hiking the San Juans

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.

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

[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

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".

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

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.

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.