push to the top. As I waited, two free soloists came marching up the rock, one carrying a banjo and the other a guitar. Immediately I began to smile, hoping that we’d get to hang out as a group on the top and enjoy a world class view with some accompanying music.

The music begins as we wait for a party to clear the summit blocks

After a short wait I brought Ben up to the party and he gave Marzena and Jill a belay while I shot some video of the music scene. Once we were all on top I couldn’t help but feel extremely fortunate. Not only did the rain stay away, it was sunny and beautiful. The climbing ended up being more enjoyable than I had even remembered. Plus I got to share a summit that is always incredible with three people that I am fortunate to have in my life. Add into that the mood that the music set and it’s a day that can’t be repeated.

We ended up sitting on the summit for almost an hour, soaking up the sights and enjoying the music. I can’t thank everyone enough for making that one of the more memorable and enjoyable hours that I’ve had. The only bummer of the day was that Linda didn’t get to experience it with us. However, I did manage to get a couple videos where the wind didn’t totally destroy the audio. I’ve posted them below along with a couple other photos from the day.

Marzena enjoying the summit

The four of us on the summit

• 4000′ of elevation gain
• 26 pitches climbed
• 16 miles of hitchhiking
• 13 hours of almost non-stop work
• 8 literes of water per person
• 6.3 miles of hiking
• 2 routes completed
• 1 more of the 50 classics ticked

Okay, now for all of you who don’t have ADD or Aspergers.

Almost two years ago on my first climbing trip to Yosemite Valley Ben and I shared a Camp 4 site with a couple guys named Hector and Doug.  One night at camp we were all talking about what we had climbed that day, Hector and Doug mentioned that they had climbed the South Face of North Dome (5.8).  I looked in the SuperTopo climbing book to get a better feel for how they spent their day and was immediately impressed.

North Dome is 8 pitches long and features just over 1100′ of climbing.  At a rating of 5.8 the route is quite moderate, but when the approach is factored into the climb it becomes substantially harder.  Typically the first step is to hike all the way out of Yosemite Valley, for most Americans this step alone is beyond comprehension and ability.  The approach is so much work that SuperTopo suggests that it can take up to 6 hours.  That’s 6 hours of hard work for a fairly fit person before starting on a climb that takes roughly another 6 hours to complete.  I must be getting old because this didn’t seem too appealing to me at the time.

But then at the beginning of this season Ben and I were talking about how we really need to do Royal Arches, especially given that it’s one of the 50 Classic Climbs of North America.  But the thought of doing the legendarily epic-inducing descent was rather unappealing.  Then it hit me… why not make the descent worth it by climbing North Dome while we were up there!  Then an even better idea struck me… climb Royal Arches, hike over to and climb North Dome and then walk off the backside into Tuolumne!  By walking off the backside of North Dome into Tuolumne we could avoid the descent completely and life would be grand.

So we had a… complicated dream.  The general problem is that we’d end our day many miles away from where we started and therefore could use a little bit of outside help to make it happen.  Here’s the plan we came up with.

On Thursday August 25th Ben and I drove up to Yosemite and camped for the night in the forest service land just outside of the park on Evergreen Road.  On Friday we’d wake up at 5am, pack up our stuff, grab some food and head into the park.  We’d leave my car at a pullout near Crane Flat (point A on the map below).  Later in the day Ben’s wife Linda along with our friends Marzena and Jill would pick up my car at Crane Flat and then we’d meet them along highway 120 before enjoying a weekend of climbing in Tuolumne.  To span the 16 miles that separated my car and the start of Royal Arches (roughly point B on the map below) we needed to hitch a ride into the valley.  If that proved successful, we’d climb Royal Arches, hike a mile over to the base of North Dome, climb South Face on North Dome and lastly hike from the top of North Dome back to highway 120 to meet the ladies at the Porcupine Creek trailhead (marked with the green arrow on the map).  Our plan was to meet at 8 but Ben and I figured that 9 was a bit more likely.

Point A is where we left my car, point B is where we needed a ride to and the green arrow is where we were to be picked up (click to enlarge)

So at 6am, while listening to a dog either having sex or being eaten by a bear, Ben and I started to realize that there wasn’t too many people going to the valley at this time of day.  But sure enough, the very first car to drive by gave us a lift.  We couldn’t believe how easy it was.

The car that picked us up had three Bay Area folks that were planning on hiking Half Dome that day.  Two of them had never been to Yosemite and the third had only been once.  It’s always fantastic to see the reaction that people have when entering Yosemite Valley for the first time.  The contrast between their first time in the park and the adventure that we were about to embark on really set a fantastic tone for the day.  Sharing some knowledge about the valley, answering questions that they had, giving directions and even telling them where to park.  It simply felt good to think about when I was in their shoes vs where I’m at now, to help them have a successful adventure just as they were helping us.

We parted ways at the parking lot, each of us heading to a different side of the valley.  Before getting on the route Ben and I stopped in the Ahwahnee to use the bathroom and grab a small second breakfast.  When we got to the base of the route and racked up it was 8am, exactly the time we had hoped to begin.

The start of the route was rather jarring.  We had hoped to be able to simul climb the majority of Royal Arches but the route begins with a very slick chimney so we figured that we’d play it safe and start the simul climbing after the first pitch.  After three pitches of easy 3rd and 4th class we got to the start of the 5th pitch and found a party of three going up the 5.7 fingers section.  We didn’t have time to get stuck behind another party so I picked another line and proceeded to take us up, skirting around them.

Another 5 pitches of simul climbing and we were at the well know pendulum swing.  Royal Arches is rated at 5.10b because of the moves to get across this fairly blank but short section of rock.  But instead of freeing the route, most parties use the fixed rope that’s at this point to swing past it, making the route a 5.7 A0.  I had intended to do the same, but when I got there something inside me wanted to do the moves and free the route.  With a touch of trepidation I started to move away from the security of the cracks and onto the face.  I had found some very small edges (about the thickness of a nickel), one for my left foot and a couple for my fingernails.  I slowly moved onto them, easing my weight onto my left foot and hoping that it would stay put.  Found a nicer left hand further out, stepped through with my right foot, stood up and bam, I was hanging onto the ledge on the other side.  Ben followed in good form and we both laughed somewhat uncontrollably, proud of ourselves for being bold enough to try and confident enough to execute.

Ben on the 10b crux of Royal Arches

After this section the climbing turned easy again for a pitch.  I then made a bit of a mistake.  Instead of continuing along this ledge to the very leftmost side, I went up what appeared to be a well worn gully.  It wasn’t.  Turns out that it wasn’t climbers that had made the rock look worn, it was water.  After two pitches climbing up this mungy and hard to protect gully I decided that we should rap down to the ledge and get ourselves back on route.

Back down on the ledge I figured out where I went wrong and got us back on track.  Another 6 pitches of simul climbing and we reached the end of the route.  Our little off route adventure ended up costing us about an hour so when we sat down for some food it was right about noon.  At the top of the route there is thankfully a fantastic little spring.  It was so incredibly hot that both Ben and I had burned the two liters that we each had with us.  We had planned on refilling our water here but hadn’t planned on being so thirsty.  Given the nature of the spring, we decided to chance it and put down a couple more liters each without treating it.  It was a risk, but we needed the water pretty badly.

After about an hour of hydrating, eating and cooling off we started the hike up to North Dome.  We had expected this part of the day to go by pretty easily, but it ended up being a lot of work.  SuperTopo claimed that it was just under a mile of hiking and gained 500 feet, no big deal.  Turns out that the distance was about right but it gains about twice as much elevation.  We had anticipated this part to take us about a half hour but it ended up being double that.  This put us at the start of South Face at around 2pm.

Given that the climb on North Dome was far more sustained with an overall harder rating and that we’d already done a good amount of climbing, we decided to pitch the climb out.  I took the first pitch and when I setup the anchor after a full 200 feet of climbing (I actually linked the first and second pitch together) I felt exhausted.  The entire time I was belaying Ben I was thinking about how nice it was going to be to have him lead the next pitch.  But then when he got up to the belay said that he thought we should lead in blocks.  Shit.  But I couldn’t fight him, we were both feeling tired so leading in blocks made sense.  So I took the next pitch, a choice I would not regret.

The third pitch of the route was truly spectacular.  The route takes you up a left facing corner but after 20-30′ from the belay you must move right along the face of the dihedral and onto the higher face, avoiding a large overhanging section.  When climbing I knew that I had to make this move at some point, I just wasn’t sure when.  I spotted a line that looked like it could work but I really wasn’t sure.  Feeling as though it was my best option, I proceeded to give it a try.  As I approached the arrêt on my right I started to wonder if there would be anything on the face for me to use.  Pressing on the wind was screaming and I had a tiny flashback to a the Overhanging Bypass route in Joshua Tree.  As I got past the arrêt and onto the face, I smiled at how wild the section was and felt kind of bad that Ben wouldn’t experience it in quite the same way.

After the high of the third pitch, I told Ben that I’d take the fourth as well.  In all honesty, I was happy to lead these lower pitches in order to avoid the 5.8 laybacking at the top of the route.  So Ben took pitch 5 and wrestled with the chimney while wearing a small pack, not fun.  After 22 pitches of leading I was so ecstatic to actually follow a pitch that I couldn’t contain myself and just raced up it.  Given that Ben was going to lead the next two pithes as well I figured that I had nothing to lose.

After another awkward chimney on pitch 6, the climbing turned to polished laybacking.  This is the section that I’d been working to avoid.  I’m a pretty smart guy.  At this time of day, the climbing here was tough.  Near the top of the pitch Ben took a small fall, his first fall onto trad gear.  I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve fallen four times onto trad gear, but given that I’ve experienced such things before I had a feeling that it would shake him up a bit.

Ben asked if I wanted to give the section a try, which I knew was more of a request than a question.  I told him no.  That was a hard thing for me to do, but I knew that there was another difficult section above us and that I was going to have to lead it.  Because Ben is a stronger climber than I am, I didn’t want to deal with the mental challenge of reconciling how I was going to get through a section on lead that gave him troubles.  So I made him finish the pitch, which he did without complaint.  This is what makes Ben a great climbing partner.

After seconding him on pitch 6 and getting up to the belay, I was actually feeling pretty good.  I knew that the next pitch was going to be my responsibility and that it likely contained the crux of the route.  I also knew that we were on the verge of having a very pleasant day of climbing turn into a pain to finish and that getting through the next section was absolutely critical to staying on schedule.  Thankfully it went down without issue and I felt a ton of pressure evaporate.

Ben and I talk a lot about how important it is to operate as a team while climbing these types of routes.  Having two capable leaders not only allows you to mitigate situations like this, it shares the responsibility, shares the enjoyment and perhaps most importantly makes it easier to be empathetic with the person at the other end of the rope.  Ben has come through for me more times than I can count so it felt good to be able to come through for him.  But the lasting joy comes from seeing how strong we’ve become as a climbing team.

Our route up Royal Arches and North Dome

After another pitch of climbing we topped out to a truly amazing sunset.  It was 7pm and we’d been moving for the last 11 hours.  I had run out of water three pitches ago and Ben was out as well.  We still had five miles of uphill hiking left and we were suppose to meet the ladies in an hour.  So we ended up being an hour behind schedule, but overall I’m pretty amazed at how well we did.  We took a moment to enjoy the beauty of  where we were and what we’d done.  Looking at Half Dome across the valley we couldn’t help but wonder how the day went for the group of three that gave us a ride.

Compared to the intensity of the climb, the hike back doesn’t really stand out much in my mind.  I remember it being uphill.  I remember it being easier than I had expected.  I remember that my only source of refreshment came from some chapstick.  At one point I told Ben that if I was presented with the choice of water or a desirable woman, I’d choose the water.  After about three miles into the hike we ran across a stream.  We tanked up with another two literes each and couldn’t resist having a few sips before the treatment finished doing it’s duty.

At around 9pm we got to the road and wondered if we’d see my car.  Alas, it wasn’t there and we proceeded to sit down and wait.  In the proces it started to sprinkle a bit and I once again ran out of water, my eighth liter since we started climbing 13 hours prior.  At around 10pm, just as I told Ben I was going to take a nap, two cars started slowing down and pulled into the parking lot.  Big hugs were exchanged.  It’s a day that I’ll never forget.

In fact, a shower was such a rare thing that I actually have a memory of visiting a relatives house and using their shower.  Given the fact that I can’t remember who the relative was, only the experience of cleaning myself while standing, should be a good indicator of how ingrained bath time was for me.

Sure, I had to take showers after P.E. class in junior high but that was different.  At the time those were events where you were forced to get naked in front of all your same gender peers, go into a big room with water coming out from everywhere and find the delicate balance between getting clean and getting out.  That’s not a shower, it’s forced awkwardness made worse by the one kid who either didn’t feel awkward at all or was completely overwhelmed and reacted by goofing off and occasionally touching other kids.  Perhaps this was the driving force behind being a fast runner… getting to the locker room first so I could be in and out in relative solitude.

So yea, showers were rare and generally not enjoyed.  Thankfully this changed when I left home.  In college the showers were private and outside of the occasional incident when someone would jokingly empty a trash can into your stall, they provided me an atmosphere to focus on the intended task.

I don’t remember how, but at some point in my freshman year I discovered something interesting about my washing ritual; I washed my hair after washing my body.  In a bathtub it’s logical to wash your hair second, or at least it’s logical to me.  But in the shower, applying a top down approach is naturally the right way to go.

Being someone that appreciates and strives for logical approaches (even when it’s a bad idea) I changed and have been washing my hair first for almost 14 years now.  Up until last week.

Last week I ran out of liquid soap and turned to a bar of soap that I’ve had around.  It’s typical for me to be thinking about some problem while in the shower and therefore my mind is pretty distracted.  So when I almost got out of the shower without washing my hair I laughed at my focus induced forgetfulness.  The next day the same thing happened and I started to get a little worried about myself.  Day after that, remembered to wash my hair but once again it came second to my body.  Same for the fourth day.

Now to make things a bit more interesting, for the last three days I’m back with liquid soap and washing my hair first has come back naturally as well.  Okay, perhaps some won’t find this very interesting, but to me it’s fascinating.  I’ve got 14 years of a daily pattern: washing hair first and body second using liquid soap.  Growing up we mostly had bar soap so for those 18 years the pattern was: washing body first and hair second using bar soap.  So on the surface, it appears that my mind made some strange connection that tells me to instinctively wash my body first when using bar soap, no matter where I’m washing myself.

Of course this could all be coincidental, but I don’t feel like it is.  I find it to be a really fun example of how pliable our minds can be while at the same time be disappointingly literal.  It’s as though I hadn’t changed my behavior, I just learned a new behavior for a new set of paramaters.  If this is in fact what’s happened, it’s both a useful and a disturbing detail of our minds.  On the useful side, it means that we can subvert a behavior with a new one by just changing some of the paramaters in our environment.  But what’s disturbing is that the old behavior seems to linger and will show itself when the old conditions are present once again.

Makes me wonder how much we really change as people.  With enough duplication of my childhood environment, would I go back to behaving the same way I did when I was a child?  One comforting aspect is that while maybe we don’t have as much control over our behavior as we perceive, perhaps that’s offset by our ability to influence our environment.

Of course I’m not a psychologist or sociologist.  I’m just a guy who has part of his mind stuck in a bathtub.

Tate is my only sibling and being four years older than I am he naturally dips his toe into some waters before I do. He turned 30 before me, purchased a house before me, got married before me and started working on having a family before me. Hell, I haven’t even started on those last three. Thankfully there isn’t a lot of competition between the two of us so you won’t find me complaining about this arrangement… maybe I wish that I turned 30 first but that’s it.

While my brother and I are quite similar, there is no doubt that we are in different places both geographically and chronologically. Growing up he was kind of a fortune teller. I could see the path he was taking and for so many years I instinctively wanted to follow that same path. It was his interest in having a car stereo that set me on a path to starting my own audio business when I was 16. It was his friend Josh’s acne that made me reluctant to treat my own. I even imagined that I’d join him in Minneapolis after I graduated college. This list can go on but you get the point, Tate was my role model and a fantastic one at that.

Things changed a bit when I moved to California. Without realizing it, I found a slightly different path and one that I’m pretty happy to be on. But I find it a little ironic that I never realized how much influence my brother has had on my life until I noticed how different our present places were. This realization was uncomfortable. I never would have thought that on the night before my brother would become a father and my parents would become grandparents that I’d be feeling the weight of 4 years and 2000 miles.

After the delivery we visited Tate and Tammie in their hospital room. I tend to be sensitive towards various sounds and the beeping from Tammie’s heart rate monitor was one of them, it called to me. I noticed that every now and then it would jump up dramatically. The first time it was kind of puzzling. Then it happened again and again. After a few times I figured out what was going on and had a hard time holding my composure.

Every time Tammie touched or held Callie her pulse would shoot up at least 20 bpm.

You can see the connection that Tate and Tammie have with Callie by the way they look at her, smile at her and hold her. But Tammie’s heart rate shows a different kind of connection, one that exists outside of her conscious mind.

For me one of the joys of living is exploring all the different things we can do while we are alive. My parents did an amazing job of introducing me to wide variety of things and very rarely did they ever push them down my throat. Instead they presented me with opportunities and let me find my own direction and my own passions. That was quite the favor that they did for me.

But there seems to be something inside us all that wants to see our interests passed onto our children. Just take one look at the pressures that fathers can place on their kids to participate in a particular sport. If you ask me, that’s a pretty good way to ensure that they either won’t like it or will end up resenting you. So when I started hoping that some aspects of me would rub off on Callie I started feeling like a hypocrite.

After seeing her on my last trip I realized that my urge for her to have something in common with me is motivated by my desire to be connected with her. To have something that we can talk about, something we can share. So I’ve reframed things in my mind a bit. Instead of wanting a part of me to rub off on her, my goal is to share as much of me as I can and see where she takes herself.

The West Coast is a different kind of place than the Midwest with opportunities to explore different kinds of things. So it’s exciting to think about the things I can share with her out here during different parts of her life. Hopefully some of them will enrich her life and get her to ask some questions but I know that others will go right by her. But that’s okay, it will be her choice.

Just so you know the gist of this story: I climbed, I fell, I broke my back… literally.  But I’m okay.

I live a pretty adventurous lifestyle.  Outside of this latest accident and a torn ACL 9 years ago, I’ve managed to get through a dozen years of activities like mountain and road biking, wilderness hiking, downhill skiing, backcountry snowshoeing, rock climbing and simply being a male in his 20′s without much health drama.  While the average American might look at my lifestyle as dangerous or crazy, to me it’s a lifestyle of being alive and one that I’m perfectly comfortable with.

What you are comfortable with is an important thing to always keep in mind.  Knowing when you can push that comfort zone and when you should stay in it.  Comfort and confidence are strongly tied together and we mostly limit our lives to what we’re confident doing because well, it’s comfortable.  But to continue growing as a person we need to expand what we’re comfortable with and increase our confidence in new dimensions.  We all do this by learning new things, meeting new people, starting new relationships and many other ways.  It just happens that one of my dimensions is exploring myself in nature and over the years I’ve become very confident  in this area.

I mention this because I don’t want the lessons I’ve learned to be lost via dismissive thoughts like “he’s crazy” or “he was asking for it”.  The reality is that we’re all crazy, we’re all asking for it and every now and then it catches up with us.  So here’s the latest story of how I was asking for it and how it caught up with me.

“We did it because it’s fun and mainly it was fun… every now and then it went wildly wrong” — Joe Simpson, Touching the Void

The Stage

If you’ve been reading my previous posts, you’ll know all about the events leading up to my fall so this section will be a bit repetitive.  For those that haven’t, I was in Yosemite Valley for a 6 day climbing trip and on a route called Selaginella (5.8).  The entire trip was going fantastically and the climbing couldn’t have been better.  We were making great time, the weather was awesome, both Ben and I had done some great leads and the views were beyond spectacular.  Everything was so fantastic that even the fall that I’m about to describe can’t tarnish those experiences.

I had just finished leading a 200′ rope stretching pitch to one of the coolest rock formations and belay stations I’d ever seen.  From this location it was about 800′ straight down to the valley floor and about 170′ to the top of our climb.  So with Ben taking the next lead I was assuming that once he reached the top I’d just have to follow up behind him and clean the gear along the way, piece of cake.

I couldn’t see Ben’s progress on most of the route so I was judging how things were going by monitoring the amount of rope I was letting out.  Knowing that it was 170′ to the top I was surprised when Ben went off of belay with 60′ of rope left.  I couldn’t hear him at this point so I wondered if I was mistaken about how much climbing we had left or if the beta in the topo was just wrong.  Either way I started climbing up to him.

About 50′ from him he informed me that he hadn’t reached the top and that I’d understand why when I got there.  I was curious what was going on but Ben didn’t sound remotely worried so I wasn’t either.  He had stopped on this 20′ long ledge that was about 18″ wide and about 30′ from the top.  He didn’t finish it off because the climbing below was pretty strenuous and he wasn’t sure if we were still on route or not.  That was cool with me.

The Fall

So we looked at our options, we had two of them.  Over to the left was a large flake that was totally separated from the wall and looked like you could just push it over.  In front of us was a face section with some very thin and detached flake and what appeared to be a small crack.  The face looked quite featured and I thought I’d be able to get a piece of protection in 10′ off of the belay.

So I used these very thin flakes as foot holds while walking my hands up this seam in the rock that I thought turned into more of a crack.  These flakes were about 1/8th of an inch thick and I could feel them moving a bit when I stepped on them.  Needless to say I wasn’t looking to hang out on them for too long.  When I got up to where I thought I’d be able to get a small nut in I realized that it wasn’t going to work out as I expected.  This didn’t concern me too much because while the rock was sketchy, the climbing was easy and I wasn’t worried about falling.

Looking up at what I had left to climb I spied a nice pocket in the rock about 4 inches tall and 3/4 of an inch wide making it big enough to fit a solid cam into.  I became a bit fixated on this pocket and when I reached it I discovered that I had run out of solid footholds on my right side.  So instead of resting on the rock my foot was mostly holding on with friction.  My left foot was on the sloping section of this seam in the rocks so it didn’t have a great amount of purchase either.  I had a solid right hand in the pocket that I noticed below and a good left hand on the seam.

In order to place the cam into the pocket I had to remove my right hand from it, select an appropriate sized cam from the rack of gear, place it into the rock and clip my rope into it.  The first cam I selected turned out to be a bit too small and the lobes on the cam were tipped out.  What this means is that the cam was fully extended in the rock and it’s holding power would be drastically reduced.  So I removed the cam to replace it with a larger one.

At this point I found myself starting to get nervous.  My right foot started to Elvis (shake uncontrollably) which isn’t a good thing when it’s gripping the rock with friction.  I managed to get myself to calm down and my foot stopped shaking.  So I went back to looking for the right size cam and was having real trouble finding one that I liked.  The nerves kicked up again and this time the shaking in my foot caused it to slip.  Because my left foot was on an even worse hold and I only had one hand gripping the rock, I couldn’t hold on and fell.

At the time that I fell I was about 20′ above the belay and about 5′ from the top of this climb without a single piece of protection between me and Ben.  This is called a factor 2 fall and it is the worst type of fall that a climber can take.  When you fall on lead you fall twice as far as you are above your last piece of protection plus a bit for rope stretch.  When your last piece of protection is the belay itself, that means you’re going to fall twice as far as you have climbed plus some rope stretch.  For me this translated into what we are estimating as a 50′ fall.

At 190 lbs, I’m not the lightest climber and after 50′ of gravity doing it’s thing it takes a good amount of force to stop such a moving mass.  When the rope started to come tight Ben initially couldn’t stop the fall and the rope started running through his right hand.  Being an extremely good belayer he quickly found where the rope was leaving the ledge and stepped on it.  Outside of being a fantastic person, this is reason I climb with Ben.  Without his quick thinking my fall could have been 220′, I can’t thank and praise him enough.

The Aftermath

The rock I was climbing wasn’t quite vertical, it was sloping just a little bit.  So when I fell I slid down the first 20′ which wouldn’t have been bad except for that 18″ ledge.  When I hit that Ben said that I just crumbled onto it and then off of it, this is what caused most of my injuries.  This sent me tumbling down the remaining 30′ of my fall.  When the rope came tight I found myself upside down and a bit disoriented, kind of like the scrambler amusement park ride if it were to end with you inverted and hanging by your waist.

Ben shouted down, “are you okay?!”  I replied very quickly with “yeah, I’m fine”.  He didn’t believe me and proclaimed that he saw my fall and that there is no way I could be fine after something like that.  I felt pretty beat up but I didn’t feel broken and quickly swung over to the route we had climbed up and told Ben that I was going to start climbing up to him.  He shouted down for me to hold on because he was “dealing with some pretty bad rope burn”.  My heart sunk and I felt incredibly guilty about the injuries I caused him.

But in no time he told me that I could start climbing up to him and while doing so I noticed that my left heel was hurting a bit as well as my right knee and my lower back.  But I honestly didn’t think too much about it at the time.  I made my way back to Ben pretty quickly and got myself secure into the anchor that was now proven to be very bomber.

We hung out there for at least a half an hour.  In that time my injuries were starting to become quite noticeable and I was growing anxious for a plan of what we were going to do.  Our options were to rappel down the route leaving behind an enormous amount of gear and probably taking a least a couple hours to do so, have one of us try once again to finish the climb or wait for a party far below us to catch up and have them help us out.

With how slow the party below us was moving it would be at least a couple hours until we got to the top if we waited for them.  Rappelling the route was not only unappealing for the massive amount of gear we would leave behind, it was also pretty dangerous.  So we decided to get the guide book out and see what it suggested for our route.

Turns out we were suppose to go up the large flake over to our left.  After thinking and talking it through, Ben said that he’d be willing to lead it and I could follow up behind him.  Even with very severe burns he managed to climb up the flake and finish the route without any troubles.  The adrenaline was starting to leave my body by the time I started climbing so it proved to be pretty painful.  But even in my state I managed to finish it off without weighting the rope.

The Descent

At the top Ben asked if I wanted to take a moment to at least enjoy the view, I said “nope”.  The pain in my knee was excruciating and while I was happy to be at the top and next to a very popular hiking trail, I was pretty worried about the mile of hiking and the 1000′ of descending that was now in front of me.  I couldn’t put any weight on the heel of my left foot and the pain in my right knee kept me from stepping down with that leg so the many sand covered steps of the trail were bound to make things interesting.

So I set myself little goals.  I’d focus on getting to a landmark that I knew of or to a specified elevation.  Along the way we ran into a couple of hikers that warned us that there was a bear just off of the trail in front of us.  I thought about how ironic it would be to survive the fall but be eaten by a bear.  So we approached the area slowly and made a bunch of racket.  We noticed the bear above us and it seemed pretty content to mind its own business so we continued on our way chatting with the couple that warned us of the situation.

They, like almost everyone else that a climber runs into, was very curious about how we climb such things.  I left the explanations and demonstrations of how the gear worked to Ben.  While I was very worried that I had torn a ligament in my knee, I was very pleased with my ability to keep up with two hikers who were injury free.  Plus the conversation helped keep my mind off of things and we were back at camp in no time.

At camp we got out the first aid kit.  Ben cleaned up his burns and threw on some tape while I put an ace bandage on my knee with some ice.  After hanging out a bit and sharing what happened with Dustin and Katie we walked back to the trailhead to pick up my car and went to the grocery store for some food.  When we got back to camp I was still very sore but feeling surprisingly well.  Well enough to make us some breakfast burritos for dinner and then hang out by the fire for a couple hours before heading to bed.

I was tempted to visit the medical staff in Yosemite but figured if the swelling in my knee and heel didn’t get any worse I could wait until I got back to the Bay Area.  The next morning I woke up very stiff but was mobile.  We packed up the car and started the drive home.  Along the way we chatted about what had happened and bigger picture stuff around our climbing futures.

The Hospital

When I got home I didn’t want the doctors to be repulsed by my smell so I took a shower and headed to Stanford Hospital.  I tried to get an appointment with a sports medicine doctor but none were available so I headed over to the ER.  They admitted me and by 3pm I was in a room getting checked out and having some X-rays taken of my heel, knee and back.  Around 5pm they decided that they wanted more info about my heel so they ordered a CT scan of it, fine by me.  Around 7:30 they said that they couldn’t see anything wrong with my heel and started to discharge me.

Cross section of my L2 vertebrae

Just before signing my discharge papers the doctor came in and put an end to the fun.  He said that a more senior radiologist looked at the X-ray of my back and spotted a compression fracture in my L2 vertebrae.  My response: “you’re shitting me”.  Just like that I went from being a beat up guy to the most interesting person in the hospital and while everyone loves some attention, you don’t want it from doctors.

So I asked what this meant.  They said that they needed to get a CT scan of my spine to determine if it was a stable or an unstable fracture.  If it was unstable I’d have to go in for surgery and get my vertebrae fused and if it was stable they’d put me in a back brace for a month and I’d be on my way.  What a contrast that is, I could be fine in a month or my entire outdoor life could be over.  I started freaking out a bit.

So I called Ben and told him what was going on and asked if he could keep me company, he said that he’d be on his way.  After getting of the phone I went in for my CT scan and was very nervous about it.  I was so nervous that my entire body was shaking and all of the techniques I knew to calm myself weren’t doing the trick.  This continued for another 20 minutes until Ben showed up.

Not only was it nice to have Ben around to keep me laughing and distracted, he was a better witness to what happened to me than I was and could tell a side of the story that I couldn’t.  It also gave me a chance to hear about his struggle to find an burn specialist for his hand that his insurance company approved of.  After a series of “recommended” doctors that no longer existed, he thankfully managed to find one that was truly interested in taking care of him and he needed it.  With bandages covering the severe third degree burns on his palm and finger tips, it was pretty obvious to the staff that he was there to see me.

It was about 9pm the parade of doctors was just about to begin.  Seems like everyone that was on staff that night came to check me out and hear my story.  Each one of them performing their favorite barrage of neurological tests on my body, one of them even wanted to check the “tone” of my rectum, fun for everyone.  I kept hoping that one of them would be as attractive as Elliot Reid from Scrubs, but alas that was not the case.  As a reward for going through all of this they ordered me a dinner but the kitchen was closed so instead I was treated to a few packages of graham crackers.

The hours past and I got no conclusive information from the doctors.  They seemed to be debating about how bad my fracture was and nobody wanted to make a call so they kept bringing in people with more experience hoping to clarify the situation.  It seemed like some doctors just stopped by because they wanted to hear the story in person, one guy was even a rock climber.  But at 4am they seemed to acknowledge the fact that a decision was not going to be made and they’d have to wait for their senior spinal guy to show up in the morning.

Not wanting to admit me into the hospital and not being able to send me home they decided to stick me over in a corner of the hospital where I could spend the night.  I affectionately referred to this area as purgatory.  I don’t care what the religious folks say, purgatory was really pretty nice, they had food, comfortable beds and some pain meds which allowed me to get to sleep.  They even offered to let Ben stay in a room next door if he wanted!  While a gracious offer, home has a pretty strong pull over a hospital, especially after 8 hours and there was really no point in sticking around.  I was out shortly after Ben left.

In the morning the spinal guy checked me out and kind of laughed at me still being there, that made me feel good.  It was clear to him that my fracture was stable and they threw me in a brace and shoved me out the door.  I was to wear this brace for the next month or so and even though it was pretty annoying I was just thrilled to not need any surgery.

The Lessons

Like almost every other accident, there isn’t just one thing that went wrong in this one.  Nothing in life is black or white, safe or unsafe and this is why textbook rules are impossible to apply to all situations.

Some climbers my criticize me for not following the best practices and getting some protection in sooner but anyone who has done a good amount of living knows that things don’t always work out that nicely and trad climbing is no different.  I could have possibly clipped the rope to one of the pieces of the anchor but even that practice seems to be subjective and would not have changed my personal outcome in this case.

I could have and should have taken a look at the topo before setting off on this lead.  It would have been obvious that the face was not the way to go and would have likely avoided the whole accident.  I think about this one a lot and it frustrates me that I had this information and did not use it.

I could list off a number of other things that would have made a difference and kept us safer.  But I feel like doing so would be like telling someone that 2×2 is 4 instead of telling them why 2×2 is 4.  You could spend your life learning lessons about specific climbing situations and never know how to climb safely.  So instead I did a little 5 whys exercise to see if I could find a deeper lesson.

What I came up with is the feeling like this accident was brewing for a while.  So even if I had avoided the accident in this specific case, the risk of a similar accident would not have been removed.  I’m not saying that I got injured because it was fate and I’m not saying that I deserved this because of the activity I was doing.  What I’m saying is that the way I was escalating my climbing made a preventable accident inevitable.

In less than one year I’ve gone from no climbing experience to leading routes that 60 years ago were considered to be almost at the limits of human ability.  I spent a lot of time measuring my success and gauging when to move up in difficulty based off of being able to complete a climb at some level.  That’s a totally reasonable and safe approach to take in a climbing gym where things are predictable and you don’t need much margin for error.  Trad climbing has a different set of requirements.

So instead of some blanket rules that every climber has heard, what I have come up with is the more abstract realization that I should have been paying more attention to what was fueling my confidence.  I was comfortable leading a section that I shouldn’t have been because I had confidence in my abilities to do it.  But that confidence was founded more on ego than reality and when things didn’t go just right it caught up with me.

If you’ve done something long enough that it becomes second nature, that’s a solid thing to be confident about, that’s what I’m calling reality driven confidence.  Talking yourself up and increasing your ego driven confidence is fine, that’s a good way to push the envelope, but you should recognize when you’re doing that and avoid doing it when you’re betting the farm.

I continue to find that rock climbing closely parallels life and I think that’s why I love it so much.  You have confidence you climb, you loose confidence or find that the confidence was misplaced and you fall.  I don’t care if it’s rock climbing, building a relationship, running a company, the stock market, the housing market or anything else that involves humans, the same rule seems to apply.  The more reality based confidence in the system, the safer the climbing.

Unlike other areas of Yosemite Valley, the rock face is not continuous all the way up the valley.  Instead it is divided up into tiers by very large ledges, so large that the Upper Yosemite Falls Trail runs on top of the second tier.  The first tier gets you about 400′ off of the valley floor and the top of the second tier gets you another 600′ higher.  So to climb to the top of the second tier you have to link together a couple of different climbs.  For the first tier we decided to head up Munginella (5.6) and then finish off the day at the top of the second tier via Selaginella (5.8).

To access the base of Munginella you park at the Lower Yosemite Falls trailhead.  While gearing up and getting ready I noticed a couple ladies who were also getting ready to do some climbing.  After a bit of chatting we discovered that they we were all heading in the same direction and they informed us that the climbers trail can be pretty hard to spot.  So they offered to help out by showing us the way.  We were quite thankful because they were right, the trail was quite hard to spot.

After a bit of 3rd class walking we arrived at the base of the climb.  There was a party of three just getting started in front of us and not long after we arrived two more parties of two showed up behind us.  A women in the party of three informed us that they were going to be moving pretty slowly because this would be the first lead for two of their members.  Thankfully they were quite respectful and after they all managed to get to the first belay they allowed us to climb past them.

Ben took the first pitch and wasted no time in flying up the first half of the route.  He setup an anchor above the first party and we made a quick changeover by swinging leads, trying not to hold them up.  The second pitch flew by so fast that I barely even remember leading it.  I reached the top and setup an anchor off of a few trees, trying not to spray rock and dirt down on the parties below us.  With both of us at the top of Munginella we checked the time and laughed, 45 minutes to knock out the two pitches and 300′ of climbing, that’s really moving for the two of us.

In order to get over to the base of Selaginella you have to walk along the top of the first tier.  It’s a very sandy and dirty climbers trail with a bit of elevation gain and a huge danger of dislodging rocks onto those below.  While looking for the start of our next climb there seemed to be a number of possibilities.  So we kept checking the guide book and compared the crack systems that we saw with what was drawn.  After about 10 minutes of hiking we came across a location that was pretty obviously used to belay people from and sure enough, it was the start of the climb.

It was Ben’s turn to take the lead.  The first pitch runs up a pretty nice dihedral and a solid 5.7 crack for hand jams and a bit of layback action.  Because the route is quite vertical, there aren’t as many locations to take breaks making the climbing quite sustained.  As the follower I was finding myself having to remove gear and rack it while keeping a hand in the crack at all times.  The topo seems to suggest belaying just above a tree stump but if you continue on just a little bit further you’ll reach a huge ledge, queuing yourself up for being able to do the route in three pitches instead of four.

The second pitch starts out with a pretty solid 5.7 crack that requires good usage of fists.  When you reach a piton you should start to traverse over to the left.  The topo calls this section 5.0 and for some reason my expectation was that I’d be able to pretty much run up this part.  While the climbing wasn’t hard at all, the route finding does require a bit of thinking.

While I was leading I remembered seeing a tree on the topo which I managed to sling with a double length runner so I knew I was on track at that point.  But above there I was faced with a couple options.  Over on the left there was a huge dihedral but it didn’t look very appealing.  On the right there looked to be a squeeze chimney that I thought would be safer but I wasn’t sure if it was on route or not.  I decided to take the chimney.

As I’ve mentioned in the last few posts, chimneys are kind of new to me.  Unbeknown to me, this chimney is rated at 5.8 and is a very tight fit.  I could get myself into it and feeling quite secure, but placing protection was a mammoth pain in the ass.  The chimney was so tight that my body was just wedged into it so the movement of my arms was quite limited.  But I managed to set a couple solid nuts along the way and was pretty happy when I was out of it.

Realizing that I’d done about 150′ of climbing I figured I should start looking for a place to setup an anchor and belay from.  There were some good cracks around but nothing very comfortable to stand on.  So I found myself looking upward, spying a place that looked good, getting to it and really not liking it that much.  This cycle happened about three times until I saw what looked like a glorious ledge just a bit further.  This one worked out.

I got up onto the ledge and immediately ran out of rope.  I had climbed a bit over 200′ and if it wasn’t for the bolt and the piton I would have been worried that I was off route.  I used the bolt and the piton for my anchor and backed it up with a big nut located in a crack between the two.  After I got Ben on belay I had a moment to look around and started smiling ear to ear.

Looking below from my belay on Selaginella

This wasn’t just any ledge I was standing on, it was a peninsula of rock jutting out of the face and just big enough for two people to stand on comfortably.  It was easy to get a full 180 degree view of the valley below as well as see everything that we’d climbed so far.  I yelled down to Ben that he was on belay and could watch his progress the whole way, it was very cool and I couldn’t wait for him to get up to me so we could share the experience.

I was also anxious to check the guide book and figure out where we were on the route.  When looking we discovered that I had almost climbed two pitches and from here we’d be able to finish the route in one more pitch.  But there was a decision to make, we could traverse left around a very wild 5.8 section or go up a 5.7 crack with a face section.  Ben chose to take the 5.7 crack and I can’t blame him, the traverse looked extremely exposed.

From my vantage point, I could only see the first 20′ or so of this last pitch so outside of watching how much rope I was feeding Ben I wasn’t able to see his progress.  I knew that he had to climb about 170′ to get to the top so I was rather surprised when he went off belay with 60′ of rope left (we climb with a 200ft rope).  I wondered if the beta in the topo was wrong or if I was just mistaken about how much climbing we had left.  Either way, I assumed that I was done leading for the day and after cleaning the route it would be in the bag.

The pitch itself was rather intense.  The crack climbing off of the belay was pretty straightforward and it led up to a ledge full of large chunks of loose rock.  Above that was a very tenuous traverse along a face with some under clings in a thin flake and minimal protection.  After this traverse you get a bit of a reprieve with some nice 5.7 fists up to a small ledge.  Taking a break here is likely a good idea because above here is some fairly strenuous 5.8 layback and stemming.

About half way through the stemming section Ben called down to me and told me that he hadn’t finished the climb.  He said that I’d understand why when I got up there in a happy and almost excited way so I kind of laughed and said okay.  When I reached him I found that he was standing on a big ledge about 18″ wide and 20′ long.  Looking up I could see the top of the climb about 30′ above us, close enough I felt like I could just touch it.

So I asked Ben why he hadn’t finished the climb.  Turns out the last pitch was pretty strenuous on lead and he wasn’t sure if we were off route or not.  So he figured he’d bring me up and get my read on things.  I could easily see how the climbing below would be strenuous on a leader so I completely understood and applauded him for deciding to bring me up.

We had two options to finish the route, a layback off of a detached flake on the left and a featured but difficult to protect face in front of us.  The flake looked rather suspect to use as a layback so I decided that I’d lead the face section as it seemed safer.  I’m going to save the details of the events that followed this decision for the next post.  But as a summary, the features on the face got thinner and the places I thought I could get protection in didn’t work out as planned.  As a result I had a rather bad fall.  So in as far as beta for this route is concerned, I’d highly suggest not climbing the face and using the very stable fake on the left.  It can be protected and is a much safer route.

I don’t enjoy leaving you dangling in regards to my fall but the details of it and the lessons learned deserve their own post.  Also, the quality and enjoyment that this climb provides doesn’t deserve to be weighed down with all of that extra baggage.  So I’ll leave you with a more pleasant image, a panorama taken a bit lower on the climb.

Some of our campmates had done some climbing on the Glacier Point Apron the day before and spoke pretty highly of the experience.  So we checked out what the area had to offer and it turns out that there were a number of options that looked interesting.  The Grack, Center (5.6) is touted as the best 5.6 climb in Yosemite but we were looking for something a bit longer than three pitches.  What we found was Goodrich Pinnacle.

Panorama from Goodrich Pinnacle

Goodrich Pinnacle (5.9R) was first climbed by Royal Robins, Liz Robins and TM Herbert in 1964.  They put up the route in honor of Don Goodrich who died while attempting the first ascent of the west face of Mount Conness.  The guide book described the route as one of the better climbs of its length in the Valley and gave it a five star rating.  Featuring some cracks, a lot of face climbing and even a 5.6 chimney section, we were pretty excited to give it a go.

It was a Saturday and the perfect temperatures were not ignored by the climbing community so we were expecting to deal with some crowds.  To our surprise what we found was complete and total solitude.  On the approach to the climb we didn’t see a single person, on the route itself we didn’t see any parties, we seemed to have the entire crag to ourselves.  Perhaps folks were sleeping in or perhaps the relatively recent (1998) and deadly rockfall in the area was still a deterrent.  I’m not sure about the reason but I was thankful.

At the base of the climb the guide book shows about 60′ of 4th class climbing and in order to link together some pitches we decided to belay from the top of the 4th class.  While getting to the top of the “4th” class was fairly easy, it was much closer to 5.0 climbing so I’d suggest roping up if you aren’t comfortable free soloing easy stuff.

When I studied the route beta I decided that I wanted to lead the first pitch.  Doing so would allow me to follow on the crux as well as avoid leading the 5.6 chimney at the top.  After Ben’s quick ascent of the 5.6 chimney a couple days earlier I had decided that he should lead them from now on.  Plus with only 5.4 and 5.5 moves, the first pitch was quite easy and a good warmup.

We were already 200′ off the ground when Ben started the second pitch of 5.7 hand jams.  Above this pitch the cracks run out and the route transitions into face climbing until last pitch.  The beginning of the third pitch features this very cool arching crack that goes up and left towards a bolt at the end.  Above this crack lies the psychological crux of the climb, 30′ of 5.8 climbing without any protection.  Psychological crux eh?  With a little reluctance I decided that I would lead it.

I used the arched crack as footholds and really zippered it up with a lot of cams and nuts because I knew that I wouldn’t need them above.  At the end of the crack there is a very nice resting place and a solid bolt.  With all of the runout 5.8 above this point, I took my time and got a feel for what was ahead.  Royal Robbins worked the first ascent on this section and said, “for half an hour I made repeated starts here, carefully backing down each time until I had the combination worked out.”  So I don’t feel too bad about taking my time either and it paid off because I climbed the pitch cleanly.

Ben taking a break before the traverse

The next pitch was back in the hands of Ben and it featured the crux of the climb.  At a piton 30′ above the belay the climb has “a traverse as delicate as any I have seen” (Royal Robins) for 30′ over to a small flake.  Once at the flake you climb up for another 30′ on very smooth 5.9 glacial polish.  You can fit at best two creative pieces of protection into the flake on the right (a small nut and a .5 cam).  While I was climbing towards him, just before reaching the crux, Ben tells me that right above me he had to palm the rock with both hands and could feel himself sliding down while trying to move up.  Even as a follower, that pitch really kept my attention.

The guide book made the next pitch look rather innocent.  It had three very closely spaced bolts early on and a 5.7 runout section at the end of the pitch.  Thinking that Ben got us through the crux of the climb I was feeling like the worst was behind us.  Incorrect.  I got to the first bolt with relative ease and the second bolt was just a few feet above with the third bolt just a few feet further, it’s like we were at the gym.  But alas, it was not the gym and these bolts were there for a reason, the climbing is tough.

Above the second bolt there is not a single hand or foot hold in sight for 10′.  Climbing shoes are made with a very sticky rubber that is able to flow into the rock for more friction and in general is really amazing stuff.  In this case it wasn’t amazing enough.  The rock was smooth as glass and when I would step up and apply pressure my foot would not only slide down, it would make squeaking sounds in the process!  I didn’t think that was possible with climbing shoes and after a bunch of experimentation I decided to be lowered back to the belay and have Ben give it a try.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ben was able to figure out a way to make it up this section, but he wasn’t having much better luck than I was.  Perhaps this is why Royal claims that Glacier Point has some of the “severest friction climbing in the country”.  Wanting to complete the climb, we spied a section of rock over to the left that was much more featured but would be a sketchy traverse.  So with a bit of shame we decided to weight the rope and pendulum over to it.  The rock in this section was much nicer but with 60′ of runout Ben stayed focused and got us through the section.

We were down to the last pitch and because I was suppose to lead the last one that meant that I would get to finish the climb.  But like I mentioned earlier, the top of the route features a 5.6 chimney and my last experience with a chimney of that rating was pretty slow going.  So while I had confidence in being able to do the moves, I wasn’t really looking forward to them.  At least there was plenty of protection in this section so I really didn’t have anything to complain about.

To my surprise and joy the chimney was extremely easy.  I’m quite aware of the subjective nature of rating climbs but there is absolutely no way that I can see calling this chimney and Church Bowl Chimney a 5.6, there is no comparison.  But after six pitches and 800′ of climbing we were now over 1000′ off of the valley floor and quite proud of our accomplishment.  This was the longest climb that I had completed and our first experience with 5.9 face climbing in Yosemite.

But all good things must come to an end and while rappelling down the route they did exactly that.  We decided to rappel down the right side of the pinnacle and on the way down Ben noticed that there was no way our ropes wouldn’t get stuck.  When we started pulling them they did exactly that and we needed to figure out a way to get them unstuck.  We decided that Ben would climb back up the route to where the knot got stuck.  I had remembered there being a piton somewhere up there and was hoping that it was close to the trouble spot.  Turns out that the rope was stuck about 10′ above the piton so Ben climbed up, got it unstuck, down climbed back to the piton and then rappelled off of it.  Just in case the piton blew, I kept him on belay.

After getting that unstuck we thought the rest of the rappel would be pretty straightforward but it wasn’t.  Below our third rappel the ropes ran over an area with a bunch of cracks.  We tie knots into the end of our ropes just to make sure we don’t rappel off of the ends.  As we started to pull the rope through the anchor, one of these knots got stuck in a crack below us.  So I tied the longer end off to an anchor and single rope rappelled down to where it was stuck.

After two stuck ropes it was taking us between one and two hours to get off of the route.  The guide book claimed that from the second belay station it’s 200′ to the ground so we figured we’d be able to get down from there, but the ground looked pretty far away.  I was the guinea pig and went first.  With two generous 60m ropes and rope stretch it still wasn’t quite enough.  I found myself about 10′ off of the ground but close enough to get onto the 4th class and get myself off rappel.

Even with the problem prone rappel, I’d highly recommend the climb.  The views are amazing and the climbing has a good amount of variety on a clean route.  However, I would suggest being a rather confident 5.9 leader with some experience on Yosemite slabs.  I’d also keep my mind open about using some aid on the 5.9 sections of the climb.  If you finish the route, it sounds like rappelling off the left side of the pinnacle is less painful and on the lower pitches consider relying on a backup prusik knot when rappelling and skip the knots at the ends.

Manure Pile got its name not because the rock is crap or because it looked like crap but because people used to dump crap at its base.  More specifically, in the mid 1960′s the stable owners in the valley would dump their horseshit here which actually did deter some climbers.  It wasn’t until 1965 that the first known route was completed and by none other than Yvon Chouinard (founder of Black Diamond and Patagonia).  That route was called After 6 and it was given that name because he and his partner started the climb at 6 o’clock… in the evening.  With an impressive 6 pitches in length, starting this first ascent at 6pm shows how skillful of a climber Chouinard was.

Being that After 6 (5.7) was the first established climb at this crag, it’s coincidentally appropriate that it was our first climb on it as well.  If it was June maybe we could have started it at 6pm but seeing that it gets dark around 7pm in October, we set out for a 10am start.  After a very short walk from the car to the base of the climb we found that there was one party in front of us.  The leader was already about a third of the way through the first pitch so we hustled to get ready to go.  Turns out our hustling wasn’t really needed.

The party in front of us was comprised of a guy and his girlfriend.  He managed to complete the first pitch (which is the hardest of them all) without too much trouble and at a fairly good pace, however she was not feeling so comfortable following and it took her quite a while to complete the pitch.  We gave them a bit to get started on their next pitch before Ben took off on lead.

Apparently when Ben reached the top of the pitch the couple was still there and having a bit of an argument.  He seemed upset at her for not being comfortable and moving slowly.  On top of that he was demanding that if they were to continue that she lead at least one of the pitches.  Ben suggested to her that she should lead the second pitch because it’s just 3rd and 4th class walking.  Apparently that wouldn’t do, it needed to be “a real pitch”.  This just baffles me.  If you’re on a climb and your partner is sketched out the last thing you should do is demand that they do some leading, especially when it’s your significant other.  Thankfully the coupled bailed and rappelled down the route before getting themselves into real trouble.

The first pitch is without a doubt the physical crux of the climb.  With a good amount of 5.7 layback moves it’s a fairly sustained 130′.  One section about a third of the way up even features about 10′ of polished granite which can be a bit tricky to get through if you aren’t a confident 5.7 leader.  I had planed on leading the second pitch but when we got there we discovered that it really was very easy 4th class climbing and not worth putting me on belay for.

At the base of our second pitch it was now my turn to take the lead.  Wouldn’t you know it, the first section of the pitch featured a small chimney.  Higher up the chimney turned into a wide crack with nice foot holds on the left side but was a little difficult to protect.  At the top of the crack is the next official belay station before a section of face climbing.

I had forgotten that this pitch was so short and continued up and past the easy face climbing section.  Above this there was a nice ledge to belay from and I contemplated stopping there but the next 40′ of climbing featured a wonderful hand crack and I really wanted to lead it.  So I shouted down to Ben for an estimate of how much rope I had left.  He couldn’t give me a very accurate answer so I took that as enough to get to the next ledge.

At 200′ of climbing rope drag can get to be a real issue.  I had just reached the ledge that I wanted to get to but I was feeling so much drag that I thought I had run out of rope.  Wanting to build an anchor about three feet away from my fingertips I debated what I should do.  I decided to give the rope a good pull and see if I could get any slack.  I managed to get just enough to throw some pro in the wall and bring Ben up, a perfect rope stretching pitch.

Our third pitch (traditionally the fifth) was back in Ben’s hands.  Physically it was pretty easy but route finding was fairly challenging.  There were trees galore mixed in with many different route options.  The trees made it hard to look ahead to see where you should be and created some rope management issues as well.  But after finishing this pitch we only had another 100′ of climbing left and we’d be at the top.

At 600′ above the valley floor it was starting to get a bit windy.  I knocked out the last pitch without any troubles but at the top there wasn’t anything close to the ledge to setup an anchor on.  Closest thing I could find was a couple cracks 30′ off of the lip.  When I setup the anchor and tied myself into it I could no longer see down to Ben and the wind made vocal communications impossible.  The rope drag was also making it hard to communicate via the rope as well.  But eventually we got it sorted out and finished off the climb.

Once back down at the base we realized that we had enough time and energy to do some more climbing.  We pondered a couple sport(ish) routes but neither one of us really wanted to lead them.  So we went searching for the start of Nutcracker (5.8).

Nutcracker is the climb that really changed everything.  In 1966 Royal Robbins (also a maker of excellent outdoor clothing) had done a couple climbs in the UK and found that they were starting to jam machine nuts into constrictions in the rock and use them for protection.  Recognizing the long term effects of placing and removing pitons, Royal was conscious enough to realize that using nuts was a more sustainable style of climbing.

So when he came back to Yosemite he decided to put up a first ascent using noting but removable nuts.  He called this route Nutcracker Sweet, a wonderful pun that was lost on some climbers and the name was eventually shortened to just Nutcracker.  As others started to see how viable removable nuts were, this new style of climbing swept through the valley very rapidly and forever changing the climbing world.

I’m not sure if it was conscious or not, but on the first pitch of the climb Ben managed to set nothing but nuts for every placement except one.  Along the way he even found a small Buddha statue resting on a shelf that looked like it was once fastened to a climbers harness.  I followed him up on the first pitch and when reaching the belay we discovered that we had taken an alternate route, oops.

This wasn’t too big of a deal but it did mean that my pitch would have to start with a 20′ long 5.8 runout traverse.  The first part of the traverse was a piece of cake, walking along the top of a flake.  But the second part was pure face and I very gingerly took my time finding the best foot holds that I could and getting the sequence of my feet just right.  With a few minutes of time and a moment of talking myself out of just jumping for a huge hold off to my right I made it.  The rest of the pitch involved moving along this huge shelf and was so easy that it’s not worth mentioning.

Getting ready to rappel down Nutcracker

It was getting fairly late in the day and we hadn’t intended on doing the entire climb, but I think if there wasn’t a party in front of us we would have considered it.  Seeing that they were taking their time (and dropping some gear) we decided to stick to plan and rappel back to the ground.  Finishing this climb off will have to wait for another day, one that I look forward to.

That Friday night we enjoyed some spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce and once again pondered what the adventure for the next day should be.  After hearing about some good climbing over on the Glacier Point Apron, we settled on Goodrich Pinnacle.

In the early days of developing climbing techniques, Church Bowl was a popular proving ground.  The large number of short and moderate climbs coupled with a good amount of variety still make it a great personal proving ground.  Neither Ben or I have much experience with climbing chimneys but wanted to do some bigger climbs where we’d run into them.  The extent of my experience was this perfect 60′ tall chimney in Arches National Park that I had free soloed about 7 years earlier.  This was a fact that I would regret sharing with Ben as he rather enjoyed giving me a hard time about it.

Armed with our lack of experience, we followed the recommendation of our guide book and decided to give Uncle Fanny (5.7) a try.  The description of the climb called it “a good introduction to chimney climbing”, excellent.  Also in the description they suggested we use the “heel/toe technique”.  Having never used this technique, we could pretty well guess what it was but weren’t so sure on the details.  Oh well, we were fairly sure we’d figure something out and looking at the route from the ground it looked very manageable.

Before taking on the climb, I felt the need to shed some weight in the form of  a #2.  There was a line of portable toilets right next to the parking lot and we heard them being emptied out a bit earlier so I figured they would be nice and clean.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  The smell was manageable at first but by the time I was finishing up I found myself gagging and on the verge of throwing up.  I’d never smelled anything that bad in my life and I needed to exit quickly, very quickly.  I didn’t have time to put my harness back on or my chalk bag.  In fact, I didn’t even have time to pull my pants up.  I opened the door and practically jumped out of there with everything at my knees.  This wouldn’t have been a issue, but I was also cursing and that drew the attention of a small group of students walking by.  I didn’t hear anyone say anything in response to the sight of a grown man running and yelling out of a bathroom with his ass on display so maybe nobody saw anything.  Or more likely they were just too shocked, such is life in the woods.

After telling Ben this story and getting ourselves together he took the lead on Uncle Fanny and I watched as he made his way through this squeeze chimney.  This really isn’t what comes to my mind when I think about chimney climbs.  Ben has a slightly smaller stature than I do and it seemed like he was having to time his breathing to get through the smallest sections so I wasn’t sure how smoothly it would go down for me.  The chimney section is really only 15′ long or so and as the follower it didn’t give me to many challenges but did make me think a bit.

When we got down to the ground we both agreed that the climb was not what we were expecting.  It doesn’t help that the aesthetics of the route leave something to be desired as well.  While we got what we wanted, some more experience with chimneys, we were thinking that a fun climb was in order.  So we started to make our way over to Bishop’s Terrace.

Along the way we ran into a group of four climbers just arriving from the parking lot.  They asked us what route we were heading towards and we said that we were going to check out Bishop’s Terrace.  They wanted to do the same climb and while we all arrived at the start at the same time, they seemed to feel like they got there first.  It’s not a huge deal, but it kind of annoyed me a little bit being that they were a large group.  So we wondered around a bit trying to find something else that looked fun.

We wanted to do some more chimney climbing and it was my turn to lead.  After taking a good survey of the route, I decided on Church Bowl Chimney (5.6).  This was the first route ever ascended at this crag and done so in the 1950′s.  It’s a huge flaring chimney that is wide enough to apply pressure with your heels and back.  The back of the chimney sits at least 20′ in from the face and there are numerous ledges to take breaks on.  Regarded as the next step up from Uncle Fanny, it seemed like the logical thing to try.

I began inching my way up the chimney, applying pressure with my back and feet.  While there were a number of options for setting protection, all of the ledges made being truly safe much more difficult.  As soon as you’d get 15 to 20 feet above one ledge you’d reach another one, so a fall on the route would almost certainly result in landing on one of the ledges.  This made for a more stressful lead and as a result I took a number of long breaks to keep myself fresh.

Near the top of this 120′ tall beast, the moves transitioned into doing kind of a layback inside of the chimney but it wasn’t quite wide enough to truly layback.  With a small roof at the bottom of this section, I found myself resting using a knee bar between the two opposing walls.  While the comfort level on my knee was not high, it was a great trade off for the rest and security that it offered while placing gear.  By the time I got to the top about 45 minutes had passed.  I was excited to see how Ben would manage with the climb and was secretly hoping he would struggle just a little bit.  He didn’t, he’s just too good of a climber.  I think he managed to complete it in less than a fourth of the time that I did.  I then informed him that he would be leading our chimney pitches from now on.

After that adventure I was feeling pretty proud of us.  We rested a bit and had some food before heading over to see if there was a line on Bishop’s Terrace (5.8), seeing none we got ourselves ready for this two pitch classic.  This was the second route to be climbed in this area and was done so by Steve Roper in December of 1959.  The second pitch of the climb features a fantastic jam crack, viewed as one of the best 5.8 cracks in the valley.  In the guide book Roper talks of how scared he was leading the second pitch and the shame of using two pitons for aid.

Because I led the last climb it was Ben’s turn on this one.  We decided that we’d do the climb in two pitches so each of us could have some fun on the sharp end.  The first pitch is mostly layback climbing and is quite pleasurable.  The very beginning features some nice undercling holds and plenty of chalk from other climbers to highlight the route.

The second pitch was all mine and I had a bit of nervous excitement in me.  For the lower half of the pitch the crack is very wide at the face but also very deep with pretty good hand jams 6-12″ into the crack.  I hadn’t climbed a crack quite like this one before and while different, it wasn’t too challenging.  Up higher the crack gets shallower and eventually runs out.  Thankfully a few feet to the right another crack appears, also with amazing hand jams.  This section also features one usable and one unusable piton right around the crux of the climb.  I can’t help but wonder if these are the two pitons that Roper used as aid when first climbing the route, pretty cool if they are.

Top of Bishop's Terrace

The rest of the climb went off as smoothly as the earlier parts.  After struggling on some chimneys earlier in the day we were very glad to finish on a high note.  We hung out at the base of the climb for a while and chatted with these two cute girls that were getting ready to give it a go.  Both of them worked in the park and climbed when they had the time.  During the conversation they informed us that they had a group of about 30 women that were all climbers and worked in the park.  Awesome.

Heading back to camp we started to drool in excitement for our dinner that night, sausages cooked over the camp fire, wrapped in tortillas with mozzarella cheese and chile paste.  While relaxing we contemplated what to do the next day and concluded that the delightfully sounding Manure Pile Buttress was the place to go.

Yosemite Valley is without a doubt one of the most well known natural landmarks in the world.  Known by most tourists for the largest waterfalls in North America, the steep granite faces of El Capitan and the towering presence of Half Dome.  While it’s quite obviously a destination for rock climbers, few know much about the history of climbing in Yosemite.

It’s not just a great place to go climbing, Yosemite Valley is and has been from almost the beginning of the sport the place to go climbing.  Advancements and movements tend to emanate from epicenters where the best and the brightest get together.  After World War II, Yosemite was the epicenter for the climbing community.  It was here where the present climbing style and ethics were all born.  The push to free climb routes instead of pulling on gear, innovations in rope management, the use of pitons to ascend harder routes, the rise of removable protection to avoid scaring the rock, the development of active protection and hundreds of other advancements.

Photo: Flickr/hoipolloi

Not only did all of this happen inside Yosemite Valley, it was confined to one place, a campground called Camp 4.  Camp 4 is where the climbers lived and shared ideas, sometimes staying at the camp for months while working various projects in the valley.  In fact, Camp 4 was so central to the climbing community that it was here that Yvon Chouinard invented and sold his high tech pitons that allowed climbers to ascend new routes, that company is now called Black Diamond.  Chouinard also created a line of technical clothing under the familiar name Patagonia.  This is just one story of what came out of the community of climbers in Camp 4.  As a result, in 2003 Camp 4 was added to the national registry of historical places.

I’d stayed in Camp 4 before, but never as a climber and never for more than a couple nights.  The campground has room for about 210 people and is the only walk-in campground left in the valley.  Because of this, the sites there are extremely sought after.  To maximize it’s usage, the park service puts six people in every site.  This means that you’ll likely be sharing with some strangers.  While some might not think much of that idea, it’s actually an extremely cool experience.  It kind of forces you to hang around the campfire and hear what others have been up to and it’s a big part of what makes the tight knit community at Camp 4.

Because of the demand, Ben and I couldn’t get into the campground on our first night so we camped outside of the valley.  The next morning we got up before the sun rose and got ourselves a place in line by the campground registration window around 7am.  Because the window doesn’t open up until 8:30am, we got out our sleeping bags and took a little nap while we waited.  There were a number of parties in front of us but we managed to get a site.

We unloaded some gear and headed out for a climb (more about the climbing in a later post).  When we returned we got to meet our fellow campers.  All four of them were from the east coast but two of them will forever be in my memory, Dustin and Katie.  Dustin and Katie were in their early 20′s and decided to go on a mammoth road trip.  They left at the end of August and didn’t plan on going home until the end of December.  They had been climbing in Yosemite for the previous couple weeks and were very enjoyable to talk to.  To me, the two of them were so iconic of the lifestyle of so many climbers in Camp 4, in touch with the things that mattered to them and willing to make sacrifices to make it happen.

When the weekend rolled around a couple of new campers rolled into our site.  When Ben and I came back from our climb they were making themselves some dinner and asked if we’d be cool with some of their friends coming over to hang out.  Naturally we were fine with this but we didn’t quite realize what we were agreeing to.  About an hour later or so our campsite was filled with no less than 14 people in it.  One of them started a campfire and by the time we finished our dinner it was getting dark and we all hung out around the fire.

A bit later in the night some of our neighbors even joined us and brought along their guitars.  At this point we probably had almost 20 people huddled around the fire, singing, playing music and staying warm.  A park ranger even stopped by and commented on the fact that our site was the place to be that night, it was a very cool experience.

As the night progressed we slowly realized that all the extra friends were intending to actually stay at our campsite.  With a maximum of 6 people per site, 14 seemed like a pretty ridiculous stretch.  We were pretty cool with it until the group tried to setup a 7th tent, that was just making it too damn obvious.  So instead they crashed on their crash pads and in the vestibules of other tents.  It was all quite humerus in a way, however around midnight I was really wanting some peace and quiet so I could get some sleep.

That’s the way things seem to go in Camp 4 and I was feeling very fortunate to be a part of it.  I was wondering if I’d enjoy the climbing in the valley as much as I enjoyed it up in Tuolumne.  While the trip didn’t quite end the way we hoped it would, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy it.

It was a Saturday and not only had our own group grown from two to four, the number of other climbers had likely increased by roughly the same percentage.  So we contemplated what we should climb.  Trying to balance difficulty, quality, escape routes and climbing traffic, somehow we ended up choosing Hermaphrodite Flake.

The lower half of Hermaphrodite Flake is rated as a 5.4 with a lot of 3rd and 4th class climbing to get to the start (I’d say a solid 300′ of it).  We thought this would give us some good opportunities to split up and do some top roping if we so desired.  But the idea of that much unroped down climbing wasn’t appealing to anyone so we found ourselves somewhat committed before even getting tied in.

There were a couple groups ahead of us and being a party of four we decided to let one party of two start before us as well.  So we had plenty of time to hang out and enjoy the view of Stately Pleasure running right down into Tenaya Lake.  During that time we decided that I’d lead the first pitch, have Ben follow behind me trailing two ropes for Tyndall and Linda.  Once Ben got to the belay we’d each take one of the ropes he was trailing and bring the others up.

The first pitch of the climb is what gives Hermaphrodite Flake its name.  About half way up the pitch you’re confronted with three options to get around the flake.  You can take the easy route walking along the topside, the moderate route by tunneling under the flake or get the most exposure along the bottom.  Yes, you read that right, the flake is so large and separated from the main wall enough where you can climb underneath it.  When you look at this huge rock that’s about 50′ wide and 110′ tall somehow clinging to the side of this dome you have to wonder how it is actually staying put.  One would think that as you get closer up you’d be able to solve this mystery but as it turns out, the closer you get, the more mysterious it is!

I’d never seen anything that big that you could climb through the middle of so I was leaning towards taking the tunnel route.  But we had two backpacks with us and we were worried about how difficult it could be with them on.  So I was talked into leading the 5.4 layback route on the bottom of the flake.  According to the topo, there was a 15′ section right at the bottom of the flake that couldn’t be protected.  As the leader, I was kind of curious to see how that section was going to work.  With a layback climb, you get purchase with your feet by applying an outward pull using your hands.  But if there isn’t any room for protection, there wasn’t going to be any room for hands either.

Thankfully the climb flattens out enough where you can pretty much friction climb through this section and right in the middle of it I actually found a very nice hand hold along the bottom of the flake that might be able to fit a #1 or .75 cam, not sure.  After this 15′ section the flake separates from the face again and the last 15′ feet up to the anchor is a real pleasure.

When I was getting up to the anchor (two bolts) the party that was above us decided that they had enough and were rappelling back down to the ground.  This is all well and good but they were using my anchor so I couldn’t clip into it until they were finished.  This wasn’t too big of a deal because I was comfortable clipped into a piton just to the left but it would have been nice to be able to share the anchor, at least enough so I could get myself clipped into it.

Looking Down at Hermaphrodite Flake

I brought up Ben and then Linda and Tyndall, all of them making the climb look very easy.  Tyndall was excited to lead the next pitch and the rest of us were happy to let him go for it.  The first 40′ is more layback climbing along the right side of the flake and then 150′ feet of 5.6 and 5.7 face climbing.  The face section is bolted pretty well but could use a visit from the ASCA pretty badly.

I followed Tyndall up the pitch and trailed the two ropes for Ben and Linda.  Ben had complained about how hard it was to trail the ropes on the last pitch and while I believed him, it was difficult to get a sense of it until it was my turn to do the same.  What a workout that was.  The ropes themselves don’t weigh all that much but the friction that the carabiners generate as well as the rope running over the rock is huge.  By the time I got to the top, it was requiring a solid 40-50 pounds to pull the ropes up, thankfully I didn’t find the climbing itself very challenging.

For the last pitch we had another decision to make.  We could continue straight up and make the route a 5.10b, traverse over to the left for 30′ along a 5.8R face section to an easy crack or rappel back down to the ground.  The 5.10b route seemed a bit out of the question and rappelling when you’re one pitch from the top isn’t a ton of fun so the runout 5.8 section was the way to go.

The gold areas are slick as glass glacial polish, avoid.

Tyndall took a good look at it and was comfortable leading it so we let him go for two in a row.  There was a healthy amount of glacial polish on the rock but it was fractured in enough places so there was actually a pretty healthy amount of foot holds.  Tyndall had no issues getting over to the crack and throwing in some pro.  At the top of the crack the topo said that there would be two bolts before a two bolt anchor.

Tyndall was getting close to running out of rope and could only find one of the two bolts and no anchor was in sight.  The wind was picking up a bit so we couldn’t hear each other and because he was on the top, we couldn’t see him either.  In these situations we use tugs on the rope to signal each other, but with all of the rope drag, we couldn’t actually feel them.  So after about 10 minutes of no activity, we decided that Ben would put me on belay and although Tyndall probably had me on as well, I’d climb with the mentality of a leader.  After about 15′ of the traverse it was obvious that Tyndall did have me on belay, but it was good to take the extra precaution.

Once we all got to the top we basked in the sun and our accomplishment.  Almost 600′ of climbing in three pitches with a party of four and it took us under four hours, far from being speedy but not too bad either.  It was also pretty cool to be 900′ above the the gorgeous Tenaya Lake.  From this height we could almost see all the way from the Western side of Yosemite to the Eastern.  You can even make out Half Dome in the distance. (Thanks for taking photos Linda :)

Tenaya Lake with Half Dome in the distance

With another day of spectacular climbing under our belt, we hiked down the backside of the dome back to the lake.  We had one more day left in Tuolumne before heading back and we planned on getting another multi-pitch climb in on Medlicott Dome, Left but ended up getting horribly lost not once, or twice, but three times.  We ended up at the base of Medlicott Dome, Right and did some sport climbs but were kind of bummed that our plans didn’t quite work out.  But I guess that’s the way it goes, it will just have to wait for another trip.

The day after we got home Ben asked me if I was hooked on trad climbing.  I was.  So we decided to plan another trip a few weeks later to Yosemite Valley.  That turned out to be quite an adventure so expect this series of posts to continue.

After the previous day of fairly intense climbing on West Crack, Ben and I were thinking that something a little bit easier might be nice.  After tossing around some options we decided that Zee Tree looked like fun.  The route is actually quite visible from highway 120 and Ben recalled seeing what he believed to be “zee tree” while passing many times.  We were excited to be getting an earlier start than the day before and hoped to be the first ones on the route.

When we pulled into the trail head parking lot, it was nice to see it fairly empty.  While we were getting our gear together another group pulled up with plans to climb Dike Route (5.9R) which starts in the same location as Zee Tree.  They had done both routes before so we decided to follow them to the start of the route.  However, along the way and quite unconsciously, we stopped following that group and continued walking along the southern edge of the dome to where we thought the route started.

From the road you can see this huge tree growing out of Pywiack Dome, many times larger than any other tree on the rock.  With such a large tree we assumed that it was “the tree”, it simply had to be.  So we climbed up the 3rd class slope and setup an anchor when it turned into fairly steep 4th class climbing.  The previous day I discovered that I’m pretty comfortable with low angle climbing so I decided to lead the first pitch up to a pair of bolts.

I managed to place a few pieces of protection but after 200′ of climbing I ran out of rope and there were no bolts in sight.  After a few minutes of searching around, I made myself secure so Ben could check the topo to see if he could figure out what the deal was.  With only a glace at the beta, it was obvious that we were very far off from where we should be.  This presented us with a little problem.

I was 200′ up a mystery route if it was a route at all and needed to get back to the ground.  This gave us two options, Ben could climb up to where I was with another rope and we could find something to rappel off of or I could down climb the 200′ back to Ben.  Given that the climbing was very easy, I was pretty comfortable down climbing.  When I got back to the ground we packed up and headed back towards the road and the start of the real route.

During the hike back we laughed at how fixated we were on that big tree.  It gave us such tunnel vision that we diverged from the group that actually knew where they were going.  I’d love to know if I was on a known route but we joked about my first ascent.  Our mistake ended up costing us a good amount of time and we found ourselves getting our real start at about the same time as the day before.  So I declared the name of our mystery route “almost noon”.

The real Zee Tree route

Feeling somewhat confident that we were on the right track, I prepared to lead the first pitch again, hopefully finding the bolts this time.  After about 100′ of climbing without a single piece of protection, I enthusiastically reported to Ben that I had found the bolts and that we were on the right path.  Ben joined me at the anchor and prepared to lead the next pitch.

Zee Tree is a face climb and in Tuolumne face climbs usually translate into massive amounts of runout.  Because there isn’t any crack systems in face climbing, these routes are usually protected with bolts but the first ascent parties tend to be a pretty brave bunch and only lightly bolt the routes.  Amazingly the second pitch featured 9 bolts for 180′ of climbing, this is very heavily bolted by Tuolumne standards.  The section between the first anchor and “the tree” featured climbing through 20′ or so of glacial polish.  Thankfully the polish is broken up in a few places enough to get an edge for your feet.

For the third pitch it was my turn to take the lead again.  This pitch was an easy 100′ section of 5.3 climbing that I pretty much ran up (almost literally).  I think we managed to complete this pitch in less than 15 minutes which felt really great.  Up to this point the entire climb had been bolted and we didn’t need our rack of trad gear but that would change on the next pitch.

For the fourth pitch there were a couple bolts leading up to a layback crack where some traditional pro could be placed.  But instead of taking the entire rack we decided that Ben could simply take a few cams and the set of nuts.  This would have worked out great except for one small problem, we thought there were bolts for an anchor.  When Ben ran out of rope and discovered that there were no bolts in sight he had no option but to build a traditional anchor with the few nuts that he had left over.  Thankfully he had enough and the climbing was so easy that there was very little chance of falling, but it was an excellent reminder that it’s a good idea for the leader to have all of the gear.

The final pitch was this very fun looking 5.7 layback crack.  I was having so much fun on the route that without even hesitating I said that I’d love to lead the pitch.  It didn’t even occur to me that I’d never been on the sharp end for a pitch this difficult or the fact that I didn’t have much experience with layback cracks.  But I just went with it and it went off without a hitch leaving me feeling quite proud of myself.

Peace out from the top of Pywiack Dome

Compared to the day before where I followed Ben for the entire route, this day I managed to successfully lead 3 of the 5 pitches, what a fantastic feeling that was.  The view from the top of Pywiack Dome was also an incredible one.  Overlooking Tenaya Lake as well as all of Tuolumne Meadows was such a treat.  After spending a solid half hour on top looking around and eating we rappelled back down to the ground.  Back at the parking lot we hung out a bit before taking off.

Ben’s wife Linda as well as our friend Tyndall were heading up that afternoon to spend the next couple days climbing with us and we thought it would be fun to run into them alongside the road.  After about an hour or so of chatting with tourists and hearing their various reactions to our chosen recreation, we headed back to camp and waited for them outside the campground entrance.  With resupplies from Linda, the group of us relaxed at the campground and prepared for the next days adventure, Hermaphrodite Flake.

As excited as both of us were, we had some things to attend to before we could start climbing.  Little things like, paying for our campground and getting enough cash to do so.  Then there was the bigger thing of teaching me some trad climbing skills.  As I mentioned in the last post, I started top roping last January and have been lead climbing since June but trad climbing was something that I hadn’t done before but was about to embark on.  On top of that, I’d also never done any multi-pitch climbing so some quick lessons close to the ground were very much in need.  We found a short 5.6 crack that I could get some practice on and right after placing my first piece of protection, I fell.

Talk about a humbling experience.  How could I fall on something so easy?  This question was so humbling that it really shook me up a bit and I wondered what I was getting myself into.  This crack was 15′ high and about as easy as they come.  I found myself looking up at the 800′ tall domes that surrounded me and all of a sudden the meadow didn’t feel quite so open anymore.  Massive feelings of doubt washed over me as I questioned my climbing skills more than I did when I didn’t even have any.  But I finished the “climb” and we packed up our gear and headed off to our actual destination for the day, Daff Dome.

Base of West Crack

We found the trail head and from the road we could actually see the route called West Crack that we were intending to climb.  I looked up at this mountain of granite above me with this sliver of a crack running up it and couldn’t help but almost laugh.  So I was pretty nervous but also incredibly motivated and really curious to know if I could do the climb.  So we headed off to the base of the route with me mostly keeping my doubts and emotions to myself at this point.  When we got to the base we found that there were two parties in front of us.

Having a bit of time to look at the route, I started to feel pretty anxious for the climb to begin.  I wanted the feeling of some success to build up my confidence a bit more.  When it was our turn to head up, Ben took the lead and made the pitch look pretty easy.  Once he finished with the pitch it was my turn to climb up behind him, clean the protection that he had placed and join up with him at the belay.  The length of the first pitch was 165′ and by the top of it I was breathing pretty damn heavily.

I distinctly remember two things while standing at that first belay station with Ben, the length of time it took me to put all of my weight the anchor (minutes) and Ben asking me if I wanted to keep going.  This was a very good question of Ben to ask because after this point the climb gets pretty committing and if we continued on, there would be a lot of pressure to get to the top.  I didn’t share with him the fact that I was questioning if I was cut out for this.  Instead I replied with “you bet I want to keep going!” which yielded a response of “I knew you’d want to”.  What Ben didn’t tell me was that his question was kind of a leading one and that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue.  But my enthusiasm kept him going.  So when you boil that down, the experienced guy was kind of motivated by the enthusiasm of the newbie who was questioning himself.  What a pair of climbers we are :).

So Ben took off on the second pitch with me once again cleaning behind him.  This pitch intimidated me because the guide book labeled sections of it as being off-width.  Off-width climbing is not one of strongest skills but it actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.  The beginning of the pitch also featured a slightly overhanging section which was quite awkward with the backpack on.  Thankfully there were huge jugs on the left hand side and while awkward, it wasn’t too difficult.  Ben ended up loving the pitch and it was clear from the smile on his face that he was glad we kept on climbing.  While I was happy to have completed almost 300 feet of climbing, what I saw ahead of me made me swallow pretty hard.

Third Pitch of West Crack

Looking up at our third pitch I saw nothing but and endlessly long (about 200′) finger crack.  While it was an amazing and beautiful sight, I was having a hard time imagining myself being able to climb it cleanly.  So when Ben asked me if I wanted to lead it, I laughed and said hell no.  So Ben took off again and after about 40 feet of climbing he paused for a moment, looked down at me and said “it’s harder than it looks”.

Shit.  Without even touching the rock I was thinking that it looked pretty hard and Ben’s telling me that my eyes are fooling me. Given the fact that Ben is a much better climber than I, the possibility of having to ascend the rope with prusik loops seemed almost like a certainty to me.

By the time Ben finished the pitch I managed to get the thoughts of failure out of my head and instead focused on taking it one step at a time.  In reality I really didn’t have anything to fear because if I came off of the rock I’d only fall a few feet.  But I was trying to put myself in the position of the leader and gauge if I’d be able to safely lead the pitch.  My conclusion?  Nope.  While I didn’t fall, I wasn’t comfortable enough physically or mentally to have pulled it off.  When I reached Ben I congratulated him on a superb lead.

We hung out at the third belay station for a good while.  There was a great ledge that I took a seat on and finally had a moment to absorb my surroundings.  Up until that point I was so fixated on doing the work that there was no space left for observation.  Ben once again asked if I wanted to lead the final pitch and once again I declined.  While the climbing looked easy, my mind was not in the right place to be on the sharp end.

While the climbing on the last pitch was easy, there were few places for protection.  I think over the last 200′ of climbing Ben was able to place maybe 4 or 5 pieces with sections of at least 50′ of runout.  But we both reached the top without any incident leaving me exceptionally relieved.  Great sections of the climb were kind of a blur to me, overshadowed by the questions running through my head.  But I had answers to some of the questions, answers I was very satisfied with.  I was able to do the moves, stay safe, not get freaked out and finish the climb (a hard one at that).

There were still many questions left in my head but the next two days of climbing would continue to answer more of them.  Next up, Zee Tree (5.7) on Pywiack Dome.

Looking towards Hetch Hetchy from the top of Daff Dome

This climbing adventure was so monumental for me that it’s hard to find words that I’m satisfied with, perhaps a photo will help.

300º view from the top of Pywiack Dome

Nope, that doesn’t quite do it either.  Everything is just too damn big.  To get a slightly better sense of things, click the above photo to see the original.  Even though it would take two 30″ displays to view the entire photo at once, it still doesn’t do the scene any justice.  Not only were the views on this trip huge, the experience as a whole was huge and one that I couldn’t even imagine doing just a year ago.

In fact, it’s too big for one blog post.  So as a warm-up I’ll give a bit of an overview of the area as well as some of my thoughts going into the trip.  Then I’ll throw up a separate post for each of the three big routes that we climbed (West Crack, Zee Tree and Hermaphrodite Flake).

Tuolumne Geology

Tuolumne Meadows is located in the northern half of Yosemite National Park and is accessible during the non-winter months via Highway 120.  Through these meadows flows the Tuolumne River which carved out Hetch Hetchy valley over millions of years and presently fills the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir providing water and electricity for San Francisco and surrounding area residents.  While there is great sadness downstream, the Tuolumne area is breathtakingly beautiful.  Situated at 8600 feet above sea level, the meadow is surprisingly large and surrounded by dozens of domes, peaks, spires, lakes, and valleys.

While the main attraction in Yosemite Valley is naturally the valley itself along with the waterfalls, Tuolumne is a bit more subtle in its beauty.  For its elevation and surrounding peaks, the meadow is very large.  Rising up around the edges are these wonderfully smooth looking domes of granite upwards of 1000 feet tall.

Around the time of the dinosaurs, what is now the Sierra Nevada mountains was deep underground and in the form of magma.  But plate tectonics started to force the area upwards and very slowly, under huge amounts of pressure from the rock overhead, that magma cooled and turned into various types of granite.  Over the next 150 million years or so, the tens of thousands of feet of rock above the granite were pushed upward and eroded, creating the fertile central valley.  Around 4 million years ago the area started to undergo massive tilting and the range that we see today was pushed upward.

As the rock above the granite eroded, pressure was reduced on the magma and it started to expand upward to form domes of solid granite without any layers.  As it expanded it formed joints along the curve of the dome, making each dome similar in structure to an onion.  As glaciers moved into the area, the lack of vertical and horizontal joints in the domes made them quite resilient to glacial plucking (pulling out large chunks of rock).  Instead the glaciers ran across the domes, slowly sanding them down and creating what is known as glacial polish.

This glacial polish is easily seen today when viewing one of these domes up close.  It isn’t too hard to find rock that has been polished as smooth as a granite counter top and reflecting the sun like a mirror.  You can also see long tiny lines in the polish, these lines indicate the direction that the glacier was traveling over the rock.  I find comfort in this humbling knowledge.  To think that water and ice could remove so much material in just 4 million years puts the earth’s 4.5 billion year history into greater perspective.

Such beauty is more than this climber can ask for.  The challenges and variety of climbing that the area offers makes the views from the top sweeter than I could have imagined.  Being able get far above the tourists and see just how rolling the domes are, how huge the meadow is and how things flow into one another is addictive enough all by itself.

Thoughts Before the Trip

I’d been climbing for 10 months before embarking on this trip, lead climbing in the gym for 4 and a handful of sport routes outside.  While I’ve put a lot of time and energy into climbing and made fast progress, in Yosemite terms, I’m far from an experienced climber.  In fact, looking back on things, the set of things I didn’t know was larger than the set of things that I did.

But Ben is a fantastic climber, extremely great guy and a good teacher.  So while this trip had a bunch of firsts for me, I had a lot of confidence that I’d get the instruction that I needed.  Even still, I was nervous and for good reason.  In trad climbing the leader places protection (nuts, cams, etc) into the rock as they go and the follower removes them.  All new to me.

On top of that, I’d never done any multi-pitch climbing either.  We were looking at doing climbs that were 700 feet tall and I wasn’t sure how I’d react both physically and mentally to that.  To quote comedian Steven Wright, “I’m not afraid of heights, I’m afraid of widths”.  While that’s a joke, it’s actually pretty damn accurate for a lot of people.  Being high isn’t the problem, it’s the contrast between high and low and when you’re hanging off of the rock in the middle of a climb you’re a part of that contrast.  The fear of looking down at the air below you and the intimidation of what you have left to climb.

But I was excited and highly motivated.  For years I’d looked at rock faces and thought about how amazing it would be to climb it without ever believing that it would actually be possible for me.  It seemed like my dream could actually be coming true and what scared me the most was walking away from the trip having failed to achieve it.  Being forced to look at future faces without the ignorant bliss of no data but with nagging memories.  I find that I’m somewhat prone to negative stigmas and I didn’t want one surrounding such beautiful structures.

Given that I already mentioned the three big climbs that we did, you can guess that I didn’t walk away with any negative stigmas from the trip.  In fact, it was one of those trips that continued on in my mind, constantly getting better, long after we returned.

So why does it bother me that John McCain introduced this bill?  Simple, he knows next to nothing about the subject.  In an interview last year he stated:

I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.

I applaud him for learning and making progress, but if you’re going to propose a bill that changes a core principal of how something functions don’t you think you should have a bit more experience with the subject at hand?  This isn’t a Holiday Inn Express commercial, you can’t jump into the scene and be an expert.

Another thing that bothers me is one of the reasons McCain states for introducing the bill.  He fears that forcing the telecommunications industry to treat all information (requests) online equally will “stifle innovation”.  This just flat out doesn’t make any sense to me.  Can anyone honestly believe that the online industry is having problems innovating?  Look at how much has changed in the last 20 years in regard to information dissemination.  Somehow we’ve managed to fundamentally change communications across the globe while having net neutrality in place and McCain fears that the innovation will stop if net neutrality continues?

Another thing that bothers me is the use of “Freedom” in the title of the bill.  I’m a believer that the title of something should be somewhat indicative of its contents.  Handcuffs aren’t called “freedom cuffs” because they are the antithesis of freedom and for all of the companies and individuals that operate on the internet this bill would be the equivalent of handcuffs (in that your movement is hindered).

I suspect that bills today are given titles that busy people have a hard time going against when making a knee jerk decision.  “Internet Freedom Act”, “Patriot Act”, “Marriage Protection Act”, they all conjure up emotions while masking their true intentions.  So if someone hasn’t read the details of a bill, the hope is that they will just vote based off of the name.

Being someone who is working on an internet based startup, it brings me great comfort that (for the time) I won’t have to pay the telecommunications industry to prioritize my traffic.  What enters your mind when you think of an organization saying, “if you don’t pay us more money we’re going to make it hard for your business to operate”?  I don’t know about you but I get this image of the mob or a gang demanding “protection” money.  And to think, senator McCain would like to make it legal for the telecommunications industry to do just that.

Anyway, enough ranting, I’ve got innovating to do.

Update: According to this Reuters article, John McCain is the largest recipient of campaign contributions made by the telecommunications and ISP industries over the last two years.  Coming in with a total of $894,379, he has been given more than twice the amount of money than any other legislator.  Please excuse me, I just puked on my desk.

So sitting in a big room with about 300 other folks I waited to hear my name called.  I was quite relieved when I was in the first batch of 70 people to be called into the court room.  This meant that I wouldn’t have to listen to the two guys in front of me talk about boxing and other macho crap anymore.  No, now I could stand in a hallway and watch prisoners in dayglow orange jumpsuits being marshaled around and wonder what their state of mind was before they got those new outfits as well as what it is now that they have them.  Pretty depressing.

As we were called into the court room all 70 of us eventually sat down and the judge started giving us instructions.  He also introduced us to the lawyers as well as the defendant.  The defendant was a middle aged guy that looked like he was being prosecuted for money laundering or a similar crime.  I didn’t think too much about it until the judge informed us that he was being charged with rape, possession of a weapon and a dozen other crimes that were listed too quickly to comprehend.  The central word in my head… shit.

I was expecting to potentially serve on a simpler case with lesser charges, not one where the defendant could end up spending the rest of his life in prison.  I’ve watched enough Law & Order episodes to know that prosecuting a rape is not a simple process so when the judge informed us that the trial was scheduled to last 3-4 weeks, I wasn’t surprised, I was horrified.

I was horrified not because of what this man was accused of or by what happened to the victim, but what it would mean to my startup.  These extremely selfish feelings are ones that I am not proud of but also can’t deny.  The thought of not making any progress for a month while continuing to burn my savings was more frightful than recent announcements from a quasi competitor.  But wait, what are these “hardships” that the judge is describing?

Turns out that there are five classifications of hardships that are reasons for being excused from jury duty, one of them being money.  I just had to fill out a form making a case for the financial burden that jury duty would place on me and the judge would review it and decide if I could be excused.  I haven’t focused that hard on making my writing legible since drafting class in high school.  As the hardships were being reviewed in the back, the deputy would bring them out in small batches and inform us of the judges decision.

I don’t have any problems paying attention and generally can always find something to keep myself entertained, but not in this case.  I needed something to pass the time but there was nothing.  I couldn’t even find much to count… 37 clipboards in front of me, 14 chairs in the jury box (odd), one nervous defendant who had to go to the bathroom twice and one very angry man who’s pleads to be excused were revoked (coincidentally I saw this same man yelling at the security folks earlier).  Then my name is called and I couldn’t reply with “here” fast enough… “you’re excused”.

Whew!  I walked out of that court room with such a huge smile on my face that I must have looked like I was just acquitted of a crime.  While I would have enjoyed serving my civic duty, it really would have killed me at this time in my life.  So it turns out that in this case being excused was an even better outcome than meeting a girl.  I’ll just have to keep looking for more ways to meet women, hopefully ones that aren’t so threatening to my future.

View From The Bear on Mount St. Helena

At 4,342 feet, Mount St. Helena is the tallest point in Napa County and marks the intersection of Napa County, Sonoma County and Lake County.  It also happens to be the site where Robert Louis Stevenson spent his honeymoon writing The Silverado Squatters.  The mountain itself is roughly a 2.4 million year old volcano that had it’s origins a bit further north by Clear Lake.  I found the rock at The Bear to be quite beautiful with streaks of reds and black mixed in with earthy browns.  It also had some of the largest crystal structures I’ve seen in rock and am now wishing that I took some photos of them.

The guide book for the area (Rock Climbing the San Francisco Bay Area) is a bit out of date in that there are some new routes and bolts that change things up a bit.  There is also a much easier climbers trail that leads to the wall than what is described in the book.  The book describes a trail on the left hand side of the fire road marked by a 16′ pine tree on the right side of the road.  This trail is easy to find and can be scrambled up with some effort but it’s much easier to continue walking up the fire road for a couple hundred more paces.  You’ll reach a break in the pine trees where there is only shrubs and a very distinctive trail off to the left, use that one.

There is roughly 20 routes setup on The Bear that range in difficulty from a 5.9 crack to a couple 5.12b’s.  There is even a few of routes that are a couple pitches tall.  Pretty much all of the climbs have a steady and slightly deceptive overhang to them and I was surprised how pumpy I felt at the top of a couple of them.  The first route we setup was Jeckyl & Hyde (5.10b).  This route used to be runout by sharing the same anchors as Rampage but now has its own set that has removed the runout.  The route has plenty of very solid hands and feet but I found some of them to be kind of elusive at first.

We also setup a rope on Rampage (5.10c) and had a report that a new line had been established just left of the bolt line that was a 5.10b but the rating on that climb might be a bit off.  I intended to give this route a go but instead found myself with a very strong desire to try the next route to the right and with a name like The Beast (5.11b) how can you blame me.  The bottom section of this climb is fairly straightforward.  It features some great underclings and generally easy 10c moves.  The fun starts to kick in between the second and third bolt.

I decided to tackle the problem by continuing to climb straight up after the second bolt and then traverse to the right over to the third bolt.  I didn’t make the moves cleanly but it felt like a solid enough sequence for me.  After this point I found myself resorting to a series of layback moves alternating between the left and the right.  The sequence was really quite fun and while I managed to make it through all of the moves, it took a few tries and a good amount of problem solving.  I’m anxious to try it another day.

After a little break and a quick snack Tyndall asked if I wanted to try leading Mark’s Moderate (5.10a R).  The climb is described as a chimney and while a couple moves fit that description, I found that the majority of it was stemming.  The climb through the first half is quite solid with fairly obvious moves.  However, around the top of the climb the crack starts to narrow and you have to move onto the face a bit.  Because of the runout in the top section I decided to do a slightly shorter traverse over to the anchors for Black Hole Sun and setup a top rope from there.  Maybe it was just the rush of onsighting the climb but I found it to be kind of fun.

So now we had a rope setup for Black Hole Sun (5.10d) which happens to be rated as one of the best climbs in the area, naturally we had to try it.  Up to the first bolt it shares the same section of rock as Mark’s Moderate but then traverses a bit over to the right.  Because of this the route features a number of different climbing techniques.  You’ve got some chimney/stemming in the beginning, a short traverse to some larger pockets and a sections of overhanging rock as well.  On the top side of the overhang I even found some very handy heel hooks that allowed me to recover from a couple moments of hanging by one arm.  So when I reached the anchors with my third onsight for the day I was feeling pretty pleased.

We left the mountain just as the sun was starting to set and I think all of us would be happy to return for more fun in the future.  There is still a bunch of climbs that look like fun and I’m feeling pretty determined to get a redpoint on The Beast.  Add in the fantastic shade that the entire wall gets after 2pm and it gets pretty easy to spend a bunch of time climbing The Bear.

Photo: Flickr/seangloster

Pinnacles is located about 120 miles south of San Francisco and is the location of the northern half of a 23 million year old volcano.  The San Andreas fault once ran directly underneath the volcano and is responsible for tearing the volcano into two.  The southern half has stayed put near Lancaster California while the northern half has slowly traveled 195 miles north.  The rock at Pinnacles is mostly rhyolite in a breccia formation.

Rhyolite is a type of igneous rock that has some similarities to granite but tends to be rather explosive during an eruption.  Breccia is most easily thought of as a natural forming cement, essentially it’s ash and other rocks bonded together with lava.  The lava and ash seem to erode faster than the rock chunks which leaves them sticking out of the side of the sheer faces.  On top of that, when rhyolite cools quickly it can form rock with a glassy texture.  To a climber this makes for an extremely interesting climbing experience.

At first I found the climbing at Pinnacles a little unnerving.  Falling rock is not a possibility, it’s a guarantee.  Frequently there are plentiful amounts of hand and foot holds but it takes a bit of time to trust them because they simply look like pieces of gravel sitting on top of the rock.  But in reality they are (frequently but not always) cemented into the rock and extremely solid.  However, many times the holds can be quite glassy and thus very slippery.  The hand holds are also frequently at odd angles with sharp edges that make them a little painful sometimes and completely unlike anything you’ll find in a gym.  All of this is what makes it fun.

With over 900 climbs in the park there is not much risk of getting bored.  Ben and I decided to spend our time on the Discovery Wall which boasts 50 climbs all by itself.  We got to the wall, opened up our guide book and decided that we’d warm up on a climb called Protent (5.6) which is regarded as one of the best climbs in the area.  The beta for this climb said that you could do it in three short pitches or one long pitch but we decided that we’d do it in two pitches.  Ben was on lead and I was going to second him and clean on the way up.  He placed one cam and then used three fixed bolts but oddly couldn’t see any more bolts up ahead.  Much to our surprise, he ended up topping out the route with the last 40 feet of it being all runout.  So we decided that I’d lower him down, I’d do the climb, clean the route and then rappel back to the ground.

Only one problem.  As I lowered Ben back to the ground we almost ran out of rope.  I had to climb up a few feet so there was enough slack for him to get off belay.  Given how easy the climb was, this wasn’t a big deal at all but we were thankful that we had a knot at the end of the rope so it wouldn’t slip through the belay device.  So I then cleaned the climb, set the rope up to rappel down and started my rappel.  About 20′ from the bottom I noticed that I didn’t have the middle of the rope at the top of the climb which meant that I couldn’t make it all the way to the ground.  Oops.  Thankfully I had tied a backup prussic loop onto the rope before I started the rappel which allowed me to self belay myself back up the climb and then walk off the back of the cliff.

So our first climb of the day didn’t go very smoothly but that happens once you leave the gym.  For our second climb we decided to give The Wet Kiss (5.9) a try.  This climb was suppose to be an 80′ climb but after 50′ or so Ben reached the chains at the top, we both thought that was a little odd but at least this climb went smoothly.

Continuing our warm-up we decided to knock of another classic climb called Stupendous Man (5.10a).  Ben lead the climb and made it look beautiful so I decided that we’d pull the rope and I’d lead it as well.  It’s really a one move wonder that involves a fantastic mantle over a small ledge, blissful once completed.  Feeling pretty good we decided to bump it up a little bit.

Thirty feet to our left was a climb called Pistol Whipped (5.10d R).  This climb consisted of three bolts, the first one about 20′ off the ground and required two cams up top.  Sequence and concentration was the key to this climb.  Ben didn’t have too much trouble getting through the moves and placing the cams.  So we pulled the rope and it was my turn to try it on lead.  Getting to the first clip is solid but a head trip and something that shouldn’t be tried if the climb is at your limit.  The crux is above the third bolt and we solved it by moving slightly to the left and grabbing the small ledge above with a slight dyno move.  But for me the drama happened right at the end of the climb.

I was within five feet of the anchor at the top and was delighted to inform Ben of this accomplishment.  I high stepped with my right foot and was a simple mantle move away from finishing the climb when my right foot slipped and sent me falling.  My last clip was on a red cam about five feet below me and with slack and rope stretch I ended up falling about 20′.  This was the first fall I’d taken on lead outside as well as my first fall on trad gear.  Thankfully Ben is good at placing gear and I ended up finishing the climb without any injury and a smile on my face.

While we sat down for a little break and grabbed some food we started thinking about how wrong the first two climbs felt.  So we examined the guide book and discovered that we were in fact on the wrong routes.  Turns out our first climb wasn’t Protent, it was Plague (5.10a R) and our second climb wasn’t The Wet Kiss, it was Ordeal (5.8).  I found the names of the climbs that we actually did to be a bit ironic but it was soothing to figure out what was going on.

We rounded out the day with an easy but interesting chimney called Cleft (5.6), The Verdict (5.11a) and Lithium (5.11b).  Ben successfully lead both the 11 climbs but they were a bit above my comfort level on lead outdoors so I tackled them on a top rope.  I found the start on The Verdict to be especially fun and Lithium has been added to my project list to lead.

So it truly was a fantastic day of climbing and one with a lot of good safety reminders.  Here’s what I took away from the day:

• Climbing outside is not climbing in a gym, there are inconsistencies, unexpected events and things that go wrong.  Plan for it to happen.
• Different rock requires different techniques, give yourself time to get accustomed
• Always tie knots at the end of the rope when belaying and rappelling
• Always use a backup knot when rappelling
• Stay focused until the climber is on the ground
• Carefully study your guide books (but don’t assume they are right)
• Climb with a person that you trust

When I started thinking about writing this post I decided to do a quick search and see what others out there had to say about taking healthy risks.  So I started out with a simple Google search of “healthy risks” and laughed at the irony when it asked if I meant “health risks”.  For me, a healthy risk has nothing to do directly with putting my health at risk.  In fact, I can’t think of a single healthy risk that didn’t improve my health, even the risks that didn’t pan out.  Perhaps I’ve been lucky or maybe the things that I’ve done aren’t that risky or perhaps I’ve just been good at mitigating that risk, I’m honestly not sure and that uncertainty makes me question what the definition of a healthy risk is.

It’s kind of a hard thing to define, even the internet doesn’t seem to provide a quick definition.  I can think of tons of examples of things that I consider healthy risks, but what I find risky might be mundane to someone else, so examples really don’t provide much of a definition either.  So after a bit of thinking here’s what I’ve come up with:  A healthy risk is doing something outside your comfort zone where the positive outcome is something that you desire and the negative outcome can eventually be recovered from.  A part of me wants to also add that a risk could be healthy if the negative outcome is unlikely, but would that still make it a risk?

Now that I’ve got a definition, I can actually start to seek out healthy risks to take instead of stumbling across them.  The only question left in my mind is, how many should I take?  Like everything else that we consume, there has to be an upper bound where above that a good thing turns bad.  Perhaps the need to step outside of what’s comfortable helps to make it a self regulating system, I’m not sure.  But I think to start with I’m just going to jump at the ones that present themselves to me and see where it takes me.  Maybe I’ll come to find out that I already had the appropriate amount in my diet.

What I do know is that I absolutely love the feeling of taking these kinds of risks and I’m going to chase that feeling a bit more.  If you’d like to chase it along with me, I’m thinking that Twitter is a good vehicle for sharing the healthy risks that we take and getting ideas for new ones to try out (use the hashtag #HealthyRisk).

Solve some really hard problems.  So much of what kids do is problem solving and it’s easy to see and hear their excitement when they find a solution.  That’s a reproducible feeling but it gets a bit more challenging as I get older because I’ve solved a bunch of problems already and the ones that are left (which are many) tend to be a bit more complex.  No longer is making a stack of blocks an accomplishment, so the trick is to seek out and find equally challenging problems, adjusted for age inflation.

Last Thanksgiving I started working on what is now the foundation for my startup.  At the time this was a project unlike any I’d ever started, I didn’t even know if it was possible to accomplish what I was setting out to do.  If it was technically possible, I wasn’t sure if I had the mental goods to pull it off.  Thankfully I’ve still got some hubris in me and I wasn’t going to let worries of what reality might be get in the way of finding out what reality really is.

I use the word hubris cautiously because it has a pretty negative connotation.  Its definition usually includes other wonderful words like arrogance and overconfidence.  These are characteristics that most people wouldn’t want to have applied to their general self but I’m wondering if they can be useful to your problem solving self, perhaps even necessary.

Arrogance – having an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities
Overconfidence – excessively confident: mistakes were made through being overconfident

Are these really bad characteristics for problem solving?  I don’t think so.  Hard problems are relative to the individual and all hard problems tend to crush ones confidence at points.  So an exaggerated sense of what one can accomplish could be helpful in getting over self imposed barriers.  As for making mistakes, they should be embraced, not feared.  They teach you what doesn’t work, which leaves your mind free to try a new path that is more likely to succeed.

I think not knowing the path from A to B is what ties problem solving to feeling young.  I like to think of each experience in my life as forming a little path in my brain.  The more I travel down the same path the more defined and worn in that path gets.  Travel a path enough and it turns into a rut.  Seems like our brain can pretty much be on cruse control when going down these defined paths.

Don’t get me wrong, very well worn paths are useful things.  Without them performing complex tasks like playing a musical instrument would be impossible.  But simply following those paths doesn’t really stimulate your brain in the same way.  Getting out in the wilderness and doing some bushwhacking, that’s the kind of activity that your brain did all the time as a kid.  This is why you never hear a kid complaining that they are stuck in a rut, there is just so much to be explored.

As I say goodbye to my 20′s, it’s not really an accident that I’m trying to lay down a bunch of new paths in my brain and the good news is that it’s working.  The feelings that I’ve had while working on my startup have been nothing short of childhood bliss.  There has been more than one occasion where I was so excited after solving a problem that I ran out of my house in the middle of the night in uncontrollable laughter.

So the next time you’re wishing for some of your youth back, find yourself a hard problem, have a bit of hubris and start working on it.  If it’s a sufficiently hard problem it will take a while to solve it, but in the meantime at least you’ll be distracted from getting older.  While it’s not as quick as going out and buying a fast car or something like that, I will guarantee that the results will feel better, make you smarter and be a lot cheaper.

Sure enough, Jimmy called me boss when I gave him my money as well.  In fact, he called everyone boss and multiple times at that.  “Blackberry Bliss for Carla…  Here ya go boss”.  While annoying, it isn’t the lack of creativity that Jimmy had when addressing people that bothered me.  It’s the use of the word alone that I have a problem with and here’s why.

First off it’s simply an incorrect usage of a word for the given context.  Some may claim that its usage in this case is considered slang but I’m not buying it.  Besides, boss is already slang for excellent or cool.  Nope, when used as a title for another individual boss only has one meaning and it’s to denote that the person is your superior.  Not only am I not in charge of Jimmy, I don’t want to be in charge of Jimmy.

Second, essentially when someone calls me boss they are insulting themselves.  Why would someone voluntarily do this?  I can’t imagine that a person feels empowered after using the phrase.  If every random person that you serve is your boss, how much control can you have over your life?  Are they trying to boost my ego by making me feel like I’m important?  While I suppose some would appreciate that, I just can’t see the masses of service workers so willing to help out the egos of their customers.  I worked in a service job when I was in high school and it takes enough energy just to maintain your own ego while wearing one of those uniforms that there isn’t anything left to give.  Something isn’t adding up here.

I love sarcasm, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I feel like this usage of boss is actually a sarcastic remark.  I’m not convinced that everyone that’s using it intends for it to be sarcastic because lets face it, pop culture tends to be a bit of an echo chamber (in fact, I wonder if an echo chamber is a requirement for pop culture, but that’s a different topic…).  If I’m right about this, then calling someone boss is actually a backhanded complement.  Thanks Jimmy.

The difficult thing with backhanded complements is that they are often hard to reply to.  Treating it like it was a genuine complement only feeds into the desires of the person who gave it.  Replying with a backhanded complement of your own is a natural and somewhat satisfying reaction but that puts you on their level.  So what’s a good response to being called boss?

A part of me wants to treat their usage very literally by replying to the statement “thanks boss” with “you’re welcome subordinate”.  This is what I’ll call the Dwight Schrute response.  Somehow I don’t think people would enjoy hearing that all too often and they may think twice about using the phrase.

To stay on The Office theme, Angela Martin would take the direct approach and reply with something along the lines of “I’m the boss of my cats, you’re not good enough to be one of my cats, so stop calling me boss”.  While I’d love to see the look on someone’s face after that line was delivered to them, it’s not my style and I couldn’t hold a straight face.

Toby Flenderson would either take the polite route and ask that he not be called boss or perhaps the passive aggressive approach by filling out an anonymous comment card for the establishment.  While the polite route is probably the most adult way of dealing with it, Toby is pretty much ignored as a character and would likely get the same treatment in this case as well.

Stanley Hudson would go for the “whatever” reaction by uttering a “Ahhhh huh” while filling out a crossword puzzle while Roy Anderson would probably just punch the guy.  So maybe looking to The Office characters isn’t the greatest model for a response, but it sure is a fun one.

I don’t want to take all of the fun, so what would the other characters respond with?

Starting my own company.

That’s right, in the midst of what I hope will be the worst economy in my life, I’ve decided to leave my comfortable and well paying job at Mark Logic behind and do my own thing.  It’s not a decision that I made lightly, in fact I’ve been pondering it since Thanksgiving of 2008.  I’ve given the concept plenty of time to soak in and as the weeks have passed I’ve increasingly felt like it’s something I have to do.

I had this moment in high school where I decided that the secret to my life was to minimize regrets and after 14 years it’s still serving me pretty well.  Yes this is a risky move.  Yes I could blow all of my savings on it.  Yes I could end up regretting that.  But what overshadows all of those could be regrets is the certainty of regret if I don’t try.  Plus, I’m at the point in my life where doing something like this only gets harder.

The more time you spend in financial comfort, the harder it is to live a life of minimalism.  Plus, for most people their thirties are a time of increased responsibilities in the form of houses and families.  These things seriously raise the bar on funding your own startup.

But the biggest motivator to take this risk is that I’m very excited about what I’m working on.  I haven’t felt this kind of excitement since I was working on my search engine in college.  I’m not ready to share all of the details about my project in such a public place but I will say that it’s very closely tied to my biggest passion, music.  So not only am I going to get to work on my own stuff for my own good, I’ll be forced to listen to music while doing it, what a hard life.

As usual I’ll do my best to share the details of this adventure on this blog.  Of course, if history is an indicator of the future I might get distracted for a while and have some gaps, but we’ll just have to see.

Many thanks to all of those that have encouraged me to give this a go as well as those that have given me a moment of pause, my determination is stronger thanks to you.

Immediately I started thinking about all of the projects that I’ve worked on and tried to identify how progress was measured on each one.  The most disastrous project had a huge specification jammed down the throats of the developers and progress for that project was measured by how much of the specification was implemented.  There wasn’t much about this project that felt right, but the self centered metric for measuring progress should have been the biggest indicator of failure.  At least 10 man years were spent on that project, it never made any money and has now been shut down.

The next project I worked on at that company was one of my own making.  Personally I was measuring progress by how much the company was able to innovate.  Admittedly that too was a stupid metric because you can have progress without anyone else caring. Consequently while the site is still around, the original projects on it were a bit of a flash in the pan and died a slow death.

More recently I was working on a project that had a pretty clear metric for progress, traffic.  But I suspect that this metric was a bit too vanilla and thus provided little value.  However, the bigger problem was that different parties had different metrics for progress.  Our group was measuring traffic and saying that generating more of it was the most important thing to work on.  While the CEO was measuring our progress by how much money we were making, which was none.  So it strikes me that not only is it important to have a good metric for progress, it’s something that all parties need to agree upon.

So I feel like a real idiot.  I strongly believe that asking questions is a fundamental part of making anything that’s successful.  I’m not talking about asking random questions, I’m taking about asking the hard questions and having the endless curiosity to ask why.  But I feel like I’ve neglected to ask the hardest and seemingly most important question of, what is our metric for progress.

So today I’m thinking about all of the other aspects of my life and it’s surprisingly refreshing to realize the places where I’ve been measuring the wrong thing.

A simple example.  When I started climbing I measured my progress by how hard of a climb I could complete.  Typical male stupidity.  That metric had me focusing on pure strength instead of technique which has caused me a tremendous amount of physical pain.  Or take this blog for example.  It’s very easy to measure my progress by looking at beautiful charts that tell me how many people are reading what I’m writing.  But is that really what I’m after?  No.  I’m just trying to share things in my life with those that are interested, not make more people interested in my life.

When taking a macro look at the things around me I really start to wonder what metrics are being used in other areas.  What’s being measured when we bail out banks and automotive companies?  Simply not dying?  How about the housing market?  More homes being purchased?  What about the economy as a whole?  Please tell me we aren’t using the stock market.

I’m hoping like crazy that someone in a position of power has answers to those questions.  But even if we have the metrics, what I fear is that the people in power don’t agree or even communicate what they are.  What would happen if every law we passed had to have a metric of success tied to it and we voted on both the law and the metric?  Then we would have real data that can be used to decide if the removal of our rights as Americans has a proportional increase in our safety.

Humm… much to think about.

First impressions can say a lot, but sometimes they don’t say enough.  I showed up right around 2pm on a Saturday and strangely enough I couldn’t get into the building.  The entrance was around the side of the building and honestly felt more like the back door of a restaurant than the entrance to a gym.  The fact that the door was locked only added to this sensation.  But apparently the guy working there heard us trying to get in and opened it up for us.

As soon as I stepped in I realized that this was a very small gym and that we were the only people there.  The guy behind the counter got out some harnesses and tried to give me one even though I was already wearing one.  But what was really surprising is that he didn’t give anyone any climbing shoes.  He didn’t even offer to rent anyone a pair.  This was very surprising because I had heard that this was suppose to be a really good instructional climbing gym and climbing shoes really make a world of a difference.  In fact, this quote taken directly off of their website seems to suggest the same thing:

If you are just starting out, you will want to take advantage of the Bay Area’s best instructional rock climbing gym!  Twisters is a nationally recognized member gym of the USAC and is the only rock climbing gym in California with certified coaching staff! We are excited to help you climb!  Of course our expertise will be available to you at all times, but our classes are definitely the best around. In as little as one hour you can be off on your own, handling the ropes and reaching new heights!

There are some pretty bold statements in that bit of text and given that they ended 80% of the sentences with an exclamation mark tells me that they even realize how bold they are.  The only problem is that from my experience I have a hard time believing a single part of that quote.  The “instruction” that our group got was miserable at best and actually woefully inadequate.

The guy there did show the group how to tie a figure eight knot as well as a fisherman’s knot, so in theory they should have been able to tie themselves into their harnesses.  He then spent a couple minutes showing them how to use a grigri belay device.  The grigri is a locking belay device which can give people a false sense of security.  It’s also a more complicated device than an ATC, so proper instruction is really important.  On top of that, it’s somewhat awkward the first time you try to belay someone and he didn’t even bother to see if people were understanding the basics.  Instead he demonstrated belaying one person and then expected everyone to just get it.

I guess the last sentence in the above quote could be correct.  He did have everyone off on their own in only 15 minutes and I was a tiny bit worried that they would be off to new heights, heaven.  At this point we had four people who had never climbed before barely understanding how to tie some knots and maybe understanding how to operate a grigri.  No mention of any voice commands.  No helpful hits on climbing technique.  No confirmation that anyone knew what they were doing.  Climbing is a dangerous sport and he was treating it like it was ping pong.

Not only were these far from the “best classes around”, this guy clearly wasn’t excited to help.  In fact, I’d actually be surprised if he wasn’t completely stoned at the time.  Thankfully the two of us that had climbed before could fill in the gaps (and by gaps I mean very wide canyons) in the instruction.  However, what we couldn’t make up for was the safety of the gym itself.

The floor of every gym I’ve been to is covered in this thick foam material with a blue fabric on top.  It can absorb a fall from six feet off the ground without issue and is really great stuff.  This gym had the same blue material on top but was actually missing the foam underneath!  I didn’t realize this at first and hopped down from a bouldering problem and landed on the floor so hard that it caused a great amount of pain in my heal for a few days.  I then started inspecting the rest of their gear.  I then found carabiners with stuck or sticky gates, a couple ropes that looked like they should be retired and I think I even saw a static rope.  I can’t help but wonder who is insuring this gym.

I will say that their routes were challenging and that they were playing some good music (Dispatch) but I really can’t recommend anyone going to this gym.  For the sake of the people that love this gym, I hope I caught them on an off day (or month… or year…) and that it truly is a safe place to climb, but somehow I doubt that.  Besides, when it comes to safety and climbing, off days can result in serious injury.

No Spouse Sad Face

I filed them online and in the process of filling out their forms they asked if I had a spouse.  While it’s always fun to play pretend, I don’t think the IRS enjoys the game so I fessed up and admitted I didn’t have one.  After I was all finished they showed me a summary of my information which is where I saw the image to the right.  When I first saw this I thought they had a sense of humor and had put in a sad face because I didn’t have a spouse.  This of course made me smile and for a moment I was amazed that a tax website could have a sense of humor.  But then I realized that they were trying to output and underline a social security number that wasn’t present and all I was seeing was the dashes that usually follow the third and fifth digit.

So I guess this isn’t a sign of humor at all but more of an oversight.  Either way, it made my taxes a little more entertaining and I’m only paying in $38 so I’m not complaining one bit.

Climbing has taken a toll on my hands

In February I joined a climbing gym (Planet Granite) and have been spending about 10 hours a week torturing myself on its walls.  This is a huge amount of time for someone as busy as I am but for some reason I really can’t help myself.  Just like any other attraction, there is a certain amount of mystery behind it and I like to solve mysteries.

So I’m making a list.  A list of feelings and skills that showcase themselves while climbing. I doubt this list will be able to fully express things enough to come to any conclusions but I’ve got to start somewhere.  And just like Columbo, I’ll probably have to come back in the room and add in “just one more thing”.

Forced Social Behavior – Pretty much all of the outdoor activities that I’m into are ones that you can do by yourself.  Climbing is refreshingly different.  Because every climber needs someone to belay them (take in the rope as they climb) it’s kind of a hard activity to do by yourself.  This makes it very easy to approach others and strike up a conversation and so far almost everyone has been receptive of this.  In a world where most people avoid saying hello to strangers, climbers seem to encourage it.

Freedom – For years I’ve been exploring various parts of the wilderness and seeing rock walls that looked impossible to scale.  Being an idiot, I naturally want to conquer such things and it’s this kind of desire that I think worries my parents.  But as it turns out, acting on those desires can be really empowering.  The ability to traverse over any physical object opens up whole new worlds.  No longer is that island plateau off limits, no longer is the view from the top of that mountain out of reach and no longer are you simply stuck to foot paths.  It’s physical freedom on a level I have never experienced.

Problem Solving – Unless you’re on a ladder, climbing isn’t a straightforward task.  You need to plan your moves, anticipate the crux and find places to rest.  It sounds simple and logical while on the ground but these are easy things to forget when you’re getting mentally and physically tired.  This is what makes the sport so challenging.  You know where you want to go but just need to find the right combination of movements that will get you there while staying coordinated, balanced and under control.

Focus – Problem solving requires focus.  You can’t think about what is below you or how the last sequence of moves didn’t go as well as you planned.  You need to be looking ahead and knowing what your next few moves are so you can execute them logically.  At the same time you can’t forget about proper foot placement, keeping your hips close to the wall, progressing using your legs and so on.  You get so tuned into the task that you forget about the other things around you and feeling them reappear when you’re finished adds to the sensation.

Grace – Grace is just another word for control.  While keeping your temper and frustrations under control is very important, I’m actually talking about control of movement.  Making smooth movements to adjust your center of gravity helps you be a more efficient climber and use less upper body energy.  Watching the fluid movements of an experienced climber really is like watching someone dance on the rock, very graceful.  While the less experienced climber looks more like the portrayal of a white guy dancing.  I am a white guy and I think I stand a better chance of being graceful on a rock than I do a dance floor.

Physical Strength – Climbing is a full body physical activity.  Every muscle group can be used at different points but only some of them require real strength.  You discover pretty quickly that the muscles you want to use the most (your forearms) are the ones that are the weakest.  I may be in the minority, but I truly love pushing my body to its limits and feeling like I’ve done something at the end of the day.  If climbing doesn’t do that for you, it’s time to move up a few levels.

Mental Strength – Focus is the product of mental strength.  As a climber gets tired there seems to be a tendency to climb in a less efficient manner, this is clearly a downward spiral.  So having the mental strength to remain focused in the face of increasing pain is a valuable tool.  Being able to trust yourself to hold onto a grip is also an aspect of mental strength, if you can’t do this all you’re doing is closing off options.  There is also an aspect of dealing with fear.  Falling is a very natural and healthy fear, but if gone unchecked it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Achievement – The feeling of accomplishment after finishing the hardest climb in your life is simply fantastic.  You struggle through it, push through the pain and come out on top.  Then down the road you find yourself able to do the same climbs that you once struggled on without an issue.  Because the routes follow a (sometimes rough) rating system it’s pretty easy to see improvement over time.

Endless Challenges – There is always a harder route to climb and many different types of rock to play with.  You can work on slabs (rock that isn’t quite vertical), overhanging rock, cracks, chimney climbs/stemming (using pressure with your feet and hands to scale up two parallel or adjacent faces), routes that require a lot of balance, routes with a lot of crimping holds, etc.  You can have some fun on some sport climbs or get the full rack of gear out for some traditional climbing.  This translates into a lifetime of goals.

Nope, that list doesn’t solve the mystery but perhaps it’s the mystery itself that is so appealing.  Afterall, one of the things that drew me to start climbing was the mystery of what’s at the top.  It seems kind of fitting that the mysterious journy to the top is what keeps me coming back.  So maybe this one should go unsolved.

Climb on.

Back in 1997 I first visited the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University as a high school senior.  I was so taken back by the things they were doing in their lab that I simply had to get my hands dirty with it.  I ended up attending Iowa State after high school and one of the first things I did was to walk over to the VR lab and get more information about what they were using to build these virtual worlds.  Enter SGI, stage left.

I walked away from the lab that day knowing that these SGI computers played a big part of making these virtual worlds.  At this point in my life the only thing I had ever programmed was my TI-86 calculator and I had never even heard of UNIX based computers.  Somehow none of this discouraged me one bit.  I simply saw a toy that I wanted to play with, end of discussion.

During the summer after my freshman year I started going to these surplus sales that the university had.  One week I walked in and couldn’t believe my eyes, sitting on a shelf was a SGI Indigo Elan.  This was a computer that once sold for tens of thousands of dollars and could now be mine for $225.  It came complete with a 19″ monitor, 64MB of memory, a 500MB hard drive and a R3000 processor at 33MHz.  Not exactly a barn burner in 1999 but like U2 says, “love is blindness”.

So I got the damn thing and had absolutely no clue what to do with it.  The university wiped the hard drive so I had no OS to run on it.  I knew that somehow I had to get a copy of Irix 5.3 to install but that wasn’t an easy thing to come by.  But with the help of some folks at ISU somehow I managed to get the thing to going.  It was now officially my first computer and would end up being the most influential.

I can’t imagine how different my life would be today if that computer was a Windows machine instead of an SGI.  My SGI allowed me explore in depth the wonders of networked computers.  Being able to login to a remote machine, pipe windows over a network and mount network drives.  It fostered my love with the command line which is a fundamental requirement for being a productive geek.  I loved this machine so much that I ended up purchasing two more just like it.

By the end of my second year at ISU I had my three Indigo’s and also a R5k Indy at 175 MHz.  After finding a copy of Irix 6.5 the Indy became my primary workstation.  But my collection didn’t stop there.  Over the next few years I got a couple more Indy’s and a couple of green Indigo 2′s.  Then came my favorite machine, my purple Indigo 2 R10k.  I have so much respect for that machine.

That machine served as the database server for my search engine for two years, handling millions of queries each month with grace.  However it was also the last SGI that I owned.  Eventually my needs outgrew what this pile of hardware could provide.  Just like the next generation of startup companies, I too was making the transition to commodity hardware running Linux.  Exit SGI, stage right.

When I moved out to California I left behind my old flames.  They now reside in my parents basement in Iowa, collecting dust and probably dreaming of being useful once again.  Somehow I can’t imagine the thought of actually getting rid of them.  There is a part of me that would like to fire them up again and just look back at that time in my life.  What was on my desktop?  But I can’t bring myself to do it at this point in my life.  What’s the point of looking backwards when there is so much in front of me?  Besides, it would just make me crave the days when I had so much time to simply learn.

Maybe I’ll compromise and pay a visit to the Computer History Museum and see if they have any old SGI boxes on display.  Not only is the hardware and software they produced of historical significance, the museum now occupies a building that SGI once owned so it only seems appropriate.

It amazes me what people type into search engines that ends up landing them on various posts in this blog.  Most of them are very logical and not surprising (eg: a search for my name).  But every now and then I come across one that catches my eye.  For example, this week someone searched for “jack johnson guitar” and somehow landed on my blog.  This is surprising because there are hundreds of thousands of pages with those words on them and somehow someone found one of mine.

But this week I stumbled on one of the greatest search referrals in my life.  Someone searched for “I love Ryan Grimm”, I actually let out a little laugh when I saw that.  Immediatly I started to wonder if a celebrety or artist popped up with my name, thankfully it doesn’t look like it.  So what was someone looking for when they typed that into a search engine?  Is it possible that they were actually looking for me?  I doubt it.  But it at the very least, it’s nice to know that someone out there is searching for their love of a Ryan Grimm.

The reality is that too many things have been going on and in some cases, things of the wrong type.  I’m sure we’ve all had points where we knew that if we opened our mouth we’d end up saying the wrong thing.  So I’ve been exercising some self control and holding off on sharing until I was confident that I’d be happy with what I had to say.  The only downside of this is that I inadvertently stopped talking about all of the fantastic and fun things that have been going on as well.

The result is a feeling of constipation.  I’ve got so much stuff to share that it’s a little overwhelming and I’m not sure where to begin!  But I’m anxious to sort it out because some of the experiences are fairly unique and the amount that I’ve learned in this duration has no match to any other period of my adult life.

I’ll be sharing again, thanks for being patient.

My first set of skis was a fairly cheap pair, I think they were S3′s or something like that.  But even at the low end these skis were better than the rentals that I’d been on up to that point.  However, on the very last day of the 2006 season I got back to my hotel room and noticed that they started to delaminate.  So I took them back to the great guys at Santa Rosa Ski and Sport and they kindly sent them back to Volkl for me.

A few days later, to my relief, I was informed that Volkl would warranty the skis for me.  Not only would I be getting new skis, the shop gave me the option to upgrade to some better skis along the way.  I took them up on the offer and decided to go all out and get one of their better skis, the AC3′s.

Just out of the resort boundary

It was the summer of 2006 and I couldn’t wait for the snow to hit so I could give my new skis a go.  Opening day… loved em.  Between the winter of 2006 and the spring of 2008 I skied on them a fair amount and loved every turn, even the ones that sent me to the ground.  The AC3′s were responsive, fast and handled everything including groomers, trees, powder, ice and bumps quite well (deep powder being the weakest of the bunch).  So with great sadness at the end of the 2008 season I noticed another fatal flaw with my skis.

The AC3′s were a wood core ski with titanium reinforcements.  This made for a fantastic ride but oddly the titanium didn’t extend all the way to the tips of the ski.  Instead it ended about 3/4″ of in inch from the tip and caused the base layer to crack right where it stopped.  It ended up cracking so badly that I could actually see the titanium inside the ski.  All the P-TEX in the world wasn’t going to fix this problem.

I’m somewhat of an aggressive skier but this type of failure seemed like more of a design flaw than a user flaw.  So a few weeks ago I decided that I’d try sending them into Volkl and see what they had to say.  It was a bit of a long shot because the skis were now out of warranty but I didn’t have much to lose.

Today I got a call back from my local ski shop and I was informed that Volkl decided to warranty the skis anyway!  Not only am I getting a new set of skis, I’m getting upgraded to the AC30′s as well!  I couldn’t be a happier skier right now.  Okay, I take that back, I’d be happier if was driving to Tahoe right now and the resorts were open.  But it warms my heart a little to see a company back their products this well.

Thanks Volkl.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Independent, it’s a smallish venue that holds, by my guess, about 300 people. There is a regular stream of good artists on their calender, but getting to see a band like Cake in such a intimate setting doesn’t happen very frequently. Even at $50 a ticket the show was a bargain considering the experience.

Speaking of money, the reason Cake was putting on such a special show was to raise money for Proposition H which is on the ballet this November in San Francisco. If it passes, San Francisco will become the first city in the U.S. to be 100% powered by clean energy sources. Cake has a long history of finding creative ways to help environmental causes and it’s one of the reasons I love their music so much.

Naturally the place was packed and the crowd was fantastic. Very enthusiastic and clearly big fans. The set was almost two hours long which is amazing considering that John McCrea (lead vocals) was feeling a bit under the weather with a sore throat. But this fact didn’t seem to get him down much as he frequently addressed the crowd, interacting with us, asking us questions, making us laugh and (in typical fashion) giving away a tree.

This show was so unique that it’s really impossible to truly describe in words. But thankfully I did manage to get a couple videos that at least give you a feeling for how personal the setting was. Take a look and be jealous if you weren’t there :).

Comfort Eagle

Wheels

Top of Mount Diablo

A couple months ago Evan talked both John and I into signing up for the Mount Diablo Challenge which is a road race up Mount Diablo with the goal of raising money to protect the mountain.  To get to the top, cyclists have to ascend 3,250 feet over a winding 10.8 miles with roughly a 18% grade for the last tenth of a mile before the finish line.

This year roughly 1,000 cyclists participated in the race and a new record of 41 minutes and 19 seconds was obtained by Howard Love.  But you don’t have to be anywhere close to that fast to feel at home going up the mountain because the race attracts all types of cyclists including very young children, mountain bikers and unicyclists.

Start of the Mount Diablo Challenge

Because the three of us are at fairly different levels of fitness we sadly couldn’t be in the same starting wave.  Being the fastest, Evan was in the second while I was in the third and John was in the fourth.  Evan’s goal was to finish in under an hour, I wanted to get in at 1 hour 20 minutes and John wanted to make it to the top.

The day was sunny but rather cool overall with some significant winds on the upper half of the mountain.  I was feeling pretty good for the first 6.5 miles of the race.  I’d ridden this section of the road before which really helps with the mental aspects of a race.  However the last few miles of the ride required an increasing amount of mental tricks to constantly push out the fact that I didn’t totally know what was ahead of me.

I was actually quite confident that my time was nowhere close to what it needed to be in order to accomplish my goal so I forced myself not to look at the clock in fear that it would be depressing.  However, in retrospect this was actually a mistake because in reality I was actually doing quite well.  I discovered this after I crossed the line and to my complete surprise I had managed to finish only four minutes behind my goal.  While it would have been nice to meet my goal I’m still quite happy with my results given how little training I did for the race.

As for Evan and John, I couldn’t be happier for the two of them because they both accomplished everything they wanted to with the race.  Evan finished in exactly one hour and John crossed the line in under two.  Earlier in the year Evan was doing the math for how much more energy he would have to pump out in order to make it in under an hour which to me seemed like it might not be obtainable.  Even more impressive is the fact that prior to the race John hadn’t made it to the top of the mountain at all.  Congratulations to both of them.

John, Evan and Ryan at the top of Mount Diablo

Next it looks like we’re going to do some of the climbs in the low key hill climbing series, we’ll see how they treat us.

Anyway…

This last weekend I attended the Austin City Limits Music Festival and sadly two of my best friends couldn’t attend the festivities. So I figured the next best thing to being there is getting to hear live recordings from some of the sets. I’d never done any recording so I knew the chances of me getting something of quality wasn’t likely but worth a shot. Plus, the endless string of shows over three days would allow me to cram a ton of learning into a short time frame.

Before making my purchase, I did some research online. I managed to find this fantastic article by Mark Nelson on the O’Reilly Digital Media site comparing the M-Audio MicroTrack II to the Edirol R-09HR. Mark leaves it up to you to decide which recorder best fits your needs and it was the 48 volt phantom power on the MicroTrack II that sealed the deal for me. That and the fact that I found a brand new recorder on CraigsList for only $225.

Shure SM57 with TRS cable

The MicroTrack II came with a simple stereo microphone that seems to be of good enough quality for unplanned recordings, but my desire for better quality required the use of a nicer mic. A few weeks prior I had purchased a Shure SM57 dynamic mic to play around with and I wondered what kinds of results it would produce. So I picked up a TRS to XLR cable to go from the MicroTrack to the SM57 and did some test runs using my home stereo. Right off the bat I noticed that the mic that came with the MicroTrack was much more sensitive than the Shure. I wasn’t sure which one would do a better job at the festival so I decided to take both and experiment.

Ideally in this situation I’d have a nice condenser mic but I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy making the recordings and I didn’t want to dump more money into this if it wasn’t going to yield any pleasure. Fortunately I found out quite quickly that the stages at the festival were loud enough to drive my dynamic mic and I left the small clip on mic in my bag for the rest of the weekend.

Austin Texas tends to be fairly hot this time of year and while recording, the MicroTrack actually generates a little bit of heat on its own. The first set I recorded was Yeasayer and things went off without a hitch. I kept an eye on my levels throughout the show keeping them low enough not to clip. After the set I wanted to listen to the recording in a bit quieter setting to get some immediate feedback. I started playing the track back but to my surprise, I couldn’t adjust the volume on the headphone output. This had me a bit worried so I decided to power cycle the recorder.

The combination of the heat from the sun and the internal heat that the recorder generates was clearly upsetting my new device because after turning it back on, it immediately turned itself off. After biting a couple fingernails I decided to let it sit in the shade for a while to cool off with the hopes that it would come back to life. It did.

For the rest of the afternoon I continued to play around with various settings and was quickly finding myself very comfortable with the layout of the device. It’s operation is really straightforward with a minimal amount of buttons and only the ones you need quick access to. My first real complaint was the fact that when recording from a mono source (left channel only) you only get audio in the left channel of the headphone output, even when setting the recorder to mono mode. This seems like an oversight on M-Audio’s part, making it slightly annoying.

The last set I saw on Friday was Donavon Frankenreiter and I so desperately wanted to get a good recording of what I knew would be a fantastic show. I managed to get a great spot on the right hand side of the stage and it felt like a pretty good place to setup shop. At the end of the set we headed back to the hotel and I got my first chance to hear what I had captured in detail.

It was amazing, I could hardly contain myself. The last time I felt this type of magical experience was making prints in a dark room. The recording didn’t have the same quality as a sound board recording but for such a simple and portable setup I’m truly shocked at the results. Here’s a video that Will shot, I replaced the audio from the camera with my recording.

Encouraged by Friday’s results, I went into Saturday with a lot of enthusiasm especially because Iron & Wine was playing in the evening. Once again, the recording went off without a hitch but I’m discovering that it would be nice to roll off the bass a bit before the signal hits the MicroTrack. I want to do this because some of these shows have so much bass that it’s difficult to keep the input from clipping like crazy and still capture the rest of the detail. In photographic terms, it’s a lot like trying to take a picture of something in the shadows while staring at the sun.

Sunday was a big day. I wanted to get a recording of Tristan Prettyman, Neko Case and The Raconteurs. All was going well with the Tristan set when I realized that twenty minutes into the set I ran out of space on my CF card. This was confusing to me at first because I had removed all the old recordings from the previous day and my 4GB card should have had enough space for over three hours of recording. Being a geek, I had a theory for what went wrong.

When deleting the files I didn’t use the delete button on the MicroTrack, instead I deleted them via the Finder on my Mac and it seems as though the files weren’t actually deleted, just hidden. The file browser on the MicroTrack only shows you audio files that it can read which in normal situations is nice. But when you’re out of space because of clutter it would be great to be able to remove that clutter while in the field. So I’d highly recommend that M-Audio adds a feature to allow you to browse all of the files on the device for these kind of emergencies.

Because this feature isn’t present, I found myself running around the festival looking for a usb cable so I could hook my recorder up to one of the computers that Dell had at its tent. This was a fruitless task and I was left with no option but to reformat my CF card, loosing what I had of the Tristan set. But thankfully the reformatting worked and I was able to grab the other two.

So the bottom line is that I love my new toy and I highly recommend it. It’s friendly to use, affordable, portable and produces amazing results. The only reliability problem I had was when it got excessively hot. As for features, I’d love to monitor a mono signal in both ears and be able to manage the non-audio files on the device.

That's a big bunny, even for Tate

Ah the third and final day. The strangest thing about this year’s festival is that Friday and Sunday had the best lineup (in my mind) and yet neither day was sold out.

First up for the day was Priscilla Ahn. Will had seen her when she opened for Amos Lee a while ago and suggested we check her out. She was a last minute replacement for Adele which had to be somewhat difficult, especially given that it was just her on this huge stage. But she delt with the pressure really well, in fact she’s pretty damn funny. One of her songs in particular titled “The Boob Song” was really enjoyed by the crowd.

At the same stage after Priscilla was Tristan Prettyman. I’ve been a Tristan fan for over three years now and I’ve seen her in concert a number of times and always look forward to each performance. I was especially excited for this show because I wanted to get a recording. Things were going great, Tristan was playing some of her new material which I really enjoy, but when I looked down to check my levels I realized that my recording had stopped. I tried to start things back up but it would immediately stop recording once it started. What the hell. After a few moments I realized that it was out of space. So I abandoned the recording process for the rest of the set and simply enjoyed the set.

I suspected the problem with the recorder was that when I deleted the old files from the CF card that they really didn’t get deleted. Sadly I needed a computer to remove these old files and Dell and AT&T had a booths setup with laptops so I figured one of them might have a USB cable. No such luck. My only option was to reformat my CF card to free the space but that meant I’d loose my Tristan recording. Given that there was two more shows that I wanted to record, I saw little option.

With free space at hand, we headed over to see Neko Case. When buying some cables for my recorder I started talking to this fantastic guy that works at Gleb Music and along the way I mentioned that I was going to ACL. He immediately stated that he’d love to get his hands on a Neko Case recording and told me stories of how he’d traveled from California to Washington to see one of her shows. How couldn’t I check her out after hearing a story like that.

We then hung out for an hour, keeping our spots a few feet from the stage to see The Raconteurs. Their show was amazing. As much as I love Tristan, I think The Raconteurs edged her out just a little bit. Unfortunately Jack White (lead vocals) had a slipped disc in his back but somehow managed to pull himself through the show. Their studio albums most definitely have a rock feel to them but their live performances are much more intense, but how couldn’t they rock with a guy like Brendan Benson on guitar?

Initially I wasn’t sure about this years lineup, but thankfully those feelings were unwarranted because in the end I had just as much fun this year as I did the last two. Plus, this year was a lot cooler (temperature wise) than previous years and the grounds were much more enjoyable thanks to volunteers picking up bottles in exchange for t-shirts. I was really glad that Tate could join us this year and am hoping that we can have an even larger group for the next festival.

Clothing Optional Area

Tired. Very Tired. We got a bit of a late start on Saturday which actually worked out pretty well because there wasn’t anyone on the schedule in the morning that we really had our hearts set out to see.

Will and I checked out Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings while playing a little game of Hot or Not. Neither of us had ever heard any of their music but really enjoyed how much fun they had interacting with the crowd. After that set we checked out the merch table, I got a fairly cool recycling themed shirt but sadly the posters this year weren’t all that appealing.

We then wondered over to the stage where Erykah Badu was going to perform. I haven’t listened her since 1998 so I can’t exactly say that I’m familiar with much of her music. But she’s got a fun sound so we figured we’d check it out. Sadly she started the set 10 minutes late and then decided to spend five minutes telling the crowd a story. I’m all up for artists telling stories during their set, but spending 10% of the set on a story is a bit excessive. We headed out to meed my Dad and Tate at the WaMu stage to see The Nachito Herrera All Stars.

None of us had herd the Nachito Herrera All Stars before but apparenlty a couple of Tate’s friends had actually seen them the night before in the Twin Cities and were impressed. Apparently the group had only played together for a few shows which is quite impressive. They didn’t have a whole lot of lyrics to their songs but that’s pretty understandable. I was just impressed with how well Herrera conducted the group while playing they keys.

By 6:30 the day was really starting to roll. We all checked out John Fogerty (front man for Credence Clearwater Revival). I started listening to CCR when I was in junior high which surprised my Dad at the time, so I’m quite familiar with Fogerty’s earlier work. I wasn’t sure how much of his older stuff he’d play but happily he had a good mix. It’s always interesting to watch someone as legendary as Fogerty.

The highlight of the day for me was Iron & Wine. When I started working at O’Reilly a coworker named Matt introduced me to their music. I listened to the album a bit but sadly didn’t spend much time with it. This is a decision that I’ve regretted after circling back around and hearing their latest album, The Shepherd’s Dog. Iron & Wine continues to develop a more complex sound which is especially present in their live performances.

This was the only show that I recorded in its entirety on Saturday and I’ll post it if I find out if they are cool with having their shows recorded. As a side note, for all of you in the bay area, Iron & Wine is going to be playing at this years Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival on October 5th. The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival is a free festival in Golden Gate park and I’d highly recommend checking them out.

We closed out the day with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss and happily walked back to the downtown area feeling a bit more energetic than the night before. Plus, we had the pleasure of being informed that we’re sinners by some religious folks outside the park, always a good time.

Part of the reason I didn’t have time to write at the end of each day is because my Dad, my brother Tate and one of my best friends Will made it to the festival as well and we were simply having too good of time hanging out together (wish you could have made it Alex and Amanda). This was the first year that my brother came along with us and I was excited to see what he thought of the experience.

Given how exhausted we all were from traveling to Austin, I was very proud of us for getting to Zilker park a bit after noon. The first show I wanted to see was Yeasayer at 1:30. I first heard of Yeasayer last January from Liz and I’d listened to their album All Hours Cymbals a few times but didn’t give it a whole lot of attention until leading up to the festival. However, in the last few weeks the album has really been growing on me. Their lyrics can be a little hard to follow along to sometimes so I wasn’t sure what the others would think of the show.

They played most of the songs off of the All Hours Cymbals album but without a doubt, Sunrise and 2080 were two of my favorites. My only complaint is that the base guitar was driven into distortion which cast a lot of the delicate and intricate details into the shadows. But that’s fine, it gives me a good excuse to see them again the next time they are in San Francisco.

Next up was Jakob Dylan, son of Bob Dylan. Last year Bob Dylan was the closing act on Sunday and lets just say I was disappointed with how he interacted with the crowd. Thankfully his son Jakob seems to have plenty of energy and spark in him to say hello to all of us. Knowing that it would be a fairly long day, Will and I kind of relaxed a bit during his set but still found it quite enjoyable.

At 3:30 we made our way over to see Del tha Funky Homosapien. I love Del. He is by far one of the most innovative and talented artists in the Rap/Hip-Hop world. Many people aren’t familiar with him under this name but chances are you’ve heard him without knowing it. His most well known work is likely on the song “Clint Eastwood” with the Gorillaz. But for me his greatest work is the Deltron 3030 album. We didn’t get very close to the stage which is a bummer because there was clearly a ton of energy in the crowd.

Going off of a recommendation from someone that Will chatted with on the flight to Austin, we decided to check out Patty Griffin. She didn’t seem too bad but given that we didn’t know much about her, it was kind of hard to really get into her set. So we headed out halfway through, got some food and then listened to the first half of the Slightly Stoopid set. I was hoping that G. Love would come out and join them for Mellow Mood and in fact G. Love did come out, but they sang a different song. Will and I decided that we’d leave early and get a killer spot for The Swell Season.

If you aren’t familiar with The Swell Season and you like folk music, make sure you do something about that. Many months ago Will suggested that I check out the soundtrack for the movie Once and that was the best music recommendation Will has ever given me. The soundtrack for the movie was written and performed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová (they also starred in the movie). So when Will informed me that The Swell Season was made up of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, I was very excited. We managed to get some spots a few feet from the stage and the show firmly cemented the desire to see the two of them in concert again. Especially because we headed out fifteen minutes early to see Donavan Frankenreiter.

If you follow my blog, you may remember me blogging about how amazing the Donavan Frankenreiter show was at the Outside Lands Festival and that was an experience I wanted to duplicate, so I was very motivated to get a good spot for the set. My Dad and brother didn’t feel the same need so they hung out a bit further back in the crowd while Will and I managed to be close enough to touch the stage. Once again the show did not disappoint. Donavan was as fantastic as always and clearly seemed to be enjoying himself.

But what made this show special for me was when G. Love joined Donavan on the stage. I passed on seeing the G. Love show in favor of The Swell Season, a choice that wasn’t easy to make. So it warmed my heart to be able to see him join in on both “What’cha Know About” and “It Don’t Matter”.

Normally at shows I spend a good amount of energy taking photos. But for this festival I took a grand total of 15 pictures, 15! Last year I took ten times this many photos and frankly it felt very strange to not have a camera in my hand the entire time. But I have a good excuse, I promise.

Shortly before the festival this year I went to a JJ Grey & Mofro concert and during the concert I was wishing that I could share what I was hearing with others. Then it hit me, I could totally share what I was hearing if I got some recording equipment. I did some research online, got myself a portable recorder and I already had a mic so it was easy to get something simple going (I’ll share the details of my setup in a later post).

I played around with the recorder and various mic positions earlier in the day and by the time the Donavon show came around I was feeling fairly confident that I could get a good recording. So Will and I stood right up front, me grabbing the audio and Will grabbing some video. Not only was the set better than I expected, the quality of my recording exceeded every single expectation I had, almost to the point of tears :). Here’s the video of “It Don’t Matter” that Will shot:

Friday ended up being a very long day for all of us and we were all ready to get back to the hotel for some much needed rest. Between the sun, moving about and the music, one tends to feel pretty drained at the end of the day. But that’s actually a pretty good demonstration of exactly how amazing these festivals are. It’s the memories that are made hearing so many amazing artists with such amazing friends that makes it all so worthwhile.

I know, it wasn’t that long ago that I blogged about JJ Grey & Mofro but trust me, my listening habits aren’t centered around this one band. It just happens that their albums are amazing, they recently released Orange Blossoms and played the last two nights at The Independent in San Francisco.

The combination of leaving my place late and dealing with the never ending saga of parking around the venue made me miss the opening act, Hill Country Revue. This is a bummer because they appear to be a very talented bunch but thankfully I didn’t miss a minute of JJ Grey.

Most artists tend to play their most recent material at a concert and this show wasn’t an exception to that rule. But I was pleasantly surprised at much material they also played from prior albums. They hit up Jookhouse and Brighter Days off of their first album Blackwater. They played the title track off of Lochloosa as well as Fireflies.  Off of Country Ghetto they included War, Footsteps, Turpentine, Mississippi and possibly others (I was too involved in the music to make set notes).

Personally this was exactly the type of set that I was hoping for, one that mixes both the past and the present. However, the audience reaction wasn’t quite what I was expecting. The title track off of Orange Blossoms is a full on rocking song that tells a great story. I thought for sure the crowd would react strongly to the song but they didn’t. My guess is that the album is just so new that most fans haven’t had the chance to absorb it yet. Those fans are in for a treat when they do.

Also to my surprise was the fact that seemingly everyone in the audience sang along to Lochloosa. That track was released four years ago and really goes to show how strong and loyal the fan base is for the band.

At the end of the almost two hour long set I was wishing that I had gotten tickets for the Friday night show as well. So I will guarentee that you can find me at another one of their shows down the road.

The catalyst for this thought is the fact that I recently moved. While parts of moving can suck (boxes, utilities, general disruption, etc), the absolute worst part is finding all the people that you infrequently visit.  People like a new doctor, barber and taxidermist. Being a healthy guy without pets, naturally the need to find a new barber was encountered first.

The need for a haircut tends to sneak up on me. One day it’s not on my mind, the next day it’s screaming at me to do something about. This was the case I found myself in one day last week. So I figured I’d get some work done in the morning and then head out in the afternoon and find a place to get the job done.

One thing led to another and the next thing I knew it was 7pm and not only had I skipped lunch, my hair was still too long as well. Damn. So I knew that the haircut would probably have to wait but I decided to walk downtown and grab some food. I managed to find a mexican place that was so good that it took my mind off of my shaggy head. But then on the walk home I actually found a barber that was open! Unbelievable.

Sadly it was Great Clips. Even sadder is that I went in. Perhaps my judgment was clouded by the food that I just ate or the feeling that I wouldn’t have to sleep with this mess on my head another night.  I’m not sure, but I should know better than to make the mistake of asking, “do you have enough time for another haircut?”.

That question should never be asked. If it’s close enough to closing time where you have to ask if there is time for a 15 minute haircut, walk away and come back the next day. Why? For the same reason you don’t want to order fast food right before they close, these people are anxious to get the hell out of there. And when someone has fairly sharp instruments that close to my head I’d like them to be thinking about the tasks at hand, not the tasks at home.

This wasn’t the only sign that I should have continued on my way. After the woman responded with a confidence inspiring “sure”, she asked me for my phone number. Not because she was attracted to me but because she wanted to enter it into the computer. After telling it to her three times and her still not getting it right I decided that it was best left incorrect. None of this really bothers me, in fact I’d prefer if they didn’t have my real phone number.

The reality of what I got myself into slammed home when she also couldn’t understand the fairly simply description of how I wanted my hair cut. “Tapered up the sides and an inch or so left on the top”, I have a hard time thinking of a simpler haircut that one would actually pay for. After repeating myself she responded by saying, “I love your accent, are you from England?”. You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m from Iowa and the only accent I can even impersonate is a northern one don’t ya know.

What could I do at this point? I’ve got that neck based apron on so it’s hard to just run away. Calling the woman an idiot or actually saying anything that was in my head at the moment isn’t going to help one bit. So I bit my tongue, closed my eyes and told myself “it grows back”.

But if you say that to yourself for too long you’re liable to just blurt it out at some point. So instead of dealing with that awkwardness I decided to think of all the other signs that you’re in for a bad haircut. I remembered this one time I got my haircut in college (also at a Great Clips, what’s wrong with me) by this guy that had the ugliest hair I’ve ever seen in my life, it made mullets jealous. It literally looked like he sculpted his hair into a bird and no, this wasn’t in the 80′s. If someone thinks that style is good enough for themselves, who knows what you’ll walk away looking like.

After remembering that story I couldn’t help but wonder about Great Clips itself. I’m always suspect of any company who’s name implies quality. It just feels a little arrogant and insulting to me, especially because there isn’t much that’s great about them.

Thankfully when I opened my eyes at the end of my haircut the result wasn’t as bad as I expected. She didn’t do a great job, but nobody has laughed at me so by some measure it’s a success. But I’m going to find myself in this exact same position in a few weeks and I clearly need all the help I can get. So if anyone has ideas for other things to watch out for, I’d love to hear them.

I intended to write this post yesterday but the three days of fantastic music soaked up all of my energy. I still can’t quite get over how special this festival was and I’ll be amazed if they can get as impressive of a lineup next year (hopefully San Francisco won’t object to having the festival again either).

I busted my ass Sunday morning to make sure I had enough time to blog about Saturday and still be able to get to the park before ALO started at 1. I managed to get there around 12:30 which was early enough to land me a spot right up by the stage. I first saw ALO when they opened for Jack Johnson at the Greek Theater, same concert they filmed A Weekend at the Greek at. Based off of the audience participation and how many people showed up for the show it seems like the band is building a good fan base, including myself.

Next up was Stars. I haven’t spent much time listening to Stars but they were at the same stage as ALO so I figured I’d give them a listen. There was a bit of conflict inside me because The Mother Hips were playing at the same time and I’m a fan of them and their lead guy Tim Bluhm. The Stars show wasn’t bad but in hindsight I wish I would have gone to The Mother Hips. But I did head out a bit early to get to the next show, Bon Iver.

Bon Iver (french for “good winter”) is one hell of an artist and performer. He wrote and recorded most of his first album during a four month stay in a hunting cabin in Wisconsin and it generated a very unique and fascinating feeling for the album. His shows feature a massive amount of percussion, sometimes played by every member in the band. I was shocked at how big the crowd was for his show and even more shocked at how involved they were.  I’ve never heard an audience sing like they did during the song The Wolves, it was really very amazing and something that will be difficult to experience again.

Because of Bon Iver I wasn’t able to catch the opening of Andrew Bird which is a bummer but a conscious choice. I’ve been listening to Andrew Bird since the release of Swimming Hour. His music is probably difficult for most people to really get into but it is well worth the effort. At his shows, Bird plays both a violin and an electric guitar, mixing them together quite skillfully with a looper.

After the Andrew Bird show my day hit a bit of a Lull for a while. Jack Johnson was the closing act for the day and I’m such a huge fan that I couldn’t stand the thought of not having a good spot, this didn’t come without some costs.

I was going to miss out on most of the Broken Social Scene set as well as all of Wilco. I’ve seen Wilco a number of times so I was able to deal with that loss. So I headed over to the Lands End stage where Jack would be playing in 2.5 hours. I was actually able to get shockingly close to the stage, especially when the act before Jack started to play and people shifted around. That act was Rodrigo y Gabriela and honestly I could have done without them.

Their set started out quite impressive and it’s obvious that both of them are quite talented but in my mind their set lacked depth. It was just the two of them on stage with acoustic guitars and it’s essentially an hour long jam session between the two of them. It’s an impressive jam session but that’s all it was. No lyrics and highly repetitive. The crowd was the most energetic when Rodrigo would work in some familiar chords from popular songs. I’m not sure, but this might tell you something about what sticks with people and what they want to hear. But don’t get me wrong, I respect their talent, it was just a bit much for me after 30 minutes.

After their set we had a 45 minute break until Jack came on. It was so crowded up in the front that during this time I couldn’t sit down or really even move but somehow the time managed to fly by.

Anyone that knows my musical tastes probably knows how much I love Jack Johnson. I’ve been listening to him since the beginning of his career and no artist resonates with me more than he does. His music has this fantastic ability of being laid back while delivering an amazingly powerful message and that mood is paralleled perfectly in his live performances.

Jack Johnson breaking out the electric guitar

Merlo Podlewski doing some freestyle rapping

Zach Gill up front with his accordion

This mood makes for a show that has a hard time going wrong. During the performance on Sunday there was this spider on Jack’s microphone that simply wouldn’t go away and as you can imagine, Jack was finding it hard to sing into this mic. But instead of letting it bother him he simply shared with us (in the middle of a song) what he was seeing and we all had a laugh. Being this playful with the crowd really seems to get people involved.

This involvement is what makes the live shows so powerful. Everyone sings, even those that truly suck at singing and it’s great. To have that many people together singing songs about what’s gone so wrong in this world as well as all the things that are so right is something that I find so comforting that it’s hard to express in words.

For me this is what life is all about, weekends like this. Like so many other things in our lives, most days go by without leaving any imprint in our memory. They tend to blur together into a stream of events rather than individual moments. But it’s the points in life that are jagged that you can’t forget. Moments that break your cycle and put you somewhere totally different for a while. This festival is one of those moments and because of that it’s something that will stay in my memory for as long as I have one. Thanks to everyone involved in the festival for breaking my cycle and the tens of thousands of others that also attended.

For the last couple years I’ve been going to the Austin City Limits Music Festival and I’ve been fortunate enough to have my best friends there with me. So being at the Outside Lands festival without them makes me a bit sad, especially with the amazing lineup that they have.

The beginning of the day didn’t feature any artists that I was hugely familiar with so I decided that I’d do some live music browsing. This is one of the greatest things about large music festivals, with three bands playing at any given time you can sample a bunch of new artists and see what they are like in their element. I checked out a couple songs from Dredg then made my way over to long time locals The Coup. The Coup was playing at a stage right next to the festival merchandise area and I wanted to pick up one of the festival posters, so I ducked out a little early to go pick one up.

This is where I have my only complaint of the festival, merchandise. Tons of people want to buy t-shirts and other memorabilia at these festivals but it appears like they didn’t plan all that well for this one. Granted it is the first time they are putting on this festival so I will cut them a little slack, but there’s plenty of other festivals to model things after.

All I wanted was a poster, simple enough. I had seen them on Friday but got so annoyed with the people running the booth that I gave up and decided to come back early Saturday. I was shocked and very disappointed when I learned that the posters had already sold out! How could they be running out of things when it’s just a couple hours into the second day of a three day festival? I’m not sure but I wish it wasn’t the case.

Fortunately there is plenty of good music to cheer me up and I was going to go check out Liars. I listened to their opening song and honestly wasn’t feeling them so I moved on to see what Sean Hayes was like. Good choice on my part, Hayes was fantastic. He had a really playful and fun mood about him and it was clear that he was excited to be there.

M Ward was playing right next door after Sean Hayes closed his set so it was a no brainer to go check him out. His set was very easy to listen to, even if you aren’t familiar with his music but I only stuck around for the first half of it. Donavon Frankenreiter was playing shortly and I needed to be up front for that show.

Donavon Frankenreiter

I got to Donavon Frankenreiter’s set about an hour early and people were already starting to gather. Fortunately I was only a few feet from the stage and incredibly excited to be there. My best friend Alex turned me on to his music a few years ago and somehow I hadn’t managed to see him in concert yet, a problem that would soon be resolved.

During the 35 minute set he managed to play songs from both of his full length albums including two of my favorites “Free” and “Move By Yourself”. I love artists like Frankenreiter because they have passion for the songs that they sing and respect for the people that listen to them and it’s never more evident than when they are playing a live show.

About to hand the mic to the crowd

On many occasions I’ve tried to explain to people why I love going to live shows where I can be right in the front of the audience, especially smaller venues and artists that aren’t mainstream. This show by Frankenreiter is the prefect example of why I am so addicted to these types of concerts. He closed his set by playing “It Don’t Matter”, not only is this a fantastic song, his performance was truly amazing. The chorus of the song goes “If it don’t matter to you, it don’t matter to me” and at the end of the song Donavon climbed down off the stage and into the crowd bring along the mic. He then gave the mic to the crowd and allowed us to sing into it. This was one of the greatest moments of my life because I was right there, singing the chorus into the mic at a Donavon Frankenreiter show. The trust that you have to have with your crowd to do that is something that you simply don’t find with larger artists. Simply amazing. I just hope our singing didn’t suck.

I was so excited that I immediately had to call Alex and share the experience with him while walking to the Ben Harper show. I’ve seen Ben Harper a number of times so I hung out in the back of the pack for the first few songs then made my way over to the Sutro stage because Cake was performing shortly. I became a Cake fan after the radio stopped over playing “The Distance” but I’ve also never seen them in live.

I got to the stage where Cake was playing early enough to once again be right in the front. Cake has such a deep bench when it comes to great songs to play and they had no problem filling the hour with a crowd pleasing set. They even took a moment during the show to give away a potted tree to a fan that was able to tell them what type of tree it was. In exchange for this tree, the person had to plant it and send Cake a picture of the tree to put on their website every couple years. I personally think this is such an awesome and creative thing for them to do.

The crowd was so pleased with the set that at the end of it almost nobody left. We all stood there cheering and chanting, trying to get them to come back on the stage. This almost never happens at a music festival because they have to adhere to such tight schedules and I think it made some people kind of nervous. Here we had at least 10,000 people all wanting the set to continue but the sad fact is that it can’t, and it didn’t. But it was still a fantastic show and a fantastic crowd.

The last act for the day was Tom Petty. I like Tom Petty but I don’t love him, I can listen to his music but I won’t buy any of it. Mostly because he’s too popular and that makes it really hard to get up close and interact with the performance. So with 30 minutes left of the set I decided to beat the crowds and head out early.

Even though I didn’t have my best friends around to enjoy such an amazing day, it was still exactly that, an amazing day. The only thing that I expect will beat it is day three: ALO, The Mother Hips, Bon Iver, Andrew Bird, Broken Social Scene, Rogue Wave, Widespread Panic, Wilco and best of all Jack Johnson.

I talked Evan into joining me for the day so we left for Golden Gate Park around 4pm.  Given that parking around the park is hard enough on a regular weekend we figured it would be exceptionally painful for this event.  However, we easily found a spot just four blocks south of the park off of 19th street.  That left us with about 20 blocks to walk but I was honestly expecting things to be worse.

As soon as I took my bag out of the car I realized something, I forgot my pass! How could I do such a thing. I managed to remember sunscreen, a flashlight, a blanket, two cameras, extra batteries and a water bottle but not the most important item. At first I wanted to drive back to my place and pick it up but Evan talked some sense into me. We figured it would be better to just buy a new ticket for the day and not miss two hours of the festival going to get mine.

During our 20 block walk, we thought up a few other ideas as well. The show wasn’t sold out so maybe I could pick up a ticket for less than face value. It’s also a big park so maybe there is a chance that I could sneak in, after all it wouldn’t even be stealing. But before we tried anything the plan was to see if they could just reissue my ticket.  After about 30 minutes waiting in line, a new ticket was in hand. Smiles all around.

First up we caught the end of Black Mountain who I’d never heard of but was really quite talented so I’m kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to see more of them. Next up we headed over to check out Manu Chao, another band that I didn’t have a chance to check out beforehand. We stuck around for a while but cut out early because Lyrics Born was going to be playing at the stage next door.

I love Blackalicious and Lyrics Born has worked with them and others on many occasions so I was excited to check them out. The show was fantastic, loud, packed with people, very energetic and all around entertaining. I was quite pleased that we cut out of Manu Chao early to get a good spot.

Next up was Radiohead, the headliner for the night. I’ve listened to Radiohead off and on but have never called myself a fan. But when I learned that they would be at the festival I figured that I needed to really sit down and listen to their albums. In the process I found myself really enjoying a number of the tracks from In Rainbows so I was quite excited to see them in concert.

Because we checked out Lyrics Born beforehand, we weren’t all that close to the stage which is a bit of a bummer because it was a pretty cool show. But the biggest bummer was that during the performance the audio completely cut out, twice. I’m curious what the cause was but thankfully the problem was resolved both times and the show continued.

Overall day one was a ton of fun and I can’t wait to get there today.

Last Friday was Mark Logic’s summer BBQ and in the tradition of things getting better every year, this year it was held in Saratoga Springs. Given that there is some fantastic riding in this area, Evan, John and I decided that we should do some cycling before the BBQ started. We did a quick 9 mile loop up Hwy 9, down Redwood Gulch and then back to Saratoga Springs via Mt Eden and Pierce Rd. It was a great ride to start off the day with.

However, after Evan and I got some food in us and were totally annihilated in foosball we started thinking that we should go for another ride. I’d heard from my friend Bill of this fantastically difficult climb in the area called Bohlman On Orbit. Bill was quite insistent that this was one of the hardest climbs in the area so I suggested to Evan that we give it a go, he was game.

The climb starts right off of 6th Street in downtown Saratoga at an elevation of about 600 feet. After a small bit of residential area the road narrows and the grade increases to about 10%. Ten minutes into the climb the grade had not let up, Evan and I started wondering if it was going to flatten out at all and give us a little break. We jinxed ourselves.

20% grade on a section of Bohlman

Turns out Bill was right, this climb is relentless. The road is filled with switchbacks and they aren’t just for looks, this road seriously needs them. If you don’t find the average grade of 10% challenging enough don’t get depressed, harder sections are ahead.

One of the toughest parts of this climb is the mental exhaustion. Things get challenging when you’re working fairly hard on a climb and the road is steeper than normal yet you look up ahead and don’t quite believe your eyes. You think to yourself, how can this be? A quick check of the cycling computer tells you that you’re on a 12% grade and yet it appears to be flat in contrast to what you will soon be facing. To top things off you can see a corner up ahead and this is the point where the optimistic viewpoint of thinking, “it may flatten out after the bend” is lost.

Pessimism proves to be right as you find out that the climb leading up to the turn is a 20% grade, the turn itself is 22% and then it settles right back down to an all too familiar 20% grade.

After about 1000 feet of this painful climbing there is a Y in the road. Bohlman continues to the right and On Orbit goes off to the left. Knowing that On Orbit is the steeper of the two, Evan and I naturally had to take it.

Riding up On Orbit Evan made the observation that the road is very correctly named because we thought for sure that we had climbed enough to actually be orbiting the Earth. Evan was clearly feeling a bit stronger than I was because all I could think of was how insane this climb is. Shortly after this Evan and I both agreed that to really be into cycling there has to be a part of you that deep down loves pain. So I think we’re in agreement on how difficult this road is.

Life On Orbit isn’t all bad however, the views are quite spectacular and it gives you a great feeling of accomplishment. There’s also one section that is about 1/10th of a mile long where the grade is a very welcome 6% (as a comparison, interstate 70 that passes through the Colorado Rockies is roughly a 6% grade). But make no mistake, On Orbit is brutal and an absolute ass kicker. The average grade is about 14% with sections going up to 22% and is just over a half mile long.

Once you reach the top of On Orbit there is a slight downhill section before it meets up with Bohlman again. The speed of this 100 foot descent feels quite nice and cools you down a bit before the last 500 feet to the top. The climb calms down a bit after it meets up with Bohlman. There is a couple sections with a 16% grade but overall if you’ve made it this far, making it to the top shouldn’t be a problem.

The last half mile or so runs along the ridge line at the top. It’s a perfect time to relax a little bit and look around at what you’ve accomplished. Bohlman is a dead end at the top, however, there is a fire road that continues on and connects up with Montevina Road after about a mile. Taking this will eventually get you close to the intersection of Black Rd and Hwy 17. I think the next time I do this climb I’m going to continue on this path and turn the ride into a loop (Bohlman, Montevina, Black, Skyline, Hwy 9).

So overall I loved the climb. It has all the right ingredients, challenging, beautiful views, low traffic and can be accomplished. You won’t find me doing it every week, but once a month would be fine with me.

Sometimes in interviews you get asked questions like, “if you were a fruit, what fruit would you be”. While it can be fun to watch people squirm over abstract questions like that, I’m not convinced that they tell you much about a person. All you really find out is how comfortable they are with abstractions, maybe it’s useful when interviewing someone for a management role but not useful in getting to know them.

I like questions that can start conversations. If someone tells me that they’d be an apple, what am I going to ask them after that? No matter what the follow-up question is, it would take a very special person to turn that into an interesting conversation. So asking someone what type of fruit they’d be almost feels like you’re setting them up to fail.

In general I don’t think it matters what question(s) you ask a person, as long as those questions can start a conversation. My two favorite questions are, “where would you go if time and money weren’t factors?” and “what would you learn if time and ability wasn’t an issue?”. I love these questions because the answers I get are so insightful.

These questions can tell you so much about a person because there is more to the answer than the answer itself. If someone replies, “I don’t know” to either of these questions you can probably assume that they aren’t dreamers or maybe that they are very shy. I’d suggest ending the conversation if they reply with, “I’ve already been everywhere and know everything”.

You can also get insights on someone’s past with these two questions. If they reply very quickly and with great detail it’s likely that the person really loves to travel and always has ideas for trips. What does it tell you about a person if they answered with the Egyptian pyramids (maybe a history fan), Darfur (could be a caring person), the Moon (trail blazer) or the Jedi Temple from Star Wars (might not be grounded in reality)?

The answers for what you’d learn are especially interesting, simply because time is more of a restriction than ability. However, some people don’t recognize this which makes me wonder how confident they are in themselves. Also, from what I can tell most people would choose to learn something in a totally different area than their day to day life. This is very interesting but not all that surprising when you think about it.

The nice thing about these questions is that there is absolutely no wrong answers, only insightful answers. Maybe we’ll both discover that we have a lot in common, maybe our own dreams will even be expanded or maybe we’ll both realize that we’re not likely to get along. These are all fantastic outcomes in my mind.

So if I haven’t asked you these questions yet, you’ve got time to think up some answers. Even better yet, surprise me with some questions of your own and we’re sure to have a great conversation.

This is where I think something should change. Language is such an important thing to be conscious about, especially when used to communicate our environmental state. I believe the most frequent misuse of language in weather reports is referring to things as records. We constantly hear things like “we set a new record high of 108 degrees today” and it needs to stop.

The word record almost makes you feel like we accomplished something. Growing up I honestly was excited when we set a new weather record, made me feel like I had lived through an important event in history. I think most of us are quite aware today that setting these records isn’t anything to be proud about. However, the word record has such a positive connotation that it doesn’t accurately convey the situation.

So how do we communicate that these increasingly severe weather events aren’t what we’re looking for? A good first step is changing the language we use to describe them. What if instead of saying that today set a new record high, we said that today we lost our previous high. Using the word lost almost makes you depressed, it might even provoke a competitive response.

Ultimately I think it is hard to get our nation to truly take action and change our behavior because climate change is a rather abstract and difficult thing to comprehend. But the weather is all about our climate and it’s something that people are actually drawn to and can feel. So in many ways weather reports are the perfect setting to remind people of the impact that we have.

Imagine the changes that could take place if we stopped saying, “I’m sick of this weather” and started saying “I’m sick of how we’re screwing up the weather”. The latter of those two is an empowering statement because it points the finger at someone, us. It also sends the message that we have the power and desire to change what frustrates us.

Thankfully we all have good intentions and I firmly believe that with the right motivation those good intentions turn into good actions. So along with changing the language that we use to describe the weather, it would be great if we got tips on how to do our part to help our environment whenever we lose a previous high. Tips like how much your fuel economy drops as your speed increases.

After all, informing people of the road that we are on is important, but that only creates good intentions. Educating people on how they can help might turn those intentions into actions.

JJ Grey is based out of Jacksonville, Florida and released their first album, Blackwater, in 2001. Then in 2004 they released Lochloosa and in 2007 they treated us with Country Ghetto. Their sound is somewhat unique to my collection and because of that it took me a little while to really get into. Thankfully the lyrics were strong enough to keep me engaged and eventually engrossed in the music.

In fact, it’s not just the lyrics, it’s the passion that they convey. In my opinion, Grey isn’t just making music for fun and money, he’s got something to say. Many tracks are full of advice or express a love for the environment while others border on political or deal with relationships. I think it takes a good amount of courage to be this honest and passionate with anyone willing to listen, especially when most of the population won’t see eye to eye with you on some things.

Blackwater

Blackwater – This album is a mix of both serious and simply fun songs. This mix makes it a pretty easy album to just sit back and relax to but not bore you.

Favorite tracks:

Free

Some people think they’re free
if they get to do just what they want to do
and do nothing, nothing else

This song is all about what it means to truly live free (as in freedom) and that living free doesn’t have anything to do with wealth or possessions.

Florida

Now skyscrapers and superhighways
are carved through the heart of Florida
Building sub-divisions while the swamps are drained
makin’ room for people and amusement parks

I visited Orlando last year for a conference and really didn’t enjoy the city. It seemed to be a culmination of all the craziness that is the United Sates, so this song resonates with me fairly strongly.

Brighter Days

Boy you about to hit the bottom
I’ll be alone
I feel I’m movin’ where to a land you never saw

Thankfully I can’t relate to every aspect of this song, but at the same time it always reminds me of my move from Iowa to California. The song touches nicely on how difficult it can be to leave what’s comfortable knowing that hard times are bound to follow.

Lochloosa

Lochloosa - This album has a lot of the same feelings and themes as Blackwater but with more music and less filler. The lyrics on this album are as strong as ever and musically I feel like it is more expansive than Blackwater.

Favorite tracks:

Lochloosa

All we need is one more damn developer
Tearing her heart out
All we need is one more Mickey Mouse
Another golf course another country club
Another gated community

This track is quite similar in its message as Florida off of Blackwater. While some might see this as a lack of creativity, I see it as continued exploration of something that is clearly important to Grey.

The Wrong Side

Time ain’t standing still
And there ain’t no way to get it back
All this looking over my shoulder
A bad habit

I like this track simply because Grey appears to be reflecting on how he’s spent his life and is trying to deal with some regrets. We all have regrets and sometimes it’s hard not to fixate on them but the song reminds us that it’s a bad habit, always a good thing to keep in mind.

The Long Way Home

No effort, no gain
No effort, stay the same
No don’t you ever try to live a lie

This song also has some parallels to Brighter Days from Blackwater which is probably why I latched onto it quickly. But after hearing it a few times I realized that the song is more about asking yourself what type of person you are.

Country Ghetto

Country Ghetto – This is their latest album and in my opinion it is the most varied album both musically and lyrically out of the three. Topics vary from political to personal relationships while keeping an undertone of love for nature and the simple life.

Favorite tracks:

War

Ain’t but one thing that’s for sure
Everybody want some more
No one gonna do what’s “right”
All we’ll do is fight

This track opens up the album with a bang. A bit more up tempo and charged than anything on the previous two albums. It almost a similar feel to How Come by Ray LaMontagne but with more of an electric flavor.

Country Ghetto

Little boy you ain’t never take a dime from the man
Starve to death before you live by a government handout
They call us poverty
Life in a country ghetto

Musically this song is surprisingly appealing to me and lyrically it’s quite interesting. It seems to confront the stereotypes that typically surround people living in the rural south and it does so with pride.

By My Side

Hear these fools tell you who you are
but you don’t hear a doggone thing
And maybe that’s why, why I love you

This is one of the examples where Grey gets more into personal relationships. While there’s no shortage of music about love, this song isn’t sappy about it which is refreshing and uplifting.

Lately I’ve been pretty good at keeping the junk food out of my diet but honestly I’ve allowed my brain to consume a bit too much of it. Feeding your head all those excuses only fills it with fatty thoughts which makes it harder and harder to truly solve the original problem. I was feeling kind of bummed about this situation I’ve put myself into earlier tonight, combine that with a head full of excuses and you’ve got a situation that should be avoided.

Over the years, I’ve found that distraction can be key in these situations. I distract myself long enough to stop feeling bummed, then I can work on clearing out the excuses effectively. So tonight I decided to catch up on some reading, Wired Science Blog to be exact.

I was reading through yesterdays stories when I got to this one about Randy Pausch. The blog pointed to a lecture that he gave about accomplishing your childhood dreams which seemed so wonderfully inspiring that I felt the need to watch it. The video was 85 minutes long and right from the start I knew it would be an enjoyable 85 minutes.

Randy talked about the dreams that he had as a child and then explained how he managed to accomplish them. In the course of this, I discovered that he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and that he’d spent a large portion of his career working in virtual reality. Being someone that worked in the virtual reality lab at Iowa State University for two years, my interest was growing.

In high school I was fortunate enough to visit the Iowa State campus and tour their virtual reality lab. The work they were doing was so spectacular that I couldn’t get my mind off of it. When it came time to decide what college to go to, my parents and I visited ISU and I made sure to stop by the virtual reality lab and see if I could talk to someone there. One of the students was kind enough to not blow me off and actually described a bit of the technology they were using. I made sure to stash this info safely in my head.

My choice to attend Iowa State was strongly motivated by my dream to work in this lab. One of the required skills was being familiar with SGI computers and during the summer of my freshman year I managed to purchase one for $225. This computer was a wonderful SGI Indigo with a R3000 CPU at 33MHz. It was the first computer that I’d ever purchased and honestly I knew nothing about how to use it. But damn, I was motivated to figure it out. By the end of my sophomore year I had become quite proficient with this machine and decided that I’d walk down to the VR lab and see if I could start to volunteer my time.

I talked to a professor there named Judy Vance and as it turns out, she had money to actually pay me for my time. I can only remember one other time in my life when I’ve felt as excited as I did at that moment, my dream had been realized.

I loved the work that they had me doing and I learned such a wide variety of skills. Then Judy asked if I could help out the Society of Women Engineers on a project. They were working with Carnegie Mellon University to setup these very inexpensive VR systems with the goal of getting kids involved in programming. My job was to help them with some hardware interfaces, something that I’d worked on for a previous project. The only difference was that this time it needed to be interfaced to this virtual reality software called Alice.

This project was kind of exciting for me, it isn’t often that geeks get to literally work with a room full of women and have some loose ties to CMU. However, to be honest, at this point my attention was shifting away from virtual reality and over to search engines and I couldn’t get myself dedicated to the project.

Now here’s the amazing part. Alice was developed at CMU… by Randy Pausch! The man that I’ve been watching give this fantastic lecture is the same guy that we were working with to setup this virtual reality program for kids and I didn’t even know it. In all likelihood, my boss Judy Vance knew Randy Pausch. I continued watching the lecture with more enthusiasm now than ever.

Overall Randy shared some truly fantastic advice. Advice like, “when there’s an elephant in the room, introduce him”, “when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore that means they gave up”, “experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted”, “get a feedback loop and listen to it”, etc. It’s well worth the time to watch and it’s exactly what I needed to really motivate me to ditch the excuses that I’ve been struggling with for a while now.

Not only was it inspiring because Randy Pausch is a smart guy with good advice, it’s also inspiring because he gave this lecture after finding out that he had 4-6 months left to live due to pancreatic cancer. To see someone in this situation with such a good sense of humor (complete with quasi Jim Carry facial expressions) is a very awesome thing. I’d think that it would be so easy to fill those last 6 months with excuses but instead he did what he needed to do.

Randy Pausch died yesterday, July 25th 2008, at the age of 47.

A while ago my friend and fellow music lover Liz asked me why I liked vinyl so much. At the time I gave her the same answer that I give almost everyone, it simply has a good feeling to it. But that’s kind of a bullshit answer to the question, what does “good feeling” even mean?

My intention with that answer has never been to give people the run around or to pretend that I’m some kind of pompous connoisseur. I’ve given that answer because I’ve never really sat down and thought about the mysterious draw that it has on me. Because I don’t really enjoy giving Liz bullshit answers, I sat down for a few minutes after she left and tried to figure out exactly what it is about vinyl that I love so much.

First off, vinyl appeals to the geek in me because it’s an engineering marvel. When you think about the very small electrical signals that are generated by the needle moving a coil between some magnets and how those signals are so carefully amplified by the phono stage before hitting the preamplifier then going down the line to the power amplifier and finally reproducing the exact same movements on a much larger scale in your speakers. It’s a purely mechanical and analog system and it’s alone in this sense. The technology has been around since the first recordings and still manages to amaze me that it actually works.

Not only does it work, it actually works quite well. People talk about how vinyl has a warm sound to it, and in an effort to describe things succinctly, I guess that’s a fair description. But to my ear, that warm sound is actually the sound of imperfection. Some might get confused at this point and wonder how imperfection in an audio system could be considered a good thing.

One of my all time favorite bloggers was Kathy Sierra. Her blog was called “Creating Passionate Users” and it clued me into a number of things regarding human nature. One of those things was the fact that we are somewhat drawn to a small amount of randomness. If that isn’t obvious to you, think about it for a short while. What’s more interesting, a person that is perfect or a person with some flaws? A perfect person may sound nice on the surface but I’m sure we would all find that person boring after a short while. I believe that this draw to the imperfect is partly what makes vinyl enjoyable.

Another thing that I love about vinyl is that it really forces you to listen to the music. It takes so much effort to skip a track on a record that you end up not bothering. Maybe we should give kids that can’t concentrate a pile of records and a turntable instead of prescribing them ritalin.

Really good albums tend to have a story to tell, each track being a chapter and in a way I feel that I owe it to these artists to listen to what they have to say in the order they intended… at least once. To be honest, I have found myself quite annoyed that I couldn’t easily go back and listen to the same song again once it ends. But in time I realized that this was actually a fantastic thing. How many times have you found yourself listening to the same song on an album over and over again because it’s so good and leaving the rest of the album untouched? I’ve found myself in this trap many times and one sure fire way to cure it is to make it a royal pain to put things on repeat.

While my collection of vinyl records is far from huge, I do take every opportunity that I get to purchase vinyl at concerts. On the plus side, vinyl is frequently more profitable for the artist and I’m all about supporting them. Another little known fact is that today you frequently get a digital copy (without any DRM) when you purchase a record. This makes it so easy to have your cake and eat it too.

So keep an open mind. If you’re fortunate enough to find a good turntable and are able to hook it up to your system, you might want to consider it. Hopefully you’ll experience the same combination of relaxation, excitement and enjoyment that I do while fully exploring what the artist is sharing.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media and tends to be very insightful when it comes to technology (he’s also one hell of a nice guy). Every year he holds this (un)conference at the O’Reilly campus in Sebastopol and invites interesting people to attend. The conference starts on a Friday and goes through Sunday and is three of the most enlightening days of my year. There isn’t much for lodging in Sebastopol so attendees are invited to camp on the lawn.

One of the greatest things about Foo Camp is that you always feel like the dumbest person there (or at least I do). For years now I’ve wondered how NASA communicates with the vehicles on Mars. The time delay to communicate that far away is so massive that I couldn’t see traditional communications working. I could have done some research online or I could have just attended Foo Camp because I actually meet a person that worked on the communications systems for the Mars projects! Talk about making my day.

Foo Camp is a very special place because no matter where you turn, you are talking to someone that has done something notable. I had some great conversations over dinner with Andy and Dave from Pragmatic Programmers, Jim Zemlin from The Linux Foundation and scores of others as well. Late at night Scott Berkun and I spent hours sharing stories with our mutual friend Bonnie around the fire pit.

As for the talks at the conference, they are always spectacular. I went to a fantastic talk about renewable energy sources and exactly how big of a task we have ahead of us (I might devote an entire post to this topic). Another fantastic session was by Dan Kaminsky where he talked about the huge DNS security hole that has recently been making waves in the tech circles. But in general I find that my most valuable time is spent with one on one or impromptu group conversations.

So as usual, I walked away 100% exhausted. Ze Frank made me laugh just like he always does, catching up with former O’Reilly coworkers is always fantastic and I’m more motivated than ever to continue doing things worthy of Tim’s appreciation with the hopes of getting another invite next year :).

Evan is a very experienced and talented cyclist so naturally he brings out the competitive side in me. He’s also in a bit better shape than I am, so when he suggested that we ride from Cupertino to Santa Cruz and back I couldn’t say no and I had a hard time telling him that I was a little worried about being able to do such a ride. I’ve ridden centuries before, but I’ve never done a ride that is this long with so much climbing.

So the plan was to start at my place early in the morning (8am ish). It’s roughly a 20 min ride from my place to the bottom of Redwood Gulch, the first major climb for the day. Redwood Gulch is really a fantastic road, very light traffic, gorgeous scenery, fairly short (0.75 miles) and very steep (at least 25% grade in places).

At the top of Redwood Gulch you meet up with Highway 9. Hwy 9 has a fair amount of traffic but is thankfully quite wide and a popular ride for cyclists so cars are fairly aware of your presence. The grade is more relaxed at 8% but still a lot of work. At 2500′ you reach Skyline (Highway 35) and the top of the climb. It’s a fun and easy descent on the western side of Skyline all the way to Santa Cruz so Evan and I made pretty fantastic time. We even got to see the tail end of a parade along the way.

Evan has a fantastic obsession with food so once we got to Santa Cruz we stopped for a quick lunch. After a bit of mexican food and some time trying to convince Evan that the hostess was totally into me and my spandex, we got back on the road.

The climb back up Hwy 9 is pretty easy. There is number of towns along the way so traffic can be kind of heavy, but the sights help to make up for that. When we got to Boulder Creek we decided to take the long way home via Big Basin State Park. Taking this route added a dozen miles to our trip and about 800′ of extra climbing but it’s such a beautiful place that we thought it would be well worth the effort.

Right outside of the park I had my first feelings of fatigue and I knew what the climb was like getting out. We took a short break, got some cold water and chatted with one of the park rangers. This guy actually suggested that we find a motorcyclist to pull us up the climb!

I actually made it out of Big Basin without any trouble at all, but the final section climbing back up to Skyline was pretty brutal on me. I made it but not without a fair amount of cramping.

I thought we were home free, but our descent down Redwood Gulch was a bit problematic. That road is so steep that Evan’s breaks were fading and the heat buildup actually caused his wheel to fail. I ended up riding back to my place and grabbing the car to go pick Evan up.

All in all the ride was right around 90 miles with 7300′ of climbing and it took us around 5 hours 30 min to complete it. That’s not too bad given that the climb up the eastern side of the mountain would be at least a category 1 climb if not a beyond category climb in the Tour.

Being an astronomy fan, I kind of see this as my own personal Big Bang. An event that spews stuff out into the universe. Some people might find that stuff interesting, others might find it confusing and even more are bound to interpret things incorrectly. While I like to think that I’m an interesting person, comparing my murmurings to the Big Bang is ridiculous, so I’ll remain humble and call this my little puff.

I tend to find almost everything interesting so it’s hard to tell exactly what topics will dominate this blog. But it’s probably a safe bet that I’ll talk a bit about geek stuff, cycling, hiking, skiing, photography, music and the endless stream of stories that dating and relationships provide.

So welcome to my little puff, I hope I can supply you with ample amounts of the basic elements needed to start some conversations.