Volcano #3 (Mt. Adams)

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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: