Musings of a wandering physicist.

Honeymoon Part II: Lake Powell, Zion, etc.

2011-12-28T07:45:00.000-08:00

Where'd we leave off? Let's see... We got to car at midday and headed to the Grand Canyon North Rim Lodge. Went in hoping to find a room. The front desk people were kinda short with Anita (plus they were unable to give us a room) and that set her outlook on the place from the beginning. Turns out all the staff were pretty lax. They were mostly youngsters hoping to have a good time, and didn't care much about guests. The view was spectacular. We watched the sunset and I had a couple of cold beers. We stayed at the nearby campground that night and got up at the crack of day for the sunrise, which was pretty, but all the tourists kinda put a damper on it for me. I prefer seeing it from Point Sublime with just me and my family/friends.

First sun striking Angel's Gate as viewed from the N. Rim G.C. visitor center.

We decided that hanging around the N Rim Lodge wasn't for us and that Anita was hiked out for the moment. Heard about a California Condor release happening 100 miles to the NE in the Vermillion Cliffs, so headed there. Was an interesting affair. Learned about how the main cause of death of Condors is lead poisoning due to the lead fragments in the gut-piles left during deer hunts. Even if the main part of the bullet is found, small pieces have gotten into the guts. Condors eat that stuff and it apparently kills them or their young. The people orchestrating the release were called the Perigrine Fund -- they used to be focused on Perigrine Falcons, but the Perigrines are in better shape now and so they switched to Condors. Headed to Page, Arizona. I thought Anita might be interested in seeing Glen Canyon Dam and we could do some swimming in Lake Powell. The dam is an impressive, if somewhat abhorrent sight.

Glen Canyon dam.

Giant dams are feats of engineering something like the Egyptian pyramids. But this one covered up some exquisitely beautiful canyon country with a very thick layer of sludge. We went swimming near Lone Rock. There, vehicles are allowed to drive willy nilly across the sandy beaches and in the surrounding hills. Good ole boys have swarmed the area with their trucks. I would've traded the AWD Kia Sedona for one of their trucks a couple of times as the thing bogged down in the deep sand. I was concerned that I might have to ask some drunk dude to help pull me out of the sand. Swimming was nice especially since it was about 95 F outside.

Stayed that night with a Mormon couple who ran one of two B&B's in Page, AZ. Well, we stayed with the couple (grandma and grandpa) and a large part of their family. And the photos of the remainder of their family were plastered all over the B&B. But what do you expect at a Mormon B&B? In the morning over breakfast (and they did make some pretty mean pancakes), I kinda egged the very nice grandpa into telling me about his political views. I was intrigued b/c he worked at the large local powerplant for 30 years. One of his opinions is that Obama is a communist who is trying to control every aspect of our lives. Also, God made the earth for humanity, so whatever we do is right. Strangely, though, he is in favor of nuclear power instead of coal. Go figure. Blames environmentalists for stopping nuke power from taking hold in the US. Dude also had some very strong opinions about gun rights. Of course, he feels that Obama the communist is trying to strip him of all guns. All Obama wants to do, as far as I know, is to prevent every good ole boy from having an AK-47. Another insult the guy made to his own intelligence was that volcanoes pump out more CO2 than humanity does by burning fossil fuels. He had a good buddy who was sure volcanoes put out more CO2, and this dude believed that his good buddy would never lead him astray. I signed heir guest book and asked him to send me his reference about CO2 output. Here's an article on this issue:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/volcanic-co2/

All the breakfast banter provided good conversational material on the way to Zion Nat Park that morning. We discussed gun rights. Anita thinks guns should be banned in the US; I disagree -- my understanding is that the founding fathers felt that people should have guns so that they could overthrow the government if they had to. This radical view came about from experience under British rule for so long, and the success they had overthrowing it with their guns. Anita and I agree that Obama is probably not a communist :) We got to Zion, hit the visitor center, and did a couple of short hikes. While at the visitor center, I had the wildlife experience of the trip -- a little caterpillar! He was crawling into the sidewalk danger zone. He was two inches long and half an inch in diameter. Beautiful markings. I prodded him and he stood up on his back legs and sprouted some ugly, mean looking horns. Awesome! My mom identified the critter as the caterpillar of a western tiger swallowtail butterfly. We went on to visit a hilltop food storage site of some ancient Anasazi. Then did the Watchman hike.

Tiger swallowtail caterpillar. Has "horns" that protrude when it gets riled up.

Next day, we hit the Zion Narrows. We got to the part where you have to wade and Anita pulled up like a horse that spotted a snake. She was spooked and though she did cross the first water, it was with the utmost reluctance. I'm afraid I didn't give her enough time to settle in to the notion that the water crossing would not be dangerous before rushing her across. This was what's known as a "dumb young husband move" and resulted in some emotional suffering. I continued a bit further than she did, wading into nearly neck-deep 55 F water. Intense. Anyway, this hike was crawling with tourists and was paved until the last half-mile. Of course, you could continue on another 5+ miles and escape the crowds. We went back down-canyon and hiked the Emerald Pools trail. The pools were a dirty brown in the fall conditions. In the spring, I'm sure they're much more attractive. We did spot a tarantula on this hike and a snake (non-venomous).

Anita and I on the trail near Emerald pools with Virgin riviera below.

On our final day in Zion, we hike to the Subway. It's about an 8-mile round trip. I figured it would take us about 4 hours. Wrong. Even the most gung-ho hikers would require 6 hrs. We took a leisurely pace at first and took a wonderful break at a pool that had banks covered with cute little frogs.

A tiny frog near a pool on the Subway Hike.

Once we realized we were going to run out of daylight, we picked up the pace and finished in 8 hrs. The huge upturned sandstone blocks covered with dino tracks are an impressive sight.

A dino track. Amazing how this area was muddy, then suddenly changed such that this track was preserved.

These two large sandstone slabs are covered with dino tracks.

We tried to keep dry on the way up until the last mile or so when it is obvious that you gotta get wet. On the way down you save some time by just sloshing down through the creek until the last mile which requires a climb out of the canyon. At the top, we were treated to the beautiful Subway itself. It's a highly unusual formation. It's a bit like a slot canyon, but at the bottom of the slot, it opens into a wide tunnel -- like a subway! The floor of the canyon at that point is immaculately carved by eons of gentle erosion so that there are deep blue pools here and foot-deep slots of rushing water there. Amazing.

The mouth of the Subway.

Looking down the Subway. Anita took this photo which I think is suitable for Nat. Geographic.

Overall, it is a rough hike. I whacked my head against trees and slipped cartoon-character-style into a completely horizontal position before plummeting to the wet, slimy, and very solid sandstone. Anyway, we survived all the ups and downs of the hike and reached the car just before dark. I ceremoniously leaned my trusty agave hiking stick, which I had plucked in the Grand Canyon, against the trail signpost for the next hiker to enjoy -- it was quite useful on this hike with all the water challenges.

On our last day, we hit the town in Vegas for a few hours before catching our plane back to MN. We stopped into one of the casinos and found some penny slots that suited us perfectly. I almost won $2 after starting from $1. Then I got greedy and lost the entire wad. Anita didn't fare any better. But it was kinda fun.

Overall, I think it was a very successful honeymoon. We could've had a good time in some
tropical or otherwise exotic place, but plane tickets would've cost a lot more, we probably
wouldn't have gotten nearly as much exercise.

Honeymoon Part I: North Rim of the Grand Canyon

2011-11-22T17:49:00.000-08:00

Anita and I had a beautiful and excellent wedding in Minneapolis in September really deserves its own post (!), but I'm focusing on the outdoor stuff in this blog. After the wedding, we did a nice trip to eastern South Dakota (Badlands, Jewel Cave, Mt Rushmore, etc.) with Anita's family and Indian relatives. Then, we took a trip to CA, where I went to a workshop in the Bay area (Livermore), and then visited southern CA, where we saw friends and I visited a private fusion company. Finally, we were off on our honeymoon down in the Grand Canyon area. We did a 3-day backpacking tour from the North Rim on the Bill Hall trail to Thunder River, then toured down to "Lake" Powell (actually a reservoir that is highly controversial from an environmental standpoint). After visiting the Vermillion cliffs where we saw the launch of a few endangered California condors, we went down to Page, AZ, where we had an interesting stay in at a B&B with a Mormon family. We concluded the trip by visiting Zion National Park. For all the details, read on! For all photos, see:
https://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20110920SfLaGcZionBestOf

This N Rim trip is probably my 4th or 5th trip to this part of the Canyon. My dad brought me and my Uncle Rick down here back in 1995. What an adventure we had with no GPS and limited backcountry experience :) Ended up eating fish from Thunder River for sustenance.. but that's another story. I figured with all my accumulated mountaineering and backcountry travel experience, I'd have no trouble guiding my (physically quite capable, but not exactly mountain-tough) new bride down here without ending our marriage and hopefully making it stronger by sharing this beautiful place together :)

We flew into Las Vegas on Tues the 20th of Sept, and headed to Pipe Springs National Monument ranger station to get a permit. We were too late, so skipped the permit (which actually turned out to be legal after all). We headed down into the Kaibab (the forest on the North Rim of the GC) to camp that night. Found really nice spot near turnoff onto the little FS425 that leads out to some excellent N Rim hiking. Saw a bushy-white-tailed Kaibab squirrel (famous for its existence as a distinct species after separation from its South Rim cousin squirrel) and a few deer, but no turkey or anything else. Wednesday morning, we headed to the Bill Hall trail parking lot at Monument Point.

Looking down from Monument Point. Bridger's Knoll center left. The esplanade is the flatish area upon which the Knoll sits. Powell Plateau is the flat feature in the distance at left.

As we started the hike, we saw a Perigrine cruising around but it didn't swoop down past us. Didn't see a whole lot of other wildlife for the duration of the GC hike, but the breathtaking vistas alone are sufficient to hold one's interest. No rattlesnakes (but didn't go beating through the bushes). Anita was somewhat distressed about the exposure in some spots as we headed down the trail, dropping through about 1000 feet and many millions of years of rock layers. Notably, near the beginning of the hike, there are some hair-raising dropoffs as you walk along the trail. In one or two spots, the trail has mostly sluffed off, and you have to take a big step over the sluffed spot. Then the little step down the Toroweap went smooth, but was still a little scary for her.

Anita questioning her new husband's honeymoon location choice (hey, it was a JOINT decision!).

After about 1000 feet, you hit the so-called esplanade, a layer of tough sandstone called Supai, which forms a sidewalk-like surface that rings the canyon. There is an interesting geological story behind the Esplanade: above the Supai is a layer called the Hermit Shale. The Colorado easily cut through this shale layer (after slicing more slowly through the Toroweap and Coconino above). Then it dwelled for a long time in the Shale layer, slowly washing it downstream. As it washed some away, it left overhanging cliffs of Toroweap and Coconino. These cliffs, once deeply undercut, broke away and their crumbled remains were also washed downstream. The river meandered in the Shale, carving away at the cliffs until the Supai "sidewalk" of the Grand Canyon was exposed. You can see the esplanade best in the first photo from Monument Point.

We camped on the Esplanade at roughly the planned spot, just above Surprise Valley. Some people were occupying the best little spots under the ledges, but a few hundred meters further (and right near the rim), there was a nice spot. Brought 6 L each down from Monument Point. Turns out we needed 4 L each. Left 2 L at bottom of first decent from Mon Point. Left 2 L or at first camp. The camp was within 100 feet of the rim of Surprise Valley, which has to be one of the more astounding geologic features of the Grand Canyon (see photo). Surprise Valley was spread below us to the south, and to the east was Powell Plateau, a vast and strikingly flat feature which has one of the few virgin Ponderosa Pine forests in the world.

Standing near our first campsite on the esplanade .

What a view just 100 feet from our camp. Surprise Valley was created in a colossal landslide. Water had greased the skids, and the Supai and Redwall collapsed in a rotational landslide, forming the valley and blocking the Colorado river.

Headed down to Thunder Spring Thursday morn. Still some distress on Anita's part hiking trail leading down to Surprise Valley. More distress on the way to the Spring itself. Again some hairy spots. To me, these hairy spots go completely unnoticed unless i'm hiking with somebody like Anita who's scared of heights. I came to recognize when she'd be scared. On the final trail down, we saw a dude hiking up that we thought might've been a ranger. He was a young guy (my age), with the posture of a fresh military recruit out to impress, and a clean-shaven face. He had a big and very clean stiff-brimmed hat. As we later learned, he wasn't a ranger after all. When we got to the Spring, Anita was ready to sit for a while. There was a woman sitting there who we briefly chatted with. She was sitting reading a book and explained that her badass hubby had busted it over toward Deer Creek that morning and was coming back later in the evening. I didn't guess it at the time, but this was the wife of "the ranger".

On some rocks while hiking down into Surprise Valley.

From the Spring, I scouted ahead to look at the trail. It was too tough for her, and I couldn't justify asking her to come down to the upper camp. We didn't have permit anyway, although it appeared that there would be a nice two-person spot remaining for the night. (Two other groups were going to be taking up the main sites.) Plenty of rafters down near Thunder Spring. We had several offers to join rafters for dinner down at the CO river at their camps. They, as usual, were loaded for bear, foodwise. Swordfish was apparently on the menu.

Lots of rafters were climbing around near the spring pouroff

Headed back up to Surprise Valley and camped there that night. Wandered along trail to near the Y intersection and found nice spot a few hundred yards short of that. Our food was really good. We did simple things like Idahoan mashed potatoes with jerkey + dried fruit, and tortilini pasta. We got some non-meat jerkey called Seitan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_%28food%29).

Friday morning, we got cracking at 4 am and hiking by 5. We made the Esplanade a little before 8 and stopped for a good brunch of pita bread, butter, peanut butter, oatmeal, string cheese, etc. "The ranger" and his wife had camped up in Surprise Valley right near the dropoff to Thunder Spring. They reached the Esplanade and passed us just as we were getting going again. We leapfrogged them several times on our way up to Monument Point. The ranger and his wife were all business on the trail. The only conversation we had was when we talked about what a bunch of slobs people are on the trail. Yes, people are a little ridiculous to ditch all the stuff they do. Food, water bottles, etc. But I must admit that on one trip somebody (it MIGHT have been my own father) decided to ditch all sorts of junk out of desperation -- we were really low on water and out of food! -- including an entire backpack and a thermarest.

Hardly any flowers were out in the fall, but there were some impressive agave stalks out on the esplanade. This is a good example of the "sidewalk" nature of the esplanade.

The fruit at the end of an agave stalk.

The walking was pretty smooth and easy along the esplanade. Not too hot mid morning. Made good time to the forty-something switchbacks leading up to Monument Point. The guidebook I have claimed there are exactly 49 switchbacks, so I decided to count. To keep myself and Anita entertained, I decided to tell the story of my life, one year at a time as we hiked up beginning on switchback 15 at age 15. The pace was slow and plodding in the mid-day heat, so I had plenty of time to think as I breathed deeply and sweated my way up. When I got to 31, I started telling the story of Anita and Eric. At age 35, we had a child. At age 37, we had another. At age 45, the first kid (named Liam as an abbreviation of William) was 10. Etc. It was kinda fun. Eric became a professional tennis coach, for example. The final push to the top was hot and slow, but no big problems. Both of us had no major foot pain, and we had plenty of water.

The honeymoon so far wasn't as relaxing as laying in the sun on a tropical beach. However, it was an experience that few can say they've had.

Elfin Lakes tour

2011-04-07T19:25:00.001-07:00

Elfin Lakes ski tour
Eric Meier and Jeff Schomaker
Friday-Saturday April 1-2, 2011

You're a grad student being hammered by research work.. sitting around day after day running simulations and writing papers. You're in Seattle near the end of the winter.. it's been raining something fierce and moss is growing between your toes. What do you do? You get your ass out into the mountains for a ski tour! I tell you, it's like a religious experience for me to get way up in the mountains, preferably in the sun with an expansive view of wild and ragged mountain peaks. This trip was no exception. Awesome. Everything comes into focus out there.

Some noteworthy things have happened since I last blogged (like getting engaged!), but I haven't gotten out on many good adventures this winter. In November, just before they shut down Hwy 20 over the Cascades, Reid, Jeff, and I did a nice skiing day trip up by Blue Lake. Also, the three of us did a day trip at Baker in January. Finally, I got out again! Jeff and I headed up to Canada. Jeff was none too optimistic that the weather or skiing would be any good. But it all turned out pretty well.

All pics (and a video somewhere near the end of the picture set) can be found at
https://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20110401ElfinLakesWJeff#

We headed up across the Canadian border to Garibaldi Provincial Park on Friday. As usual when one of the infamous Meier brothers crosses into Canada, they want to do a full cavity search. Well, it's not that bad, but they always stop me going in for a few minutes. It's kinda hilarious how the Canadians have a need to waste their own time and mine. I joked with Jeff, who was driving, that they always stop me on the way into the US too.. but they give the driver the cavity search. (Actually, we did get stopped coming back into the US! They harassed us for 1/2 hr or so. Jeff was sweating bullets because he had some prescription pain killers for emergencies. They let him off the hook, telling him he should not cross with painkillers.. but if he was going to, he should crank up his operation some.)

We stayed in an awesome shelter in Garibaldi Park near Elfin Lakes. The shelter comes equipped with a heavy duty propane heater, a kitchen with four propane stoves and lots of pots. It's user maintained and is in good shape. Lots of propane.

Elfin Lakes Shelter upon arrival Friday eve.

On Friday night, the shelter was pretty quiet. Only three chicks from Vancouver were there. They were pretty cool and didn't smell too bad, which was good. One of them was a nerd like me and wanted to play some chess. I took her up and we had a good game. Two of them spoke French (one was a teacher of French), so I spoke some with them. She said she thought Americans like the French (so maybe that's why I would pick up the language). Au contraire, I told her. Most Americans are French-hating rednecks.

We slept like lazy bums until 7:00. When we woke up, things looked marginal. But after about 1/2 hour, it looked absolutely gorgeous and we seized the day. Good visibility was needed to navigate the terrain around there without being in danger of avalanche, cornice failure, etc.

Elfin Lakes shelter with Garibaldi in background

Elfin Lakes area panorama

After some vigorous exercise, we made it to the top of Diamond Head which is about 7,000 ft high at the shoulder of the larger Garibaldi. Looking around at the top was quite a treat.

Panorama from the top of Diamond Head. Garibaldi at right. Coast Range in distance.

Had some great turns on the way down... until I sprained my ankle during the last downhill run. It was a pretty bad sprain and made it quite painful to struggle down seven miles to the car. It's five days after the injury, and the swelling is basically gone, but it's still tough to go down stairs or to move aggressively at all. Anyway, it's a small price to pay for the pleasure of the trip.

On the way down (limping along), we ran into a weird dude from Vancouver who wasn't using his skis. They had good skins on them and he had good boots, but he was carrying them. He asked us, "why does anybody use these things on the way up.. I do better walking." We said "Uhhh. You new to this? You might want to try skinning again." Skinning is a great way to get around in the mountains.

Forbidden Peak

2010-10-20T22:13:00.000-07:00

Forbidden Peak West Ridge
Reid McCaul and Eric Meier
Oct. 16-17, 2010

Reid and I thought about doing something a little more aggressive than this. I’m glad we didn’t. This was quite sufficient. I didn’t know it until Reid pointed it out, but this route, (Forbidden Peak, West Ridge), is one of the fifty climbs made famous in the popular book, Fifty Classic Climbs in North America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Classic_Climbs_of_North_America), by Roper and Steck. I’ve climbed one other route on their list – Mount Rainer's Liberty Ridge.

Mt Forbidden photo by John Roper, July 27, 1968. The west ridge is the one pointing toward the upper left. The glacier extends at least 1000 feet into Boston Basin (to the left of the peak in this photo). Now, it spans just a couple hundred feet of altitude.

We got on the road from Seattle Saturday morning at about 7:30. Made a grocery stop and picked up some food including a bag of fabulous trail mix which was soon to be eaten by mice. Checked in at the ranger station in Marblemount at 9:30 and got to the TH (about 3,500 feet elevation) at around 10:30. Route from the road up past the old diamond mine and to the Boston Basin high camp was fairly straightforward except where the trail was washed out in a few places near the low camp. Temperatures in the shade were near freezing, and ice presented a challenge at some stream crossings. Snow was sticking in spots as we reached 5,000 ft. Got to high camp at 6,400 feet at about 3:30. Had some time to kill and did a 2-hour side trip over to a saddle just below Mount Torment (all the peaks around here seemed to have great names). From the saddle, had a great view of Eldorado Peak. From anywhere in Boston Basin, the view of Johannesburg Mountain is striking. I got some great pics of all this scenery including sunset. Unfortunately, my camera did not finish the trip with me. After some discussion of the sub-relativistic Doppler shifting of light, we were tuckered out and hit the rack.

We woke at 5:30 and got going by 7 Sunday morning. We had noticed a few mice the previous night, and I put my trail mix into my drawstring canvas bag and into my pack. This was not adequate protection from these driven little bastards. They had eaten almost all of it by morning. They brazenly snuck in to grab the last morsels even as I was chasing them around camp with intent to kill.

Beckey’s guidebook description said it would take 6 hrs to the summit, then 4 hrs back down to high camp. That would make it 5 pm. Barely enough time to make it out before darkness which fell at 7 to 7:30 pm. Beckey is not known for the high accuracy of his time estimates (or for his exact route descriptions), so we expected our headlights might come in handy. On the approach hike, we quickly warmed up and took off our down jackets. I took my camera off and set it down. I never picked it up again. I realized 15 minutes later that I’d left it. I figured I could probably find it on the way down. No such luck. The terrain around there is too monotonous, not to mention that it was getting dark and we were in a hurry. The marmots are having a good time with it, I’m sure. The final approach to the technical section involves crossing tiny little glacier that has almost melted away (thanks global warming!). We decided it was beneath us to put our crampons on. This proved to be a minor mistake. Reid got off the glacier and onto a nearby rock outcrop sooner than I did. I went a little higher where it’s a little steeper and a little icier… where my mountaineering boots could barely penetrate the ice to give me any grip. This made for some fun ice climbing on a 45 degree slope with only my mountaineering axe. But I made it after five or ten minutes of quad burning workout. I think this part of the approach was the beginning of the end for my quads which are still sore now, 3 days post climb. After getting onto the rock, things scarcely improved during the mixed rock and ice, tooth and nail up to a safe spot. Greater respect for this tricky approach would be appropriate.

It was a great relief to put on climbing shoes and rope up. The usual couloir was out of shape, so we took the alternate route recommended by Beckey. Ascent is straightforward to the notch in the west ridge. We simulclimbed a good chunk before reaching some difficult sections. One of the first moves is a long step over a spectacular abyss. My oh my, it is exciting. The route favors the north side of the ridge. Unfortunately, that’s where the snow collects first. But there was never more than a couple of inches on the important holds, so it only added a point or two to the climb’s class 5.4(ish) rating. Mostly, it was easy class 4 scrambling albeit with dizzying drops on either side. After getting off to a rocky (icy?) start on the glacier, I was happy to have Reid (a far more experienced climber than me anyway) in the lead.

Near the summit, Mount Baker peeked out from behind Eldorado which had been neatly hiding it. On top at 1 pm, exactly 6 hours after departing camp, the summit views were magnificent. Reid took a few photos with his iPhone.

Me on top of Forbidden. Eldorado is seen with Baker peeking from behind it.

Here’s the view of Johannesburg from the top.

Reid with Mt Logan in background. Heavily crevassed Fremont Glacier is below Logan.

Our downclimb took us 5.5 hours. Maybe we can blame the snow for the slow pace. Spent half an hour looking for my poor camera to no avail. Raced down the mountain in the near dark. Managed to stay on the trail almost exclusively which was no mean feat. This rapid descent took a toll on the quads, knees and feet. As Reid says, “the dogs were barking”, meaning our feet were hammered. We had quite a philosophical discussion about how some people can manage to enjoy climbing despite the significant pain that must be endured.

Reached the car just before 9 pm. I knew Anita would be getting concerned, so I was anxious to get down into cell phone range. (Reid had told his gf that she should not worry until midday Monday unless the area is hit by a nuke.) On the way down the dirt road, we were hailed by a woman in an SUV. She was distressed and asked us if we knew much about the route up Eldorado. Why? Her husband was due to be down that evening and he hadn’t called yet. Reid (who has done Eldorado) tried to explain that the routefinding is tough and they may be spending the night up there. Impressive that she drove two hours from Bellingham. Clearly her hubby is a fairly new climber or she would be used to this shit by now. Hopefully he made it down safely.

All in all, a fabulous climb. Great to be up there on this classic route without seeing any another climbers. Great weather. Snow will probably make the route impossible later this week.

Dark Side of the Moon

2010-08-31T21:10:00.000-07:00

That title sounds cool, but should be amended to read "Far Side of the Moon". The moon rotates around the earth and is "locked" so that we only see one face of it. My sister and bro-in-law were wondering what the explanation was for this. I took a crack at it, and had a tough time convincing them. So, I've studied up and am writing it here for them.

Why is the moon locked facing the earth? I looked this up years ago and learned that it is basically due to what's called "tidal locking". From the wikipedia article on tidal locking, "A tidally locked body takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner." Tides basically cause an spherical body (like the moon and earth) to be stretched in the direction of it's orbital partner.

How is it that something related to tides could cause a celestial dance between giant objects like the earth and moon? Don't tides just make the oceans go up and down? The image below gives some idea of what's happening on earth.

Tidal bulges. Earth's oceans are stretched toward the moon on the side facing the moon and away from the moon on the opposite side. The diagram above also shows earth's rotation dragging the stretched shape slightly counterclockwise such that the bulge "leads" the moon.

The moon is also stretched like the earth, and the stretched direction always points to the earth. This is because when the stretched direction is not pointed at the earth, there is a correcting force that rotates the stretched direction to point at earth.

When the moon was liquid, it was bulged, and rotated "under the bulge" just like the earth does. As it cooled and froze, it's rotational energy must've tried to move the bulge from its orientation toward earth, but the corrective force mentioned won and we have our tidally locked moon.

Cool, huh? My dad asked the tough question of why the stretched shape is formed. For example, why doesn't earth just have a single bulge on the side facing the moon? Why another bulge on the opposite side? How the devil does this really work? Ike Newton was one of the first (if not the first) to understand this scientifically. The wikipedia page on tidal force is excellent. A summary follows.

Tidal forces diagram. Moon's gravitational forces (red arrows) are acting on the earth (the black sphere).

The red arrows in the top pane shows the moon's gravity which is weaker farther from the moon. The earth (the black sphere) is in free fall. Thus, it makes sense to subtract off the average gravitational force acting on the earth. This is done in the lower pane. Now you can see the forces that cause the tidal stretching.

Keep in mind that the tides are only ~10 feet. This is a tiny bulge for an object with a radius of 20 million feet.

Another cool thing I learned in the article is that the debris that makes up Saturn's rings would have condensed into moons if not for tidal forces exerted by Saturn.

Cassini image of Saturn.

Tidal forces are stronger closer to the source of gravity. Moons formed around Saturn when the debris was far enough away that tidal forces didn't disturb the formation.

windward side rain / orographic lifting

2010-08-30T21:03:00.000-07:00

The issue of rain on the windward side of mountains arose in my trip last week. My dad attributed the phenomenon to cooling of the rising air mass. The reasoning is that air is cold at high elevation, so as the air gets higher, it cools, reaches dewpoint, and starts releasing water. After further study, fundamentally, it is correct that the air cools and reaches dewpoint. However, the cause for the cooling is kinda ... cool. It's called orographic lifting. Basically, the air expands as it goes to high altitude. As it expands, the air does work on the air that it displaces. The work energy had to come from somewhere. It came from the energy of the air molecules. Temperature is, basically, a measure of the average speed of the air molecules.

For further reference, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orographic_lift

On that page, there is a beautiful picture of clouds being formed at the crests of waves, called gravity waves. Orographic lifting can cause air at the crests of the waves to reach dewpoint and form clouds.

Clouds are created at the crests of gravity waves due to orographic lifting. These waves are created as air flows over an island in the southern Indian Ocean.

For more on gravity waves, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave

horseback trip into Gilbert Basin

2010-08-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

I just spent a week in Utah, visiting Tess, Tim, and Zoey in SLC on either side of a 3 day horsepacking trip into the innermost valleys of the Uinta mountains.

Visiting Tess, Tim, and Zoey in SLC was nice. Zoey is 8 months old now, and is getting quite animated in her interaction with people.

Isn't she cute?! We went for a hike up Big Cottonwood Canyon. Tim and I played some golf in a serious windstorm. We also got in a few hands of bridge. Their pups, Howie and Sadie, are doing very well too and are as sweet as ever. We had a lot of fun one night doing accents. Tim has me beat on his Snoop Dog accent, but I think I've got him in the Aussie category.

Next stop was Roosevelt to get ready for our 3 day ride. The hosses were in good shape. My parents just got a new horse named Coco in addition to their old hands, Boss and Mischief. I was to ride Boss, who, true to his name, is the head horse, nipping the others as required to exert his authority. Steve had drawn up a route for us -- head up and over Fox Queant Pass and down in to the Uinta River drainage. Then up to Gilbert Basin. I've ridden my parents' horses on and off over the past several years, but never for more than an hour at a time. This time, I was gonna ride 8 hours a day for three days! I hoped my bike seat had me saddle ready.

Getting the horses loaded up is no mean feat. Saddle blanket, saddle, front and back girth hitches. Front saddle bags. Back saddle bags. Bridle. Breast strap. Boots. Yes, rather than regular metal horseshoes, nailed into hooves, my parents prefer rubber boots which snugly fit around the hoof and are strapped around the ankles. Of course, the usual camping gear has to be organized too.

The horses were cruising slowly on the first day, not in any rush to get far away from their trailer which they knew would bring them back to their comfortable pasture, and a steady supply of hay and water. We were a little off the pace, but made it to Fox Queant Pass some time around 2 pm. The trail is rocky and the horses had to take it slow. Most horseback riders probably wouldn't even consider taking their horses on a trail like this. It's a touch hiking trail! But Mischief and Boss are expert trail horses and Coco is well on his way.

Looking NW from Fox Queant Pass

From the Pass, we cruised to our campsite past some pretty lakes and gorgeous meadows formed by beaver dams.

I'm reclining on the saddle trying to rest my back which got rather sore. Beaver-created meadow to the right of my head.

The campsite location (near the trees above Steve's hat) was gorgeous. Gunsight pass is just below the sunlit clouds. See the low, sharp peak? Maybe the pass got its name because this sharp peak is like the front post in a common gunsight.

On our first night, we watched the full moon rising.

The spot I slept is behind me in the photo. I was rather chilly that night. Daisy hung with me a while, then retreated to the tent with my parents. Frost covered my bag. Really, I wasn't too cold except for my toes. But I did squeeze into the tent the next night.

Horses grazing in the morning. This pretty stream ran right past our campsite.

The next day, I was up at the crack (partly to try to warm up). Looked out in the meadows, but didn't see any game. Of course, the horses had cow bells around their necks and game probably could hear us miles away... The good thing is that bears could too and probably stayed far away. We got going pretty early. Terrain was again quite rocky. We reached our destination, though: Gilbert Basin. The basin sits just below Gilbert Peak (13,442 ft). My dad and I had been to this basin back in 2003. On that trip, we saw lots of elk. This time, it was still glorious, but no elk that we could see. They must've been laying low.

Gilbert Basin panorama in 2003.

Mom and Dad at our high point in the middle of Gilbert Basin.

The ride back down that day got pretty scary when Coco blew out a rear horse shoe. The arabs (Coco and Mischief are partly Arabian) tend to freak out when a rear horse shoe comes off their foot and hangs by the ankle strap. They start kicking wildly trying to get the thing off. Steve dismounted, asked me to stop Boss, and started working on the rear boot. I tried, but Boss.. well, he's the Boss, not me. Maybe if I was a more experienced rider, I could've halted him. But he walked, encouraging Coco to walk instead of stay still. Steve got knocked under Coco and the horse spooked and ran. Fortunately, Coco didn't step on him. Stopping is tough for these horses. Maybe it has to do with their insatiable appetites. They want to go, go, go until they get to some grass. Then, maybe they're willing to stop and munch. Any chance they get, really, they try to stop and eat. They are eating machines which makes sense for 1100-pound animals.

Sleeping in the tent was nice and warm. The next morning, we started back. After straightening out my stirrups, it seemed we were ready to make some good time. A few minutes down the trail, though, my saddle started sagging sideways. I knew this was bad news -- when the saddle slides sideways, the horse flips out. Boss started trotting, cantering... my mom yelled for me to bail. I did. That's where the crash skills from the snow sport (skiing / snowboarding) days come in handy. No problemo. We realized we hadn't tightened the saddle cinch!! Doh! Another lesson learned.

Navigating the rocky trail back on the 3rd day of riding was pretty tiring. We managed though. And the scenery was amazing.

My favorite from the trip: the hairbell.

Another nice flower: Daisy. :)

Looking back SW from near Fox Queant. The animals are all lined up behind Steve .. well, he's an animal too, really :)

Cowboy Eric. Anita thinks I look a little like the Marlboro man in this photo.

This trip was tres enjoyable overall. In general, I think Boss was a great trail horse for a beginner like me. Quite an experience to get out on a 40 mile horseback ride. Always fun to spend time with my family.

We had a few science/physics-related discussions that I plan to blog about soon. Teasers: Why does the moon always face the earth? Why does rain tend to fall on the windward side of mountains.

Madrid

2010-05-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

I'm getting kinda burned out on blogging about this trip. So, first, I'll give you some thoughts on totally random things. Then I'll short change you on the Madrid stories because I'm lazy.

First random thing: Anita and I made mayonnaise this weekend! Turns out it's a little tricky, but totally doable. It's basically made from two egg yolks and 1.5 cups of oil. You beat the oil into the egg yolks a tiny bit at a time... Go too fast and you have an puddle of oil with some funk in it, which is what happened to our first batch. But the second batch was awesome.

Next random thing: I took a tour of the Boeing manufacturing plant in Everett as part of a VIP group from our UW Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. Huge place. The main assembly building is 40 acres with 115 foot ceilings. Huge cranes and equipment strowed everywhere. They were building 767s 777s and 787s (the Dreamliner). The 787 is definitely looking pretty cool. There are three that are painted for All Nippon Airlines, rolling down the line. ASA has 55 of them on order. If you were to place an order now, the plane wouldn't be delivered until 2020. Was fun to see the plant.

Madrid

Last entry, we had just arrived in Madrid. Adam and Maria made us a home cooked meal. We just stayed in that evening...

Days 9, 10, and 11 -- Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Sunday, April 22, 23, 24, and 25th.

Anita and I went to the Prado in the morning. It is a top-notch place with lots of European paintings and statues. The focus seemed to be on Spanish works. A few of the paintings were being copied. My dad and I were talking the other day about how small details make a big difference. For example, when dry fly fishing, subtle differences in fly presentation can make all the difference. This rule surely holds true for painting too.

This guy was doing a pretty good job copying this naked chick. But I think the fine details on the original make it significantly better.

This Goya painting show the Spanish royal family around 1800. The old lady third from left has a big black spot on her face. Turns out this was is an artificial mark thought to be beautiful in that day. Almost like Cindy Crawford, but slightly witchier. (I stole this picture from Wikipedia.)

We also walked around a large pleasant park in central Madrid. That evening, we went out to several different tapas places. The first place was kinda cool because they just served mushrooms cooked in various different ways. Exciting if you're into mushrooms :) I do think they're pretty cool after reading Omnivore's Dilemma which describes the biology of mushrooms in some detail. The rest of the evening was nice .. just socializing with Anita's friends and their friends there in Madrid. There was this really funny German kid who worked with Adam. (Adam is a programmer.)

The next day, we first headed off on a mission to find saffron and buy a bunch of it for Anita's parents if it was a good deal. We found it and it is NOT a good deal. That stuff is amazingly expensive! In fact, I'm thinking of becoming a saffron farmer at some point. There was some hope it would be cheap in Spain because it is grown there. We wandered by a fancy palace upon which the Spanish royalty squandered the sweat and blood of Spanish peasants on hundreds of rooms full of trinkets. We passed through the main Madrid plaza and saw some interesting and unusual street performers. My favorite was the fat, middle-aged Spiderman. I thought he was so funny I tossed 50 cents in his hat. He then insisted on a thorough photography session. Interestingly, he spoke very good english. Almost like he had had money at some point and a good education, then just decided playing Spiderman was the most fun he could have.

Spidey even convinced Anita to take a picture with him.

Nothing too special left to report. We enjoyed the rest of the day, had a special dinner Adam cooked up for us. Then went out for a beer or two on the town.

Saturday morning, we embarked on our return trip which was quite a fiasco. The volcanic eruption in Iceland had clogged European airways. But Madrid was a good place to be because we'd fly south of the mess. Unfortunately, the Delta airplane broke down. Some kind of hose problem in the nosegear. We waited 3 hrs at the gate before they finally gave up and cancelled the flight. Anita and I split up so she could get us on another flight while I retrieved our bags. It was quite an affair, but the plan worked. I got our bags. Anita got us booked on Air Europa. The Air Europa line was incredible. Took over 2 hrs there... Enjoyed talking to some Harley rider dude who had a twisted mustache like Salvador Dali. Finally made it into New York. No flights until the next morning. Delta was so kind as to put us up for the night. After waiting in 2 or 3 more hours of lines, we landed in a room. The next day, Sunday, we got back without any more trouble. It was tough to get up and get back to work Monday morning, but not too bad. finally, back in the routine, we could get some rest...

¡hasta luego Barcelona, ola Madrid

2010-05-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

Day 8 -- Weds. April 21

We hit a couple more sights in Barcelona before we took off for Madrid. First, we stopped at the Statue of Columbus (Monument a Colom). Apparently, this is where Columbus first set foot on the ground again after seeing America. His big bronze head is covered with birdshit. But it's still pretty cool. Then we headed on a tour of the Gothic quarter of Madrid (which is where a lot of the Shadow of the Wind is set). We considered seeing the Picasso museum, but saw Dali instead. It didn't disappoint. If you know, Dali, you can imagine the kind of wild stuff we saw there... It was full of stuff he did throughout his life plus lots of photographs of him. He was a weird sonuvagun. I like him.

I'm not doing a very good imitation of Chris... and I'm not sure why he's pointing anyway...

Salvadore was an unusual individual.

He did illustrations for a fancy edition of Cervantes' Don Quixote.

The train ride to Madrid in the afternoon went smoothly, literally speaking -- the train, even at 180 mph, rides silky smooth. Amazing.

Here's the high speed Barcelona-Madrid train. Fancy.

Upon arrival in Madrid, Anita's friend Adam met us at the station and we went back to their place where we stayed a couple of nights with he and his gf, Maria. It was nice to have somewhere to stay and Adam and Maria were very generous with food, etc. Their place was quite tight with four of us there! Madrid stories in the next entry...

Waterfront, Barcelona Open, Montjuic

2010-05-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

At the end of the day Monday, we did a long trek along the Barcelona waterfront. Got some ice cream at a little stand. The chick working the stand only let me have a taste of one kind of ice cream. I was pissed. I mean, how in the hell do you *choose* when you've only tasted one?! Our destination was the Frank Gehry fish. (Gehry is the same the architect who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.) On the way there, we saw some funny things like a little kid climbing up a high rope ladder structure (like monkey bars with ropes) and yelling at his parents from the top. Also we were accosted by a beach salesman who wanted to sell me a beach towel thingy (sarong?) for like 2 euros. He started at 10 and I said "nah". He said "OK, how much?" (He knew plenty of English to sell stuff to Americans.) He said 5 euros and I got interested but still refused. He shadowed us for a few minutes basically begging me to buy it. I might have gotten it (we could've used a beach towel...) but Anita talked me out of it since she (and she says every other woman) has been given about 10 as a gift at one time or another. We made it to the fish and it started to rain and we retreated to the our hotel (the Atlas).

Carp are everywhere including the Mediterranean.

It was nice and sunny early in the afternoon.

Here is the kid perched high on the rope structure, yelling at his parents.

Anita on cool concrete lounge chairs with Gehry fish in background.

We went to an excellent restaurant this night. It was a French place called Les 15 Nits. Don't recall exactly what we had -- some tasty salads. Also had a good dose of tasty sangria, which was quite refreshing.

Day 7 -- Tuesday April 20

The next morning, we took the metro to the Universidad polytecnica de Catalunya. Adjacent to campus is the tennis club where the Barcelona Open was held. I'd been pretty stoked about this for a while and we planned to watch a half day before heading elsewhere. Nadal had backed out (worn out from winning too many tourneys), but plenty of the heavy hitters were there. This was one of the first days of action and the big players had byes. The most exciting match was Lleyton Hewitt who plays quality tennis and usually has some entertaining on-court antics. It was nice just to hang out in the nice weather and watch a few hours of tennis. He played a youngster from Turkey named Ilhan who seems to have potential...

Hewitt in characteristic stretch ... this is how he hurt his hip I suppose.

(See all pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20100413SpainLoRes#)

Next, we headed to a place called Montjuic, a name derived from mountain of the Jews.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montjuïc

You take a tram halfway up. Then you can hike the rest of the way up to the Castle which has awesome views of Barcelona. We really enjoyed going to the upper deck of the castle.

On the hike to the castle on top of Montjuic, there were lots of parrots! (Or I guess they were some kind of parrot.)

View along castle walls.

Anita and I on top of the castle with clouds on the Mediterranean in the bg.

Me and Anita with Barcelona sprawling below.

The only funny thing about Montjuic was the smell. Once we topped the hill, we looked down and saw this smoking, steaming industrial shitpile. This explained the odor.

I'm sure we found some Spanish restaurant that stuffed us with bread and cheese, but I've forgotten... We hung it up. The next day, we'd spend the morning in Barcelona and then head to Madrid on their newly (as of 2008) installed high speed rail (nearly 200 mph!).

space fix

2010-05-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

Let's take a brief siesta from Spain blogging.

I am a bit of a space fanatic and, lately, I've been letting it show a bit. I attended a conference on National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges that included a big session on space stuff. A big hot shot from NASA was there and I really enjoyed hearing him talk and talking to him some afterwards. Then Anita and I went to see Hubble 3D. It showed great footage from the recent space walk to fix the Hubble and showed some great deep space images including a (CGI-enhanced) fly through of the Orion Nebula. The 3D effects were cool, but I'm not really sold that it was that much better than a high definition 2D movie.

At the conference on Grand Challenges, they only addressed a couple of the challenges. I attended sessions related to the challenge, "Engineer the tools of discovery", into which they shoehorned both space exploration and biological research. Relevant web links are,
Grand Challenges website: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/challenges.aspx
The challenge involving space: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/8965.aspx

At the conference, they also discussed computer technology issues (apparently just because this is Seattle and people around here know computers). Nowadays, I do supercomputing, so it was interesting to me to learn about the giant cross-country data pipelines they're working on.

Mike Griffin was NASA chief from 2005 to 2009. His resignation was accepted by Obama. (NASA chiefs always resign. If the new president wants them, he rejects their resignation. Unless they write another resignation saying, "no, really, I quit!", they stay on.) Recently, Obama has shaken up the space program by rejecting the Bush-era plan called Constellation which had set NASA's sights on the Moon. Griffin is, not surprisingly, pissed about this. IMHO, Obama is screwing up cancelling yet another NASA program. NASA is plagued by programs in which billions are spent and then the program is scrapped. Let the poor agency have some continuity!

Griffin's talk was about "systems engineering". Some of the things he hit on in the talk or in the Q/A afterwards were
- A book by a guy named Pirro (sp.?) called Normal Accidents. In systems engineering, you shouldn't focus on what is going to go right. You should focus on what can go wrong. Some accidents/errors can be predicted.
- He said: "All these damned requirements are causing high costs ... But desire to control costs has driven requirements." Requirements were something that drove me crazy as an engineer at Aerojet. So many requirements. You can hardly look at the hardware without getting a form signed. Certainly you can't make a common-sense change to a test procedure without running the gauntlet.
- Related to the concern about requirements, he related an anecdote in which a banker is talking to his son and says, "Son, sometimes you have to rise above principles."
- At Aerojet, we used to talk about Rube Goldberg designs which are overcomplicated contraptions put together of many disparate parts that end up doing some simple thing. Griffin cited it and mentioned that the saying comes fro Boy's Life. Wonder if any readers have heard of it before...
- "The only way to make complex decisions efficiently is by benign dictatorship." Yes, this is what we need for NASA. And the benign dictator must not be replaceable by each new president! Think we should choose head of NASA like we do supreme court justices.
- 2 million people died of scurvy until captain Cooke gave crew sourkraut. Exploration is dangerous. Griffin brought this up in response to a question about the danger of going to Mars. Everybody these days is afraid of the tiniest bit of radiation. There might be some radiation danger in going to Mars, but the danger is insignificant compared to the risk taken by millions of sailors in the age of ocean exploration.
- NASA has gotten more money in the last 15 years than the 15 years of Apollo in inflation adjusted dollars. This is an impressive figure. We (the US via NASA) have done some pretty cool stuff in space. But this fact does hint at the inefficiency of big, bureaucratic, "failure is not an option" NASA.

Now for the 3D Hubble IMAX show. Robots cannot possibly replace people in space when it comes to doing complex jobs. These astronauts depicted in Hubble3D were doing things that regular mechanics might do: leaning into funky positions and stretching to extract resistant bolts. They had to resort to brute force sometimes, breaking parts off when they just wouldn't come off by usual means. (The near-earth space environment isn't easy on machinery.) Imagine trying to design and program a robot to fix your car. That kind of robotics is not in sight. Anyway, the 2009 mission improved Hubble's resolution dramatically. It has a fancier wide field camera than before, and several other failed components were replaced.

In a breathtaking sequence, the viewer is taken from the Solar System through the light-years of space into the Orion nebula.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula
There, viewers were shown a giant star at the center of the nebula. The star blasts the surrounding matter with interstellar wind, and often triggers star formation from clumps of gas. The clumps of gas, called proplyds can look like teardrop shapes in the wind.

This clump of gas in the Orion Nebula, imaged by the recently upgraded Hubble, is called a proplyd. It is described as a protoplanetary disk.

Hubble3D tried to engage J.Q. Public by harping on the theme that our space program (including NASA hardware like Hubble) is unlocking the secrets of the universe and, specifically, helping us home in on other life in the universe. I think it would be cool to find other life, don't get me wrong. But I think that our space program should be about using space to directly benefit humanity somehow. Granted, it's hard to see how ... just like it was hard to see how exploring the ocean would impact humanity. Further granted, discovering other life might benefit humanity in various ways. (E.g., we can ask them how to pull our heads out of our ass.)

My next space fix will be next Tuesday when Anita and I go to another lecture in the Seattle National Geographic Lecture series called Exploring Mars: Rovers of the Red Planet.

Barcelona -- Gaudi

2010-05-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

Day 6 -- Monday April 19th

We made friends with the guy at the desk at the Atlas Hotel, where we stayed while in Barcelona. He was an Indian transplant to Spain. Seems like Indians run a lot of businesses there. Anyway, this guy was very friendly and gave us lots of good directions and asked us to be safe, etc.

It was a very happy moment when we handed off the keys to the rental car. The line was incredibly long. When it was finally our turn, I realized we hadn't filled up for a hundred km or so. The guy said I could go fill it up and come back. No thanks... Turns out it was full enough anyway. Renting the car turned out to be a pretty good deal. Less than 40 euros/day.

One of the first things we saw (or heard, really) was a guy running down La Rambla screaming, apparently hot on the trail of somebody who'd just stolen something of his. "Policia! Policia!" he yelled. I couldn't tell exactly what happened, but it seems like he tackled the robber. Nice.

This day would be a big walking tour of Barcelona. We stopped and saw the Gaudi Museum from the outside. We hardly paid a single museum entry fee -- partly, we are cheap, but also, one could spend an awful lot of time in boring museums :) This guy, Gaudi, is a famous architect around these parts. He was an eccentric character and his architecture style fits with that.

Casa Battlo. Locally called House of Bones. Gaudy tended to design things with a bit of a spooky skeletal nature. Gaudi also famous for using no straight lines. Didn't use blueprints. Only sketches.

Stopped in a high-end cosmetics store called Kiehls which Anita likes and is cool because it has a Harley parked inside. They were nice enough to give us some free sample sunscreen. I could've bought some but the 40 euros seemed a little steep. On we went to the Sagrada Familia, which is a cathedral largely designed by Gaudi. His lack of blueprints was a tiny bit problematic for them on this complex structure. Gaudi died in 1926, but they're still trying to straighten it out.

Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral, still under construction. Good place for ping pong.

An interesting story about Gaudi is that he ended his life in penury, begging every rich person he knew for more money to finish his cathedral. He was hospitalized when he was hit by a streetcar. He was wearing ragged clothes, so, not recognizing the famous architect, they put him in the paupers' hospital. His friends found him the next day, but he insisted on staying in the poor people's hospital where he died a few days later. His primary benefactor, a guy named Guell, had died in 1918. The next place we visited required a few miles walk -- the Parc Guell. You can read about this and all of Gaudi's other stuff on the Wikipedia page about him

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Gaudí

where there are links to his major works including Parc Guell, Sagrada Familia, and Casa Batllo. Briefly, the Parc was designed initially to be a garden-oriented housing development for rich people. Didn't work out, so Barcelona made it a municipal garden.

Anita photgraphing the famous multicolored mosaic dragon. ("Mosaic" refers to the thousands of tiles that it's made from. This mosaic style is classic Gaudi.)

By the way, later, when we got to Madrid, Anita's friend Adam reminded me that Barcelona is the location of the story The Shadow of the Wind (Momma and Tess, you've read this...). Might've been fun to keep an eye out for some of the specific places in the book.

Next, we got lazy and took the metro back down to the waterfront where we walked another 5 miles. More on that later!

on the road to Barcelona part dos

2010-05-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

So now we're in Day 5 -- Sunday April 18th. We've left Pamplona and are on the way to Zaragoza. Lots of wind farms in the Spanish countryside here. Also some big solar arrays the likes of which I've never seen in the US.

When we arrived, we stopped into a place that sold good old pizza. Wow, was it nice to get something that was exactly what we expected. Plus, the place was showing the Monte Carlo tennis tournament final in which Rafael Nadal was finishing up his devastation of the competition there. (Unfortunately, because Nadal played so damned well in Monte Carlo and in his previous tournament or two, he was too tired to attend the Barcelona which I'll describe in a later entry.)

Zaragoza is a medium-sized city. Seemed to be a lot of large, unused infrastructure. (Wikipedia: Zaragoza hosted Expo 2008 in the summer of 2008, a World's Fair on water and sustainable development.) The thing that attracted our attention is the Aljafería Palace, built in the 11th century by the Moors. Christians took it over early in the 12th century.

Me standing under a pretty old Moorish arch

A courtyard with orange trees. Note the mathematical patterns in the architecture which is a hallmark of Muslim architecture in general.

Prior to and during the trip, I boned up on Spanish history some by reading the generous history section in my book, "National Geographic Traveler: Spain" which I think is a great guide.

Charlemagne (b. 742, d. 814) did a lot of fighting in NE Spain and established Catalunya as a buffer zone between Moslem Spain and Christian Europe. My dad pointed out to me an interesting bit of history that I hadn't heard or read before: Charlemagne attempted to conquer Zaragoza, but failed. Apparently, as he was heading, tail between legs, back to France, his rearguard took a lot of heat from Moslem/Moorish fighters. This event inspired the song of Roland which you can read about on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_Roland
One of the stranger parts of this epic poem/song, in which Roland is the hero, is that Roland, after his forces are demolished, blows an olifant (named after elephant .. it's made of an elephant's tusk) horn so hard that his head explodes and he dies.. Yikes!

A few hours later, we rolled into Barcelona. We drove up the main strip in Barcelona called La Rambla. With amazing ease, found a place to temporarily park and check in to our hotel. Parking at the hotel was interesting. For one thing, we had to drive around the block and a couple of crazy drivers nearly squashed our poor little Seat (and poor little us) when 3 lanes suddenly became only 2. I hit the brakes and the two vehicles on left and right came within inches of taking off the left and right side-view mirrors. Navigated onto the pedestrian-dominated side streets and went down the exit ramp into the parking area. They parked the car New York style -- that is, put it on a lift and moved it into an overhead car slot somewhere out of view. Barcelona is a very crowded place. After going out for a not very exciting dinner (we got stuck in a tourist trap type place), we hung it up for the night.

On the road to Barcelona (+more Picos)

2010-05-04T22:28:00.000-07:00

First, let's have a look at a few of Anita's pictures from the Picos / Casa La Xerra.

The flock of sheep that we rumbled on the way to the middle of nowhere destination that the iPhone picked.

Milo, the cute puppy, while he's waiting patiently at the door for somebody to throw him some scraps. He also likes to chase balls as if his life depended on it.

Our amazing breakfast.

Now. Continuing where we left off in the last entry, we headed to cave, Cueva de Tito Bustillo. We joined the tour group in the nick of time as they headed into the cave. As we headed into the bowels of the earth, it dawned on us that nobody on the tour, including the guide, spoke a word of English. We did glean a little bit: the guide showed everyone how to view the 25k year old paintings from various different angles, such that the relief allowed various different images to emerge. The cave walls were not flat like a usual canvas and the prehistoric people took advantage of that. There were also big painted stalagmites -- some of the earliest known phallic symbols present in the cave.

On we went to Bilbao. I've mentioned the roadways before and and Anita had a picture of a viaduct that I'll include now. Pretty serious infrastructure. No wonder Spain is doing almost as badly as Greece these days...

Viaduct going up in N. Spain

We got there and parked in "libre" parking. I looked up this word and it means "free". Great! Well, I had my doubts... We walked out to see the main attraction in Bilbao: the Guggenheim Museum which was designed by the famous starchitect (star architect), Frank Gehry. Surrounding the Museum itself are various cool pieces of artwork.

Anita with a flower dog

A scary spider outside the Museum

Anita and I with the Guggenheim in the background

We basically got thrown out when I started photographing the inside of the building which is against the rules (apparently .. hey, I can't read Spanish). Arriving at our car, we realized that, indeed, "libre" didn't mean "free". It meant "available" .. but it was only a few Euros.

Having knocked out the Guggenheim by late afternoon, we headed on to Pamplona, a city about 1/3 the way to Barcelona from Bilbao. From Pamplona, we'd only have another 4 or 5 hrs driving to reach Barcelona. The guidebook said that Pamplona was kind of a sleepy little town. So we picked a cheap hotel in the middle of the city. Once we arrived, we realized that the guidebook had lied. It was Saturday night and Pamplona was happening. This wasn't what we needed that particular Saturday night. After being stuck in a people-jam (and people are harder to rumble than sheep) for 15+ minutes, and hunting for a parking spot for half an hour, we managed to bring our little Seat (the car make as you'll recall) to a halt. Then we headed into the thick of things to look at the cheap hotel. Well, it turns out that it was too cheap. Like Prabaker said in Shantaram, one can find "a cheap hotel, a very cheap hotel, a too much cheap hotel, and even such a cheap hotel that nobody in a right minds is ever staying there also." With its grungy single bed, shared bathrooms, and flophouse appearance, this was one of the latter. We went back and stayed at a 75 Euro/night place near where we'd parked. We also got a fine dinner at a place I noticed right by the parking spot we found. For the first time in Spain, I think, the service was fantastic. There was this 18 year old kid who was a service enthusiast and treated us very well. We hit the sack happy that night if a little wasted.

The next morning, we woke up and got breakfast at a cafe where Ernest Hemingway used to write in the main Plaza in Pamplona. In his book, The Sun Also Rises, an annual Pamplona fiesta is the backdrop. After breakfast, on we went. Our next (brief) stop before reaching Barcelona would be Zaragoza, named after Caesar Augusta. Say Caesar Augusta really fast with a Spanish accent and you hear "zaragoza"... ¡hasta luego!

rural Spain; Picos de Europa

2010-04-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

(In the last entry I made you click on the Picasaweb links. This time, I inserted photos for you. Do peruse the whole photo set at
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20100413SpainLoRes#.)

Nothing too exciting happened on the way through rural Spain on our way to Casa La Xerra. A couple of observations:
* The countryside looked healthy. From the airplane on the way into A Coruna, the organic look of the agriculture -- small fields interspersed by equally large forests -- looked nothing like typical agricultural land in the US. On the drive we saw a lot of that up close. Also, as I noticed when I was in Switzerland in 1998, the cows there just look fatter and healthier.
* The freeway construction there in northern Spain is pretty intense. They're shooting for US-style gigantic roadways. Evidently, some Spaniards are not too happy about it.

Having plugged our destination into my trusty (ahem..) iPhone, we navigated our way into the hills north of the Picos de Europa. Having left the main paved roads now, we wound up some gravel roads, taking various turns according to the Phone. The gravel roads became dirt roads, and we began wondering if we were making a mistake. After driving through a flock of sheep (like you sometimes have to drive through buffalo in Yellowstone), we reached a dead end -- exactly the location marked on the Phone. Great. This was certainly not it. It was some kind of obscure picnic area. It was 8 pm by this time. The situation could be salvaged. Looked up directions on the Casa La Xerra website. Translated the Spanish and had some rough idea how to get there. Drove as directed. Still couldn't find it. Began asking random roadside Spaniards. My Spanish sucks. Their English sucks worse. Finally broke down and showed a guy the website on the Phone. He had a eureka moment -- "Oh!! Casa La Sierra!" I had been pronouncing it Casa La ex-erra .. not sierra. One of his friends was good with ad lib sign language and explained how to get there. Finally we made it!

By this time I was starting to feel like a mute. I couldn't talk to anybody (except of course Anita). Usually I joke around with people I encounter and I couldn't do that... I figured communicating with the owner of La Xerra would be like that. Ana met us and was happy to see us. She had a little dog, Milo, following her around. He was a non-barking, big personality, little dog. We talked in broken Spanish and English for a few minutes, then she revealed that she speaks French! Boy, was I excited. I could finally talk to a stranger. It was surprising how voluble I could be in French when it was the only way to communicate. Ana and I talked about hiking the nearby Picos. She showed me a map and pointed out some ideas. We dropped our stuff off in the room which was gorgeous.

Here is a view from the window (which doesn't show the room).

She told us about her favorite restaurant down the hill. We headed there and were greeted by 15 suspicious stares when we walked in the door. These were a bunch of locals. Playing cards. Smoking. Oh well, we were hungry so sat down. They took their time serving us. Finally did and I took a sip of my beer. Tasted .. ok, but something seemed weird. I read the label -- "cerveza sin alcohol." My spanish is poor. But "sin", I was pretty sure, meant "without." Funny they seemed to be playing tricks on me. I took the beer to the counter and got one with alcohol... Food was not too bad. Then we got out of there.

Day 3 -- Friday April 16

The next day, our hiking expedition was fun. The drive was winding, and Anita felt a little queasy by the time we got to the top, weaving along a narrow road with sheer dropoffs. Scenery near the bottom of the hike involved green rolling hills and sheep/cattleherders structures.

Scenery in the Picos

Our high point was near this hiker's cabin.

There was a nice dog to greet us there.

Clouds moved in and a bit of rain started falling, so we retreated. On our way down, we stopped in a little tourist spot that revolves around a shrine to the Virgin Mary established in 722. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Covadonga
Had my search for the truth ended? Here was a holy place where they worship a virgin mother! Impressive. However, judging by the tourist riff-raff around the place, this was not the truth.

That evening, I took a few photos around Casa La Xerra.

(I love this one.)

Ana made dinner for us that night. It was like Thanksgiving. She brought out one dish after another. A preposterous amount of food. Fish soup. Squid in its own ink. I forget all the dishes. Then fruit salad for desert. Most of this stuff from her own garden. She raises squid in a pool out back. Kidding. Breakfasts were decadent too. Bread, cheese. Honey from her beehives. Ana was an interesting lady. Had spent 20 years in Geneva, Switz. doing "natural medicine". Was raised just up the road from La Xerra. Dairy farmering family. New EU rules have made it tough to be a smalltime dairy farmer apparently. I think it has to do with the Common Agricultural Policy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

Day 4 -- Saturday April 17

The next morning, we shipped out. Our first stop would be a cave with prehistoric artwork. Ana had recommended it and arranged for us to be in a tour. This sounded goood, but I seem to have forgotten about our lack of Spanish... To be continued...

Truth-stalking in Spain

2010-04-27T22:14:00.000-07:00

I stalked some truth in Spain with Anita from April 15th to April 23rd. This is the first entry of several in which I'll try to capture some of the adventure and fun we had there.

For pics, see the albums involving Spain at

http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice

Only my pics are there right now, but I will soon be adding Anita's. You may find some of the comments on the pics interesting, so take note of those.

Day 1 -- Tuesday to Wednesday April 13 / 14

Took off from Minneapolis on this transatlantic journey -- my first trip away from North America since 1998 when I went to Switzerland -- and first landed in Amsterdam. I guess I recall a little of the wonder of being abroad and a little about how challenging it was. Without much difficulty, I connected from Amsterdam to Madrid and then from Madrid to A Coruna. The landing in A Coruna was kinda exciting: the flight was pretty empty, but for some dumb reason, I took my assigned seat at the window with the other two seats in my row taken by a retirement-age Spanish couple. On the descent into A Coruna, the pilot must've been having a little fun because it was like being on a fighter jet in a dogfight. We swooped this way and that at extreme bank angles. When we landed, the lady beside me puked. Great. Why hadn't I taken a seat in an empty row??!!

Met Anita there at the airport quite easily and we headed back to her hotel room. I was wasted of course from traveling for the past 20 hours, but I was stoked about going to see a 2000 year old Roman lighthouse in A Coruna. So we did that. Cool place. See

http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20100413SpainLoRes#5464678496352214002

Wind was blowing like a Republican opposing finance reform at the top. We're talking Mt Rainier conditions. A Coruna is situated at the far NW corner of Spain. Anyway, view was nice and was fun to see this ancient lighthouse (but I must say it was a little tough to tell what was authentically 2000 years old in this significantly remodeled structure).

We got some early dinner that evening. Well, in Spain, they don't start dinner at restaurants until 9 pm, so 7 pm is "early" there and we had to just get "tapas" or, as Seth dubbed it when we got tapas at a Mexican restaurant one time in DC, "tap-ass" (implying the tapping of your ... pocketbook when buying tapas). The problem with ordering tapas in Spain wasn't really the cost, but rather the total unpredictability of what you're going to get. I had my spanish dictionary, but couldn't usually figure out what was coming at restaurants. Usually, it would involve huge amounts of cheese and some bread which isn't too bad.

Day 2 -- Thursday April 15

Rent car. Car rental guy had a British accent. Said he'd grown up in London where his folks had moved to get decent paying jobs. Car make was Seat. Probably pronounced like the first part of Seattle. But we pronounced it like a chair-type seat just for fun. It was a typical narrow European car. Ran well. Had tiny engine. Stick shift. So we took off. The wrong way. Traffic was bad in A Coruna. Plus I was driving for the first time in Spain. Their roundabouts are free-for-alls. Another crazy thing is that they don't have yellow lines for two-way roads. Sometimes roads are one way. Sometimes two way. Always the same white lines. Aaaaaahhhhh!! Busted out iPhone and got straightened out. Anita is an excellent navigator and without too much effort, we got on track for our first destination, 50 miles away, Santiago de Compostela, where there is a famous cathedral which pilgrams hike from the Pyrenees across Spain to see. See

http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20100413SpainLoRes#5464678576001538594

We enjoyed the cathedral. The Spanish seem to be pretty religious folks in general. There were less tourists and more local and visiting Spanish people than I expected. In the cathedral, they were taking the ceremony pretty seriously and I couldn't handle the chanting very long. I/we enjoyed the nearby expansive park a lot more. Nice day. Weather was quite good for us in general during this trip. 70 deg F highs. 50ish lows.

Got back on the road to cover the 200 miles to reach the B&B-type place (rural house) that I'd booked for us for two nights (Thursday and Friday nights). We had quite an adventure finding the joint. Check back here soon for that story and more!!!

Groundhog Day 2010 (my 32nd birthday)

2010-02-02T19:12:00.001-08:00

(revised/expanded Feb. 5, 2010)

I went to the office today and sat in on one of the two classes I'm taking this quarter. Then I did a little thinking and tinkering on my research proposal which I'm presenting in March. Then I just slacked off the rest of the day! And, for a change, it was a very beautiful sunny day. I rode to school, but forgot my iPhone which I am addicted to. So I rode my bike to my house then back to campus where I took a bus downtown to meet Anita. But on my ride back to the office, I took a detour through the Union Bay Natural Area which is an ex-landfill which has been covered up and made into a sanctuary (for birds primarily). I saw a turtle and a Great Blue Heron:

My GBH picture is pretty poor but here's one that one of my colleagues (Alan Glasser) took a few weeks ago. It is a fairly awesome picture. He has a very fancy Canon 20D digital camera and a pretty nice telephoto lens to go with it. These herons are incredibly tolerant of close human presence.

Anita took me out to lunch downtown in Pike Place market to a fancy french restaurant. We ate something called la raclette. It involves a petite grill that you simmer cheese on and then put the melted cheese on some ham and potatoes that are served on the side. Tasty! The authentic French waiters were pretty funny with all their "voilas" and stuff.

We've been wanting to go up Seattle's historic Smith Tower for a while, so I decided my bday was a good day to give it a go. When we got there, they said we couldn't go up because, in the winter, they're closed during the week. Anita gave them a smile and puppy dog eyes and they let us go right up. There was a sweet old black man operating the elevator. Everything in the place has delicate architectural touches that remind you that it was built in 1909 (see http://www.smithtower.com/History.html). The view from the top is pretty spectacular my shots don't do it justice but ...

Anita on top.

The view looking south past the gladiator arenas (the football and baseball stadia) at Rainier.

View looking north. The Space Needle is visible looking down 2nd Ave.

After doing a little more work that afternoon, we burned the last of the daylight by taking a stroll through the Arboretum -- another one of Seattle's big wonderful parks. We went to my favorite spot there, an old gazebo. That evening, we both did more work (alas), but then watched the Lost season premiere. It was good. The chaos in the show (in terms of time travel) is getting out of control :) Anita made tasty coconut cupcakes sweetened with honey which were very tasty. She gave me a copy of Open, Andre Agassi's biography. So far I've found it fascinating! The next day, my friend G gave me the same book with a very nice handwritten inscription.

It was a day I wouldn't mind repeating a few times. But not as many times as Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day.

Rainier ascent via Emmons-Winthrop

2009-08-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

Rainier ascent via Emmons-Winthrop

Aug. 8-10, 2009 (Saturday thru Monday)

Eric Meier, Seth Meier, Cihan (the Living Legend) Akcay, (Pistol) Pete Norgaard, Ralph Swanson, Kaitlin Murdock

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090809RainierEmmonsWinthrop#

Seth flew in Friday night late as hell as usual. We started out with the game plan of departing early on Saturday morning and going for a summit and return to vehicles on Sunday. We did manage to leave *relatively* early, but the Sunday return to vehicle was not to be. The mountain is too damned rough this time of year for that. We got out of Seattle at about 9 AM (early, huh?). Got on the trail by about 12:30. The wildflowers were gorgeous down low in Glacier Basin.

Seth, G and I were a little behind Pistolé, Ralph, and Kaitlin. We caught up to ‘em just before we hit the Inter Glacier. (It is called “Inter” because it’s between the Emmons and Winthrop Glaciers.) The Inter is a big mess right now. It’s like a mostly melted ice cube sitting in a big tray and collecting a helluva lot of rock and dirt.

Climbing it required crampons and a lot of care to avoid slipping which would mean a very unpleasant ride down the rough ice/rock surface. The thought of climbing down was rather unpleasant. In the early summer, it’s cake: the whole basin is filled with a big snowfield and you just glissade down. We made the top of the Inter at about 6 pm. At Camp Curtiss, we traversed down onto the Emmons with no trouble. (There is a fairly clear trail.) On the Emmons:

Made camp at 8:30 as dark fell. Upper camp was full on this busy Saturday night and we had to clamber down to the snow below the exposed solid-ground campsites and join a couple of guided groups. Chill set in as we dug out spots, threw up tents and melted drinking water. I believe Jupiter was the beautiful object in the sunset.

The guided groups didn’t appreciate us crashing into camp. Some curses could not be contained as we fought across a little mote between the rock and snow/ice. Somebody told us to quiet down (they were getting to sleep in prep for early departure). This is common courtesy at such a camp and they didn’t even need to tell us. They arose at 2 AM (an hour before our planned wakeup time) and started raising hell and talking like they were drinking beer in their back yards.

We were up and at ‘em at 3 AM and actually hit the trial at 5, all roped up. There was the red team: me, Seth and Ci (pronounced “G”). There was the green team: Pistol Pete, Ralph and Kaitlin. (Our ropes were roughly red and green.) My buddy Reid two of his pals had started a couple of hours ahead of us. We stayed in touch with radios. It was nice to have them ahead to tell us about any route difficulties. G as we got started:

We enjoyed the sunrise on the way up to 11.5k,. So beautiful. Venus was shining bright. I caught this shot (Anita's favorite) just as the sun rose.

Mt Stuart and Glacier Peak showed themselves in the distance. By 11.5k, Ralph and Kaitlin, who had not really trained for this trip since they were roped into it on short notice, were pretty worked and decided to hang it up. It was also at this point that Pete and I started throwing our gear into deep crevasses. I donated my fairly new (et un peu chèr) sunglasses to the crevasse gods and Pete contributed his helmet to make me feel better about myself (real slick; the good news was that rockfall was not really a concern on the upper mountain). Fortunately, I had a pair of ski goggles to use as a backup. Here's a shot of the upper mountain from about 11.5k about a half-hour after sunset:

Pete roped into the red team and on we went. At this point, the route goes up “the Corridor” and then turns right beneath gnarly crevasses. We took a break at about 12.5k to melt water. It took what seemed to be an eternity to melt enough to get going again. But good to be hydrated. It was toasty that afternoon and we were sweating heavily. On the way to Liberty Saddle at 13.5k, the route weaved this way and that around broken snow bridges. No technical climbing was required at all on the route. After reaching the saddle, the walk to the top is simple. As usual, you just put one foot in front of the other, taking one full breath per step and just resign yourself to the grueling task. Eventually you end up with a pretty nice view.

Descent was decent. Hard on the knees/ankles. Seth was raring to haul ass and I had to hold him back a little. We got back at sundown with a half hour to spare before pitch dark. Slept well and felt great the next morning. We found a way to descend without touching the Inter Glacier. We asked around at camp and found that you can just descend the ridge upon which Mount Ruth sits. It worked out nicely.

Yellowstone (Fairyland Basin)

2009-07-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

SLC / Yellowstone (late June 2009)

THis post is quite late. We did this trip 3 weeks ago!

I made a visit to SLC where we celebrated Seth's bday, attended the wedding of one of one of Seth's best buds from high school and college days (Ben Passey), then headed to Yellowstone with my dad and a buddy of mine from here at UW (named Christian, who is actually back in Denmark now). Selected Yellowstone pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/200906YellowstoneSelected#.

It was fun to get together with all of Seth's old SLC crew for his birthday celebration and for Passey's wedding. The wedding was fun. I got into some interesting conversations. Talked to a Swedish Jewish woman who told me a bunch of history of holidays (like Hannukah and Christmas). Also talked to an older couple about global warming (which often comes up when i tell people that i do research in fusion science), and about the justification for our government support of NASA. We also got together with a few of my old buddies (Mano and Poore). Seth and I hung out a lot with eachother's friends...

My sister Tess just did a great post about the family trip on her blog,
http://tessothy.blogspot.com/2009/07/family-visit.html (pictures courtesy my mom).

We arrived in Ystone Monday morning. The crowd was horrendous. I almost lost the handle while driving the big Ram pickup and simply drove over some of the tourists' cars. But Christian's danish etiquette restrained me.

We had a lot of interesting conversations, many of which did not end up in wrestling matches. As i've mentioned, Chris is danish. But he seems to have had a bad reaction to the heavy dose of liberal social policies in Demnark. He largely agrees with Libertarian ideas. We had a heated discussion about whether it would be better to let the free market handle Yellowstone or not. Chris thinks that private conservation efforts would be sufficient to protect the Park and all of our other protected wild areas in the US. My dad and I are fairly convinced that capitalists would gobble the place up and spit it out. Another interesting discussion was about gun control. In demnark, handguns aren't allowed. A shopkeeper who'd been robbed several times eventually got ahold of a gun and shot a robber. The shopkeeper was thrown in jail. We talked about when somebody like the shopkeeper is gonna just snap and how everybody has a breaking point beyond which any morals or compulsion to follow laws goes out the window. Christian pointed out that there's a fundamental question about how much power governments should have, arguing that they will be inefficient because they aren't part of the free market. I pointed out that governments were established essentially through free market forces anyway. So it IS the free market keeping Yellowstone alive!

Lots of beautiful scenes in Yellowstone. We finally made it to the seldom-visited Fairyland Basin. It was quite a slog through a fog of mosquitos and mile upon mile of lodgepole pine downfall. But the fantastic thermal features along the way, plus the Basin itself made the slog worthwhile.

Volcano #3 (Mt. Adams)

2009-06-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

I've made it to the top of three volcanoes around here now. First Hood, then Rainier (twice), then Adams last weekend. Did this trip with Reid, Veronika (a friend from the UW climbing club) and several of Reids buddies (one of whom [Bill] toughed it out to the top with us).

This was a spectacular trip. Gorgeous weather, good friends, and to use a UW climbing club phrase, good times. We climbed the South Spur. I had to tow a tree out of the way as we drove to the TH at gray daylight. We got on the trail at 7 am, and hit the summit just before 4 pm. TH is at 4500 ft. Summit is at 12300. Nearly 8000 vertical. The most vertical footage I've ever done in a day. But we did get to cheat and ski down. Took about 3 hrs down.

Here's a google earth image of the route we did (GPS trace from Veronika's GPS).

See all pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090606MtAdams#

Saw some of Veronika's fellow Russians near the summit and they posed with their flag. The dudes joked with me that they were meeting there for a secret KGB meeting. I joked back asking where their Kalashnikovs were. They responded quite seriously, "Kalashnikovs are quite heavy. Nearly 10 kilos. We would never carry those up here."

Here's our summit shot.

and a picture of my skis on top :)

Veronica took some nice pics of me on the way down the SW chute. The route was spectacular. At the top, it was a bit icy, but below about 11,000 ft, the snow was softened by the sun. The best part of the chute had snow of very uniform consistency that let you sink in about a foot with each jump turn. See the video too in the pictures on Picasa.

Rainier -- On top again.

2009-05-27T21:20:00.001-07:00

This Rainier trip went pretty smoothly. Me and Ci and another guy named Aaron (also in my research group) were the crew. In a 2-day effort, we tagged the summit via the Ingraham Direct route and returned to Seattle. Left Friday morning early. Got back Saturday night. I'll sprinkls some photos in this post, but if you want 'em all, see
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090523RainierWithCihanAndAaron#
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090523RainierCihansPics#

We did a glacier skills training day the week before and pics from that are at
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090516GlacierTravelTraining#

We got up to Muir in 5.5 hrs. Left Paradise at about 10:30 AM and made it to camp at 4. We chilled on the heli pad for a while in the sun.

The shelter had plenty of room. There were lots of guided climbers, but they set up their own tent sites. Here's a nice shot of the camp from above:

A guy had fallen into a crevasse the previous day. His team (including his guide) arrested his fall and he was able to climb out on his own power using his axe and crampons. He was petrified though, and headed back down. I talked to him on his way down past us. He said he'd need some therapy, then he'd come back to the mountain for more (I think he's a big pansy for turning around .. was he that shocked that he had to use his equipment? Why did he think he was roping up?? to look cool?).

We got up the next day at 1 AM and departed at 2. Beautiful morning climbing. Venus and Jupiter were up and bright. Here's a pic at sunrise:

Made the summit at 9 AM (7 hrs climb).

Hung out there for 1.5 hrs. G and Aaron felt like dogshit. I felt decent if not chipper. They felt better once we descended. Descent only took 3 hrs. Hung out at camp for about 4 hrs (until 5 pm) and then headed down to car where we arrived at 9 pm. I admit that I did feel like hell once I got back down to Camp Muir and was happy to get going to lower altitudes that evening instead of hanging out for the night.

You'll notice in my pics that I tried some night photography. For example, here's a shot of St. Helens with Portland lighting up the night sky behind it.

I actually hauled my full-sized tripod up to Muir. In retrospect, it was perhaps a mistake. It is a long way up there... But it was fun to have it and I learned that I had a little more to learn about night photography. For example, I had the ISO set way too low.

We met a badass guy who's been climbing Rainier and other NW volcanoes for 17 years. He said he did the Kautz as his first route on rainier with his dad back in 1995. Said route was vastly different then. No significant ice climbing. All snow. Hard to imagine, but i guess it's true. Anyway, this guy was soloing the mountain on skis. Has done solos on skis numerous times. He showed me where the climbing register is stowed under a rock ("register rock") near the summit and I signed in this time.

I bathed myself in sunscreen and avoided sunburn altogether this time. We brought far more food than we needed. But we were planning on 3 days + emergency food for 4 days. I ate mostly my usual fare of ... clif bars. However, i did down a fair amount of freeze dried food, snickers bars, and dried fruit. Oh and I did have some power bar goo packets which are good quick energy. We didn't have to boil water on summit day. Just carried about 1.5 quarts. Ate a little snow to tide us over until we reached Muir again.

I kept my heart rate at or below 120 primarily. I wouldn't want to push it over 130. I was happy that on the final ascent, I was only running 110, and my pulse was calm on top.

Victoria (followup)

2009-04-30T07:43:00.001-07:00

I left out a few fun things.

On our bus ride back from the Gardens, the bus was jam-packed. Ani and I found a nice open-looking spot near the back door. I ignored the yellow stripe and settled in. At the first stop, we found that the back door automatically (!) opens. It continued to attack us for the remaining 20 stops until we got home. We learned how to properly defend ourselves.

We went to dinner one night at a local pub. The local color was interesting. In particular, we sat next to two older (or just old?) couples. They had fun conversations about tennis (i was stoked) and politics. One lady complimented Anita and I on being a nice couple that reminded her of she and her husband. It was very sweet. Plus, her husband was a Catholic priest, so i think it was a good sign.

Anita challenged me with a couple of puzzles on the trip. The first I won't describe here except to post this link:
door puzzle
Momma and Tess, if you read this before your other (clearly worse) halves, you can challenge them with it. Be careful though, this almost wrecked Anita and I's friendship. I was so sure I was right. But she was the one asking the puzzle question! What an idiot I can be.

The other puzzle is given here. You're gonna have fun with this one. I'll post the answer later. I'll also respond to comments if you're stumped.

A bad guy buries three other guys up to their necks in sand as shown in the figure below. He then blindfolds them and puts hats on each of them as shown. It is critical that only the guy in back can see two hats. The middle guy can only see the hat on the front guy. The front guy can't see anything. The bad guy takes the blindfold off and says: you each have hats on. There are either a) 2 black hats and 1 white hat or b) two white hats and 1 black hat. Without speaking to each other, if one of you can tell me what kind of hat you have on, I'll let you all live. Otherwise you die. [edit: If one of you guesses what color your hat is, but is wrong, you all die.]

How do they survive? (They do survive.)

Victoria

2009-04-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

Pictures -- http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090426VictoriaWithAnita#.
Anita probably got some better shots than me that I can post later.

Anita and I had a great time going to Victoria last weekend. We caught the Victoria Clipper at 8 am Saturday morning. The tix were $90 round trip per person. Kinda expensive, but when I calculated how much the gas cost for the 200 passengers, it's not too bad. Canadian customs decided to allow another visit by one of the notorious Meier brothers. (They harass Seth and I every time we enter Canada because of a little border-crossing incident back in 1997 when their dogs thought our vehicle smelled a little like a marijuana... well OK, that dog's marijuana detection system was probably totally overloaded and permanently damaged. Anyway, we made it in.) Hopped on a bus to get to the famous Butchart Gardens. They were indeed beautiful. But a little smaller and more manicured than I expected. And fairly crowded. But it was nice to see.

We saw one of the street performers in the harbor. These young acrobatic guys put on little shows and are usually hilarious and pretty impressive (juggling torches, etc.). Had a nice dinner and the hotel provided a pretty deluxe night's sleep. Next day, we rented a car and drove an hour to a nearby coast hike. There were some pretty spectacular trees. Especially right on the coast where they hadn't been logged. There were a couple of downed trees that happened to run down the fall line and were turned into quite useful staircases. It would've been nice to spend even more time walking, but a 5-hr hike was pretty nice. We had to hurry to get back for the 5 pm ferry back to Seattle. Talked to some interesting people on the ferry. A Swedish guy who was pretty excited about fusion energy. A couple of French girls who helped me "progresser mon francais". The boat ran into something halfway back to Seattle. Whack! Thud thud thud thud konk. She came to a halt. They pulled the log (hopefully they didn't hit a whale and pretend it was just a log) out of the water intake and we were able to keep going. Delay wasn't too bad. Overall 'twas a smooth trip to Canadia. Oh -- the report wouldn't be complete without mentioning the "Victoria Bars" that Anita baked for the trip. Wow. They are made with crumbled graham crackers with a sorta pecan-pie-ish filling... mmmmm...

Barack's in ... & Ski trips

2009-01-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

First of all I'd like to say GO BARACK! I thought his speech was fairly appropriate. I only wish that, at the end, instead of just saying "God bless America" he would've said "God bless America, bless all the other nations in the world, and bless the planet itself."

Did two trips last weekend. One was with my buddy Peter up to Marmot Pass in the SE Olympic mtns. Stayed Friday night at a little motel in Quilcene. Took off at 0530 and got on the trail at 0700. Hit snow so couldn't drive to TH. Had to stop 4 miles short (4!) of the TH. Hopped on skis and rounded the first corner... then took skis off and trekked along bare road for a mile or so. Snow was off and on until somewhat higher elevations. Dammit. From the formal TH to the Pass is 5 miles. 9 miles up. Whew. But we pulled it off. Pete was committed to doing an ass-kicking trip. He got his wish. Beautiful views from up top. Returned to vehicle at 1730. I was quite blistered by the end of the day. Pete was snowshoeing and used his hiking boots so had an easier time in the bare spots. But skis saved me some energy for significant stretches, so was about equally difficult i guess.

This pic shows the remnant debris from a big avalanche coming down Buckhorn mountain. As you see it's quite melted down now tho.

Here's a pic looking down the valley we'd just hiked up. Beautiful clear view of Cascades on this fairly cold day. Glacier peak visible at left in distance.

A pic of me at the top looking west from the Pass.

A pic of Pete, exhausted, at the Pass.

The other trip was one that Orli organized. We snowshoed/skied in a fairly popular area up near Snoqualmie Pass. Slava (the postdoc i work with) and Ci came along with several of Orli's other friends. The trip was short but sweet. It was pretty socked in so we couldn't enjoy much scenery, but it was nice to get out. And at least this trail was totally snow covered. Wow. Had 4 dogs along with us. One little-bitty dog was running around harassing the bigger dogs (2 golden retrievers and a siberian husky). Fortunately the big dogs were not hungry and did not eat the little dog as a snack. My blistered feet were plenty happy to keep it down to a 3 hr round trip.

Here's a shot of me and Ci.

Here's an artsy picture of Orli.

plasma school

2009-01-12T20:57:00.000-08:00

Down at UCLA, I enjoyed another 6-day plasma science winter school. (I previously attended in 2007.) Plasma science is mysterious, but when you couple good theory (pencil and paper work) with the enormous computing power that's we're developing. We covered several topics, listed below, but the funnest was probably the astrophysics.
* Learned something about how magnetic field is generated on large scales -- earth's magnetic field; galaxies' magnetic fields; magnetic fields in the universe in general.
* Learned some new stuff about turbulence and associated heat transfer in both astrophysics and in fusion devices.
* Learned more about shocks in fluids and in plasmas.

It's hard to convey how neat some of the computer simulations were, but here is a picture of one of the sims. The full sized movies (which I can't round up online right now) and images were more impressive.

Here's a picture of the aftermath of Tycho's supernova, the shell of which is a plasma shock wave:

Here are some pictures of the crab nebula. It has a pulsar at its core. Image in optical spectrum on left. Infrared (?) taken by Hubble on right.

Now the Crab nebula in xray:

Met lots of cool people. The U Wisc Madison crew was especially fun. We went out one night and ended up hanging out at one of the plasma labs where we drank a few beers and some British guys showed us how to play cricket -- the game seems quite strange to me.

Had an afternoon off on Wednesday. Went down to the beach to enjoy the 70 deg weather. I jogged from Santa Monica to Venice and back. At sunset, I took this photo of Ci using some rings. I'd never seen this kind of set of rings before. Some kids were doing some spectacular acrobatics on them...

Note the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier in the background. It was fun to ride that.

One evening Ci and I went to the nice outdoor track at UCLA. I ran a mile in 5:53. I was shooting for 6 min. I incorrectly calculated that I needed to run four laps at 1:20 per lap. Because I aimed for this pace (which would've given me a 5:20 mile), I managed to average 1:28 per lap... :) Then I did a 100 meter sprint to see how slow I am. On the first try, I set a new world record at 9.5 sec. Then we realized I hadn't run quite far enough. My time was 13.7 sec. Not bad.

At sunset that eve, I didn't see it, but some people saw a "green flash" at sunset. On my flight home, I looked for the flash, but evidently conditions weren't right. I did get this cool pic tho:

UT Christmas

2009-01-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

My 2 week break in UT was wonderful. Skied my legs to jello at Solitude two days -- one with my dad and the other with an old college pal, Manolakis. Mano and I relished cutting lines in the slopes that could be seen easily from the lift.

Mano at Solitude catching a snowflake.

Happy thoughts before a fabulous powder run at Solitude:

We did numerous x-country ski tours. In SLC, we skied up Milcreek where we could take our pack of 3 wild dogs (well, really 2 wild dogs plus Howie who is most certainly not wild, but rather a dangerously accurate licker). In Roosevelt, we skied a few different places. Twice to an old oil drill site where there is a drill pipe sticking up, hence the name "stickey-up".

The white bird droppings on top of the drill pipe stickey-up really topped off this wonderful picture of Tim:

Steve and I did an ass kicker backcountry trip to a secret stash of bristlecone pine trees which live to near 5000 yrs old.

Me with a young bristlecone pine:

I really enjoyed using my new AT (alpine touring) ski setup for all of the skiing. Excellent performance. Garmont boots, Shuksan skis, Dynafit bindings.

I tried to fatten myself up on all the wonderful food my mom provided. We played a couple of games of chess, both of which were action packed. I whooped everyone's ass at scrabble (probably a holdover of skills from my spelling bee days) a couple of times.

My dad in his holiday best:

Instinct to Explore -- Chapter 1

2008-12-31T20:21:00.000-08:00

This is the first entry in a planned series of entries relating some of my experiences with Space Transport Corporation, a company that I cofounded with a fellow engineer, Phil Storm, from Aerojet. We founded the company in 2002 with our sights set on the X Prize.

The text should stand alone, but pictures are included at the end.

-------

Human beings have thrived on this planet because of an insatiable curiosity – an endless drive to learn and explore. This trait has led to a remarkable knowledge of and ability to manipulate our environment – perhaps to our own detriment if we are not careful! Exploration of the various corners of earth’s land took humanity a long time. We finished it off just in the last century by standing atop the highest mountains and planting flags on the north and south poles.

Since Orville and Wilbur Wright’s famous 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk [1], we have mastered air flight. This mastery was given a big boost with the legendary solo crossing of the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh [2]. Any kid who has read and failed to be inspired by Lindbergh’s book The Spirit of Saint Louis should receive medical evaluation. This crossing won him the $25,000 Orteig Prize – a hefty sum in 1927. The prize had been on the table since 1919. Aviation was in its infancy and realistic competition did not begin until 1924. Aviation saw rapid advance in the 1920s and 1930s and played a crucial role in World War II. Commercial airline service began in the 1950s and is now commonplace – about a billion people fly each year.

Next came the challenge of exploring outer space. Robert Goddard was the preeminent pioneer of rocketry [3]. The idea that space could be explored was generally considered ludicrous. In 1920 The New York Times wrote an editorial related to Goddard’s early work and stated that Goddard, because of his confidence that rocket propulsion would work outside of our atmosphere, "seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." Incidentally, the now famous Lindbergh was intrigued by Goddard’s work and in 1929 became a friend and supporter. Financing was tough to find after the stock market crash of 1929. It was Lindbergh who greased the skids for the Guggenheim family to fund Goddard’s research ($100,000 over 4 years). It turns out that Goddard was right, Newton’s laws do hold true in outer space; we saw Sputnik orbit in 1957 and Apollo 11 put us on the moon in 1969. Unlike the aviation experience, space travel has not become commonplace. In fact, we have not returned to the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. NASA has sent probes to the outskirts of the solar system, put rovers on and satellites around Mars, and played a key role in developing satellite networks in orbit. The ISS has been interesting although the overall profitability (i.e. the value of the knowledge gained vs. the cost) is questionable. But why haven’t we cultivated a large human (or robotic) presence beyond earth orbit? Because there has been no clear commercial incentive.

To mention a few of the benefits we enjoy because of our spacefaring capability, we have satellite TV, worldwide cell phone service, and GPS technology which is crucial to our commercial aviation network and to our militaries, and space observation capability that lets us feel the pulse of our planet’s ecosystem. The commercial spacecraft that launch the satellites required for these technologies are effective and cheap enough to represent only a small part of the total expense of the satellite services. However, as Einstein showed, all things are relative, and something may be cheap relative to worldwide satellite TV, but not relative to other transportation costs like air travel. It costs $10,000 per pound to put something in orbit.

Space exploitation is an appropriate and eventually imperative goal for humanity. If we are to continue our intellectual growth we need to explore and understand the broader cosmos, beginning with the solar system. Clearly, significant population increases must take place off of this planet. Furthermore, if we want to survive an asteroid impact we must have one or both of significant capability to deflect the asteroid, or a second independent population center (on Mars for example). In the *very* long run, we should think about bailing out of the solar system when the sun goes red giant.

A space tourism industry would generate the research and development money needed to build a robust and economical space transportation system. Only then can we tap into the tremendous potential benefits to be found beyond earth orbit. In the early days of aviation, barnstormers did performances and took people for joy rides. A similar spacestorming effort may jumpstart the stalled space age. Perhaps after spacestorming financially vitalizes space development, we can make serious progress in developing space. Exactly what kind of early development will be most useful to humanity is unclear, but to name a few possible pursuits, moon mining might be profitable (see e.g. the book Moonrush), space solar power might be feasible, and asteroids might yield valuable resources.

The X Prize was created in 1996 as a modern parallel to the Orteig Prize won by Lindbergh. The goal: launch a person to space twice in a two week period using a reusable vehicle developed with private funds. The prize: $10 million. The X Prize cofounder Peter Diamandis dreamed of being an astronaut. He recognized that the odds of realizing this dream were low and the X Prize idea was born. The prize received a multi-million dollar donation by the Ansari family and became the Ansari X Prize in 2004. Using the Ansari money, the “Ansari X Prize” was insured through Jan. 1, 2005 for the full $10M with a “hole-in-one” insurance policy.

In 2004, the company that I cofounded in 2002, Space Transport Corporation (STC), began testing the 12” diameter solid rocket motors that would power our Rubicon suborbital spacecraft, our entry in the X Prize. The renowned aerospace engineer, Burt Rutan, designed the Voyager airplane that completed a record-setting round-the-world flight in 1986. He and his company, Scaled Composites, began a quest for the X Prize in 1997 and eventually received near $30 million dollars from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. By 2004, they were the clear leader in the X Prize competition. In June 2004, they conducted the first private human spaceflight.

STC’s headquarters was in Forks, Washington, a quaint little town of 2,500 people on the far west end of the Olympic Peninsula. The two-man STC had been warmly welcomed in to set up operations in Forks back in 2003. The Forks City Hall officials were excited to have their own little rocket company. The populace affectionately called us the “rocket dudes.” The Peninsula Daily News (PDN) latched onto us as an interesting story early on. In May 2003, the PDN’s Jeff Chew wrote:

“Near massive stacks of fresh-dried lumber at the Portac mill, two young men quietly labor to reshape what they see as an aerospace industry stuck in neutral.”

After a rollercoaster of rocket development, in August, 2004, we were out of time and basically out of money. We had not completed our engine test program, but the Rubicon was ready in a rough form for a low-altitude test launch. Why not go for it? Among our large group of local supporters and enthusiasts, we found someone with a plot of land sitting atop a bluff above the Pacific Ocean. The Rubicon was to achieve supersonic speed and an altitude of 20,000 feet whereupon the vehicle would deploy a parachute and descend for splashdown and boat recovery.

On August 8, 2004 from the launch site atop a coastal cliff near Queets, Washington, the blue sky stretched endlessly over the calm Pacific Ocean. The Rubicon sat waiting in its launch rail, aimed out over the ocean. One passenger was on board: a mannequin that we’d prepared with a flight helmet and a jumpsuit. She would later become known as Stevie Austin after Steve Austin, the star of the 1974 film The Six Million Dollar Man. Down on the beach, about 2500 feet from the launch site in both directions, crowds of reporters and spectators jockeyed for prime position to view the launch. I would find out later that some of them were uncomfortably close. Fox News was there along with representatives from the Seattle PI, the Seattle Times, the Peninsula Daily News, and three Seattle TV news networks.

I was two miles offshore waiting on a crab boat that we’d chartered to perform the recovery operation. The five hour cruise up with the captain and his first mate was a pleasant break from the frantic launch preparations back on shore. We talked about the challenges of the crab fishing industry and I told them some rocket stories. It gave me some time to contemplate the situation. We’d had some success with smaller rockets using four-inch diameter solid rocket motors. This would be the first launch of our large X Prize space vehicle which used 12-inch diameter motors. We’d had two failures and one success with the 12-inchers. We felt that we understood the failures, but the raw facts were not encouraging. Failure would not mean the end of STC, but it would vaporize our chances to win the X Prize. Success would mean a glimmer of hope that we could win, especially if Scaled Composites encountered difficulty and the prize had to be extended into 2005 or 2006.

The last hour spent waiting for launch with spotty contact with the ground team via VHF marine radio seemed like a day. I could see the 25-foot-high Rubicon clearly with binoculars and I watched and waited. When the moment finally came, it was a disappointing fireworks display. One of the two motors ruptured moments after launch and burned out violently at the launch site. The second motor somersaulted out of control to an altitude of over 2000 feet. I couldn’t see the passenger capsule from my vantage point, but would later learn of Stevie Austin’s fate. She’d been heaved to near 1500 feet and had plummeted without parachute to a 200 mph splashdown about 50 feet from shore. This splashdown demolished her ship and separated her mannequin head from her Styrofoam bead-filled jumpsuit body. The beads floated to shore along with her head. One of our main supporters, Marty Dillon, made a deadpan statement to the media: “the occupant has been decapitated.”

The media had a heyday with this event. ABC Nightline did a 10 minute segment on us. The world saw the challenge that we faced and many wanted to help us meet the challenge. Why should Scaled Composites, the billionaire-backed project that had spent $20 million or more to win a $10 million prize be the only game in town?! The launch had been a nominal failure, but you can’t succeed if you don’t try, and we were certainly doing that! This event took a lot of wind from our sails and, though we pressed on, we were unable to solidify STC’s business foundation, and we had to close our doors in early 2005. “Rocket science” isn’t synonymous with “extremely difficult” for nothing!

The experience leading up to and following the Rubicon launch is a tale worth remembering. I’m going to try to write down the most interesting and dramatic aspects of the project in a series of “chapters” (blog entries?). Maybe I’ll eventually compile these into a single cohesive document that can be produced for the public, but at least I’ll have the record for myself, my family and my friends. We lived an adventure seldom seen outside of Hollywood (something like October Sky). We developed incredible personal relationships, lived in an amazing place, and learned what makes rocket science so tough.

References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Goddard_(scientist)

Eric Meier
Copyright 2008

The Wright brothers lift off in 1903:

Charles Lindbergh with his Spirit of Saint Louis airplane in 1927:

Robert Goddard with a test rocket in 1926:

Phil Storm and Eric Meier before a 12-inch solid rocket motor test in 2003:
[A friend of ours once compared the picture below to the picture of Goddard with his rocket test stand :)]

The Rubicon prior to launch in August 2004:

(image credit Jim Anderson)

The Rubicon blowing apart:

(image credit Jim Anderson)

Serene in snow

2008-12-20T12:09:00.001-08:00

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20081219LakeSereneWPete#

Skied to Lake Serene yesterday with my buddy Pete who is visiting. (He's from Princeton where he's doing plasma physics grad school after graduating from the A&A Dept a few years back. Here in Seattle, he's doing some research with our plasma physics group.) It was an excellent ass kicking trip. We took a fork to see Bridal Veil falls first. It wasn't cold enough for perfect ice climbing conditions, but some guys were up there giving it a whirl.

After that, we got going up to Lake Serene. The two miles from the fork to Lake Serene was killer. Very steep. Deep snow. Pete had snowshoes and wore out his quads plowing up through the deep snow. I had trouble on the very steep parts and had to get off my skis a few times.

We arrived at the Lake around 2 pm. The view at the top was quite possibly worth the effort. In the pic below, the lake is to the left of me and I'm pointing up at Mt. Index (out of pic).

As we started down there was a great photo op and I handed my camera to Pete for a pic. He promptly tipped over backwards. He took this photo from his prone position.

Temps hovered around 20 deg. Peak altitude was 2500 ft -- I really enjoyed the thick air relative to some of my other exploits this year. My new "alpine touring" (AT) skis were champs. (AT skis are like telemark skis with optional heel lockdown for downhill mode.) This was my first trip on them. Going downhill, I didn't use the heel locking feature because the ability to climb here and there was required. I kept skins on most of the time. New boots have nice stiff feel that allows great control when going downhill. With my old setup I would've fallen over backwards and wiped out with much higher frequency.

Great way to earn supper.

CO River waters

2008-12-06T12:34:00.000-08:00

My buddy Sarp (Cihan's twin bro) wrote as a comment on a photo from their recent GC trip,

"In every western state, 80% of the water goes to agriculture and ranching. In no state, even California, do those activities generate 5% of the state economy. Agriculture and ranching in California in 2005 generated a gross of about $21 billion. The gross domestic product of the state the same year was $1.55 trillion. 80% of the water goes to produce 1.3% of the fifth-largest economy in the world. It doesn't make sense."

I replied as follows:
the government has put a price on the waters of the CO. and it's cheap.

so the message to people is: "play golf, water your lawn, etc... we got plenty of water. Sure, give away water to grow alfalfa in the frakkin desert so we can eat lots of beef cows." (i believe water for irrigation is the lion's share of water wasted in the intermountain west.)

if we want water in the CO river, we need to price water appropriately.

i recommend reading
http://www.newwest.net/main/article/western_water_a_legend_of_overallocation/

quote:
"In every western state, 80% of the water goes to agriculture and ranching. In no state, even California, do those activities generate 5% of the state economy. Agriculture and ranching in California in 2005 generated a gross of about $21 billion. The gross domestic product of the state the same year was $1.55 trillion. 80% of the water goes to produce 1.3% of the fifth-largest economy in the world. It doesn't make sense."

Also, i think the USA figures "hell, if we don't use it, it'll just go down to Mexico and that'd be a waste." So we burn it however we can. Maybe we should consider letting some of the CO River water flow to Mexico. We could call it foreign aid.

Nature, 1970: don't worry about co2

2008-12-04T21:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve been doing some library research recently and saw issues of Nature dating back before 1900. I grabbed a random issue from ~1970 and browsed thru it. Found an article saying we shouldn’t worry about co2. Don’t worry, nuke power will be coming on strong by 2000. We’ll only have an 18% rise in co2 (rise to date has been ~15%, so they were on with this figure). Hell, we think the ocean will soak up all the co2 pretty quick anyway, but if it becomes a problem, we’ll just cut down on the fossil fuels. Cake. Wait.. reality check.. this ain’t so easy! Hard to figure how to slow down fossil fuel intake, either in booming nations like china and india or in addicted nations like US.

Mt. Hood extravaganza

2008-11-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

In short, nobody got hurt, but we had a little navigation problem (or was it a decision-making problem) that turned a 2-day / 1 night semi-technical trip into a 2 night / 3 day technical expedition with significant rock/ice fall hazard.

All pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20081115Hood

On the day before the trip, I called the ranger station to check road conditions for the North Face route we’d been planning. Turns out road and trail were shut down due to fire. Did rapid replanning to do Sandy Glacier route instead. No problemo. Route heads up from Timberline Lodge to Illumination Saddle. Then down below Yocum Ridge and up the Sandy. Heads up left side of Sandy headwall, up the "obvious line of ascent" to Cathedral Ridge. Then to summit. Then down the usual Pearly Gates route.

Departed Timberline Lodge and departed by noon on Friday.

Fairly smooth sailing up to the Saddle, then down onto the Reid Glacier where we set up camp at dark. Departed at 2:30 AM and headed down beneath Yocum. Battled to stay high and had some tricky scrambling on total garbage rock with undesirable exposure. In retrospect should’ve sacrificed altitude and gone down to stable rock and easy walking. Headed up Sandy Glacier and reached headwall before 9 AM.

At this point, we saw an obvious line of ascent up a couloir. It looked pretty tough at the bottom, but nothing steeper than 55 degrees. The snow/ice was solid. A gps check suggested that the couloir wasn’t the route I’d entered in the gps. However, we convinced ourselves that it must be the route. I didn’t have the guidebook description with me. Only had a summitpost writeup which said “take obvious line of ascent.” So up we went. It was a 2 hr commitment to ascend the part that we could see. As we continued past the 2 hr point, continuing on 50+ degree ice, we kept assuming that things would open up onto a snowfield. I didn’t do a thorough gps + map check until 4 hrs up. Then I realized that we were in a bad spot.

Ascending Meier Couloir:

In retrospect, we should’ve known that the route was much more technical than the Sandy Glacier route descriptions we’d read. It takes time to really sit down and puzzle out exactly where you are on the map. Plus, the Nat. Geographic Oregon TOPO maps are not particularly crisp and were of limited help when navigating up the headwall where +/- 100 m is crucial. But spending the time to carefully study the map would’ve been worthwhile at the 2 hr point, not to mention prior to beginning the ascent of “Meier Couloir”. In retrospect, we found that the notoriously difficult Yocum Ridge route coincides largely with Meier Couloir.

At the 2 hr point, our hopes of summiting were shot if the route didn’t go through. That’s probably why I was reluctant to look carefully at the navigation. Because of the technically difficulty of the route (very difficult downclimb) and the poor conditions (falling ice) that we would later encounter, that was a bad decision. By 6 hrs, we’d made it to a safe bivy on the only flat spot on Yocum Ridge. I peered over the south side of Yocum and could see an escape route. At the time, I wasn’t aware that the escape route I saw was the standard “escape route” for Yocum Ridge climbers. It was too late to descend that night. It was almost 4 pm and sunset was at 4:30. Damn it was nice to see that little V-shaped snow drift. We carved a spot for our tent and settled in.

The next morn, we made the descent down to the Reid. We essentially used leader/belayer technique to downclimb without leaving pro behind. We left at 8 AM when light was good (could’ve left at 6:30). By 10 AM, things were getting warm. We didn’t get down to safety until 1 PM. Dangerous ice and rock fall had threatened us on the way down. From the Reid to Illum Saddle isn’t too bad. We simulclimbed the upper portion of this climb with sparse protection and reached the saddle at 2 pm.

Illum. Rock and Saddle:

Neither the Reid nor the Sandy had particularly difficult crevasse crossings.

After reaching Illum saddle, it was a cakewalk back down to the car. We made it there by 4 pm.

Here's a map of the route:

Food:

For this trip, I packed nothing but powerbars and clif bars. Ate ~18 bars (4000 calories). Had 1.5 liters of white gas stove fuel with my whisperlite stove. Was sufficient to support us even with the additional time en route. Lost stove skirt at top of Sandy (blew/rolled down the hill).

Clothes:

We both enjoyed our puffy jackets. I used a pair of bib pants this time. Quite nice. Tore some holes in my puffy jacket but patched them upon return.

Lessons:

- When possible, get GPS with high-res integrated topo map

- Check map/gps at least every hr if at all uncertain on steep terrain.

- Make the decision to retreat without undue hesitation.

- Nat Geo TOPO maps are not quite as good as topozone maps online. Would be nice to have paper topo maps but Hood maps aren’t available at Seattle REI.

- Carefully prepare gear before climbing. Need to have pickets set up for easy access with slings prepared and ready for action.

- Always use leash with ice axes. I dropped an expensive ax down the hill.

fusion as replacement for fossil fuels?

2008-11-23T17:05:00.000-08:00

My grandfather (aka Uncle Bill) asked me if fusion power could replace fossil fuels. Here's my response....

Unk Bill,

You asked me if fusion can replace fossil fuel in our energy economy in the relatively near term (30 years). Below I’ll describe two candidate fusion machines. The first is a tokamak. It is unlikely to solve the problem because it’s too expensive. The other is the compact torus (CT). It is unlikely to solve the problem because a technological breakthrough is required. However, anything is possible, especially if enough research money is devoted to the challenge.

Tokamaks have received the vast majority of research effort in the past 50 years. With the tokamak, we have achieved “breakeven”, which that the ratio of fusion power out to electrical power in is one. For a commercial powerplant, this ratio should be about 10. If things go as planned, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will achieve this desired factor of 10. However, tokamaks are incredibly complex and expensive engineering marvels. Superconducting magnets are required to produce the strong magnetic fields in tokamaks. Perhaps in 30-50 years, tokamaks can be made commercially competitive with coal plants, but not in the near term.

A sudden breakthrough in an innovative device called a compact torus (CT) is a long-shot possibility. The CT is similar to the tokamak, but is generally smaller and doesn’t require the superconducting magnets. One of the keys to the CT is that it allows the magnetic fields to relax naturally instead of using the high magnetic fields of a tokamak to force the plasma to behave. Consider bridge building: if an engineer wasn’t very crafty, he/she might just make the bridge deck very thick. However, a crafty engineer would use cables to suspend the bridge, thereby greatly reducing the cost of the bridge. The CT is the crafty engineer’s approach. CT development is far behind the tokamak in funding levels and in technological development. However, a breakthrough might yield a useful fusion powerplant in the next 20 years.

Now… if fusion can’t solve the problem alone, can it help somehow? Nuclear fission technology works, but has a radioactive waste problem. Nuclear fusion can help solve that problem. Fission produces radioactive isotopes. By bombarding the radioactive isotopes with neutrons, they can be transmuted into radioactively stabilized. Fusion produces lots of neutrons even if it doesn’t produce energy. With fission-fusion hybrid technology, we can employ those neutrons to deal with radioactive waste.

Many people don’t realize how much progress has been made in fusion! We routinely control plasmas and make fusion energy. Hydrogen (which can be obtained by splitting water) is the fuel for fusion. This is a technology that humanity will surely benefit from in the long run if not the short run.

Hope this sheds some light on the issue!

Eric

P.S. I’ve only talked here about magnetic confinement fusion which uses electromagnetic fields to trap plasma (hot charged particles). Another approach is to use lasers to compress a chunk of fuel. This idea also has some merit, but I think magnetic confinement is preferable, so I ignore laser compression here.

Blanca Lake

2008-10-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

Ci, Orli, Brianne and I, along with Bri's two golden retrievers, Winston and Simon, braved a snowy, slippery, treacherous (well it wasn't that bad) trail to Blanca Lake. Probably 2500 ft elevation total. We took our time and it was a 5 hr round trip. This hike is in a newly annointed wilderness area called Wild Sky Wilderness.

[Wikipedia: The Wild Sky Wilderness is significant because it is the first new federally-designated wilderness in Washington since 1984. Also, unlike many other wilderness areas in the Cascades, Wild Sky protects significant amounts of high biological productivity low-elevation forest.]

There were some big trees up there.

We came across a guy with a chainsaw who'd been doing some serious work clearing the trail of LARGE trees which had fallen across the trail. He recruited Ci and I to help him roll some big chunks of log off of the trail. He was a volunteer from Seattle. Burly dude. He gave us his # so we could let him know how many more big logs there are up the trail. Ci kept careful count.

The dogs had a ball.

The lake was a beautiful emerald green. Wikipedia says: Glacial lakes can be green as a result of pulverized minerals (rock flour) that support a large population of algae. I didn't know (or, more likely, had forgotten) that algae is responsible for the color.

For all pics, see http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20081025BlancaLake#.

On the drive back we stopped for pastries at the Sultan Bakery. That place is legendary. Then , back in Seattle, we stopped for burgers. Judging by how my stomach felt this morning, the guacomole bacon burger was a little much.

Ci did his Bryan Adams impression for us (which damaged his vocal cords years ago because of the gravelly voice required -- this was interesting to Orli and Brianna because they are in speech and hearing science). We started singing lots of songs. Dirty Dancing also came up. So many good songs on that soundtrack :) [I've had the time of my life (and i owe it all to you), she's like the wind, hungry eyes, etc.]

Good trip!

ice climbing training

2008-10-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, I went on an ice climbing training run with the UW climbers. We went to the Coleman glacier on Mt Baker. The day was sunny and clear. We were mostly in the shade and near freezing, so the ice was good. Learned a thing or two about ice climbing technique. We didn't focus too much on placement technique -- one really must use individual judgment for this (in addition to reading about it).

A couple of pictures:

The group at the base of the Coleman below Baker.

The whole scene. The big ice blocks we climbed on are called seracs.

Jon leading 40 feet of vertical ice (photo credit Chirs Moorehead).

Religulous

2008-10-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

I thought Maher's new movie, Religulous, was entertaining, reasonably well done, and spoke some truths that we all need to hear again and again until a few things change.

He gets booted off of the Mormon temple grounds, and out of the Vatican. Some truckers, who he is engaging in conversation in their "trucker chapel", almost whip his skinny ass. He meets Jesus on many occasions. Hilariously, he often expresses astonishment with "Jesus Christ!", and often does so when talking to these impersonators of Jesus Christ.

His overarching message is that religion is detrimental to society. Religulous really doesn't make the case for such a sweeping statement. However, I think it makes a good case that Islam and Christianity must reform themselves to prevent "all hell" from breaking loose in the next 100 years.

I read some online reviews, many of which are scathing, accusing Maher of treating his interviewees unfairly. Yeah, I agree. But the world isn't fair and fairy tales may be laughed at sometimes when they are profered as gospel truth. And they may be criticized for encouraging an intellectual vacuum in which "leaders" are free to rape and pillage in the name of some deity/deities.

fall near Mount Maude

2008-10-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

Went to Mt Maude in the Glacier Peak Wilderness and soaked up the fall colors and the beautiful views from the 9050' summit. This was a return trip to the area -- I was here also in 2001 with my dad and brother. Fabulous trip packed into a very heavy day and a half of hiking. Eina inspired the trip to see the larch trees and Ci protected us with his Ka-Bar.

See pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20081013MaudeWithCiAndEina

Arrived at the TH at about 7 pm Saturday eve. (Eina had to work 'till 3 pm, so decided to start late.) Had no trouble finding the way up the spur trail leading to Maude / Ice Lakes. Could've hiked another 0.5 miles (to about 6k ft vs. the 5.3k ft where we camped) and found a better campsite. But ours was fine. Got down near 20 deg F. None of us were too cold. Didn't bring tent to save weight.

Left heavy stuff at camp and headed up the trail at about 10 am. Saw several hikers on the way up. Hit pass at about 1 pm. Made summit of Maude just before 3 pm. Down to Ice Lake at 4:00 pm. Back up at pass at 5 pm. Spectacular scenery. Wonderful company. Great exercise. No significant physical discomfort for anyone, but Ci and Eina had sopping wet (and cold) feet after ascending Maude. My REI goretex boots seemed to do better (because of sno-seal? or just because newer and goretex?) and I was hardly wet. Great trip.

outrageous CEO compensation

2008-10-06T19:53:00.000-07:00

I just googled "ceo pay explanation" and found that there are two arguments:

1) ceos and managers are greedy and are able to float their own boats
2) ceos have "general skills" that are useful to a wide variety of companies (e.g. Mullally at Boeing and now at Ford), and these general skills are hard to come by and must be purchased.

It seems typical to me that contentious issues usually have two sides, neither of which is right. Like radical environmentalists vs. those who "been on this land a hunderd years" and "know best".

It's obvious that ceos are greedy. Everybody is greedy (as mentioned in the googled articles). That doesn't explain the rise in their pay. They've always been greedy. However, there has been a consensus in the "managerial class" that you gotta pay big bucks to get talent. This has been the reality. It's maybe similar to the big bucks people felt they had to pay for tech stocks in the late 90's. I think it's a cultural bubble that will burst without any of us getting too excited. I can hear it bursting right now. There's no free lunch, except for executives in this boom whose lunch was paid for by taxpayers/shareholders/joe blows who are are starting to feel much stingier.

truth stalking -- Russian racehorses and speed vs. mpg

2008-10-05T18:06:00.000-07:00

Have done a little truth stalking today on two subjects:

- What does it mean to have to piss like a Russian racehorse?
- And what are some experimental numbers on mpg vs. vehicle speed?

I has having chai tea with a friend this morning, and she bought me a grande. I knew it'd be way too much tea, but figured it couldn't hurt. We talked for an hour or so then I rode my bike home. Would've stopped in the bathroom but it was occupied. Eyeballs were floating upon arrival home. I thought to myself -- I have to piss like a Russian racehorse! But what does that even mean!? I found an interesting tidbit:

Apparently (and I don't have any solid info on this but it makes a good story and might be true [doubtful .. see comments below .. but maybe Russians were especially agressive in their methods somehow?]), in Russian horse racing, they used to tie off the (male) horses' penises. This way, they had to pee really bad once they started racing. Not very nice, and surprising to me that it was even effective. But that's where the saying comes from! You can go farther and say "like a Russian racehorse in winter." I guess in cold winter air, mammals generally offload water to contract blood vessels and avoid heat loss.

Now on to mpg. Found an interesting website. They show what one my dad told me long ago, that slower is better for mpg. For a typical car, it is empirically found that you get better gas mileage at 35 mph or even slower. See this chart from the website. I only looked briefly into this and this website isn't the word of god but it seems pretty good...

Stay tuned for more truthiness next time.

1% of people to space

2008-10-03T20:50:00.001-07:00

I was out at my weekly Thursday lunch with my buddy Bob Lilly. He's a rocket enthusiast who has a lot of industry experience in semi-conductor manufacturing and in commercial airplane stuff (Boeing). We were talking about rocket stuff -- in particular, our department was trying to get a graduate level rocket class "off the ground".

Aside:
[ The dream is that students would have a chance to design, build, and fly a rocket and get all that good experience that comes with putting together such a complex system. Sadly, the project is perhaps too unwieldy for our department to tackle. A graduate student wouldn't be able to do any nitty gritty research. At STC, Phil and I had to put all our effort to the bare bones requirements to get a rocket off the ground and didn't really have time to hash out some of the interesting and crucial details. Which grad students in Aero/Astro would be doing the grunt work -- machining, purchasing, licensing, etc.? The thing to do in an aerospace department is probably to focus on one part of a rocket -- the propulsion, for instance. Or maybe the navigation system. Maybe year after year, different parts could be tackled. ]

Anyway, a friend of mine from international student night at the College Inn (where I have gotten my pool playing fix since being in Seattle) joined the discussion at some point. Bob told the guy I competed for the X Prize and a discussion of the future of space travel ensued. I suggested that it was within the realm of possibility that at some point in the future, 1% of earthlings might make it to space once during their lives. The guy, June, a Mathematician, said he was certain it was impossible. He said he was sure the earth would be destroyed by the resource extraction required for that much space travel.

He has clearly not read enough sci-fi :). 10 billion x 1% = 100 million people. Assuming 100 year lifetimes, that'd be about a million people per year going to space. True, if we had to launch 100,000 space shuttles a year, that'd be tough on the planet. However, what June had trouble imagining was what space travel might be like in 1000 years. One certainly can't be sure what things will be like, but this guy's imagination was like an steel trap. Space elevators might work. High speed orbital planes might conceivably work (burning atmospheric oxygen + some carried fuel in some enviro friendly way??).

The interesting thing about June's viewpoint is that he simplifies things to the following picture: planes, trains and autos have been damned tough on our environment. It's relatively easy to travel by those modes. It's much harder to travel to space. Thus, the burden on the environment must be proportionately larger than the burden due to planes/trains/autos. Anyway, I don't think the burden required to take 1% of people to space once in their lives is more than we can reasonably ask of the planet.

Ravel, Mozart, Beethoven

2008-10-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Went with Eina to the a performance at Benaroya Hall. Violin sonatas (i.e. music involving a violinist and a pianist) by four artists were played. The players were pretty hot shot guys. The violinst's mother was scheduled to play piano, but she couldn't make it. Some other high powered pianist replaced her. They started out with Beethoven. Eina wasn't too thrilled with the Beethoven. It really is quite boring when compared with the stuff played next by Ravel (you might've heard his song Bolero .. ). Ravel was much more raucous vs. what was almost predictable from Beethoven. I like Beethoven's full symphony work better than this violin sonata I think (though I'm far from being a Beethoven expert -- Momma tried to teach me piano and I enjoyed learning a tiny bit).

The Mozart was good. I like how he often threw in some minor tones in what is otherwise a flittering melody. I think this is characteristic of Mozart.

Eina and I stayed after the hall cleared out. It was fun to sing out some notes in the hall. What amazing acoustics. Evidently they didn't use any amplification of the sound from the piano and violin.

Mailbox Peak

2008-10-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

Did a pretty nice hike last weekend up to Mailbox Peak. It is a nearby dayhike, and a Seattle classic I'd been told. 4000 vertical feet reaching a 4800 foot summit. Probably about 6 miles roundtrip. Steep! The day was beautiful. Below is a shot of Eina checking her mail at the top. :) Rainier in background. View of Baker and Glacier Peak up north were excellent.

There was lots of junk in the mailbox like a little squeezy dinosaur whose tongue would stick out like a gecko when you squoze it. Pretty decent blackberries left up in this area. Below is a shot from the top looking down at Seattle. This spot is just a 45 min drive up I-90 toward Snoqualmie Pass from Seattle. Tess and Tim, Little Si is the high point that shows up in the right side of this photo. We did it with Laura and Ryan when they were out here for April and Julian's wedding. They will recall my belting out Big John on the way up for the whole world to hear.

hiking the San Juans

2008-09-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

5 dy 40 mi trip frm elk prk to needleton with Eina. Summited two 14000 ft pks (Windom and Sunlight) using CO 14ers as a guide. Guide was not particularly accurate and made Sunlight extra challenging.

See pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20080910SanJuans

Rode on durango silverton railroad. Was gorgeous ride and was historically interesting.

My parents rode this train back in '75. They spoke highly of the area and inspired me to visit. On their train trip, a tourist got angry with the ticket salesman for being out of tickets. The tourist got out of hand and threatened the salesman. My dad had to take the dude out and so they got free tickets. Well ok he just got the salesman's back and the guy backed down. But it must've been pretty cool anyway.

Reached Elk Park, our starting point at 12:00.

Mileage summary:

7 mi first dy. 13 2nd dy. 13 3rd dy. 2 14ers 4th dy. 7 mi last dy.

None of our camps were over 11,200 feet. Wouldn’t dare camp higher. Headaches at night when camp too high unless well acclimatized.

Huge granite boulders in the middle of the valley made the glacial action obvious.

Raspberries galore near first camp were awesome. First camp was at 10.6k ft. Easy day 1 – only 4 hrs hiking and about 7 miles.

Day 2 was tougher. Saw a coal seam on the way up. Beautiful Columbines in the shade at the base of cliffs. Incredible rugged mountains all around. Old miner’s cabin in high basin just below Continental Divide, and deep horizontal mineshaft nearby. A jeep trail travels right along the Divide at some 12,500 feet up.

Did easy easy x cntry route to Hunchback Pass .. No trail b/c too tough for horses. Swamp gentians beautiful + many other flowers and crystalline rocks.

Weather was beautiful after the first day when rain threatened. Slept out of tent after 1st nite. Eina slept in. Stars beau all nites. Jupe brite. Moon waxing so began to dim stars later days of trip.

On day 3, we went down the Vallacito valley to Johnson Creek. Many trout under the Vallecito bridge where the trail to Johnson headed up to the West. Deep and slow there.

Saw some impressive old timers. One dude was about 75. Dark dark tan. Big worker’s hands. Wore tennis shoes. Walked right thru rivers. As we approached Columbine Pass, scenery was the usual – awesome. Saw mines galore up there. Found a wheel from an old mining car at Columbine Lake.

Saw several big groups near Columbine Pass. Big groups --> no elk or moose. Hardly any sign of big game. Plenty of deer. And the non-native mountain goats.

I just read up on the goats on this blog --

http://colorado-lifestyle.blogspot.com/2008/06/mountain-goats.html

Evidently, the Colorado Division of Wildlife declared them “native” so that the big game hunters would have a more authentic experience. Bizarre. Anyway, they are native to the Rockies. Just not farther south than Wyoming. She also writes,

“Sighting a Mountain Goat in Colorado is a blessed event. There are two prominent herds, one on Mt. Evans and another in the Chicago Basin.”

We happened to camp in Chicago Basin our 3rd and 4th nights! And the goats tromped right through our campsite. Little guy included! Video below.

Great food the whole trip. Eina is a gourmet cook. Lentil soup. Crn chowder. Quinoa (pron: kinwa). Etc.

4th day, 1st went up Windom and Sunlight Peaks Windom near 14,100. Sunlight 14,050. Approach was easy to 13k ft. The pretty Twin Lakes sit at 12.5k. The class 2+ route up Windom seemed more like Class 3+ to me. Headed down the NW slope (class 3). The route up Sunlight shown in Colorodo 14ers book photo disagreed w route on the topo in the book!! Went with text description. Sunlight’s S slope (class 4) route was not bad. Class 4 move at top was exposed to 20 ft fall. Eina stood on tiny summit for cameras (3 guys near summit) :) I hung on for dear life.

The descent down the west ridge was tough class 4. Managed to route find well w some deliberation.

Last day was a pleasant 7 miles.

Talked to some interesting brit "coach" fans. Met a guy from York, England who invited me to come by his (evidently pretty nice) place in York anytime. Guy’s career was as a negotiator with Marathon Oil. Interesting.

Had a good dinner at a Nepali restaurant. Eina spoke some Nepali w the servers who were thrilled. Had butter tea (probly not yak butter :) ) for the first time. Quite a thing, butter tea.

Stargazing -- Jupiter, M11 (Wild Duck Cluster), etc.

2008-08-22T23:55:00.000-07:00

My 10" dobsonian reflector is really easy to take out onto the grass in front of my house. Did so this eve. Light pollution in Seattle is pretty bad, but you can still see some interesting things. Would've driven to a dark spot but moon was due to rise at 10 pm.

Jupiter is always amazing. Have looked at it several times in last month. Can see 4 satellites. Can easily see bands with my scope through either 32 mm lens (40x mag.) or 12.5 mm lens (100x mag.). Saw red spot on one occasion. Noted rapid movement (moved visibly over 1.5 hrs). Looked up Jupe's rotation period -- 9 hrs vs. Earth's 24 hrs!

Was going to look at M81 and M82. Looked hard at star charts and thru binocs. Had it nailed. Then clouds covered them. But now I know that part of the sky (NE of big dipper bowl) pretty well.

Scanned sky near jupe and saw nice blob. Looked up in star charts and saw that it is M11. Put scope on it. Nice view. Lots of stars in this "Wild Duck" cluster. Got to know Aquila constellation in which Altair shines brightest.

Moved to Ring Nebula in Lyra near Vega (Altair, Vega and Deneb form the summer triangle). Can make out ring with 100x mag. No doubt would be better in dark conditions.

Looked at Andromeda over by Cassiopeia. Maybe on a really dark night it'd be more exciting through this 10" scope. On a dark night with long film/digital exposure that you can really see Andromeda in detail, so here's a picture:

Image credit: Jason Ware, http://www.galaxyphoto.com/

Also looked at nebulas 884/869, and 654/653 which are near Cassiopeia. Seems easy to play with this dobsonian mounted scope as compared to typical tripod.

Constitutional authority for developing technology / health care / soc. security

2008-08-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

[This post is a continuation of an email conversation between my dad Steve and friend Jason .. comments encouraged.]

Interesting discussion :) Long-winded. I'll contribute some more steam before we switch to nuclear.

Jason, your idea about the limitations of the constitution is quite interesting, particularly with regard to energy legislation. A quick read of the constitution reveals that there is no constitutional mandate for our government to develop/maintain/expand our transportation system except perhaps "To establish ... post Roads" -- Art. I, Sect 8. Yet the DoT is a pretty well-funded department. Likewise, the DoE gets a fair chunk of change. Why? It's a good question. Maybe private industry could handle it. Maybe not. For instance, could private industry have collaborated to put together our interstate freeway system? I seriously doubt it. Private industry did the work, but the government orchestrated it, and used taxpayer money to pay for it. Likewise, solving our energy problems will likely require government orchestration. We'll probably need some pretty nifty power and energy transmission infrastructure including conduits for electricity and for "portable power" for autos (e.g. hydrogen).

Sometimes nations/civilizations/organisms can get an upper hand by having big common projects. Think militaries. Think ocean exploration in the 14/15/16th centuries. Think space program (but don't think so hard that your start to wonder what the hell it's done for us so far... mostly i jest .. if you've considered it much, you recognize several crucial benefits that space has brought us). I think state-sponsored technology development is appropriate. How one would write a constitutional amendment to properly sanction it is another question!

In the opening passage of Common Sense, Paine says that government is a "necessary evil", negatively constraining society's vices. Meanwhile, society itself provides the positive influence, "uniting our affections". What you are suggesting (and I expanded on above) is that gov't should be in the business of "positive influence". We also obviously need to worry about gov't properly constraining society's vices. This is where we clearly need corruption control.

Medical care and social security (which is in desperate need of being renamed "managed savings" or being re-directed to being a safety net program) are in the same boat as energy technology when it comes down to it I guess.

On the sub-crime crisis: 1) if the gov't is going to bail out these lenders, they should regulate. 2) gov't shouldn't bail out the lenders. I think I'm with you Jason, voting for #2.

Who is this physicist who told you about the nuclear fuel problem? He/she is right that we have a problem if we don't effectively use fuel. As I recall, if we used all of the available energy in uranium ore, we'd have plenty of power for centuries even if energy consumption were to go up 10x. Using all available energy would involve something quite different than what the French do which is a joke compared to what i'll call true nuke fuel squeezing. French squeeze less than 5% of available energy in fuel. Standard US nukes get only 1%. You can squeeze out nearly 100% of energy with breeder reactor. Breeders are expensive because it's expensive to make them safe. Proliferation is another concern and is a concern for any squeezing operation. But you can squeeze in a safer way using fusion as a source of neutrons (there are other possible sources too) to maintain a sub-critical reaction that uses "fast" neutrons to squeeze energy out. Look for fission-fusion hybrids hitting news in next 5-10 yrs. (physics sidenote: when you don't moderate/slow neutrons [as we do in our current "slow" neutron reactors], the characteristic time of a critical system is very very fast, making it tough [expensive, uncertain] to design a control system with an appropriately small response time).

Oh -- Nanosolar -- i hope it works! But I question their ability to get materials cheap enough to power the globe.. maybe they can tho? I really have no facts on this matter.

Dragontail Peak

2008-08-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

Did a trip to Enchantments Lake area with Eina, Paolo, Cihan and Tammy. Camped near Leavenworth on Saturday night. Left Stuart Lake TH at 7 AM. From Aasgard Pass, Eina and I summited Dragontail Peak. The rest (lacking ice axes which were requried for the steep snowfield) enjoyed the Enchantments Basin. Another highlight was swimming in Colchuck Lake. Ci and I thought we were pretty tough but Eina destroyed our egos by outswimming us in the 55 degree waters. I decided that she is part polar bear after she swam around for a couple of minutes after I hustled my skinny ass out of the water.

Some good photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20080810dragontail

The rugged "dragontail" ridge was awesome:

This area is one of the most popular in the Cascades. The mostly cloudy weather stymied WA meteorologists once again (they predicted all sun). But at least it didn't rain more than a drop or two. Only saw two groups of people above 7,500 ft.

Camped illegally Saturday night because campgrounds were full. Road had been damaged and cut off 3 of the 6 campgrounds in the area. Campgrounds were perhaps filled with rock climbers who flock to this area. The parking lot treated us well though except for the disastrous loss of Cihan's prized 2nd sandwich. He was thunderstruck in the morning when the sandwich was missing. He was sure he had it in his pack. He threatened all of us with his K A Bar (Marine) knife if we didn't fess up to stealing his sandwich. We have concluded that either an intruding man or beast must have snagged it.

Hike was a good challenge. It was Tammy's first tough hike and she handled it admirably! We made the pass in about 5 hrs, where we saw a mountain goat which Eina tried to tame:

The climb from the pass (7800') to Dragontail (8800') took Eina and I just over an hour. We made it back to the TH (~3400') after 12 hrs total. 5400 vertical ft .. not bad!

After refueling at the self-proclaimed "number one" diner in Cle Elum at about 9 pm, we drove home. I drove Ci crazy with some country music to keep myself awake. He didn't even enjoy "She's no Lady", so I skipped "Bubba Shot the Jukebox".

2008-08-04T00:54:00.001-07:00

SpaceX's 3rd rocket recently wiped out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/science/space/03launchweb.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=spacex&st=cse&oref=slogin

See SpaceX website for posts about what happened (stage separation failed), and what they're doing from here (carrying on with plenty of money). Also info about vehicle is availabe on the site.
www.spacex.com

They are 0 for 3 now. Unfortunately, this rocket was carrying some expensive satellites (previous losses were just dummy payloads unless I'm mistaken). This news makes me feel better about my own rocketry endeavor which had a pretty low batting average. Elon Musk (SpaceX founder) has a helluva lot better funding than we did -- he is the founder of Paypal which was purchased by Ebay for a healthy chunk of change -- and I suspect that they will be able to push on and succeed in the long run. However, maybe they should chalk up a success before loading expensive DoD and NASA satellites onboard.

Why is SpaceX having so much trouble? Well, getting to space is tough and there are about a million gotchas. The experts who designed the Apollo-era vehicles knew lots of those issues, but are mostly unavailable for engineering staff work. Elon's hired good people (well everyone but me), but my impression is that they're pretty young.

Stage separation was a doozie for my company(Space Transport Corp.)'s rockets too. As the rocket travels at supersonic speeds though 100+ mph wind shear, this puts lots of strain on the joints between stages (like most launchers the SpaceX vehicle has two stages). Then these parts might be unhappy about doing their job. Elon's been trying to keep things very light to maximize the allowable payload mass. If the rocket works, this might maximize profits. But maybe the lightweight stage connection was a little too light? On the other hand, it could've been something totally different like a software or electrical problem. Elon usually posts more info about failures on the SpaceX website, so perhaps he'll post some details about what happened here.

Was quality control bad? Probably not. They probably had it built just as planned. It's hard to plan properly when the only way to *really* test the thing is by flying. We humans learn best by trial and error. These are expensive tests though, so hopefully they haven't bitten off more than they can chew. I think they'll be ok though.

Other private space companies that are coming along to rattle the establishment (read: Boeing/Lockheed-Martin) cage:

www.blueorigin.com
(funded by amazon.com's Jeff Bezos)

www.virgingalactic.com
(funded by Virgin's Richard Branson .. following up with Burt Rutan on work [i.e. winning the X-Prize] funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen)

astro party

2008-08-04T00:28:00.000-07:00

Had a good time star gazing on Saturday night. I was impressed with the performance of my 10" scope. We bbq'ed at my place and watched Djokovic take out Nadal prior to heading up. Seemed likely to be clear so we headed up to Rattlesnake Lake. Ci, Monica and I drove up and met my roomies and some other friends up there. It was clear .. in a few spots .. for a little while. We got a nice view of the apparent double star in the handle of the dipper -- Mizar and Alcor -- and could clearly see the true binary system of which Mizar is part.

We got a quick look at M13, a globular cluster in Hercules.

By 11:30, cloud cover was quite thorough. So we hung out (Ci stayed warm by huddling like a homeless person in the telescope box) and hoped for clear skies for a while and chewed the fat. For instance, we talked about Starbucks, Shultz, and the Sonics. Kind of an interesting situation... We packed up at 1 am and headed down. Bhuvana called and reported that the skies cleared as they approached Seattle. So Ci, Monica and I stopped short of Seattle and did a bit more viewing. The highlight of that leg of the stargazing was Jupiter.

The image above is plagiarized from the internet. Though our viewing was not as spectacular as shown above, we could see the planet in breathtaking detail. Four of its moons were clearly visible.

We also viewed Andromeda which looked like a fuzzball. I think if it is extremely good viewing, one could make out the shape of the galaxy. Couldn't see the N. America Nebula at all (I assume was too light).

I tried to find M81 and M82 which are in Ursa Major. Couldn't get there. Need better star maps.

Sahale ... well, close anyway.

2008-07-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

My friends Cihan, Hannah and I made a run at Sahale Peak in the North Cascades on Saturday. Ci and I had to attend a "no pants" party on Friday night, so we didn't hit the road from Seattle to to the N. Cascades until 9 AM. I checked the forecast in the morning and saw that weather was expected to go to pot on Saturday night and Sunday. So, instead of our initial plan of climbing Sahale on Sunday, we switched to a Saturday afternoon climb.

For pics from the hike, see http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20080726NorthCascades.

Chose to do Boston Basin route. This route involves 5000 vertical feet, all in 10 mile round trip. Seemed like a good stiff day hike. Requires glacier travel gear and some easy rock climbing at the top. This stuff is "easy" but nerve-wracking nevertheless, and is time-intensive as compared to simple stair-stepping.

We hit the trailhead at 1 and were hiking by 2 pm. I expected that an 8 hour round trip would be best case scenario, so we brought headlights. If we were running slow, I would just request that Hannah haul Ci and I up the hill with our gear.

Started on non-existent "road" toward the seemingly non-existent "diamond mine" which were marked on the map. Trail was narrow and rough, practically requiring a machete, but was easy to follow. 'Twas hot as we got started. Passed big group of campers. Made good time through pretty cascades terrain. Reached Boston Basin in about 2 hrs. Could see Sahale looming above in its jagged splendor. Enjoyed a hoary marmot sighting. Ci and Hannah were new to glacier travel, but handled the terrain like mountain goats (well, Ci hit the deck a few times). Crevasses were present but not particularly threatening. Wound between them without much apparent risk toward the upper tongue of the Quien Sabe ("who knows?" in Spanish) which reaches up toward Sahale. We were on track for a concerningly-late 7 pm summit. Fortunately, we were saved by the clouds which gave us a good excuse to chicken out. A cloud deck formed around 5 pm and descended to about 7000 ft by 6 pm. At 6 pm at 8200 ft, we turned around. I figured we'd get down by dark. Turns out I was right for once. On the way down, we saw and explored a mine (50-foot deep horizontal shaft -- maybe just a test hole?), and saw a couple more marmots. Enjoyed glissading down the snowfields, skiing on our boots. Everybody held up pretty well considering the difficulty of the trek. A few blisters.

The next day, we took it pretty easy and just toured the N. Cascades Nat. Park a little bit. Amazingly, it's a free park which is good for grad students (and recent ex-students like Hannah). Some pretty falls just off the road. Ci couldn't stop saying "this is amazing" the whole drive. The reservoirs (Ross Lake, Diablo Lake) are quite pretty for reservoirs. Pretty blue water. We did a little 4 mile round-trip hike to Blue Lake on the east side of the park (it was raining on the west side of the park). Blue Lake is quite scenic and is nestled below the Winters Spires which are spectacularly sheer -- must be wonderful rock-climbs up there.