There are some people that not even The Easy Button can help...
I watched a lady this morning sit in her car, holding up a line of about 10 cars, because she could not figure out how to press a button. I am not kidding.
She was trying to enter a parking garage, and all she had to do was press the button on the ticket dispenser so that that gate would raise and she could enter the lot. Like just about every other pay by the hour parking garage in the entire world. I watched as I walked past (thank goodness I was walking and not stuck behind her) her, an utterly hollow expression having overtaken her being.
I felt very sorry. Not for her, but for all the people in society that have to put up with her. At that moment, it was only those 10 people behind her, but they couldn't have been the only ones she'd touched in an entire lifetime thus far of confused existence.
By the time I had walked beyond sight of her, she had not moved nor had the expression on her face changed.
So I used to fly back from Europe or Asia, arrive at, say 9 in the morning, and go straight to work without missing a beat - or using a vacation day.
The last couple of years, I've usually taken my arrival day off, going back to work the next day. I joked that I was getting old because of this.
Well, folks, I think it's no longer a joke. Now I'm definitely old. I not only take the day of arrival off, but the next day off too. Yeah, physically, I feel a lot better doing this. But here's the thing that I think really separates my old and young self: wisdom. I've come to realize that no job is worth putting myself through that crap. I've also positioned myself at work to be able to do this without feeling any guilt, and I've earned enough respect to not have to hoard my vacation days.
My best advice to any job seekers out there: you might not be able to negotiate much on your salary, but you should never settle for less than 3 weeks of vacay. Better yet, work as a consultant and bill by the hour. Then you'll never have to worry about some set number of vacation days in a year. Just make sure your rate is high enough to maintain the lifestyle you want while working the number of hours you desire. It's truly amazing.
I love being old.
Well, this was a bachelor party for the ages. Here are some of the highlights I'm at liberty to share:
- Got trashed on Dom Perignon, provided by the Russian Mafia
- Closed down the Heineken Brewery
- Drank a pub dry
- Defeated Howard Lederer in high stakes Texas Hold'em at the Rijksmuseum over Rembrandts
- Obtained two six packs of Heineken from a random newspaper stand at 2 AM on a Sunday (fuck you American blue laws)
- Watched police (politie) bust someone for overloading their pedicab while a crowd of pot smoking onlookers gathered 'round (fuck you American drug laws)
- Ate nothing but steak all weekend
- Believe it or not, didn't even set foot in a casino!
- Overflew Kugluktuk, Nunavut on my way back
- Clicked over 1,000,000 flight miles on my way back
* Not responsible for omissions, errors, embellishments, or straight out lies
So there's all these truck commercials with those absurd situations like trying to stop a plane, running a gauntlet of swinging I-beams, driving along a ridiculously thin rail against a crosswind...
but what I want to see is the outtakes...
trucks flying up into the air, gettin' smashed by I-beams, and a pile of trucks at the bottom of that canyon from being blown over by a bunch of fans.
Hahahhaha. c'mon, someone with good video editing tools, let's see your work up on YouTube.
Okay. This is pretty difficult for a Bears fan to say, but:
If it takes the Packers to take down the AFC, so be it.
Further evidence of the bigotry of insurance companies:
They show these commercials that claim "singing can add 15 years to your life!"
Okay, so if that's the case, then I want $50 off of my premium because I friggin' love karaoke. I mean, if they can charge you more for, say, smoking... why don't you get a discount for this alleged fountain of youth that is karaoke?
Scheißenhosen...
Yes, I'm still alive.
I suppose most of you already knew that, but it occurred to me that reading that last post and then not seeing another post for so long might lead someone to think that I'd fallen off the mountain or something.
No, we didn't fall off the mountain. But neither did we make the summit. We turned back at 13,200' because of fatigue and the possibility of worsening weather. We probably could have summited, but if the weather had worsened it would have jeopardized our descent considering how tired we already were. So we made the difficult but always correct choice, and we turned around to try another day.
And for the record, I did attempt to post blog entries from the mountain. On the evening of the first day, at 11,500' on the Ingraham Glacier, I tried to post a short update from our tent. My phone indicated that there were two bars of digital service, but it was roaming service. I told it to go ahead and connect anyway, but it failed. Then, a while later, I made another attempt when the phone had one bar of digital Sprint service. Same result: couldn't make the connection. I'll try this again next year when we tackle the Emmons route, because I think we may get a better signal on that side of the mountain. But I wouldn't hold out much hope of getting a live blog entry from Mt. Rainier without satellite service at this point. In any case, here is what I would have posted:
Ingraham
At the flats. Very tired. Am feeling the altitude but made decent time today. Hope the weather holds out. More from the summit hopefully. 8/11/2007 18:33.
So there you have it. Sadly, there has been no mountaineering activity since then. Honestly, I have to admit at this point that I burned myself out on climbing this summer. It will be nice to take it a little easier in the "off-season" and focus on lots of other things going on in my life right now...
So Vince convinced me to try to post updates from Rainier this weekend from my phone. Here is the first test of the technology that should hopefully enable that to happen. With luck, the next post will be from high camp on the Ingraham Flats... more later...
It's been a little while since my last climbing update, and it's been busy. Busy enough that I'm quite ready for a break, in fact.
A couple of weeks ago, there was big talk about heading up to Cashmere Mountain (8501') to knock off another top-100 peak in Washington. The weather kind of turned sour, though, and instead we just went over to Mount Pilchuck (5340') with a bunch of friends. It was supposed to just be a nice easy day hanging out on the trail, and it would have been, except for the swarms upon swarms of bugs! I'd just picked up some DEET containing bug juice from REI, so I thought I would be prepared, but not so. As it turned out, the bugs that plagued us all the way up the mountain were flies, which aren't afraid of DEET. So the only solution was to move as fast as possible. Of course, the problem with that is we were with our friends who don't climb mountains every other day, so their pace was relatively leisurely. Not a problem, except for the bugs... so I decided to innovate a bit by hiking down a couple hundred feet every time I caught up to them. That way, I could keep moving, and I wouldn't have to breathe the bugs constantly. The only solace was at the summit, where the bugs seemed to let up a little. Still, it was a fun day and I got to hike with some friends with whom I haven't been outdoors in a while.
Last week, I took a couple of days off of work, and was really looking forward to our attempt on Mount Olympus (7969'). The approach involves 17.5 miles of hiking on the Hoh River Trail through the heart of the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park. It promised to be beautiful terrain, capped with a glacier climb to the high point of the Olympic Peninsula. We budgeted a leisurely 4.5 days... our first day involved just taking the car ferry across Puget Sound, getting a permit at the ranger station, and then sleeping in our car - instead of tent - at the trailhead campground. On reflection, this would be a critical decision.
Our second day, we hiked about 11 miles into Lewis Meadows, arriving in the afternoon and finding a nice sheltered campsite. There were some gorgeous sights along the way... but also a lot of damage in terms of footbridges being washed out and fallen trees, not to mention a number of mudslides and subsidences. In any case, we stayed pretty dry that first day despite an intermittent shower throughout the day. That night, we spent a restful evening, knowing that we only had to go another 6 miles or so to get to Glacier Meadows. It was so dark that night I couldn't see my hand right in front of my face.
The third day was a slog through a constant rain, up about 2700' over 6 miles. I got a new pack for this trip, since I didn't have a proper expedition pack before. I chose the Osprey Crescent 85, and though it's a heavy pack, the suspension and stowage systems work really well to keep it balanced on your hips and back. I also got the rain fly for free, which was critical on this trip. Through 3 days of constant rain, the contents of my pack remained mostly dry. Next time, I'll probably put my critical stuff (down, extra base layer, etc.) in a small plastic bag as well, to make sure. Anyway, by the time we reached Glacier Meadows, I was getting cold and I was completely drenched. And worse, the rain started to seep through tent, ever so slowly, but surely. Not at the seams, where you'd expect, but just because there was residual moisture on the inside of the tent, so the water would wick through the nylon. Good thing we didn't sleep in the tent that first night, because this seepage would have started a day sooner if we had. It was a pretty miserable day and night as it was. By the morning, we'd have a good pint or so of water on the floor of the tent. Fortunately, our sleeping bags were still dry, through careful placement and sleeping pad management.
And of course, all this rain meant that there was no way we'd be summiting. In fact, we didn't even make an attempt from Glacier Meadows. The visibility was horrible and the rain was constant. We decided to pack it up and trudge the entire 17.5 miles back to the car the next day. Our tents were in no shape to stand another night of rainfall, and our decision was validated by the ranger we met at the Olympic Guard Station. He told us that another 3-4 inches were expected overnight. This was a painful day, descending with 60 lbs. on my back with rain constantly falling. J even fell into a creek on one of the iffy log crossings we had to make. Misery indeed.
So that was a pretty painful 35 miles to hike to not make our goal, carrying a bunch of equipment (ice axe, crampons, for example) that we didn't even use. At the start, we all wanted to go despite the forecast, because we all thought it'd be rewarding to make that hike through the rain forest and enjoy nature, etc. And I agree with that still... but it's one of those things that you do once. And that's quite enough, thank you very much. Next time I have a 4 day climb planned and the weather looks rainy, I'm going to head to the movie theater and catch up on some movies instead.
All this brings us finally to Cashmere again. We decided to give it a go this Sunday, starting from home at 4 in the morning and hitting the trailhead right around 7. Most of the distance is covered on maintained trail, with our only hiccup being a missed fork in the trail. It was one of those times when you just keep on truckin' and then you think to yourself, "hm, maybe we should have turned at that last fork..." Fortunately, we stopped and consulted the maps and got back on track quickly.
The climb actually felt pretty easy. In what seemed like no time, we were up past Lake Caroline and looking for a place where our guidebook had told us to depart the maintained trail. We did so somewhere near a switchback, and headed over in the general direction of the mountain. The only downside to all this was that because were doing this is summer, we did have to traverse across a couple of meadows, taking care to avoid too much damage to the foliage. In due time, we gained a ridge and there was a trail of sorts along this ridge right up to the col. We were even treated to a mountain goat sighting. From the col, it's a Class 3 scramble across some boulders and rocks over to the north ridge of Cashmere. This took a while, and I was glad that T had joined us with his experience. He set the pace and picked the route with ease. We were on the summit in 6 hours.
Bugs were again a problem on this hike, but this time we were prepared. In addition to the 30% DEET stuff, I mixed it with REI's "Jungle Juice" which is a concoction of chemicals that are supposed to deter just about everything. And for the most part it worked... I got only bites on my head under my Buff where I didn't have bug juice going. There was one exception to this: humongous horseflies apparently aren't afraid of any chemicals, because those bastards hounded us all the way up and down once we left the trail. And those guys bite! I suppose it was nature's way of punishing us for leaving the trail.
Unfortunately, the descent would take us just as long. Descending a scramble is always worse than the ascent, and this was no exception. It took us what seemed like forever to get back to the trail. And from there, it didn't speed up terribly much because K had developed some horrific blisters due to new socks. We kept the pace pretty steady, but it took us all of 6 hours to reach the car.
After dinner in Leavenworth and the long drive home, I was quite ready to take a break. We had done two 17 mile days in two weeks, and over 50 total miles. We had considered an attempt on Mt. Rainier this coming weekend, but K's blisters mean he's out for sure, and it was the perfect excuse for the rest of us to take a breather as well. So we'll be making another attempt on Mt. Rainier in two weeks, but for the time being, I'm going to hit the beach or something this weekend to relax.
Summited Granite Mountain (5629') after work on Tuesday. This was the first "real" mountain I summited last year when we started training for Rainier, so it was an interesting hike to go back there. This time, it was a completely different mountain in terms of terrain and hazards. We had to deal with an avalanche chute and blowing snow on our first attempt last year, which included a bushwhack to get back to the trail after we glissaded too far. On our second, successful attempt, last year, we still had to deal with a lot of snow and a steep ridge, kicking steps and all the other stuff that has since become second nature. This time, we had none of that. This is the difference between a July versus an early May/late April ascent.
Indeed, this time, it was maintained trail all the way up to about 5200', and then a scramble up fairly stable rock the rest of the way. It route the trail takes is, of course, longer than the direct snow climb. The meandering route actually took us about 2 hours, 20 minutes to ascend, including the scramble. We didn't really anticipate such a long scramble at the end, so I was a little disappointed that we didn't make our goal of 2 hours. That and we pushed it really hard at the beginning, which was alright for a while. But J practically had to run to keep up with K and me on the flatter portions, so it wasn't working out for her. And then we got passed (even though we were bookin' it by our standards) by this insane trail running dude... right on the steepest part of the trail. So we pushed even harder, which was a bad move because I burned out and had to chill at a slower pace to keep it going. Oh well, a trail runner I am not!
Anyway, I probably wouldn't have even bothered with the scramble given that we were running kind of behind and the light was going to fade fast on our descent, but we kind of had a score to settle with Granite. See, of the three of us, I'm actually the only one who'd summited this mountain. K and J had both gotten stomach ailments mysteriously last year while attempting this mountain and had to turn around! So we bounded onto the scramble determined to reverse the fortunes.
Unfortunately, this mysterious ailment would strike again! By the time we had gone about a third of the way up the scramble, J called it quits citing severe stomach pains. What on earth is with this mountain? K and I hit the summit maybe 20 minutes later and then headed down. We knew it was going to be a long descent with the headlamps, but we definitely wanted to get off of the scramble with plenty of natural light left.
And to continue our misfortunes, J had also somehow forgotten her headlamp, making the descent slower and a little more clumsy than we would like. I happened to have a tiny LED light on my keychain which she used for spot lighting while I put my headlamp on diffuse mode and tried to light the way from behind her while K lead the way. In this way, we finally managed to get back to the cars in the same amount of time it took us to climb up.
Oh well... I guess the only other thing to say is the about the bugs... friggin' bugs. At least we had some insect repellent, but I still got a couple of nice bites. Bleh. And you wonder why I prefer to high elevation glaciers.... hahahha.
