Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Lamont Pinnacles and Bald Eagle Peak

We were feeling ambitious on a long late fall weekend and managed to visit two places I'd been wanting to check out for a while.

The first was the Lamont Pinnacles, which I had been jonesing to visit since camping near Chimney Peak Recreational Area earlier in the year. 

(Interlude: On that early Spring 2021 trip I'd gone out to Long Valley, hiked along the creek to a point just short of where it joins the South Fork of the Kern, and dealt with both ice and many many ticks on the trail. I camped overnight in my still-new-feeling Subaru and ate beans that I reheated in a small cast iron cook pot that I was testing for the first time. It was a mid-pandemic trip that really helped me reset and blow off some steam.)

The Lamont Pinnacles trail was relatively easy to follow, but steep. It was exactly what we needed to feel like we'd accomplished something. We turned around just short of the gully that separates the mountain you're doing most of the hike on from the Pinnacles proper. One of the fun aspects of the hike was that the destination isn't visible from most of it, so it is a real reward when it appears. However, throughout the hike, the views of Canebrake and the valley further are absolutely spectacular.

PXL_20211112_230028278

The next destination we managed to hit was Bald Eagle Peak off Saddle Springs Road. I've been wanting to head up there for a while now, but my previous car wasn't up to the task. The Subaru did great, and I even had a chance to play with X-Mode on the descent, which was fantastic. There's lots of sharp rocks on that road, so I was pretty worried about my stock tires, but didn't actually have any issues. Eagle Peak has a bunch of sport climbing routes on it, so this was technically a climb scouting trip. The trail was pretty easy to follow, though we went out on top of the ridge and returned on a trail on the back of the ridge. We don't know which one is technically the correct one -- we suspect the one on the back. We don't have beta for the routes and they look *hard*, plus the notion of climbing there is complicated by access considerations: the road is closed during wet season, but the location faces South and is probably sweltering during the drier months of the year. Regardless, it's a gorgeous chunk of rock and highly motivating. We'll keep digging for beta.

PXL_20211113_211740332

Monday, August 6, 2018

TR: early August sail to Santa Cruz Island

I'm going to move blogging about Mental Physics, my Olson 25, here, since I don't feel like it's worth a separate blog. There's some backstory about the boat that I might fill in, when I get the chance, for instructional purposes. In the meantime...

Ben and I made it out to Santa Cruz Island from SB for the first time on Mental. (We'd done one trip to Yellowbanks and one to Scorpion last year from CIH.) We took off around 10am on Saturday. The wind filled in for real around 1pm, and we reached SC near Lady's and sailed down the coast (reef + #2) in big swells, poked into Fry's where we found three sailboats anchored, but kept going East because the forecast for the next day was for high winds and I didn't want to deal with it on the way back on Sunday. We found E Twin Harbor empty and dropped anchor in the middle, with a stern rode to the beach at high tide. Overnight there were periods that were comfortable, and a few hours when swells reflected off the SW corner of the cove and made the motion of the boat pretty uncomfortable.



When I was coming back from swimming the stern rode ashore, I surprised four bat rays who took off right and left. The other critters in the cove were spotted (presumably harbor) seals, who swam from kelp bunch to kelp bunch and popped out up to their chests whenever we did something interesting, like put in the kayak. I also saw a dark brown bird with a bright red beak that I'd never seen before, which I think was a black Oystercatcher. Sea surface temp was 73 F on Saturday evening and 71 F on Saturday morning, in other words: balmy.

We left Sunday at 11am, thinking the wind was filling in, but didn't get consistent wind until about noon. We saw a mola mola in the SB traffic lane, and two enormous container ships in the NB lane. The wind shut off 5 nm from SB, and I caught nothing trolling greenie. We were back at the slip by 4:30pm. 

Monday, April 13, 2015

One more Red Rock

Jason and I were at Red Rocks this past weekend. On Saturday we started by doing a mish-mash of a trad route: Jason led most of the first pitch of Splitting Hares to the first belay of Too Many Tantrums. I then led the second pitch and most of the third pitch of Too Many Tantrums, back to the roof and traverse of Splitting Hares. Got lost a bit above the roof, downclimbed and traversed. Super fun!

Then we moved to my old friend, Pauligk Pillar. There I had to over-protect the first few moves, resulting in a mid-route belay stop, and Jason led the second portion of the pitch. We weren't feeling the second pitch, AGAIN, so we hiked out to make the 8pm exit time.

On Sunday we played on Panty Wall, then went down to the Hamlet, got schooled on one of the lower tier sport routes, did an upper tier 7, and tried for a lower tier toprope, which proved uninspiring. Overall a good day to stretch out the soreness!

Monday, January 5, 2015

A paragraph about suffering

I enjoyed this article in Outside magazine about Misogi. This paragraph about what my older mountaineering friends call "suffering" struck me as particularly accurate:

But something funny happens once you’ve been in the grip of a painful ordeal for a certain amount of time. Namely, the body and mind—inured to the unwelcome task they’ve been set upon—mostly stop fighting it. Resisting takes too much energy. It cannot be sustained. And, gradually, in place of my instinctive resistance came an active kind of relaxation and acceptance.
This definitely happens to me when backpacking or approaching climbs in the mountains. Invariably I'm in pain of some kind -- my knees, my shoulders from the pack, altitude, it's always something -- and I just grind on and on. It's slightly different from paddling, which puts me in a distinct zone I call "machine" mode, where I'm lustily pounding at some physically exerting thing for hours with my brain finally shut up.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Climbing recap for most of 2014

Wow, I look back and realize I owe more than a year's worth of climbing updates. Yikes!

So, last summer and fall I remember doing the following:  
  • climbing Summer Sojourn with Anil, me getting really bad nausea from wearing new, distorting sunglasses, and him getting a food allergy after we got down, but not before encountering a massive rattlesnake on the descent trail!
  • training to increase my knees' endurance and my altitude tolerance on the Cathedral lakes trail, 
  • climbing on Dozier Dome (was it Holdless Horror?) with Josh, 

  • making another attempt on BCS with Josh and Terri,
  • climbing (and getting hailed on!) at Clark Canyon with Theresa.


Then I started a new job right after BCS, and late fall 2013 and winter is a blur.

In spring Theresa and I started training a bit more in earnest, and went out to New Jack City a few times.

In early summer we made a trip to Dome Rock and I took Theresa up her first trad multi-pitch, Tree Route. We also did Permanent Income Hypothesis a couple times, with T. leading, and all the time I was training in the gym with Jason and Anil.



Jason, Theresa and I teamed up for a Tuolumne weekend in which I led West Country on Stately Pleasure Dome, and then we practiced crack climbing at guide cracks the next day.

And in October Theresa and I went to Red Rocks where we played on the Panty Wall the first day, T. led Big Bad Wolf on day 2, and I led the first pitch of Ragged Edges on day 3. We were having too much fun to take pics :)

So, it's been a slow year, mostly due to the new job and due to the project of moving Koan up to the Bay Area taking up so many weekends, but not altogether a bad year!

Friday, March 8, 2013

Fall & Winter recap

Dima on the approach to Purblind

Lest the reader (hi, all 3 of you!) think that there has been no climbing this past fall and winter, I would like to submit that I did do two trips. One was to Red Rocks in early November with Dima, then hooking up with the Minnesota crew, and the second was to JTree with part of the aforementioned MN crew.

In Red Rocks we climbed Purblind Pillar on Angel Food wall. It was great, but the whole time I was thinking how we should have been doing Tunnel Vision, because that looked amazing. Stilgar's Wild Ride and Group Therapy also looked awesome, so they are definitely on my tick list. The descent was quite Olympus-like, though. Definitely plan some extra time for that. On the second day I screwed up our approach beta and we overshot the area where we were supposed to meet the MN crew (wherever Great Red Book is, which is now also on my tick list). So after a bunch of wandering around and figuring it out, we decided to head to Ice Box canyon to investigate, since it seemed like a reasonably warm day. We got on Shady Ladies (meh) and Cold September Corner (insane!), and it *was* really cold in the shade. The trip was topped off by a huge thing puncturing my brand new Yoko tires, which irked me to no end. But thankfully by Monday morning I was able to find a place that could patch it, for free, to boot, and head on home.

The second trip to JTree was a bit impromptu, when I found out that my peeps from MN were heading out there for a weekend. We did the Eye, Stichter Quits, whatever the route with the one bolt is a bit to the left of that, and top-roped Battle of the Bulge. And had glorious glorious Indian food, which was at least as good as the routes.

So, in spite of two long international trips, getting sick three times, and shit-tons of work, I did manage to get out twice. Score!

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

False positives suck

I've been holding out on writing about my recent sailing trip from the Galapagos to Panama City, because during the trip there was an occurrence that seriously rattled me, disturbed my crew-mates and generally marred a trip that had begun and promised to continue in a very chilled out atmosphere. I was dealing with the aftermath of that event until just now, when I got off the phone. Not wanting to tell an incomplete story, I suppose that now that that aftermath has concluded, I can go ahead.

On the second day of our passage my SPOT satellite messenger malfunctioned. I am frankly exhausted hearing about, re-telling, writing down and trying to intellectually and emotionally process what ensued, so I cannot bring myself to put it all down in detail one more time here. I'm sorry. I'm sure if I were a good journalist, it would spin an excellent yarn. And there are obviously a number of very very serious implications, so maybe we can talk about those in the comments, or on twitter, or something -- I'm pretty sure I know all of the 4 people who follow this blog personally -- because it's the implications that matter.

I had been using the SPOT the way I usually do, pressing OK once a day, to let my partner (via text & email) and my parents (via the website) know that all was well. I've used the SPOT this way for about 14 months, maybe 3-4 trips. Well, on New Year's Day, instead of transmitting an OK, the SPOT freaked out and started transmitting a spurious stream of "Help" and occasional "Cancelled" messages. Take a second to think about that. Deep breath. Continue. 25 minutes later, unaware that anything was amiss, I tried to turn off the device, as I always do, to save the batteries. It wouldn't turn off, so I thought, "wtf?", popped off the back and took out the batteries. That did it. That's when the random stream of "Help" messages stopped.

Several hours later, via a call from US Coast Guard to the boat's sat-phone -- which was not configured to take incoming phone calls, thereby blowing the skipper's mind -- we found out that my partner, my parents, the US, Ecuadorean and Greek Coast Guards and my private medevac insurance provider, Global Rescue, had all spent the previous few hours trying to ascertain my well being, looping in a half dozen additional minor players in the process. Had the USCG not magically been able to raise us on a sat-phone (one that has never in the past had and never in the future will have another incoming call -- magic!) the next step that was being proposed was to scramble a C130 spotter plane. Once the USCG reached us, the situation was put to sleep quickly and in an orderly fashion.

So, some distilled thoughts:

1) My partner and I have a protocol that we discuss in advance of each trip for how to respond to each of the possible SPOT messages (OK, Help, SOS and "custom", which we use as "cancel the protocol"). The protocol is basically the same in most use-cases (sailing on my boat, sailing on other boats and climbing), with small changes for what agencies to loop in. The protocol we had in place worked perfectly, so in hindsight we can look at this as a fire drill. Our agreed "Help" response is to wait two hours for an OK (thereby canceling the "Help") or an SOS (thereby immediately escalating it). That is, "Help" is what I'm supposed to push when there's something going wrong, and I am worried that I will not have a chance to press SOS later, but I'm working the situation at the moment, so there is no immediate need for assistance. E.g. the boat is heading for the rocks, but I'm trying to get an anchor down; or I've gone overboard, but I'm tethered and trying to get back on; or my partner's slid down a couloir, and I'm glissading down to check them out myself. If everything works out, I will press OK later. If things go to hell, I will press SOS. If I don't press either, two hours after the Help, my partner will assume that things have not gone well and that help is needed, and escalate to the SOS protocol. Even though in this case the "Help" message was sent as a result of hardware malfunction, there was no way my partner could have known, and there was nothing that he could or should have done differently. Our escalation strategy (first confirm the message with SPOT, then start looping in agencies and Global Rescue one by one, and follow their instructions) was correct. I would highly recommend that anyone who seriously uses SPOT plan their protocol in advance, together with the people who will have to enact it.

1b) I did learned something from a mistake I made. The moral: consider not having Help and SOS messages appear in your public mapping page. I normally don't have them appear, but I stupidly enabled them just for this trip, for no reason at all. The only person familiar with the abovementioned protocol was my partner, who was receiving messages directly, but my parents were also following along on the mapping page. Ideally, in case of Help and SOS, my partner should have been the only one to act. But through a time-zone vagary, my parents happened to look at the mapping page right after the spurious Help messages began. Thankfully, they contacted my partner first and he was able to more or less restrain them from taking actions outside the protocol. Mostly. The looping in of Greek Coast Guard was of their doing. In the end it proved invaluable in getting in touch with the UK Boat Registration Authority, through whom the sat-phone number was located and passed to US Coast Guard. But that's neither here nor there. I suppose my point is: choose whether you want just your protocol people, or the whole world to know about your Help and SOS messages, and set up your mapping page accordingly.

2) The agencies that my partner and parents contacted (US, Greek and Ecuadorean Coast Guard, Global Rescue) treated the SPOT "Help" message as credible. Nobody at any point suggested that the device had a track record of false positives or was unreliable in the least. That, at least, is heartening.

3) These agencies are AMAZING. They are total pros. They apparently did an incredible job sorting it all out, and interfacing with each other, and they were completely unfazed (the same cannot be said of some of the private parties involved) when it turned out to have been a malfunction. Treat these first responders with courtesy and respect, and they will save your hide. As first world citizens, we are so fortunate to have them available to back us up.

4) In the end, while the OK-mode for the SPOT is convenient and nice to have, I WILL NEVER USE IT AGAIN. I can understand how a device might fail to work, that is, how it can fail OFF. But I now know that an un-abused, un-wetted, comfortable SPOT can, for no apparent reason at all, fail ON. I cannot possibly take the chance that, while I'm just trying to say "Hi, I'm here, I'm OK", it will accidentally report me as being in distress, distressing all my people, in turn, and potentially launching a rescue. Screw the convenience and novelty of saying "I'm OK". The bottom line: I cannot do without SOS. I can do without OK. But then why own a SPOT instead of, say, a Personal Locator Beacon of some kind? But also, is the implication that people must personally experience a false positive before they realize that the risks associated with OK-mode are not worth it? And are false positives like this not bound to erode first responder confidence, in the long run? The answer to these questions depends on the specifics of the statistical distribution of false positives -- i.e. are they rare events, or are they significant (my data point: ~1/40 OKs turned into a false stream of Helps; that is *horrible*, statistically)? I hope, for the sake of those of us who may have to use a SPOT in a real emergency some day, that SPOT is doing its homework.

The final chapter in all this is SPOT's response. I wrote them a report of the incident, and said I wanted two things: a) for them to investigate the incident and learn something from it, and b) a replacement device, even though mine was 2 months out of warranty, and even though I vowed never to press OK again. Two days later a customer service agent called me who was obviously completely unaware of the implications of my story. She suggested that I pay $50 for a replacement device and initially had no comment on my sending it in for an investigation. I said that they could either send me a new device for free or cancel my account. She acquiesced and promised they would be sending me a warranty RMA email, with an address to which to mail the faulty device, and would be sending new a device. I pressed her on what kind of investigation they would conduct on the old device, but didn't get anything other than an assurance that they, in fact, would conduct one.

I think a chunk of the serenity prayer is relevant here...

Serene sunset, near the equator.