San Francisco and Family

We headed north to Mammoth Lakes after bishop ( named for an old mining company, not the old elephant cousin ).  It got a bit colder, and a bit nicer for climbing and sitting in hot springs.  Looking for free showers, we drove into Devils Postpile National Monument the first night.  Turns out the showers are closed... so we made dinner and left.  It's a nice park, but you have to take a $7 shuttle from a couple miles outside the park to see the rock formation the monument was established to protect. We went to see the view of the minarets that the ranger suggested instead.  It was a nice generic view.  The best part was the clouds, which I suppose I could have looked at from outside the park.

Some of those tiny spikes in the distance are the Minarets.

The next day we did a bit of climbing east of mammoth.  The rock is a neat volcanic tuff.  This makes it interesting to climb, but a bit fragile in places.  Many of the blocks on the ground seemed like pumice stone to me, which I figured would be related to volcanic tuff.  Turns out that while volcanic tuff is compressed ash that  was ejected from a volcano, pumice is formed when super heated compressed rock is ejected.  The rapid cooling and depressurization forms the light pumice stone.  Neat.

Athena stress eats while learning to drive stick.  She's not even watching the road.

 The last week or so has for the most part been spent in the bay area visiting family.  It has been busy as some are in Berkeley, some in San Mateo,  some in San Jose, and all want to spend time with us.  So a lot of driving through city traffic.  We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a day in between to get a bit of a rest.

A picture of Athena taking a picture of a leopard shark.

 The Monterey Bay Aquarium is one of the best I've been to.  Unlike many aquariums, you can still learn about fish there.  They have scientific names and knowledgeable staff and cards with interesting facts about all the animals.  Many aquariums/zoos seem to be dumbing down the content in favor of a more flashy, entertaining experience.  I like the cards you have to read and staff to chat with.

Throughout the aquarium are sculptures like this.  They just sort of hang out in corners and on ledges making the place look neat.

When we visited they had special exhibits on jelly fish and on things with tentacles ( squid, nautilus, octopus, cuddle fish, etc. )  The jellies exhibit was sort of 70s psychedelic themed.  This included a hall of mirrors, odd music, many uses of the word groovy and subtle cultural references worked into the information plaques.  Sort of weird but enjoyable.

A single floating jelly.

Lots of floating jellies.

The tentacles exhibit was extremely well done.  I'm always happy to see nautiluses ( not nautili, at least according to WikiPedia ) and they had a huge number of different cuttlefish on display.  The cuttlefish is named for it's cuttlebone, although I would argue it makes more sense the other way around. These are the oval shaped white bones that you can give to birds and reptiles as a calcium supplement. I never made the connection before. They also had a few different species of octopus, where most aquariums just have a single giant octopus or none at all.

This baby turtle spends his time swimming with his head against a blue plastic wall. Sort of sad.

A young penguin, saying hello.

Leaping Blennies I think.  They jump between rocks and breath air,  so sort of an odd fish.

Shrimp with his pal Eel.

 After the aquarium, we stopped by Athena's grandmothers house.  We stayed the night, played some Mahjong, and had some wonderful food for both dinner and breakfast.  Athena's grandmother doesn't speak any english and I don't speak Chinese so shopping while Athena was away was a bit... difficult.  She is also quite good at Mahjong.

I picked out a wonderful Japanese yam apparently.

 Yesterday we drove down to Pinnacles National Park.  It's the newest national park and feels like it hasn't quite been gumbified for the masses yet.  It's also fairly small, and has two separate entrances for the east side and the west side. Although it's only a couple miles of trail from one side to the other, it's a two hour drive as no roads connect through the park.  We entered the east side, realized the climbing we wanted was on the west side, and took a hike instead.

Huge boulders have fallen into deep gullies to form caves and pathways.  Fun for humans and bats.  13 different types of bat live in the park. 

Duckweed has more protein than soybeans. ( By weight I'm assuming, although no one ever mentions the specifics. )  I think it's pretty.

One cave had a single spot of light coming down from the ceiling.  Perfect for pretending to be tony stark. 

The base of a small reservoir and the exit from a cave.  Lots of canyon wrens (Catherpes Mexicanus)  here.

The rock formations in pinnacles are part of the extinct Neenach volcano that has shifted and eroded over time. The other half of the volcano is almost 200 miles away, due to movement of the  tectonic plates. (The pacific plate in particular ).

The park posts information about climbing closures at trail heads.  This is immensely helpful, and i wish everyone did it.  Here we, and all the visiting tourists and their families, can see that "Even Coyotes Do It Doggy Style" is 'sensitive'.

Out last day was spent walking around the city.  After wandering a bit we went to Balmy Alley with my Mom and her partner David.  Many of the murals relate to the struggles of ethnic minorities and the poor in the face of white washing and gentrification.  Tension between the older, poorer residents of the mission neighborhood where the murals reside and the new, wealthy residents moving in is fairly high.  Tech companies use public transport bus stops without paying and to the detriment of the public system, rents are sky rocketing and forced evictions are at their highest levels.  Many of these evictions are 'no-fault evictions' meaning that the tenant didn't do anything, but that the land lord can make more money with a different class of tenant.

Victorion, defender of the mission.  Lots of neat detail, including a hipster store with the tagline "unique together"

I like the hands, and all the little animals around the mural. 

Scooby and Shaggy?

 Although some argue that this process of gentrification is a natural and good thing, I'm not sure these are the same people being asked to leave their homes.  The systematic displacement of a poor minority neighborhood for a rich predominately white neighborhood doesn't really seem like the healthy evolution of an area to me.

Some of the murals are... not awesome.  Here we have a couple eyes, some prayer hands, and a sort of face on a heart in the back. Odd, unappealing, and unoriginal.  Lame.

In the upper right, police in riot gear labeled with 'google' and 'facebook' force a couple out of an eden like landscape.  The signs behind the officers read "Foreclosure" and "Luxury Hipster Community".  Cops drink Starbucks with yuppies and a wealthier class of citizen plays in the streets while the old residents are arrested, evicted, or otherwise forced to move.  Gentrification!  

It's only hip to live in the city if there is little crime, good coffee, and small shops selling expensive clothing on all the corners.  So the old community has to go.  Developing these places also happens to make the developers rich which doesn't hurt.

The chain links all read different institutions/ideas  such as IMF, WTO, Intellectual Property Rights,  etc. 

 From the above work.  I like her face.  Credits are here for the most part.

After a nice puerto rican lunch we left the city, headed back to my dads place, and packed our bags. We are off to Alabama at 5:50am tomorrow.  Hopefully it won't be too hot, and we won't get too weak in a state with almost no accessible climbing.  We have our Yosemite guide books so we can plan while in Alabama, and I have the first book in the 'Malazan Book of the Fallen' series to try.  Hopefully it's good, but if not I have a couple Harlan Ellison books to read.  

Too cool for the crag.  Flashing my belay card while I project 5.8.  I was hoping to get a sweet top-rope on-site, but I'm still a bit burnt from my sesh last week. 

Bishop and the Owens River Gorge

We've been in the Bishop CA area for the last week or so.   It's hot and sunny and full of climbing.  The Bishop area has more climbing both in terms of variety and volume than any other stop we have made.

Alabama Hills.  Lots of giant boulders piled on top of each-other.

The first day we stopped a bit south of Bishop at the Alabama Hills area.  This area is frequently used by the film industry, which brings a fair amount of money to the small town of Lone Pine situated next to it.  Because of this they have a couple of odd requests, including the need to pickup a flier from the forestry people on how to be a conscientious climber in the area.  I don't think that many people actually do this, as the ranger I talked with had no idea what I was asking for, until i explained it to him in detail.  He then handed me a poorly photocopied flier.  It contains the usual about not throwing trash around and carrying out your trash as well as a couple regulations I had never seen before, such as "park at least 3 inches from vegetation."  We didn't get our ruler out, but I think we did OK.  Although the flier's content is useless, we figured it was good to go through the effort to get one anyway.  It's good to show communities that climbers care about land owner's wishes and other users.  Of course the people who would leave piles of trash aren't the ones who will drive an extra 20 minutes to pick up a flier, so who knows if it does any good.  On the way in we saw a car commercial being filmed.  Some small gold SUV type car.

The climbing here is on monzonite granite, and is fairly rough on the hands.  Most of what we did was low angle slab type stuff in the Western Wall area.  The approach took about 30 seconds, so that was nice.

From the top of the highest point in the previous picture.

We did four climbs that morning before it got too hot, "Ankles Away," "Pangborn," "Alabama Hills Gang," and "Mon Cherie."  We headed up to Bishop that night, and slept in the Buttermilks.

The buttermilks is a well known bouldering area with a huge number of problems.  Many of these are of the highball and super highball variety, so I found it a bit frightening.  

Serious game face.

We stopped by the pollen grains area (also called the Lidija boulders) for a bit of morning climbing.  I wanted to take a look at 'Jedi Mind Tricks' and maybe give it a go.  Its a highball V4 that I'be been wanting to do for a couple years.  Turns out I'm weak right now, and the boulder is really tall.  It will have to wait for another trip.

The Lidija Boulder.  Enormous.

After drinking a failure beer, we headed to the Owens River George.  This area is a bit north of Bishop, and has a huge concentration of sport climbing.  We napped until the west face was in the shade, then headed down.

The gorge is hard to see from the road in most places, but is huge. 

Much of the land that you climb on in the ORG is owned by the LA Department of Water and Power.  They allow climbers to use it, and apparently have little care for what is done.  There a stone steps built, a shoddy pit toilet, and some other usual modifications to the land.  There are also numerous ad hoc wooded bridges, platforms drilled and attached to the rock faces, and other modifications that most areas would consider a bit too much.   In one place, there are metal rungs drilled into the rock in order to build a short ladder, and then a chain affixed horizontally above.  It looks like this might save climbers about 20 feet of unpleasant chossy climbing before they start their route.  In most places, you would just deal with this and climb over it.  In the ORW, you just add hardware to the rock until it's comfortable.  What a weird place.

A nice bridge.  Also some platforms attached to the face.  And a rock wall.  Leave no trace has no power here.

The climbing was fun. It reminded me of north table mountain outside of Golden Colorado. Just up the road from the climbing there is free camping, so we spent a couple days in the area.

We headed further north after the ORG, for some bouldering on the volcanic tuff.  The Catacombs area sits on the rim of the Owens River George just south of where it's been dammed. The rock here has been sculpted into curving towers and walls and caves about 15 feet high or so.  Many of the free standing rocks have large scoops in the top, which have filled with dirt and debris.  The end result is a castle like formation, where there are 1-2 foot wall rims and a nice flat space high off the ground.

What nice rocks.

The main attraction for me was a hard problem called "I am a beautiful man."  I worked it for most of the morning, but couldn't make it work.  It's a fun problem though, and worth a revisit on a colder day when I'm fresh.

Athena shaved my head between attempts.  We found that my clippers can only shave a small portion of one head on a single charge.  Thus we would charge them while I climbed, and every once in a while run back to the car to shave a little bit more of my head.  This took most of the day.

About 1/2 way through my haircut.

Our last stop in the area was Pine Creek Canyon.  Along with more free camping,  the area also boasts a number of sport, mixed, and pure trad lines.  Our first day was spent at the PSOM slabs where we did a couple trad and mixed climbs.  

Pine creek canyon, from the top of some climb.

Most of the climbs here involved long stretches of "friction slab."  This type of climbing involves no hands, and not really any feet.  You just sort of stand on nothing and... friction your way up.  It's a bit terrifying and lends new meaning to "just trust your feet."

Friction slab!  No hands, and everything is a terrible foot.

 At the end of the day I decided to try something a bit harder.  So... less feet than normal and a bit steeper.  Athena was skeptical because it looked "terrifying."  Her assessment was quite correct.  The dime edges that I was trying to smear on kept breaking,  and much of the climb involved just standing up on nothing and hoping that your foot would stay put.  It was a fun climb.  I spent a lot of time giggling on it; standing up and finding that I hadn't fallen, then realizing that I had no idea what to do next.

From the top of yet another climb!

This morning we stayed in Pine Creek Canyon to climb "Sheila," a highly regarded single pitch.  It's mostly a crack climb, which Athena was excited about.  If you like crack climbs, it's apparently awesome.  If you find crack climbing painful, then at least the canyon is sort of pretty and the approach isn't that long.

I found a sleeping lizard on the way down from the climb.  I have never found a sleeping lizard before.  Look at him just chilling out on the cliff.

I googled it, and lizards do sleep.  Which is good, because otherwise this would be a selfie with a dead lizard.

 Tonight we are headed up toward Mammoth Lakes area.   There's some more bouldering, and some more climbing up that way.   The temps should be a bit better as well.  I've been promised a hot-springs to soak in tonight, so that's really the only thing on my agenda at the moment.  Hot-springs, beer, and some rest.

My bro, the sleeping lizard.

SEKI and Death Valley

After leaving palm springs, we've started heading north.  Hopefully this will mean better (colder) weather and more climbing.  Along the way we decided to stop by Kings Canyon & Sequoia National Parks to do some backpacking.  

The mayflies were swarming the first night.  Huge clouds of flying bugs.  Annoying, but also neat as the mayflies' adult winged form only lasts a day or two when they all hatch together and swarm in large groups.  Then they die.

We spent a night in the car, near a stream.  I like camping near water.  The bugs were a bit annoying, but the sounds were nice and small mountain streams are always fun to explore.  This one was filled with small trout (brown or brook I think) and ran between wild flowers and reeds over small waterfalls until draining into a meadow.  Dark-Eyed Juncos ( Junco Hyemalis of the darker Oregon variety )   kept us company while we cooked and packed for the backpacking trip we had planned the next day.

Early in the morning we headed towards Roads End Permit Station to get our papers.  Our planned hike took us into the wilderness outside the park, but as we were starting the day inside the park lines we needed to go through the national park permit process.  The drive to the station was beautiful, the process was simple, and the girl working the station was nice.  No trouble at all.

Our hike was nine miles or so, with a bit under a mile of elevation gain.  We took the Lewis Creek trail to Frypan meadow.  Athena took a nap and I stripped to dry my clothes in the sun; an improperly packed beer can had soaked through everything.  My tent and sleeping bag were reasonably dry, but it felt as though I had marinated myself for the bears.

Athena dislikes water crossings.  Perhaps it is due to her poor footwork.

On the hike we spotted a Blue Grouse ( Dendragapus Obscurus ) which took awkward flight and stared at me from a tree as I peered at it.  Female grouse are not the most distinctly colored birds.

The first of many panoramas.

 The trail we took is seldom used and a soft sand for long stretches.  Deer, Coyote, and Mountain Lion apparently use the trail when hikers are absent, as their prints were everywhere.  I've never seen such clear lion prints.  I followed them down the trail for 7 or 8 distinct steps at one point.

A 'Snow Flower' (  Sarcodes Sanguinea ).  This plant is a parasite, and cannot photosynthesize for food.  It feeds on the Mycorrhiza fungi that lives in a symbiotic relationship with tree roots.  As a fungi parasite, it's called a  myco-heterotroph.

The Snow Flower feeds off of the sugars that the Mycorrhiza fungus receives from the tree roots.  In a healthy relationship, the  Mycorrhiza fungus provides the tree roots with nutrients and protection from disease.  There are few parasitic plants, and only a few of these feed on fungi.  A really cool plant.

Panorama #2... much like panorama #1.

 From Frypan meadow, we headed west a bit on a nearly invisible trail towards Grizzly Lakes.  Nearly invisible is a bit of an understatement, and for the most part I was watching my compass and looking for a rise of land shown on the topo.  Every once in a while we would follow what I could convince myself was a trail for a while, until it disappeared again.  Eventually we ran into the Grizzly Lakes trail, which we followed for a bit before setting up camp outside the park somewhere near a stream.  Athena setup the tent, I started a fire and won a game of Rummy.

Another stream!  This one by our campsite.  Either our old water filter works or it's nice clean water.  Either seems equally likely to me.

Athena checks a pool's depth on the hike out.  The water runs over granite here, and has carved pools over time.  Chilly but the rocks are nice for a rest.

A bumble bee with its pollen baskets loaded.  Bumble bees' stingers lack the barb of the honey bee's stinger, allowing them to sting more than once.

Panorama #3, remarkably similar to the first two.

A pussy paws flower ( some sort of Costanthe ). I think this is a One-Seeded Pussy Paw.  I can't find any interesting facts on this flower... but it is sort of pretty. The valley girl of flowers I suppose.

We got back uneventfully and went to visit the largest tree on earth, 'General Sherman'.  This must be a hugely popular tree, as everything about the area and the short hike was seemingly aimed at the unfit, unintelligent fool intent on injuring themselves.  Signs warn you to sit if you are tired, drink water if thirsty.  Feeling a bit abused by the half mile paved walk down to the tree? Why not take a shuttle back to your car!  The hike is fenced in and paved.  Along the way there are signs letting you know you are "Almost to the Top!" or half way to the bottom.  I've never seen such an idiot-proofed  half mile before.

The middle tree is General Sherman.  By volume, it is the largest tree.  By height, age, and circumference, it is not.

General Sherman's footprint, with a single Dan for scale.

 That night we camped in the forests outside the park, where it's a bit less crowded and most importantly free.  Our campsite was shared by a pair of White-Headed Woodpeckers ( Picoides Albolarvatus ) tending their nest in a dead tree.  It was fun watching them poke in and out of their home.  Athena was wondering why we didn't hear them pecking as you would expect from woodpeckers.  Apparently this species is one of the few that rarely if ever actually pecks at dead and rotting wood.

We headed for Death Valley the next day, sleeping on the side of the road just outside the park.  It was in the mid 80s for the whole night.

IT'S EXTREME!

Only a bit of the Valley is dunes.  Most is rock-strewn flats, salt plains, and sparsely vegetated scrub/grass land.

A family of desert iguana.  These ones were much more amiable than the last few.  There was a small baby off to the left that i didn't notice till later.  Google-ing for the family structure of the desert iguana does not turn up many results.

The lowest point in the US is near this spring, called 'Badwater'.  There are at least three hats in this picture kindly left by previous visitors.  It's about 280 feet below sea level.

Badwater is hot, and really a fairly unpleasant place.

The park has a really nice visitors center, and you can buy gas at about $6 a gallon.  The lowest point in the US, and some neat sand dunes occupied our day until we headed north again towards the Bishop area.  We plan on spending a week or so in Bishop, where there is a huge amount of bouldering, sport climbing, and some trad as well.

My father before he practiced his photo smile, and his father looking like a true cowboy.  Happy fathers day!