Grand Canyon

Tonto Plateau looking north, east of Tonto/Boucher Junction

Jen and I knew that we wanted to spend her (two week!) Spring Break outside, neither of us had ever been to the Grand Canyon, and it was on her list of things to do in 2009, so our choice was easy. In our usual hyperbolic fashion we took to calling the trip GC09, GCSB2k9, or other semi-random permutations of the characters G,C,S,B,2, and 9.We are a little long on enthusiasm sometimes.

Planning wasn’t bad. I simply fired up my search engine of choice, et voila! I found this gentleman’s very helpful website (http://www.bobspixels.com/kaibab.org/bc/hikelist.htm), containing a list of trip itineraries and mileages, along with suggested number of days to complete. Funny enough, opening it again just now, I see this prominent statement quite high on the page:

“Please use caution when planning your backcountry trip, check the trail descriptions and make sure you understand what you are getting yourself into.”

No thanks! I’ll just find something that fits our desired trip length and go blindly from there. Ok? Ok. Great. Thanks again.

We settled on a 4 day itinerary, tracing roughly a loop.

Day One:

Hermit’s Rest Trailhead

Dripping Springs Trail

Boucher Trail

Boucher Creek Campsite

Day Two:

Day trip to the Colorado river

Boucher Creek Campsite

Day Three:

Tonto Trail (east)

Boucher Rapids Campsite

Day Four:

Hermit Trail

Dripping Springs Trail

Hermit’s Rest Trailhead

—

Of course I immediately excluded all trips including the so-called “corridor trails” – the superhighways of the canyon – trails wide enough to walk three abreast, full of mule dung, and offering semi-luxurious accommodation (if not large campgrounds with running water) at regular intervals. We are not the bourgeois of the outdoors! We do not need your trail improvements and access to “emergency services”! Ha! The very idea of these well-trod paths seemed at once pathetic and worthy of contempt. We would instead find some random little piece of the canyon to call our own – something sure to offer a unique Grand Canyon experience, inaccessible simply by choice to those unwilling to buy a map and strike out on their own. We, you see, are explorers.

Oh, how wrong I was.

So having chosen our adventure (Does the pair walk off a cliff in the near-dark? Turn to page 19. Does the pair run out of water? Turn to page 41.),  I dutifully sent off for permits and generally let other things in life take over, knowing that we had two months or so until the trip was upon us. Then it came: a fat envelope from the National Parks Service! We got our itinerary approved with no modifications! Success! I then dug a little deeper into the package to find that they had helpfully included brief one-page  descriptions for each trail that we’d be using. Great! I love narrative. But what’s this? In the Boucher trail description the NPS opined thusly: The Boucher challenges even experienced Canyon hikers. The trail consists of tough, tedious traverses linked together by knee-destroying descents, with a section of exposed hand and toe climbing thrown in for good measure.

(me with a look of sliiiight consternation on my face).

The leaflet ended with this: IMPORTANT NOTES The Boucher trail is arguably the most difficult and demanding of the south side trails. The overall condition of the trail, especially in the Supai and Redwall formations, presents an obvious hazard. The trail through the Supai is hard to follow when covered with fresh snow. Map reading skills are essential. The Boucher is best left to highly experienced Canyon hikers.

(me feeling a bit… what’s the word? irresponsible?, rash? over-ambitious and under-informed?)

So…. Jen and I are not precisely experienced Canyon hikers. This is our first time, as you recall. And well, Jen has this thing with heights…. Yeah… she does not “do heights” in the current vernacular, so um…. TO THE INTERNET!

A blatantly tardy web search revealed trip reports where people spoke of the Boucher as a “moderately hazardous route involving a brief section of exposed scrambling”. Others, though, showing perhaps less restraint in their choice of words called it “a potentially deadly undertaking”. Well, this, as you can imagine caused your correspondent no small amount of worry.

Shall we try to amend the permit (he asks his ever-patient partner)? No, says she, let’s stick with the plan. I mean, they let people take this trail. How bad can it be?

My guilt assuaged, the weeks roll by. Food and other sundry items are purchased at the local REI (why no dividend on food purchases?!?), reservations for fido made at the GC Kennel (no dogs allowed below the rim), and soon enough the car is packed and we are on the road, taking I-40 across the Mojave desert towards Flagstaff, killing innumerable butterflies on the way. Our hearts are light! The audiobooks are playing, the gas stations all offer a selection of cold drinks to rival that of any minor african sultan’s palace, and we are on VACATION.

Our first “real” stop was Flagstaff. Neither of us had been before and we both came away really liking the town – a good progressive vibe and REALLY good Thai food will get you a long way with us, though. We planned to crash on Forest Service land north of town and south of the park, and I had secured directions to a cool-looking little spot in the shadow of Arizona’s highest point, Humphrey’s Peak, beforehand. When we got there, though (in pitch darkness), a gate blocked our way. Oh well, said I, let’s just throw a tent up here a little ways off the road. It’s all Forest Service land, so camping is permitted except where otherwise explicitly indicated. Good plan! Except  for when Jenna came across what by all accounts looked like a gravesite while we looked for the best place to put up a tent. Come on, people. I don’t need this. She’s a girl. Shes allowed to be creeped out by this stuff. Me? I just have to PRETEND that I’m fine with sleeping near a gravesite in the middle of nowhere.

Well, we weren’t blair witched during the night, so the next (cold!) morning we took a beautiful walk through the forest towards Hart’s Meadow. Streams were partially frozen, the dog was running and jumping, and we were en route to adventure. After our walk, we entered the park, which looked to us a lot like a big forest. The Grand Canyon National Park isn’t the Tetons or RMNP, or any number of other parks where you can see the “why” from a great distance. Instead, GCNP is a whole lot of “oh, that’s nice” until you are literally yards away from the rim, at which point you kind of get quieter and realize that there was a reason you came after all, and oh by the way, this is pretty spectacular. So we killed the day geting a rat-sack (so rodents don’t eat all your food from your backpack), dropping the dog off, and sorting gear in our campsite in hurricane-force winds.

Let me digress for a minute. Everyone who works in foodservice in GCNP is foreign. I mean foreign like Thai or Cambodian foreign. And while I am TOTALLY in support of opening our labor markets and borders, I had to wonder, was there NO applicant for these jobs in Arizona that would not have required the Delaware North Corporation (evil, evil, evil) to secure someone a freaking visa just to serve me bland food at high prices? Just seems odd to me, that’s all.

So, one cafeteria-style meal and a night of sleep interrupted by the campers next to us showing up loudly, vomiting, and then proceeding to boot and rally, the beginning of the adventure was upon us. Oh, and 4 inches of new snow was upon us as well. Seeing snow in the high desert is always really cool.

We passed the gate on the way out to Hermit’s Rest (they give you the code in your permit), and after each of us made all of our final preparations, we were on the trail at about 9am, now only patches of snow remaining but the air temperature hovering in the high 40’s. The Dripping Springs trail lets you know where you’re going in a hurry: down. The trail is like a yellow-brick road in to the canyon, replete with hand-fitted paving stones quarried locally. The trail was constructed by and for the Hermit trail’s namesake: Henry Boucher. Boucher was actually not a hermit at all, but that’s gonna be the rap you get if you’re a dude who builds a house damn near the bottom of an isolated corner of the Grand Canyon. The trail switchbacks down and down and down to a large sandy tarn after about 30 minutes, marking the trail junction for the Dripping Springs and Hermit Trails. Here we stayed on Dripping Springs, but would return to this  same junction via the Hermit Trail on the return. Dripping Springs gains a bit of elevation here, then begins a sometimes spectacular traverse of a very remote-feeling piece of the canyon. One never gets expansive views, but there is a lot of vertical relief to be seen. After another hour or so on the DS T, there is a subtle junction with an inconspicuous sign for the Boucher Trail. The Boucher Trail, at this point is an indistinct footpath through a drainage, providing the first taste of what an unmaintained (no trail crew in 40+ years) trail in the Grand Canyon looks like. The B T immediately cuts up and across a fairly narrow plateau, offering a completely different flora than we’d seen so far. Microclimates in the desert aren’t so pronounced as in coastal climates, but to see the subtle variations in life based on sun/shade and aspect was very cool.

The plateau continues narrowing until completely interrupted by a rockslide of car-sized  boulders. The path across is trivial (for me, Ryan) but requires a bit of routefinding and easy downclimbing. We ended up stopping here to eat lunch, probably a decision precipitated more by the now omnipresent fear of “where the wild things were” than it actually being a convenient location.

The mild dread of when we’d encounter the principal difficulties and exposure was not yet a total consumption, but did accompany us through every blind turn. Jenna has a serious aversion to heights, and the trip descriptions we’d read on the internet were a recurring theme of conversation. The topo wasn’t precise about when exactly we would hit what others had decided was so deadly, since they provided elevation on an absolute basis, while trail descriptions (and experienced canyon hikers) calibrate height in the canyon according to which rock strata one is in.

Having passed the easy scrambling, both of us wanted to believe that the worst was passed. The spring in our step was dampened pretty quickly when we met another party coming up trail (the only other group we would see, in fact, on the Boucher Trail), who asked unnecessarily salacious questions like “have you guys done this trail before”, and upon hearing that we had not, informed us that “it’s like, so dangerous back there. if you slipped you might die”.

Well, thank you, folks. I  was managing Jen’s emotions pretty well to that point, and you successfully shook the bottle in a place with no way to release the pressure. I went in to damage control mode. I pointed out that we’d read different opinions on the seriousness, that people tend to play up the excitement of something that they’ve recently done and are proud of, and finally, the fact that they did not look like wizened veterans of the canyons. These were no desert rats, attuned to the fickle balance of life and nature’s whim in a place where humans are at a natural disadvantage. Nay, these were the folk of GAP sweatshirts and non-load bearing carabiners holding myriad camp accoutrement to an already bloated external frame pack. In short, we were hearing from the farm team of canyon walkers. We, Jen and I, we were a cut above.

It was with some amount of dread, though, that we made progress across the next hour or so of non-descript traversing, always scouting the route ahead for where the inevitable but unenviable break came in the Supai. Finally, it was upon us – a loose gully dropping down at more than a 45 degree angle. Well, Jen soon blacked out, an emotional mixture of fear on one hand and blind trust in my ability to guide her through the ordeal on the other. From my perspective, this was a trivial sierra 3rd class downclimb through short sandstone towers and semi-consolidated scree. From Jenna’s perspective, we were making out with Death after the lights were flippped for last call in a bar you’d never been to before but with great drink specials, all of our friends having left an hour ago. In other words, a really bad idea gone too far to abort. Suffice to say that there were alternate bouts of crying and pleading, punctuated by whatever response I thought would work best in the moment, and yes, I ran the whole range:

ANGRY: Get a hold of yourself! You need to be sharp right now! There is no place for emotion. Cry later, focus now!

EMPATHETIC: I totally get that this is scary. Just go slow and you’ll be fine.

GUIDING: Your right foot goes here. Turn around. Do this part facing the rock. This block is loose.

BARGAINING: If  you do this we’ll never have to do it again. It’s over after this, babe.

CONFIDENCE BUILDING: That’s it! Great work! See, you’re doing it! Just one more step! Great! Now again, here. Goooood.

And in the end, the attitude that works most often in life was the right one here as well: calm and assertive. Jen was still freaking out, but trusting that I didn’t take her here so she could die, and we were making progress – never really stalled out long enough for her to completely melt down.

In all, the gully probably loses 300 feet of elevation, after which it dumps you pretty unceremoniously in to a broader drainage. This is the routefinding crux of the entire route, and we while we didn’t blow it, we definitely wasted some time. It’d be impossible to describe how to do it right (or even how to do it wrong), but the path here varies between pure cross country travel and very faint use trail. This is the only place where one could get cliffed out by following the wrong path, and though consequences are low if one does choose incorrectly, I think most people are mentally ill-equipped for any disappointment at this point in the day.

Having picked our way through this last tricky section, I, silently, was worrying about the amount of daylight remaining. Jen was totally baked, moving along but fully exhausted by the mental toll of the descent. Now, at least, only Travertine Canyon lie between us and our objective.

In some act of cosmic recompense, the next logical place to stop after the descent is on a pleateaued penninsula just before White’s Butte. This is a dry campsite but must be one of the most spectacular that we’d seen. Huge boulders dotted the landscape and expansive views to the east had us thinking, in our totally mentally friend state, about posting up for the night. The distance to our intended campsite convinced us to press on.

Unfortunately, we were doing our map-reading with a Trails Illustrated 100 foot contour map. While the Travertine Canyon descent looked, well, manageable, a USGS quad would have told the real story – endless swithbacks down nearly 2000 feet still stood between us and the end of our day. But hell, who am I kidding? The contours were there on my map, all 20 of them. I just didn’t want to cop to reality.

The relief of knowing that we’d passed the technical crux soon gave way to the quad-destroying reality of a 2000′ foot descent (in about a horizontal mile) to END your day. We were cooked. Talk of dinner did nothing to brighten things. Footing seemed precarious, even when it wasn’t, simply by virtue of carrying full packs on tired legs. Talk of headlamps may have happened. Honey was eaten. And finally, after a somewhat demoralizing trail junction with the Tonto (Jen was not happy to be passing in descent what we’d only have to climb to return to in order to continue the loop), we made it to a beautiful little patch of tent sites along a stream. Or rather, a creek. Boucher creek, to be precise.

Somehow the tent was up just before headlamps became more necessity than convenience, and even more spectacularly, dinner was prepared and eaten that night before tear-stained cheeks hit thermarest pillows, and sighs of relief were expelled (both from relief – mine at her being done, hers from being done).

We woke up the next day incredibly thankful that we’d planned a full day at Boucher Creek. Jenna, the first day, had kept saying that she felt like we weren’t TRULY in the canyon yet. A defensive strategy, no doubt, to keep herself from letting her guard down as to what may lie ahead, but our day trip to the Colorado River proved that we were indeed IN the canyon, and could not get any more IN THE CANYON, as the freaking river was the BOTTOM OF THE CANYON by default. Overall a cool experience more for the opportunity to see the geological force that created the entire thing rather than a destination unto itself.

The rest of the day was spent scrabbling (our big weight luxury item for the trip was travel scrabble, a very thoughtful Christmas gift from John), reading, and hanging out in the little pools of Boucher Creek. There was one other group in the area the first evening but we had this incredible and remote place all to ourselves the second night.

Day three dawned and found us shouldering our pack for the easiest of our hiking days: a traverse across the Tonto plateau. I had gone up on a restless-legs reconnaissance mission the day before around sunset to find one of the most magical and peaceful places I’ve ever found on the earth. Even better, it was damn near flat up there!

In the end, the magic of the place was far more inspiring than the topography. Our legs were fresh and we were able to chug along at a great clip while enjoying incredible open vistas and a great selection of wildflowers. There is one sketchy section for those that don’t like heights; a weird little jog around a decomposing pinnacle/slope, but otherwise this is an area and a trail where you can make major mileage in fantastic surroundings.

We pulled in to our final campsite, Hermit Creek, fairly early in the day, jarred by the first signs of civilization. Multiple tents? Graded sites? Composting toilet (that was only kind of working…)? It felt like an RV park compared to our isolated and totally primitive experience of the previous few nights. Hermit Creek did come with the dual benefit of being situated in an incredibly, improbably, lush canyon, and sitting right at the junction of the trail that would take us out the next day.

The afternoon was spent swimming in the even larger pools of Hermit Creek (where the fingerling fish nibble at you!) and, predictably, reading and playing scrabble. For the first time below the rim, wind was again a factor, brink enough that it forced us to cook inside the tent.

We had decided to go with an alpine start to beat the heat on the long climb out. Funny how a 430 wake up call is much easier in the desert than the mountains (in the mountains I’m usually cold and full of excuses at 430). Up and making our final pack preparations at by headlamp and under a bright moon, we hit the trail at first light around 530 am.

At least you know what you’re in for on a walk out of the Grand Canyon – you’re going up. The Hermit Trail “was built to serve a luxury campsite near Hermit Creek. Hermit Camp predated Phantom Ranch by 10 years, and in its heyday was complete with a tramway from the rim, a functional automobile for transportation within the facility, and a Fred Harvey chef. Operations ceased in 1930, but for two decades Hermit Camp was the last word in gracious tourism below the rim.” The HT headed out is defined for most by a feature known as the Cathedral Staircase. Unfortunately, for Jenna, it was also marked by another feature: the angle of repose slope. This formerly high-tech, semi-paved, trail, without maintenance, has degraded so completely in parts that it is nothing more than singletrack beat in to a decomposing scree field. I think that without the first day’s experience, the Hermit wouldn’t have caused a second thought, but after our trip in on the Boucher, nerves were raw and some of these areas seemed daunting.

Jen and I strategized before we started the hike: we would take the flats as fast as possible but manage to breathing and heart rate on the major inclines. Soon enough we hit the Cathedral Staircase and were pushing but not redlining. Both of us had our own best reason to get out; I wanted a beer and Jenna wanted to be anywhere associated with the words steep, exposed, or treacherous. The subsequent flats and steady climbs were fairly a blur. When we met a group of three ladies hiking down and asked them how long they’d been walking since the rim we were incredulous when they responded with a figure of 1.5 hours. Our exact goal or expectation for outbound hiking time has been forgotten, but we knew then that we were motoring. The dogs had been loosed. Instead of dreaming about dinner, we were dreaming about lunch, and instead of sleeping another night in the main campground on the rim, we started to talk about how far west we could drive.

Soon enough we came across Santa Maria spring (which would be a way cool dayhike, complete with rest area and ROCKING CHAIR!), ate some more honey, and began the final push. We breezed through the Dripping Springs / Hermit junction we’d passed through on the way in without so much as a pause to reflect and were back on the Yellow Brick road that had carried us in.

The climb was a slog, yes, but motivation was high. Occasional dayhikers wanted to stop and talk about where we’d been and how long we’d been in the backcountry, but Ma and Pa Kettle couldn’t compete with the allure of another bland cafeteria lunch and beers while wearing anything but trail runners.

In the end it wasn’t a cafeteria meal but a trip to the Deli that made it all worthwhile (we ate most of the food between them handing it to us and getting to the register). We were satisfied – me that I’d finally “done” the Grand Canyon (and via a respectable route, at that) and Jen simply to have survived it.

We went to the kennel, picked up a dog that had apparently been unwilling to poop for 4 full days of our absence, and spun tires back towards Flagstaff and our next destination: the East Side of the Sierra Nevada.

All those stories and more in the next posts…

Too much of a good thing

Two big posts to come, but for now: I ate a whole watermelon today.

Sitton Peak

Sitton Peak sits at 3,273 ft. in the Cleveland National Forest. A fine enough half-day outing; don’t miss te Ortega Oaks Candy Store at the trailhead – just stick with the candy and pastries: the sandwiches aren’t that incredible (though they are a throwback at $4.25).

We hit water at Pigeon Spring (enough for the dog, anyway) and passed a total of probably 50 cub scouts – some coming out after a dayhike, others camping and making the summit push that afternoon.

I’d recommend Bear Ridge trail rather than Bear Canyon in all but extremely hot weather, though doing this exposed and dry route in hot weather is not advised in any case. Bear Ridge has much better views and adds a trivial amount of distance and vertical to the overall hike.

jerusalem cricket

Hiking Solstice Canyon

First real walk with our new addition, Didi.

DiDi is an Australian Cattle Dog, between one and a half and two years old, about a week out of the San Pedro dog pound. Her original name was to be Darwin Drover, though that was selected when we thought Didi was a he. She is not. Yes, there are many obvious questions here, but just… we were wrong.

At once a very typical ACD (smart) but also garners comments from all who know the breed about how calm she is. She’s been great for us and we were happy to reward her with some trail time.

Solstice Canyon is a beautiful little walk just off PCH -  many other websites have the details so I’ll spare them here and limit my commentary to saying that this is a great place to take a walk in the winter, and one of the most verdant canyons I’ve seen around L.A.

We walked in hours after the last of LA’s fairly torrential rains in the second week of February 2009 and had the entire walk in to ourselves. The rain, though, had turned the creek in to a fairly raging river, forcing us to miss the ruins in the back of the canyon and retrace our steps back to the car.

Kalalau Trail in a day

View Larger Map

Kauai is the ultimate embodiment of a place that’s wonderful to spend a week or ten days of your life while being totally unsuitable for long-term habitation. At least for me, though the thousands of denizens and untold millions more longing to move there contradict my sentiment. Our time on the island was great – the perfect mix of active and passive – and the highlight of my activity was the Kalalau trail.

I can’t quite remember how I even became aware of the Kalalau. I’d probably searched for Kauai trail runs or some such nonsense, only to come across this  masochistic gem of a dayhike.

The trail is 22 miles along the Na’Pali coast, round trip, from Ke’e beach (the road’s end on the north side of the island), to Kalalau beach, gaining and losing a couple thousand feet of vert for good measure.

While the intervening years have made any sort of running commentary a bit of a stretch for my memory, I can share the following with  anyone sizing this excursion up:

-I did this in June. Temperatures were hot but far from unmanageable, but I do wish that I had carried electrolyte tablets or gel.

-I missed the near-clockwork afternoon rains, but am confident that they would have turned the tone of the trip much darker (see below).

-Consider getting a pre-dawn start and using a headlamp. The trail is easy to follow, provided you have a map. I did not.

-If you, like me, decide to strike out on this walk without a map, DO NOT GO HIGH on the grass path immediately out of the parking lot at Ke’e! Although the trail is basic and fairly idiot-proof, the first 1/2 mile is the only bit that threw me. Instead of going high, stay along the shore on the very well-trodden dirt path with views of the small Ke’e bay. Taking the high trail leads  to some exceedingly interesting (and also spoooky, given my early start and solitude) indigenous ruins and waterfalls (dry in May), but this ain’t where you want to be. Visit this another day, or perhaps on your way back.

-Cache Water: I carried 3 liters of water, plus a tallboy can of Arizona Green Tea. This, in retrospect, was definitely a sub-optimal amount given the heat and length of exertion. I could have made the whole endeavor easier, however, by stashing part of my water for the return trip along the trail, perhaps halfway in.

-Carry enough water: Roughly 3.5 liters of water was not enough for summer conditions. I was hallucinating and losing coordination in the final 2 hours of the hike, and I this was at a time when I regularly ran 3 hour trail runs at 8:30 pace in the Marin Headlands (similar topography). When you do the hike on the way in, you’re likely to note clearly that there are MANY portions of the trail where a complete loss of footing could be disastrous and potentially fatal. Carrying electrolytes could have mitigated some of my symptoms,  but more water is the other half of the solution.

-Don’t believe that you’re going to run. Some will – yes – but go in to it without that expectation. I expected to run/jog about half of the miles and ended up powerhiking (fresh) and dragging myself along (tired). Thoughts of running were dashed quickly by the roots and rocks endemic to the trail. Also, while I’m comfortable with exposure, there are a good many “no fall” stretches on this trail simply unsuitable for anything beyond a brisk walk.

The Kalalau trail in a day stands as my most gratifying single outdoor experience. I’m not sure how, given that I’ve spent most of my time in the mountains and have slowly amassed a proud amateur’s list of backcountry exploits in the Sierra Nevada.  This one day, though, tested my resolve – and rewarded it – in a singular way.

PS – feel free to have a car drop in the AM and hitchhike back to your accomodation. I held my thumb out for about 2 minutes before a couple (with child! not the kind you often think of as amicable to picking up a hitchhiker!) took pity on me.

Permit: I rolled the dice as a day-tripper. I got a away with it. Though I’m not able to find any information on the fine amount online, I imagine it’d be steep.

-Ryan

State Park Map

Permits

Rain. Rain.

Woke up at 5:!5 yesterday to drive up to Bishop and do a 3 day ski tour. Things started good across the Antelope Valley.

rainbow in the antelope valley

5 hours later I rolled in to Bishop CA, pulled into Wilson’s East Side Sports and asked about conditions. Basically they told me that everything depended on where snowline was for the storm currently underway. Bishop is at about 4K’ in the eastern rainshadow of the Sierra. Walking out of lunch, there was not a drop of rain coming out of the sky. I jumped back in the car and headed up towards the Lake Sabrina trailhead. Rain started around 6K, and it was pouring. The trailhead, though sits at 8K, right where snowline was forecast. I drove through the tiny burg of Aspendale at 7,500′ with some trepidation – still rain, and about 30 seconds later (said it was small), pulled up to the access gate. Uh-oh. The road you see is where I was supposed to be skiing. Seriously.

Lake Sabrina Trailhead

Ok. I’ll just drive _further_ north to Mammoth Lakes. Back in the car and another hour later, I step out at 8.5K’ to…. rain. Fine. June Lake looks a littlle higher. I’ll try that. Another 40 minutes in the car and WHAT? It’s raining even harder here. I turned it back towards Mammoth =, now having driven about 450 miles, including my little backroad detours. It’s 3:30 and I can’t fathom doing the ride back today. I drove so far for this! So I found a coffee shop with free wifi in town, posted up, and began to look for BLM or Forest Service camping in the area. No dice, at least not in winter. The ranger mentioned that they prohibited it because of snow and mud on the roads. Screw it, I figure, I’ll just go up some FS road and throw the tent up – they’ll never find me tonight.

Well, mission accomplished. I had myself so scared that I would be stuck that my chest was tight with anxiety. I drove half an hour out past Owens River Gorge on some godfoorsaken road (home of a supposed incident where a Bigfoot killed a person!) road, so soft and so slick that I was four-wheel rally drifting the turns just to stay afloat. By the grace of god, full time AWD, and plenty of tread left on my tires, I made it out of there but was absolutely burned out. I was defeated.

But wait! What’s this? A lovely meadow, fairly near the road? It’s beautiful.

where to sleep - outside Tom's Place, CA

Where should I sleep? Oh, probably not here, the whole thing is a STEAMING CAULDRON. The meadow was a huge seep for a geothermal hot spring.

Near Convict Lake, CA

Fuck it. I’m driving home. It’s 7p and 350 miles. I stop at a place called Giggle Springs to fill up and get a Vitamin Water. The ignorant 16 year old girl at the counter enforces their $5 credit/debit minimum on purchases at the counter – even after I explain to her that I’ve just spent $30 outside to fill my tank. (Expletive rant from email to friends edited)

Only one nap stop in a random McDonalds on the way home before hitting Home at 12:30a – about 20 hours and 800 miles after I started.

Climbing Phantom Spires

Things I climbed

Over Easy – 5.7 – Yep. Over and Easy. It was wise to start with something that got my head in to tying knobs with slings for pro.

Slowdancer – 5.9 – Cool crimpy start followed by something positive every time you need it.

Shark’s Tooth Arete – 5.10 – Defined crux and grounder potential. Fortunately they don’t happen in that order. If this climb were 2-3x as tall it would be a classic.

Gingerbread – 5.7 – A fair amount of suspect rock in the first 50 feet, but recommended overall. Definitely not a beginner .7 lead as the protection is not always obvious.

Silverado Trail Duathlon – kind of

“Am I saying yes? This is crazy…

Good thing I like crazy.

(My response to Tom’s inquiry as to whether or not I would like to do repeats of 20 miles cycling followed by 5 miles running on the Silverado Trail)

—

I think I burned myself out on pure endurance stuff last summer, going from zero to 7 hour run/ride days most weekends, so my volume this summer has been slack. I’ve spent a lot of time in the water and on rock, but that don’t pay the bills on the road and trails

My (limited) rides have all been great retribution – for my partners – who have all put in tons of saddle time and take joy in making me hurt the same way that I did them last season. My runs have been casual affairs, mostly along the marina green and shorter loops in the headlands when I want to make a destination trip. So when Tom, who is now tapering for his participation in the Madison, Wisconsin, Iron Man, asked me to go do a multisport day in Napa, I should have known better.

The basic setup is Ride 20/Run 5/Ride 20/Run 4/Ride 20/ Run 3 on the Silverado trail.

The area is totally conducive to something like this: you park right next to a Starbucks and Long’s Drugs about a 1/4 mile from the ST, so every trip is an out-and-back to your car. Also, it’s flat. Way flat.

If you are training and need something to break the monotony, this will do it. Alternatively, if you have friends who are strong that proposition you on this and you accept, you will get what you deserve. I did. Ouch.

Note: there is apparently a lot of tension/animosity between some locals and what they perceive as tourists, city folk, whatever. As you might guess, a good decision tree on the people likely to cause problems is something like:

a – [Pickup truck Y/N] – if Y then b

b – [Male Y/N] – if Y then c

c – [Age 16-40] – If Y then result

Result: duck and cover, get as far on to the shoulder as you can, prepare for impact, insults, etc.

Desolation Wilderness – Eagle Lake Buttress

(more pictures of my trip to Eagle Lake Buttress here)

The Falcon guide to Lake Tahoe climbing has a brief but intriguing mention of a formation called Eagle Lake Buttress. Multipitch granite with a backcountry feel near Lake Tahoe had me interested, and even though I couldn’t round up a partner for the weekend I decided to go in and check it out. I figured this way I could sandbag the approach with authority when we did decide to hump ropes and a rack back there.

Eagle Lake

The walk in to Eagle Lake is trivial and the lake itself is quite beautiful – so accessible and so beautiful this is no doubt someplace in danger of being loved to death. Desolation Wilderness is the most-used wilderness area per acre in the United States, and I get the feeling that most of the impact is concentrated in a few areas; Eagle Lake has to be one of them.

After Eagle Lake, you get the pleasure of either making your way up some biiig slabs or gunning up a talus chute. I chose the talus, as the slabs looked nontrivial – 5th class in my estimate, though I didn’t investigate up close. I did meet two guys on my way out who had come up that way and they didn’t seem overly shaken. What do I know? Once the ridge is gained weave through the huge boulders, point yourself to the buttress, and pick a line.

Eagle Lake Buttress

After sitting and scoping the lines for a bit, I thought that I recognized the line described in the Falcon guide. After lacing up my shoes and telling myself that I would make no move that I wasn’t certain I could downclimb, I set off on my first real free solo.

Funny enough I had just watched “Return to Sender” at Mark’s place the night prior, and was at turns intrigued and made to feel ill by the guy who is profiled in the SoCal free-soloing feature. He talks about how when you’re soloing you exist within an egg – a kind of reduced sensory reality where your body and its immediate surroundings are the only things that exist. About 30 feet off the ground I realized he was right. It was a beautiful day in the high 70’s, a nice breeze, and I was surrounded by beauty on all sides, but all I knew in that moment was the way my hands, feet, heart, and lungs felt, and the possibility, security, and reality of each move.

I’m not sure I went up there intending to solo a 300 foot route, but I did bring my rock shoes, and that says something about intent. The route (takes the obvious line towards the blown pine tree, but stays vertical where the crack leading to the tree diagonals leftward) was well within my ability (probably 5.6 with the possibility to keep it easier if one chooses the easiest moves rather than the most aesthetic), and I never had a thought telling me to “keep it together” or “man, don’t fall”, and I think that there’s a lesson in there to be held even while leading harder stuff: just do what you can with each move.

The rock quality up there is great – granite with some Tuolumne-like inclusions and laser-cut cracks. The crux for me was the downclimb on the mountaineer’s route; a wrong turn or two on those slabs gets sketchy in a hurry.

Would it be worth it to head in with a rope and rack? If you’re in the Tahoe area and want to feel like you’re in an alpine setting, yes. I think of this place as a big crag with a less-than-ideal appproach, the kind of place you go with a friend when you can’t or don’t want to make a full weekend of climbing. And as I’ve thought nearly every day I’ve spent outside; it beats almost anything else you could have done with the time.

View from the top - Emerald Bay

Holy shit, that’s big.

So we’re bobbing and riding our way through Friday morning, about mid-way along Linda Mar beach, when Wojtek says “Ryno, there’s something out there”. Out of habit (and hope) I told him exactly what I have told myself every single time I’ve had an “unverified” fin sighting at Ocean Beach – nope, it’s nothing. Just light on the water or a bird’s shadow.

But he kept it up, and got more insitant.

Finally I trained my eyes where he pointed, waited a minute, and prepared to dismiss it again.

That’s about when it surfaced.

“Wow”, I think to myself, “that’s a humpback whale”. In pacifica. About 150 feet from me.

Ok; let’s break this situation down: We are sitting on surfboards 30 feet from shore. Quite suddenly there is an animal roughly the size of two school buses making its presence known at a relatively short distance from me. Wonder what else is going on down there that I haven’t been made aware of.

We ended up sitting there about 20 minutes just watching this thing roll, surface, and spout. It was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. An experience which came to an end quite abruptly when we both saw a torpedo-shaped wave breaking, really fast, straight at us. Wojtek and I literally looked at each other and began to paddle for shore even before saying a word. Whales are big and cool and mostly peaceful and have had supporting roles in a Star Trek movie. Whatever this was met none of those criteria.

(not my picture, obviously)

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/humpback/

A Farewell to Arms

I came.
I saw.
I whipped.

Totally stolen image - same route - not me

Saturday – led p2 of One Hand Clapping, so that’s now officially ticked as a leader on all pitches. Those cupped hand jams around the corner are better than I gave them credit for. Also lead Nova Express, a tricky-to-protect 9+ with a nice section of offwidth up top. All in all I was feeling good and fairly confident.

Sunday – up early and the first ones at Snowshed. I set out on my heroic lead.

I worked my way up to the base of the final crack section (crux), plugged in 2 pieces, and make the first move….. no, don’t have it. Downclimb.

Place third piece. Head back up. Go for it! Up, up! FALLING! 15 footer.

Good, the gear held, and the fall was clean. Hang, shake out, get my head back together.

Go for it! Up, up! FALLING! 15+ footer. Hm. Wonder how deformed that top piece (grey alien, fwiw) is going to be. Hang, shake out, get my head back together.

Finally decide that this is it… It’s TIME! Summit or plummet!

Up, up. Good lock fingerlock, plug the famous .75 camalot. Shit. I’m pumped. Go from the lock to bad hands then to a dicey lieback. Hand/foot shuffle, step. fuuuuuuck! I’m falling! And I’m upside down.

Yes, I took an inverted 20 footer after crossing the rope behind my legs while liebacking.

Before I knew what was happening Iain was just going “shit man, shit. Are you ok?” over and over. I started saying “yes yes yes yes” really quietly, I think just to convince myself that I was, even before I grabbed the rope and pulled myself upright. After being lowered it took me a few minutes to put a full sentence together again, and a few minutes after that I was laughing in that way you do when you know you’ve just dodged a bullet.

I am the proud owner of a black and blue (turning to yellow) harness bruise – the outline is vivid – but otherwise completely fine. No neck pain, no weird soreness or aches.

Time to start training. I know that footwork is really the crucial element, but I’m going to have myself doing thin hands pullups by the end of September just to prove a point.

Presidio Trails

Presidio Trails - Thanks NPS

I am fortunate enough to live minutes from the Presidio, which makes for a pretty easy choice when I head out to do a little pre or post-work running.

I joined Trails Forever, thank the volunteers whenever I see them out, and am appreciative of the work that’s done. But lately I’ve seen a move to turn every trail in to a superhighway. Singletrack is being widened and “improved” with stone borders and edging, paths are being graded with huge machinery, and one high-use path near the bridge is getting a coat of tarmac.

Trail improvements are great when they are actually improvements – taking something and making it better, not bigger, cleaner, and less wild. We need to keep what few natural areas we have – and San Francisco is one of the best cities in the world at this, all told – and to enhance the experience, not lower them to the lowest common denominator.

To think that I may come back in 10 years time to tread trails, now literally hidden jewels of nature within the city, and find them just another walk in an urban park, is saddening.

California Wildfires

I smell woodsmoke each day in the San Francisco Marina.

Climbing Tuolumne Meadows

Nice long weekend of climbing, including

West Country (5.7) – What a fun second pitch that is. I hate liebacks and that thing is still a grin. Too bad that it’s going to have to be re-rated a decade from now due to polish. Somebody tell me what grade the direct 4th pitch goes at. I’d like to hear 10a, but I suspect 9.

West Crack (5.9) – Still probably my favorite climb done in the Meadows. The moves off the deck go (actually worst part of the route for me is that 15 foot runout where the crack peters out just before the first (bolted)  belay), the second pitch roof is awesome, whole thing is fun and pretty continuous, and that fingers pitch is just so much fun.

West Crack - credit: Supertopo.com

Zee Tree (5.7) – Don’t bother. The problem with TM slab climbs is that if it’s too easy you’re not interested, and if it’s too hard you suddenly find yourself much more religious than you’d realized… ZT is too easy.

Hermaphrodite Flake to the Boltway (5.10a) – This ain’t TM 5.10, kids, that’s for sure. A bolt at the move? What a joke! This is sport climbing… A worthwhile variation to take a classic climb all the way to the top.

Whatever the easy summit route is on Lembert Dome (5.6) – This is a good sunset route, but you’d have to be pretty novice to find fun climbing here. Don’t miss this if you’re anxious to get tree sap all over your rope, though

—

Does anyone know if there are any restrictions on bivvying on FS land off on 120 west of Lee Vining?

And finally, an ode to the girls at the Woah Nellie Deli:

Funny. no! astounding.

the amount of nice girls

to be found in Lee Vining

who would have imagined

a gas station with hot food

and quite so much raw talent

but though you’re quite cute

cowgirl shirts (but no boots)

I’m afraid any flirting is moot

as I’m sleeping outside, tired, and dirty

making things tricky you see

Oh, that and my girlfriend would kill me

Climbing Scimitar

This is the way to get off of the couch for the climbing season – sincere runouts and 5.9.

(Edited as I went back, led 1&3, and have now led all three pitches)

First pitch is interesting, with a bit of stemming, laybacking, and wandering from crack to face and back again. This pitch seemed almost harder as a second than as a leader, suggesting to me that there are a few ways to skin this particular cat, each one with pros and cons. As a follower I stemmed up the final the corner towards the p.1 belay. Leading, I moved back and forth from the face to the crack/dihedral (which is not all solid), and made a big final move left on the chalked up-incut about 10 feet below the p.1  belay. This felt more solid and better protected to me, as you can get a few good aliens in under the final overlap before the belay.

The second pitch 40-foot no-pro runout beta is as follows: go where the lichen isn’t, and don’t get antsy. Stay a little lower than you think you need to – or can – and make sure you’re hand traversing, not foot traversing when you go up and right. Otherwise this is trivial, and the gear is good before you pull that first roof. A little hand jamming technique goes a long way on this route, and this is the first real example.

The second bulge/roof is made much easier with a really long reach (and I have long arms) and more hand jamming. You can also slot a foot jam here so good you don’t want to leave it.

The third pitch is the business, though, in my opinion . The first challenge is the roof, dispatched through some “lateral thinking” as a second, and some pretty irredeemable groveling on lead. Just ooze it up that weird, weird, nearly horizontal layback. The second roof really isn’t, though my partner reports that it goes direct at about 5.9 in any case. The middle 50 feet is the attention grabber, though. You can go left, up, and then… wow. You have to go back right and it is exposed. Period. Underline. Italics, maybe. I didn’t like the gear in this middle stretch, but others I’ve spoken to don’t even seem to notice. I’m sure it all has to do with what kind of stances you prefer.

In my newly formed opinion, this and Traveler’s Buttress are the 5.9’s at the Leap. While Scimitar isn’t continuous at the grade, it rarely gets truly moderate, and the cruxes are substantial but well defined with good stances and gear before and after. The line is much more continuous, though perhaps a bit softer, as long as your head is on straight after the first 20 feet.

—

Also done:

Labor of Love -5.10(something)

Seems that there’s quite a range on this climb’s grade, depending on height. The person who bolted it was either on rap or quite tall. The dikes are all there, and positive, though the crux did prove to be very different for me (about 6′0 with a positive ape index) and my partner (5′8).

Note: the SuperTopo calls for a full trad rack on this climb (double cams from .6-2 and a single set of nuts). Be assured that you need nothing more than  the appropriate number of draws and double ropes to rap, provided you don’t want to leave a biner.

Surfing Ocean Beach

Ocean Beach, San Francisco

I owe thanks to Eben for many things, one of which is introducing me to surfing a few months ago.

I’m at the point where simply being able to paddle out at Ocean Beach feels like an accomplishment. Few things have ever looked so reasonable and been so difficult.

Riding the Santa Cruz Mountains

60 miles and 6300 feet of climbing.

Empire Grade = Good warm up to log the first 1K’

Smith Grade = Recommended

Bonny Doon Road = Better than staying on Pine Flat

Alba Road = Lay-it-down and open it up downhill. A.

Bear Creek Road = Where your legs start to talk

Zayante = Long downhill, bad pavement, narrow

Graham Hill Road = Screw you. Too much, too late.

Here’s the Route – starts at the southernmost marker

Canyonlands Half Marathon

The site has been dark lately, principally because I’ve logged very few miles, hours, and pitches outside in the last few months.

Fully six months ago, my college friend Nate had asked if I would be interested in running a race in Moab. Sure, I replied. It was to be just a few weeks after a marathon (Napa) I was planning on running, so I’d be in great shape and the 1/2 distance would be little more than an afterthought, a vacation run.

Well, I bagged training for the Napa marathon not long after I started, have logged 30 thousand air miles in the meantime, and have been home about 1 day in every 3 so far this year. I have long contended that one “could run a fast 10k off the couch”. It looked like I was going to see myself, and raise the stakes to boot. I had managed to find myself staring down a half marathon with zero training. Not like “very little” training, or “neglected the run but have been on the bike” training. Nothing.

The flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City is basically nonstop beautiful, and the drive down to Moab is becoming almost comfortable. I find myself doing it every few years now. [Audiobooks are key] I rolled in to Slickrock Campground around 11pm and greeted Nate and the others from Boulder and Salt Lake City that had come out for the race. Oh and yes, I said camp. There’s nothing like sleeping on the ground the night before and after a race, but the group had spoken, so I acquiesced.

Morning broke after a freezing desert night and I focused on not admitting what lie ahead. The course heads straight down an incredible steep-walled valley (HW 128). After a long pre-race wait because of the shuttling required on a one-way course, we were off. The start was a bit clustered, as pace pens were limited to 6:00, 7:00, and “others”, which was quite as diverse group… Fortunately I had no intention of PR’ing or even getting beyond a fast shuffle, so the initial mob scene wasn’t an issue for me.

I told Nate I had one goal in the race: negative splits on every mile. To achieve that with the kind of shape I was in meant going out _slow_. Good sense, no pressure, and conversation, ll kept me from getting ahead of myself. The scenery was fantastic, and the course profile had its own beauty; rolling easy hills and net downhill.

In the end I did keep to my goal of negative splitting and ran a composite 8:45 – a duffer’s time for sure, but I ain’t that fast even when I’m trained. I’d exceeded my expectations, and, as usual, exceeded any notion of common sense at the after-race feed tent. Why, why, why, do I insist on taking one (and sometimes more) of everything on offer? Chocolate milk mixed with oranges mixed with energy drink mixed with bananas mixed with cookies…

The weather had cleared and a perfect high desert 70 degree day invited us to stick around for the post-race celebration, but what? No beer? That’s right. This is Utah. And the band, bless their hearts, was, well… they were trying their best.

Fortunately, Nate and Erin had brought some of Colorado’s finest: Mountain Sun Brewery Growlers. Growlers are just huge mason jars filled with beer. Delicious Mountain Sun beer. The rest of the afternoon was spent playing music, wondering aloud about Utah culture, and getting far more buzzed than is advisable directly after running for a couple of hours in the desert.

I drank about a gallon of beer before falling asleep that night, having taken no water since the race. At some point we were eating at a restaurant, though that is hazy, and we also at some point ended up at what was clearly a locals-only saloon. I also woke up in the middle of the night from a dream in which I was at a work party, shirtless and eating grapes. Funny how the brain gets these messages across: YOU ARE TOO HOT AND DEHYDRATED. The next morning the I and the group were far less hung over than we deserved. Maybe it was for the best that we all passed out by 9pm.

Easily sleeping 12 hours is one of those mysteries of camping that I really don’t want to solve. I remember my dad would always wake up at some predawn hour on canoeing and backpacking trips. When I finally stumbled out of the tent he would have already read 100 pages of his book and have breakfast ready to boot. I’m not there yet; I’ll fall asleep with the sun and wake up 10-12 hours later if I have no alarm set.

The rest of the group was on the same wavelength, and after breakfast Nate and I set off to do a little climbing.

I can summarize the main points quite succinctly: I do not like Entrada sandstone. <End>

I had found a fun little climb in my pre-trip googling. Wilson Arch was close to Moab, moderate, and, well, that was all we needed. About 10 miles south on 191, there she was in full view of the road. We roped up and I promptly got scared. The first moves off the deck didn’t seem hard, but the exposure and angle of a fall meant about 25 feet if you blew it. And climbing prowess wasn’t the only determining factor – chunks of rock broke off in my hands under less than vigorous climbing. [there is a crack to protect the first moves that takes .3, .4, .5 camalots] This was like climbing a vertical sandbox. Handholds evaporated, feet slipped on the sand, and nothing, NOTHING, seemed trustworthy. The climb is essentially a free-solo. Fortunately most of it is very low angle. We broke the climb in to two pitches. The only protection on the first is at the first moves, and the only protection on the second is [.75 camalot] halfway up. The leader and the second are both equally exposed on this thing. I realized as I was bringing Nate up the final pitch that if he fell, he was going for a loooong ride off the side of the arch.

Thank god that the beta about a rap anchor came true – three bolts, and all as solid as they’re going to get in sandstone. This was a lifetime rappel: a free hanging 100 feet through the center of an arch. I was giddy the whole way down and the truckers honking their horns added to the experience.

Full up on the taste of fear, we parted ways, Nate headed back to Boulder and me to SLC to catch an early-morning Monday flight. The drive back was stunning as ever, with the transition from high desert to alpine topography/geology one of those miracles that reinforces the natural vastness and diversity of the United States.

Race Grades:

Organization = B

Course = A

Post-Race = C

Overall = A- (tilted by an really good schwag bag)

Wilson Arch Climbing Grades:

Approach = A

Route = D

Rappel = A

Overall = C (probably better if you’re mentally prepared for a free solo)

Vietnam by Motorcycle

http://picasaweb.google.com/ryangamlin/VietnamAndJapan2008

Cycling Sonoma and Napa – Trinity Grade

An uncharacteristically grey day up north, but  leaves are still on the vines and both valleys are oceans of color. Incredible.

Also incredible was Trinity Grade at 480 ft./mile, encountered after a missed turn very early on. Eeaagh.

Route Sheet (more or less) Here

Running the San Francisco Coast

This summer it was (the grind) from Stinson to Muir, but the beach to beach route I keep coming back to is the Marina (Crissy Field) to Baker Beach.These 6 miles are, hands down, one of the best ways to spend an hour of your day in San Francisco proper – the definition of short but sweet.

You’re never without something spectacular to look at. First the Marina, then Crissy Field, then the Bridge, then the Presidio, then the Marin Headlands, then Seacliff, then Baker Beach. Turn it around at Baker Beach and you get to see it all again in reverse.

One can do this run, round-trip, with about .5 mile on pavement. Even better, the GGNRA is making this trail even more incredible by restoring the Presidio Bluffs section.

If you do this run once, love it, and find yourself running it again, consider joining the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

Tuolumne meadows

4:43 am, I’ve woken from a dream in which a friend has told a stranger how to get in to my apartment (I have no secret way, no hidden key, nada. but then again, dreams aren’t supposed to be rational).

I like waking up and remembering my dreams. It kind of strikes me as a quaint notion, having the luxury of laying in bed and remembering the virtual reality you were just inhabiting. Most days the alarm wakes you, you know your schedule doesn’t allow for rumination on the beauty or tragedy of the story your brain was just telling itself, and so you get up and move along – that dream lost to the ether forever.

But this is different. It’s still dark out, it seems ea AAAAHH AAAAHH AAHHHH AHHH.

Damn, it was 4:43. My alarm was set for 4:45. Well, there’s nothing quite like spending a Sunday cannonballing it up to Tuolumne. Screw the dreaming – I can have nightmares of runout slabs all day!

We had tentatively decided on a late season push for the regular route on fairview dome (.9, 8 pitches). It roughly follows the line of sun/shade in the picture below, cutting up and right once the prominent bulge is gained.

So with no other cars at the pullout, we turned up the Led Zep (highschool throwback, anyone?) and started to rack up. Or rather, started to rack up after 2 minutes of just standing there and realizing just how cold it was. The car’s readout said 38. I’d bet it may have been a few degrees south of that – the streams visible on the way through the meadows were all frozen solid.

Still, we’re ambitious, getty antsy as the end of the season draws near, and perhaps just a little stupid. We racked up for the quick approach (under 10 minutes) and were _glad_ that it was uphill.

The regular route is known to be wet. This obviously wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t wet, per-se. More snowy and frozen. The first pitch starts atop some slabs, slabs at this point basically snowed over. The first pitch’s crux is in a seeping corner, a seeping corner at this point more resembling an ice climb.

And I’ve mentioned that we’re stupid, yes?

We were definitely casting verbal dice for the lead.

Bob: soooo, do you want this pitch? I think it’s about 200′ to that tree up there.

Me: hey man, I didn’t really have my heart set on it. I actually wanted the 5.7 fingers to heaven pitch, so I mean, I don’t want to snake this one from you

Bob: Dude, it’s really no problem. Do you want it?

Me: Mumbling and kicking steps in to the snowpack

So the lead fell to Bob.

[Thanks Bob, you're my hero and always have been]

I got the pleasure, however, of standing in snow for while Bob led this thing. I’m CERTAIN that this is a cruiser 5.9 fingerlocks pitch when it’s not a full on ice runnel. Reality: it was a full on ice runnel.

Holy shit this thing was slick as snot on a doorknob (and how’s that for an anachronism?). I do not hesitate to document the fact that bob stood in a sling to gain a hanging snowfield and then proceeded to cut finger pockets for 8 feet with his nut tool. Grim. Bob gave me a heads up as he began to huck dinnerplates of ice down, clearing the last 30 feet of crack to allow for some semblance of confidence in the gear he was placing.

200 feet and 2 hours later, I was on belay.

The bottom 100′ was cold and not so fun, but it was all there. When I got to the snowfield I was certain that the whole thing was going to sheet off underneath me. I would not wanted to have been on lead with this thought. I too deployed the nut tool in service of upward progress, snagging a bomber hook on a lip. I’ve never done a mixed climb before…

Bob was his usual sarcastic self, but he was still talking in full sentences, so I knew he hadn’t been 110% skeeved. Nevertheless, a 2 hour lead had taken the wind out of both of our sails. Our lack of confidence in avoiding an epic – any snow on the descent slabs would have been less than fun if we summited around dusk – combined with the view of Daff dome baking in the sun, made for a pretty easy decision. We fixed one rope, I passed my windbreaker to bob, rapped, ran to the car, grabbed the second rope, chugged back up to the base, attached the line for Bob to haul, and made my way back to the base to take in the most psychadellic display of aerial spiderwebs you can imagine.

From the Fairview icebox, we made our way to greener and sunnier pastures: the flank of Daff Dome. I’d done some stuff on Daff but never seen this little cragging area.

We finished the day with

Alimony Crack (5.8, 1 pitch): which felt really easy at the grade. Super easy hand jamming leading to a long low-angle finish.

Fingertips (5.10b, right side variation, 2 pitches): Awesome climb. I’ve not done much thin face climbing in California, but this immediately reminded me of one of my favorites: Arctic Breeze at Lover’s Leap (5.10a, 1 pitch). This one will leave dirt under your fingernails for the rest of the week, because that’s all you’re using to hold on. Fingernail crimps and rand smears for 180′, all with 5 bolts plus an intermediate anchor. This is one of those climbs that, to a nobody like me, is a true testament to the guys that bolt these things. How the hell could you do 45 minutes at one of these stances with a hand drill? Incredible.

Great Circle Route (5.9, p.1 / 5.10a p.2): An easy 50′ 5.7 crack leads to 25′ of runout face climbing above, two bolts to an anchor. This is probably a really proud climb for someone who is climbing/leading right at this level. We bagged it without the 2nd pitch to avoid rolling in to SF after midnight, but it looked way polished up there. I was suprised to see that one bolt at the p.1 anchors had been replaced but one old spinner remains. Not a setup I’d toprope off of.

Fantastic alpenglow on the way out, leaving us with a view of another meadows climb nabbed earlier this season: Tenaya Peak.

Desolation Wilderness – Ralston Peak

Though the whole world seemed to be out to drive around Lake Tahoe – and rightfully so, the aspens were incredible – it seems like the low nighttime temps (<30 deg.) have scared most people out of the backcountry.

A shame, since days were hitting that perfect “room temperature” feeling (at least as long as one was out of the the wind), skies were clear, and fall colors juxtaposed with white snow at elevation was beautiful.

After doing some climbing, we finally got ourselves to the Ralston Peak trailhead at Camp Sacramento off Hwy. 50 east of Kyburz.

Whoever broke this trail had two perverted tendencies: to needlessly gain and lose elevation while roughly paralleling a ridgeline, and forgoing switchbacks in favor of climbing straight up sandy washes. Hiss.  Boo.

Ralston peak trail is about 4 miles, o/w, from the trailhead and puts on a not-insignificant 2800 ft. of vertical.

I broke the hike down like this: first 2/3 = blah, last 1/3 = worthwhile. The first 2/3 earn their tepid response based pretty much on my very personal ambivalence towards pine forests, and that is precisely how you spend the better portion of the hike. Yes, you have occasional south/southwest views to Lover’s Leap and some snowcapped peaks, but it’s just not enough for me.

I’m partial to alpine meadows and getting above treeline. After gaining the major east/west crest around 8500′, things get better for a guy like me: traversing open grassy cirques/bowls, exfoliated granite aprons, talus, all that.

The final 1/2 mile or so up to Ralston Peak is cross-country, though impacted and obvious as you’re following the eastbound ridgeline to it’s high point.

The view from the summit takes in the majority of Desolation Wilderness. This was my first trip to Desolation and I really had no idea just how small this area is. It’s incredible to be able to see something more or less in its entirety. At about 100 square miles, this, the nation’s most used designated wilderness, faces a tough combination for future preservation.

Western aspects were still holding about a foot of snow, northern slopes a few inches, east and south had patches.

We spent about 15 minutes on the summit, taking in the views to Lake Aloha, Fallen Leaf Lake, and out to Lake Tahoe. The lake effect wind eventually won and sent us back down, for a round trip time of 3 hours.

Cathedral Peak

We drove up Saturday night and rolled in at 11p to freezing (literally) temps. Campgrounds are closed for the season, but with a late arrival and early departure, we just threw bags down a bit off the road and set our alarms for 6:00. Damn. 10,000 feet in late September is cold. Clear and cold. No matter what I do, I can’t get my bag tight enough around my face to keep my nose from freezing.

6:00 came early.

Powering down the donuts and starbucks doubleshot can I brought was not the ideal start to the day, but it was caffeine and fat – both things I needed at that point.

The hike in to the start is about .5 miles up the John Muir Trail to a use trail leading to the base about an hour and a half later. We only lost the use trail once, a minor victory, and ended up at the base around 9:00. Even so, we had two parties ahead of us. Fortunately, the route affords plenty of opportunities to pass.

A quick rack-up and look at the topo and I was off. The party to our left, of three, was kind enough, though fairly slow. The route is a classic pinnacle (see photos), so as we all neared the top, things started to cluster, even crossing ropes on one pitch. The climbing was straightforward and quick. So straightforward and quick, in fact, that I never looked at the topo again – the whole thing goes. Never a move harder than 5.7, I was actually a bit disappointed by the discontinuous profile. The views, though, were A+.

The real story of the day, though, came after we summited. The actual peak is about the size of a card table, the wind was howling, and the midday temp with wind chill was probably around 40 degrees. In short, no place to hang out. We started down, thinking we understood the descent, but came to find out that we didn’t. At all. AT ALL. We fungled this descent so bad, we literally could not have fucked up worse. Instead of a fairly trivial descent down a sandy wash and talus, we ended up doing an additional nasty 2 hours of pure cross-country hiking ( i.e. no trail).

Yeah, so, how much water does one carry on a climb? Just enough. Water is heavy.Adding two hours of vertical off-trail hiking would change those water needs, no? Though we had more water for the hike out, that was at the pack stashed at the base. Things were getting grim. We started playing the “how much daylight do we have” game, which is a pretty crappy game to play when you might die if caught out for a night in those conditions. Mark, in a brilliant coup, had left his headlamp in the car. Stellar.

We were trudging along, one foot in front of the next, balancing calorie expenditure, respiration (the heavier you breathe, the more water you lose), and daylight. Oh yeah, and Mark’s wife was going to call YOSAR at 8:00.

I was proud of my navigational skills, and we ended up back at the base about 2 hours later – around 6:45. We had 1:15 to get out. And it gets dark at 7:00. Rad!

As “not great” as our situation was, it paled in comparison to what we saw up on Cathedral: a team of two just below the chimney pitch (about 2/3 of the way up), and a soloist just above the chimney. Neither team moved in the nearly 1/2 hour that they were visible. We heard the roped team yelling, and I imagined the soloist’s internal monologue.

I’ve been damn-near benighted once, about 5 years ago in the Mexican desert, and I could vividly remember what the rope team was going through. The wind is howling, you can’t hear your partner, he can’t hear you, the frustration of the situation only adds to the already high stress, and the wheels just come off the whole operation. Teamwork turns to team recrimination, simple tasks take longer than they should, et voila – a frozen night huddled on a ledge (best case scenario) or standing in slings (worst case scenario). It ain’t pretty.

But Mark and I were on the ground, which was a fair bit better than being up on rock. Seeing these guys up there also gave me some consolation should Mark’s wife call YOSAR – at least none of those guys would die of hypothermia that night. 2 hours later, we had kicked the last root, tripped over the last rock, and shouted off the last noise in the dark, and were back at Mark’s car. Without the high near-full moon, this would have been an epic. I threw my backpack down in my apartment at 2:00am last night, 15 hours of sleep in the last three nights, 60 miles on the bike and a classic sierra summit all bagged in the meantime.

Backpacking King’s Canyon – Rae Lakes Loop

Black Wall Rescue 8/25/2007

Bob and I were descending from the top of Black Wall after a run up One Hand Clapping when we saw some rescue vehicles rolling up to the base.

Bob headed down to guide rescue up through the talus and I skirted high to see what was up. To make a very long story very short, the next 3 hours were spent on technical oversight of a climber evacuation ending in helicopter extraction using a diaper harness.

Truckee Fire/Rescue, god bless them, does not have any high-angle rescue experience, and had this climber compounded his femur instead of his tibia he would undoubtedly be dead today.

The climbing team was a shining example of misjudging objective risks and maximizing subjective risks: off-route, belaying from a small loose ledge with no anchor, leader inexperience, team inexperience, choosing a loose route, it goes on and on. As the sticker says, “climbing is dangerous. minimize the risks.”

As a PSA, should the guy in the blue shirt who was trying to run the show when I came up ever read this, one #3 C4 in mank rock is not a rescue-worthy anchor, despite the fact that you’ve “done a lot of climbing, bro”. Feel free to ask around and see what kind of response that gets from the climbing community at large.

More pictures and video available upon request, should anyone from the scene come across this page.

Climbing Donner Pass

One Day at Donner Pass, Lake Tahoe, CA

Drove up Friday night for a change. Signs all along I-80 proclaimed “No Reno Events Tonight”. Thinking this was a brilliant coup by the Sacramento tourism board, we had a good laugh. What we didn’t know was that Reno’s annual Hot Summer Nights had been cancelled due to gang activity. Reno, 911 indeed!

Sleeping in a bed such a novel thing to do before a climb. Thanks, Mark.

The morning found us debating wether that was REALLY Tommy Chong sitting in Wild Cherries cafe, and listening to Bob-san’s partner for the day wax hardman on the leads he has/will put up around the american west.

Mark and I decided we would tackle the (supposedly mega-classic) One Hand Clapping, while Bob-san and co. would get on some 10 crack nearby.

We totally fungled the approach, spending a good 10 minutes of our lives doing some classic manzanita battle while the team of two we passed at the pullout breezed by us on the use trail. Oh well, experience should be rewarded, and this team’s knowledge of the approach paid off.

We chatted with this team of two, trading stories of epics and near epics. The second (after the leader was well out of earshot, I noted) started spraying about the 11’s he was on last weekend. I tuned out quickly.

Bob’s partner set off up said crack (can’t remember the name, but it’s the splitter buried behind an arete just to the left of OHC. Much grunting, groaning, and apologies ensued from Bob’s partner. What??? I thought you were leading some “gnar” 11’s in Indian Creek last season? Anyway…

Soon enough the second from the other team was off and I set out on my lead.

Pitch one of One Hand Clapping is meant to be one of the best 5.8 handcracks in NorCal. It largely lives up to the billing, though Bishop’s Terrace is still THE 5.8 handcrack in my opinion. OHC p.1 is less consistent and has a more defined crux (where it goes to double cracks), whereas Bishop’s is just 5.8 jam after 5.8 jam for a good long while.

Posting up and waiting for the second to clear the first belay, I asked if there was room for two. The second said that there was, and I headed up for the last 10 feet of climbing. Purely on a whim I placed a completely rattly .5 c4 in a horizontal crack 5 feet below the belay (edit: it takes a .75 perfectly). I had the piece, and I had no pro for perhaps 20 feet; a little insurance never hurts.

Just as I was clipping a draw to the belay bolt, the second took a 10 foot drop damn near on my head out of the finger crack above the belay – without making a SOUND.

Everyone climbs at their own risk, I know. Still, I admonished this (self-proclaimed 5.11…) climber that the least you can do before taking a fall, ON TO A LEADER about to clip an anchor, on stuff 3 grades below your limit, is to scream like a little girl and give some advance warning. “Dude it’s super greasy in this crack. Be sure to chalk up.”. Oh, thanks for that – it’s definitely NOT your chalk+sweat that’s making that smooth granite crack greasy.

The second pitch is an attention-grabber. The moves off the belay are non-trivial fingers and off-fingers crack, with a brief respite before things get weird. Bring all your thin stuff and borrow a little more – not because the awkward, thin, section lasts too long, but looking at my partner’s placements, I’d be sewing this thing up too. Most placements were preeeety good, but definitely not bomber. FYI, carrying a pack on pitch two sucks. Don’t carry a pack on this climb.

Pitch three is good, but memory fails me. I do know for sure that the second pitch is what you’ll hold on to, looking back.

From here our collective attention turned to the laser-cut left facing corner/crack to the left of One Hand Clapping. From a distance this thing looks overhug, which prompted me to offer a (fictional, I swear) $100 bounty to anyone who lead it “in style”. I was, at this point, not worried about the new guy living up to any of his spray.

Getting closer reveals a great tight hands crack at about 75-80 degrees – looking like it would go. Bob-san threw himself at it, and did it, I would say, “in style” – if that style is Elvis. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Bob doing a Singer Sewing Machine impersonation, but it came out on this little 60 foot gem. We all followed it on toprope and declared it a great 5.9 minus (what a bullshit rating) testpiece.

This day just kept getting better.

After poking around a bit more, we decided to explore a new area. Mark and I had been to Grouse Slabs before, but had seen some stuff up and to the left of the slab proper and thought we’d check it out.

The approach up to Grouse from School House Rock is what an approach should be: easy and senic, picking up the Tahoe Rim trail (I think). This was the site of me and Mark almost crapping our pants last season when we abruptly heard the sound of a mack truck coming through some underbrush down a hillside. Neither of us admits it in public (the net?), but we each tried to position the other in front to avoid being bear food.

This was no oso, people, this was a just a bear-sized perro, happily charging through the trees and shrubs, but where was the owner? Ah, wow, there she is. Fat dog, trim, trail-running owner. Can I move to Truckee now?

Up at Grouse we strung ropes on a few climbs:

Half Hit (5.9+) – the obvious finger crack furthest to the left on the formation. Boy, I wouldn’t want to take a fall low on this thing. Otherwise a two-move wonder but a great introduction to 5.9 fingerlock territory.

Desire (5.9) – the obvious bolted line on the nearly freestanding pillar. Crux is low, like the first two moves. Little to recommend here.

One Toke Arete (5.10 face) – Wasn’t getting rave reviews from those ahead of me. Looks like sincere grounder potential to the first bolt.

Crack line to the left of desire (5.8?) – Fun little headwall to bolted anchor, with a well-defined flared crux. Worthwhile.

In a previous trip to Grouse we’d done:

Insidious Crack (5.6) – Great little straight-in crack climb, good for the new leader, though there is a little 10 foot runout near the top.

Jellyroll Arch (5.8) – Do this before you get on Frogland in Red Rocks. The move out and around the arch bears an uncanny similarity to a move many times higher off the deck in the desert. I led the 5.9 handcrack finish to great photo effect. Recommended.

With Mark behind schedule to call his family (per usual. man, what an understanding wife this guy has), we pulled ropes and headed back to the cars. Our requisite stop at Taqueria Jalisco was stymied with a line out the door, which prompted us to make a sincere compromise with Johnny’s (?) tacos across the road. Advice: if eating at Johnny’s, order 2x what you think you need – portions are small – or plan a return trip across the street to Treat Box to finish dinner off right. Or better yet, just go find something else. It ain’t that great.

How walkable is your neighborhood?

WalkScore will tell you.

Recovery

I chronicled my first Bay to Beach to Beach to Beach to Bay (b5).

My second time out on the b5, I managed to sprain an ankle. I wish that there was some great story, but alas, it was as innocuous as it gets:

The final stretch of the Dipsea, headed down in to Stinson Beach, opens in to panoramic views of the ocean and Stinson Proper. On a completely benign stretch of trail, without knowing quite what happened, I came down with my left foot completely inverted (landing on the “top” of the foot).

POP!

The sound was clear as day, and I still grind my teeth thinking about it. The hollow snap was all too familiar; I tore my ACL about 10 years ago and had a pretty decent idea of what was coming next.

I rolled off the trail with no grace to speak of, and tried to assess the damage. My ankle wasn’t quite right. It pretty quickly swelled to the size of a softball, and I vacillated between thinking that it was nothing (spare me the admonitions – I was hopeful/delusional/unable to come to terms with reality), and that this thing was realllly messed up.

Fortunately, the truth was somewhere in the middle. After a few “fish or cut bait” minutes, I decided that I was going down to Stinson under my own steam in any case, and that I may as well get started. The small, but occasionally very vocal, part of me that is concerned with others’ perceptions of my outdoors prowess dictated that I run (!) the rest of the downhill in to Stinson. Did I make things worse with this masterstroke of self-absorbed masochism? The world will never know.

Back at the firehouse I did a reassessment. I could walk, or wobble, but there wasn’t much pain in the joint, so I decided to mount up and ride back to the city.

Things were more or less normal, though the ride was marked by a definite “slip” in the ankle every time I drew the cranks up and around.

The next day, however, reality set in. I woke up hobbled, barely able to make it to the grocery and back – all of 6 short blocks. I came to grips, over the Sunday NYT (these mishaps have their silver linings. I haven’t sat down with the Sunday Times in months), with the fact that I had taken myself out of the running game for a while.

Dawn broke this morning without any fixed plans or an unbelievable hangover – a confluence of events not seen in my life in the past month – and I decided that the time to get back out had come.

I pulled off 24M on the bike and 7M running: a major victory, post-sprain… And it all felt good.

Ride: SF->Miwok Trailhead (@ Shoreline)->Run: Miwok->Miwok Cutoff->Tennessee Valley->Fox->Coyote Ridge->Miwok->Miwok Trailhead->Ride: back home.

I managed to be part of another evacuation today. South Marin Fire and Rescue was pulling a woman with a sprained ankle off of Miwok Cutoff (the irony…), and I happened across them just in time to haul their gear bag back to the BC ambulance (AKA Ford F-150) while they carried her out on a litter.

In other news: finally ordered a new digital camera. Look for pictures to make a return in future installments.

Tenaya Peak

5:10am.

Alarm.

Shit. SHUT UP! (I am fond of talking to my alarm)

What’s happening? Woaaah, move slow there, buddy. The room is spinning and, well, you’re a hair’s breath away from puking.

Ummmgh. What’s happening? Oh man, Mark will be here in 20 minutes.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, your correspondent submits another adventure in which the first chapter is marked (marred) by a hangover of Dionysian proportions.

The day’s itinerary: Tenaya Peak, a 1500′ formation rising above Tenaya Lake in Toulumne Meadows at 8150′.

Sadly for me, the day’s itinerary started with a 5:30 pickup. Even sadder, the previous day’s itinerary ended with me falling over, quite drunk, in bed at 2:30. Not a recipe for A+ performance, especially at altitude, but it’s all part of training – all an added challenge – right?

Mark showed up classically alert and enthusiastic for the early hour. I wish sometimes that I could pretend to be genuinely dour at times like this, but I can’t even fake it. Even when I’m feeling like I was scraped off the floor, I still love the opportunity to get outside. Mark, heroically without coffee, pointed us to Bob-San’s crib in the Castro, and with him on board, we were on our way.

I think I was asleep before we hit the bay bridge, but managed to come to just in time for our first stop in that town before the turnoff to Yosemite (whatever it’s called). First fungle of the day: no wallet, no cash, no nothing. My running account payable to Bob grows.

Fortunate enough to find a coconut juice at the grocery. If you are an endurance athlete/hangover athlete and haven’t tried this stuff, make it a point. Let’s let the YoungCoconutWater people extoll the virtues.

Now somewhat hydrated (and with the biggest breakfast burrito I’ve ever encountered), we set out on the steady switchbacks up in to the high country. These were grand, given my state of being, as you might imagine.

I’m glad to be a source of free entertainment to my climbing/cycling partners, as I’ve earned the reputation as the guy who always shows up hung-over.

I have to contest this kind of broad-stroke categorization of my Friday night tendencies. I am SOMETIMES hung-over when an early morning departure is mandated, and I have had to shuttle a “friend” out of the house at an early hour to avoid potential damage to a young lady’s fair reputation, but I am far from ALWAYS hung-over. 50% is fair. 60%, maybe. Maybe.

In any case, 10:00 found us at the parking area adjacent to Tenaya lake. Our racks were light; the route is long @ 1500′, but also a moderate 5.5. We planned to simul-climb the route with Bob leading, Mark in the middle, and me running anchor.

All packed up, we set off. Tenaya peak is known to have an indistinct approach and a nearly indistinguishable walkoff. We managed the approach in decent style, though. If you’re looking to do it, try to keep up:

Walking along the lake towards the peak, find the climber’s trail leading southeast, hooking up within 100 yards with a good use trail.

Following the use trail for perhaps 1/3 of a mile, passing beyond the obvious exposed ledge system over a meadow, find the indistinct deer trail striking out nearly due west. From here follow the most obvious deer trails, angling south.

The climb itself begins on a low-angle portion of rock near a seasonal waterfall. Some parties rope up here in an obvious depression to climber’s right of the waterfall, but anyone comfortable with 5.2 friction can comfortably continue for at least another 500 feet to an obvious king-sized mattress flat area.

Here the climbing steepens, though never harder than 5.4 – 5.5, following the (and I can’t believe I’m being so vague here, but believe me, it’s this easy) most obvious system of features, trending left towards the ridgeline when in doubt.

Our simul system was working well. I’d never done any “consentual” simuling, limiting myself only to those desperate moments when a pitch exceeded the 60 meters of rope at hand, and necessity dictated forward movement, wether we had discussed in advance or not.

An old pin will let you know you’re on the right track (not that there is one “right” way on this route), and precedes the first actual climbing (necessitating hands, for me) of the route.

The next natural belay for a simulclimbing team needing to re-rack is at a blocky, vegetated, corner just before the final headwall section.

We stopped to swap gear only two times in 1500′ feet – a testament to the casual nature of the climbing, not our heroics. We were running with 2x camalots from .5-2 and a thin set of nuts, about 20 pieces in total, putting us at about 1 piece every 15 feet in theory, though it was far less in practice. The singular rule of simulclimbing is to have at least two pieces between each climbing pair (as we were climbing with three), with the single goal being to keep as little slack in the system as possible. That and don’t fall, I suppose.

From here a climber is faced with almost innumerable variations to the top. Having finally regained some semblance of cognitive and muscular function, I took the last lead, which proved to be some of the most fun climbing of the day. Staying far left puts on in to a short final headwall crack – very reminiscent of my earliest climbing days at Devil’s Lake, WI.

The summit is, in a word, sublime. Toulumne is one of the most spectacular expanses of polished granite in the universe, home to spectacular peaks and domes, and one could easily spend an afternoon from this vantage point picking 100’s out with a detailed map. It was a singular vista with a view clear to Cloud’s Rest and down to Half-Dome in Yosemite Valley.

After enjoying the view, drinking up, and trying our best to creep out the other party topping out (Mission Cliffs people are everywhere) with our somewhat ribald subject matter, we started the descent.

This. Descent. Sucks. I’d love to give advice, but we obviously went the “suck” way, so you don’t want my advice. Actually, the one piece of advice I WOULD give is to stick with the really obvious hiker’s trail that looks to end up clear WEST of Tenaya Lake. It’s probably a lot longer, measured purely in terms of mileage covered, but I guarantee that it cuts out a ton of talus/scree hopping.

No day in Tuolumne is complete without a dip in the “climber’s bathtub” of Tenaya Lake, and this was no exception. The lake is a pretty shanti place at 5pm, with climbers getting loose after a day of getting scared on friction horror shows, some people doing yoga, and everyone being blissed on the majesty of the surroundings.

One of Bob’s friends is getting married on Tenaya Beach, and, should I ever find myself in the situation to need a wedding location, it seems pretty incredible.

Bay to Beach to Beach to Beach to Bay

I’ve toyed with doing the Race Across Marin for a while now, but have been put off for some reason. Envirosports puts on good events, but it’s always seemed to me like I could do something like this on my own and save the $200 entry fee.

Today I did my inaugural Bay to Beach to Beach to Beach to Bay bike/run. I need a marketing team to do a little work on the branding, but it’s a start…

Essentially: RIDE from SF up to Stinson Beach (20m), RUN Steep Ravine Trail to (Old Mine Trail) to Coastal Fire Road down to HW 1 to Muir Beach, flip it back up Coastal Fire Road and down Steep Ravine Trail to Stinson Beach (16m), get back on the bike and RIDE back to SF (20m).

I’d toyed with the best route up for something like this up and around Tam, and my introduction to Steep Ravine trail last weekend was the key. I may do it using Matt Davis next time to paint a comparison All-in it goes at 40 miles of cycling, bridge to bridge, and 16+ miles of running – all but about 3-4 miles on great trails.

The planning crux was putting together a route that had adequate opportunities for hydration. I think I hit the nail on the head; water and fuel are perfectly spaced: Home, Stinson (food and water), Pantoll (water), Shoreline (the fruit and drinks stand is always there in summer, though I didn’t take advantage this time), Muir Beach (plenty of unattended garden hoses down that way. I’m just saying…), Pantoll, and back to Stinson. You’re never more than 1:30 from h2o.

Other tips:

The owners of the Stinson beach Bed and Breakfast next to the fire station are super nice and let me lock my bike up inside their courtyard, though the big boat chain along the fence that faces the fire station looked like it would have worked perfectly as well.

Do not eat an entire plate of marinated fish tacos at Stinson Beach Grill before you ride back to the city. They’re really tasty, but I have never had hiccups on the bike before. It’s not ideal.

One could shorten both the bike and run distances by starting the run at the trailhead to Coastal fire road on HW1. It’s directly across the street from the large pullout where the fruit stand is always set up. In the absence of the fruit stand, you can find it by keeping an eye out for the fire road truck gate about 1 mile after the Muir Beach overlook sign.

This would probably put the bike around 30m and run around 13m, r/t.

And what would a post be without a rant?

I AM SICK AND TIRED OF RUDE PEOPLE ON Mt. Tam and Marin Headlands TRAILS! YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE (15 people today alone, I’m sure)! HOW ARE YOU JUST GOING TO STARE AT ME WITH A BLANK FACE WHEN I SAY CHEERFULLY, NO LESS, SOME VARIATION OF “Hello” “Good morning/afternoon” “How are you?”????

I’m going to start bringing a checkbook on my runs so I can buy you people some interpersonal skills.

Club Rides

I ride, occasionally, with my climbing gym’s club – when their ride rotation hits Marin and I’m in the City.

I should stop doing this to myself. The BA is either the best place in the world for masochists or the worst place in the world for someone who likes to compare favorably to his contemporaries (read competitive).

I am no slouch on the bike, but any cycling club in the ‘grey is going to be full of complete ringers, and this one’s no exception. Getting dropped heading up Alpine Dam(n) is no laughing matter, at least not for me. And while I’m not the slowest guy in the peloton, it’s a new and unwelcome feeling finding myself in the ass half of any athletic endeavor.

Hey, if I were still living in Chicago I’d be some kind of hero. The Bay is just home to some of the west coast’s premier athletes – cyclists especially – and I’m just a kid with two seasons on the bike.

Note to cyclists: Fairfax Coffee Roastery is closed for a remodel and bathrooms at city hall are out of order. Plan accordingly.

SF to Point Reyes Station

First “real” ride of the season (after the debacle down in Pescadero a few weeks ago) to Point Reyes Station.

I have a certain fondness for this ride, going straight up US 1, as it was my first extended solo ride.

Each time I do this trip brings great memories of visiting NorCal from Chicago, driving up 1 north of Stinson Beach near Olema Valley and seeing cyclists – I thought that these guys had to be part of some kind of cycling elite – they were in the middle of NOWHERE!

Perhaps two months after I got my bike I decided that it was time to see if I could make it to Pt. Reyes under my own steam and set out with enough provisions to have lasted me a self-supported century: 3+ bottles (including one in a jersey pocket), probably 6 clif bars, and a small jug of Gu. I had built up Hwy. 1 in my mind as a desolate, desperate, uninhabited stretch of road, and thought that I would have no access to fuel until Point Reyes.

On that first ride Stinson Beach appeared like an oasis – a shining jewel of civilization on the jagged coastline. In Stinson Beach I was convinced that I now REALLY needed to kit myself out for the push to Pt. Reyes, eating Baklava, chugging a gatorade, and replenishing all the food I had consumed so far – in the 20 miles since leaving home! The sweat on my top tube in the final push back towards SF up out of Slide Ranch is etched in my cycling memory. I realized that I was nearing the end of a physical test that had seemed nothing short of superhuman just a few months earlier.

Yesterday’s ride was far less epic, this being at least the fourth time that I’ve done this ride solo. The solitude of West Marin, though, never wears off. I knew that a hilly (~6K vert.) 70 miler would be an interesting day for a guy who’s been on the bike approximately NOT AT ALL in the past 6 or so months that I’d been focused on the run. A steady pace and a stop in Stinson both ways were enough comfort for my legs that it was a great day out.

Hwy. 1 was the foggiest I’ve ever seen it from Panoramic down to Stinson – I was worried about getting hit from behind – visibility had to be 15 feet in place! I was questioning wearing shorts instead of tights, but was vindicated eventually. The sun made it’s inexorable breakthrough near Bolinas Lagoon and it was summer again. US 1 near Bolinas lagoon is one of those weird places where somehow it manages to feel downhill both ways, which is a bonus, unlike some parts of Paradise Drive that LOOK downhill but somehow manage to feel uphill…

Rolled in to Point Reyes Station feeling just a little toasted and saw… WESTERN DAYS! Though Pt. Reyes Station is usually a pretty welcoming place for cyclists, owing to it being just about the ONLY town in this part of Marin. There is, however, a (mostly) unspoken tension between “cowboy” western marin, and “yuppie” western marin (the “hippies” stay out of it). This tension is on high during western days, as I found out while being yelled at as “THE GUY IN SPANDEX”.

I’ve drunk/drank my share of beer and bourbon in The Western – a hell of a lot more than my fair share for a guy who has lived in San Francisco for two years, and I let people know it. It’s funny how sometimes aggression respects aggression, and this was a textbook case. As soon as I started yelling back, I went from being “The guy in spandex – let’s get him!”, to “Hey, it’s the guy in spandex – get him a beer!”.

Sadly one drink made me lay down in the grass next to Bovine Bakery, and I awoke to (again) someone saying, “Hey, there’s a guy in spandex passed out with his bike in the front yard”. I wasn’t aware that this space, always having struck me as a public park, might actually have been a homeowner’s yard. I beat retreat quickly, not wanting to hear the jangle of spurs coming my way. There is only so much goodwill for guys in spandex during Western Days.

This festival was an incredible display of the confluence of cultures that continues to shape West Marin: Aged post-hippies, once anti-establishment, now checking their portfolios with the best of them (thought still maintaining the patina with the aged Volvo – de rigeur); the farmers and agriculturalists maintaining Marin’s heritage as a breadbasket to NorCal; the ever-growing Latino culture (complete with Low-Riders in Western Days!!!); and the rest of those that found themselves, one way or another, living in this corner of the world – artists, environmentalists, and workaday folks that managed to carve a spot out in the countryside sometime before this became some of the most valuable rural property in the nation.

Somehow the ride back to SF from Point Reyes Station always seems both faster AND easier. It’s a mystery I’m happy to keep exploring.

PS How did Dogtown (Pop. 30) make it on to Google Maps? Look at the size of the font relative to its population!

Lover’s Leap

Three days of climbing at the Leap over Memorial Day weekend – sounds like a recipe for long lines at the base, crowded belays, and total epics by all of the kids with shiny new racks for their first trip outside the gym.

Incredibly, there was NOBODY THERE all weekend – a midday scan of the East Wall Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, showed about 8 parties, TOTAL. This just continues to prove my theory about Lover’s Leap: Everybody is so convinced that it’s going to be a madhouse that everyone goes someplace else. Irony defined.

We camped at the not-so-super-secret “other” area (not the main campground is all I’ll tell you), and quickly realized why the Canadians we had met last season were so evasive when we had asked them about it – if you’re willing do go without the (foul) camp toilets and pump your own water in the stream, you are stone cold crazy to stay at the campground. That is, unless, you just have to get to Strawberry Lodge for ice cream at night, in which case I forgive you.

We kicked things off Saturday with a trip up Psychedelic Tree, supposedly the “ugly sister of The Line”. Well, I know The Line, and you, Sir, are no The Line. EAGGH! P.1 of this thing had blocks waiting to blow so hard I was more scared for my belayer than for myself! These things were held in with… ??? No fucking clue, that’s what. Maybe a bird crapped on them one time and sort of formed a kind of poo glue, but man, there ain’t much else keeping these things in contact with the wall. I was skeeved. The rest of “the tree” was actually enjoyable, and the topout memorable to be sure. All-in, though, not something I’m going to repeat any time soon.

Just to paint the contrast, we jogged back down and jumped on The Line. Last time Bob-san and I were on this it seemed cruiser. This time, something was different. We swapped pitches, with me taking P.1 and Bob P.2, opposite our first trip. The runout off the deck was no problem, but I found myself wondering what I was supposed to do about 100 feet up. I didn’t remember a crux around here… Whatever. With that move dispatched, we quickly ticked another ultra-classic at the Leap without waiting 1 minute for anyone. Incredible!

Day two dawned at the not-so-super-secret “other” area, and the plan was set over breakfast: Traveler’s Buttress.

I’d led p.1 of this late last season in a complete horror show, during which I left a fair amount of blood in the flaring hand crack crux. I was sketched. Good thing for me, then, that I hadn’t read the guidebook description of this pitch before I tackled it (“falls from this section have resulted in injury”). Neither of us had any desire to repeat the snap-crackle-pop pitch with poor protection, so we traversed in high on the main ledge and got our start at the notorious p.2 offwidth.

We ended up waiting for the party ahead of us (or behind, since they were coming up p.1 and we weren’t cruel enough to snake the route from them, given our lack of OW experience) in the shade, and remembered once again that it is retardedly cold on the main ledge in the shade. The route “Arctic Breeze” is aptly named…

The two girls wrapped up p.1 (with appropriate reverence for the section I had battled last season, I would add), and set off up the OW. I’d never watched anyone climb this pitch before, and while it looked challenging, they were definitely making it look possible. I would soon realize that these were special girls indeed.

I racked up for a right-side-in OW adventure, brought my Red Rocks OW toproping lessons to the fore, and set myself in to the jaws of the beast. 5 feet, 10 feet, nothing. No feet, no way to arm bar, no nothing. I was too big to get myself in to the crack, and, well, not too small for anything, really. I just felt too big. I could see some great constrictions 8 feet above me, but it may as well have been back in the bay area, for all the progress I was making through this section.

10 minutes later, I did the (not so) unthinkable: I downclimbed and turned the rack over to Bob. Bob has one distinct advantage over me – he can effectively turn the volume down on his sense of self-preservation. Appropriately deluded, Bob threw himself at the crux of the OW, and just WENT FOR IT. I tried to watch and glean some ideas about how he got through the section, but realized that he did it on determination alone. Ahhh, crap. Bob managed the rest of the offwidth in relative style, and actually managed to pull some pretty wild moves in reaching back to extend a sling, and after about 40 minutes, I was on belay.

I still couldn’t get through this section – toprope or not. I ended up using the .10b finger crack to the left of the OW to pull the moves (I love that .10b finger crack is easier than .9 OW!) and realized that while the the crux of the OW is relatively low, the crux of the pitch is keeping your forearms from blowing up during the last 80 unrelenting feet of splitter hand crack. This pitch is like Bishop’s terrace, plus a bit of difficulty, that just KEEPS GOING AND GOING. 5 stars.

I had p.3, the arete traverse. Since I am apparently forgetting what a full rope length pitch is like, I set up shop to belay (retarded hanging belay…grr.) at the parallel horizontal crack near the two pins. Oh well – I really wasn’t feeling deprived by not leading the 5.5 dikes to the top.

Final analysis: P.1 – scary but “interesting P.2 – Ultra-classic P.3 (to pins) very cool, especially if you do the step across to the pins – incredible exposure – P.4/5 yawn.

A NA 50 classics climb? Hard to vote it in that group, for me.

Fairly sated for the day, we decided to have lunch and regroup. Still almost nobody around , and a midday nap sounded pretty good. After a rest, we were drawn by the moderate climbing and booty potential of a moderate classic: Bear’s Reach. I hadn’t done this climb at all last season, and had pretty much forgottten the layout. After climbing it again I’m not sure why it’s a classic – yeah, the reach is cool, but other than that it’s not much better than everything else around it – and no booty at 6pm on a holiday weekend. What? Are the gumbys all at home?

Sunday we decided to have at a climb new for both of us: It’s better with bacon, on the Hogsback section. It was meant to be a fun, runout, 5.8 face climb, and it lived up to it’s billing. WE would have roasted th 4 pitches in about 1:20 had we not been behind a group of a guide + 2 girls. The group was rapping from the top of p.3, uneventfully, at least for the guide and the first girl. As I approached her, she screamed that something had broken. Puuurfect. The guide ended up ascending the ropes with a prussik (sweatfest) to determine (as I had suggested to her, calmly) that she had been victim of “massive ‘biner shift). I can remember how disconcerting it was the first few times you find yourself hanging a few hundred feet above terra firma, realizing that your only tether to where you are is a few pieces of nylon and bits of aluminum. Once the guide (double duty as bartender in the Strawberry Lodge) had talked her off the proverbial ledge, they did a double rap past me. The girl managed to lose control over an overhang and send both of them crashing in to me – me who is at a stance, on lead! Fortunately I had a decent jam in and withstood this girl’s assassination attempt, but we’d lost at least an hour, all things considered.

The climb itself? Worthwhile, fun, thin climbing, with enough protection that anyone who climbs the grade in Tolumne should find it fun. Just don’t get behind two new climbers and their guide.

We decided to finish the weekend with a known, fun, quantity: Haystack. I can not say enough good things about this climb. This is my favorite 5.8 anywhere. The variety of moves, quality of rock, and that roof come together to be such a fun 3/4 pitches. The downside is that I have been stuck behind some USELESS climbers literally every single time I’ve been on it, most notably standing at the p.3 belay one BAKING summer afternoon for 2 HOURS (photo). People, get your shit together! This time, sadly, was more of the same.

We had spied a group on pitch two from our top-out on the Hogsback, but figured that they’d be long gone by the time we ate a leisurely lunch and made the approach (off Hogsback and up to the East Wall). We were wrong. After a casual race to the base with another group (Nick Nolte lookalike contest WINNER, hands down), I set off up p.1. Wow – awesome, casual climbing, just like I remembered it. Too bad I am retarded and don’t know what a full rope-length pitch is like any more. I stopped TWICE, thinking I was at the belay ledge – both times short. I finally figured it out and brought Bob up. Bob dispatched the roof with style and ease, and I was up and through his belay soon enough.

Or rather, at his belay soon enough. The same dikes of infamy, the same place I baked that summer afternoon last season, I found myself AGAIN. The group we had seen on p.2 had made one pitch of progress in 90 minutes. Awesome. Chalk up another clusterfuck. Even this couldn’t drag my weekend down, though the dude at the belay with dogcrap breath was sure trying.

But with enough time left in the day to drink beer, sort gear, and take a nap in the river before we headed home, life still seemed fairly fine, and it was. I’ve rarely had so much low-commitment fun on a three day climbing trip. This was made all the better by the fact that there were about 20 people sharing the entire Leap all weekend – incredible bonus. Hey guys, stay home all season – the Leap is never worth the crowds.

PS Jimboy’s tacos is the worst food I have ever paid for in my life. Seriously. Ever. And if you think that I am not able to see you flicking me off to you coworker because I stepped on the floor that you are mopping DURING BUSINESS HOURS, then I suppose we’ve solved the riddle of why you are working at Jimboy’s tacos, and I am not.

Who you gonna call?

With a Fire/Emergency in the Marin Headlands? Not the Presidio Fire Department, if a panel of Presidio Trust and and GGNRA funded consultants has their way.

The story at:

The San Francisco Examiner

Marin Independent Journal

Interesting that I’ve had an encounter with this very fire station.

This just further reinforces my need to do some real research about the Presidio Trust…

The Relay

I spent this past weekend (and cinco de mayo, to boot) running The Relay.

The relay is a 199 mile team race from Calistoga, California to Santa Cruz, California.

I was hooked up with my team in the 11th hour, after trying to organize a corporate team and having my employer (a Fortune 25 company that starts with “United” and ends in “care” brushing my idea for a team off.

Rant: Are you insane, HR? /rant

Our team (Cool Runnings – and I did not have a hand in the naming process) managed to pull out a 28 hour, 50 minute, 14th place finish of the 49 teams in the open mixed division – pretty strong, considering that we were a very mixed group of runners. We had guys who owned no running shoes and ran in basketball kicks, and others who were kicking 6:15 splits on hilly 10 mile legs. I fell somewhere in the middle.

My total mileage wasn’t huge, at 19, but I was happy with my performance having just run my first marathon 7 days prior.

My first leg cut down through the heart of Napa Valley, on the Silverado Trail. I’d seen this area before, but never so viscerally as I literally ran along the vines. I was able to see the braceros working in the morning sun, picking grapes, hear them talking, and marvel that all those people hitting their third winery of the day on a limo tour would, for all the money they might spend today, never see these vineyards this closely.

This was a 7+ mile stretch of rollers, and my first time back on my legs since Big Sur. In a way I wish that it were longer – I felt like I was finally opening up around mile 5. Such are the ways of someone who has run for distance almost exclusively during the past few months.

I had the 4 spot in our van, so I had a few legs to watch how things went down: the transition between runners, the placement (or lack thereof) of signs to guide the runners, etc.

It was quite a scene at transitions, with team vans coming and going, volunteers trying to maintain some semblance of order, runners coming in and others taking the baton (which was actually one of those plastic bracelets) and heading off.

I pretty quickly realized that while there were many groups out to do well, most groups – and in fact most of those same groups looking to do welll – were also having a bit of a party.

We travelled right, with all the makings of gatoritas (lemon/lime gatorade+tequila) and a 30 pack of coors light in the trunk. Though space was tight in our van (suburban) it was well worth it to have a dedicated driver – it allowed me to carbo load (drink beer) pretty much constantly.

I polished off my first leg feeling pretty good with myself – I had opened up nicely in the last few miles and managed to turn out decent, or what I thought decent, splits @ 8:15’s. I will never be the fastest guy around, but I have tons of fun when I’m out there, and I’m pretty sure that I still have a ways to go before I peak as a runner. Sometimes I get frustrated that there are so many people who blow my doors off [the benefit of living in the bay area is that you never know who you hear breathing behind you - it could be levi leppenheimer on the bike, or dean karnazes on the run], but I do come back to the fact that this is my second year running.

After our van finished the first six legs we had a rest while van 2 pulled the second six. Each van has designated rest areas. Ours was the Marin French Cheese Company. I pulled out my spare clothes, laid them out, and promptly passed out in the grass.

Sleep became a valuable commodity during the course of the race. With 4 hours Friday night, I was ready to get some down time whenver it presented itself.

Soon enough it was time to pack up and get to the next transition. Runners 1-3 came out strong again, and my second leg was up around 10:00pm Saturday evening. In contrast to L1, this leg was through downtown Ross and it’s environs. I had printed a routesheet to carry with me and was glad I did; I think I spent more time looking for turns than I did just flat out running. I do love how the mind is somehow capable of conjuring just enough fear while running in the dark to generate faster times, though.

Perception of time becomes pretty warped pretty fast with the combination of exertion and lack of sleep. The constant movement from transition to transition pretty much precludes napping, and the course is set up such that each leg will take apx. 40-50 minutes for an “average” runner, so you never have a chance to rest, per-se. The upside of all of this is that drinking seems pretty normal at almost any time of day.

We wrapped up our second six around 1am, with our 6-slot running taking it across the golden gate bridge. We were at the last transition with “Team Dean” – Dean Karnazes’ three-man operation. Dean has run something like 5 of thes 199 miles races SOLO. And while I’ve met Dean before, it was interesting to just watch him stand around – if that makes sense – to just see him waiting around his minivan for his teammate to come in, being like everybody else… except for the superhuman endurance, etc.

So after a few (3) hours’ sleep in the city, we were back in the van catch up with the other van who had run through the night. We blew it. The other van had run faster than projected and were waiting for us at a transition. At the time, this was impossibly bad. The clock was ticking and nobody was running. Impossibly bad.

Actually, this was a KEY mistake to have made. The Relay actually disqualifies you if you sandbag your times (overestimate your time to complete), as they stagger starts so that all teams finish in Santa Cruz during a 2-3 hour window. Without this delay, we would have come in more than 2 hours early, thus disqualifying ourselves… We got an extra bit of sleep AND stayed in the race. Bonus!

So once again it was barely light and I was drinking beer. IT JUST MAKES SENSE, PEOPLE.

My final leg started in Cupertino and headed in to the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. I had begun to feel my legs, and the 7 hours of sleep over the past two nights.

The transition was in a bit of an uninspiring setting: an intersection across from an Albertson’s.

My friend Jenna came in to transition letting me know that she thought she had broken her toe (?) – where or how I couldn’t imagine – but I really didn’t have much time to diagnose or treat any medical problems, and I was off.

Yikes! Tight hamstrings! Tight calves! My triple americano (most BRILLIANT transition in the whole race was #27 – literally AT a starbucks, and teams were due through there between 5-7am) had apparently done wonders for warming up the mind, but the body was still a bit creaky.

This was my hilliest leg, with about 500 feet of vert. in 5 miles – normally laughable, but this morning it was looking kind of sincere. Mentally I was helped by passing a few teams that we had been trading leads with for the past 24 hours, and I could feel myself opening in to a stride as I got out of the development and out towards the open space towards skyline.

I had shared the transition with two elite runners, both waiting for their teammates to pass the baton, and both commenting on how tired they were. I could only imagine how these guys felt, knowing that they had started 8-10 hours behind us and were now overtaking the “normal” teams.

I heard the first of these two burners behind me about 2 miles in. He was a nice guy, but he obviously had places to be (the finish), and wasn’t going to stick around to talk.  The second elite came up behind me around mile 3. I could see that this guy wasn’t lying when he said he was tired. No matter how fast someone can run, you can generally tell at a glance how much effort they’re putting in to holding that speed, and this guy was definitely feeling the speed more than the first. I didn’t catch either’s team name, but the second elite’s team was waiting to do a water handoff at the top of a hill, and after attending to him, they were absolutely the KINDEST guys I’d encountered during the race – offering me food, water, and most imprtantly, encouragement, which in my warped mind is worth more when it comes from someone so markedly stronger than I am…

Anyway, it was all I needed; it was dawning on me that this was my final leg and that I had nothing left to save myself for – no races coming up, no more relay to run… just more drinking before noon and getting a tan in Santa Cruz. I managed to ignore the hamstrings and calves and turn on the first kick I can remember in months. I had just about forgotten what it was like to actually stride out after months of steadily building distance, and it was awesome. I came in to the transition, pulling a rrunner in with me that I’d overtaken in the final 400m, and found… my team wasn’t ready. Dang Felix! A bit of yelling brought the runner to the line, and I realized that me yelling was nothing compared to what he had ahead of him: Redwood Creek Road – a 18% grade over 3 miles! Ha hahaha! Have fun Felix!

Our van finished the remaining 2 legs well, passed the baton to van 2, and headed down to Santa Cruz, where I was “that guy” who was sleeping on the bench at an Irish Bar at 11am. Random things like that are what make an experience for me. You look haggard, people see the salt on your face, and you could care less. It’s very easy for me to find myself wrapped up in the material trappings of the world, and to very conciously break myself down and simply EXIST in the world is very rewarding – and I think the durability of my desire to get out in the world and push myself in these ways is generated in large part be wanting to strip away those negative tendencies in myself.

In retrospect, though, the best part about The Relay was the (very rare) opportunity to meet someone, or more aptly 4 “someones”, lock yourself in a confined space with them for 30 hours, and to watch the entire dynamic of a relationship – from formation onward – play out in fast-forward. It was an opportunity to see how I interact with different personalities, to see more clearly how I interact with them, and to (hopefully) take that experience in to the rest of my life.

Someone said it was like a reality show, and it was, in the best way. I’ll be back next year.

Big Sur International Marathon

(the only picture – Las Vegas killed my camera)

I ran the BSIM (their acronym, not mine) Sunday, April 29th.

After a needlessly long drive down (thank you to the 12,000 people that wanted to go to Half Moon Bay on a sunny Saturday – though Half Moon Bay was completely fogged in), we rolled in to Monterey, or Pacific Grove, more precisely.

As usual Hotwire was like that friend who always has “a hookup”, but the “hookup” is always of dubious value. I keep biting on this line, and here’s why: I may never get the BEST deal for my money, but I know that I’ll never get completely screwed from a price perspective. Combine that with the fact that by taking out the supplier names they completely commododize the lodging purchase experience (“here’s what I’ll pay for a 3 star hotel, so all 3 star hotels must be equal…”), thus making my decision-making process even easier, and I keep comin’ back.

I’d never been to Pacific Grove before, but hands down this is where I will stay the next time I come to the Monterey Peninsula. 5 minutes from downtown Monterey, funky cool downtown strip (and they’re not trying to be cool, in STARK contrast to Monterey), and we were at Asilomar State Park Beach in a 5 minute walk from our hotel.

After picking up race packets, chips, etc., we decided to get some food. We were both starving. Now, to my warped brain, I need as much food as possible at this point; I haven’t eaten in 6 hours (an eternity for me), it’s still early (plenty of time to digest), and I can use the fuel tomorrow.

To what did my wondering eyes appear but an Indian Buffet. Now, better minds than mine will immediately realize that this is the single most retarded thing that one could eat before a marathon, or any test of endurance, for that matter. But again, those minds are better than mine.

We proceeded to slam home the requisite 2000 calories each in pursuit of our own Nirvana. I went with about a 90/10 veggie/meat ratio. Pros: vegetables are good for you (and the planet). Cons: I ate about 2 pounds of daal (lentils). See where this is going? And yes, this is the same fearless correspondent that decided to eat 7 Gu’s and have a cup of coffee as breakfast before a half marathon just a few months ago – to disastrous effect…

Properly sated, we jumped in the hoopty, got back to Pacific Grove, and took a nice long walk in Asilomar. What a cool place. This reminded me incredibly of my ill-fated adventure(s) in Isla Negra, Chile. The climate and physical environment are dead-on. I played around in some tidepools like the pretend scientist I am, spouting off half-facts that I’ve picked up from National Geographic and the like over the years, playing with snails, and making big sea anenomes (sp) contract when I touch them.

Being in central time for the week prior had some advantages, as my body was used to going to sleep at a fairly early hour by California standards. This was a huge help, as we had to be back in Monterey by 4:15am Sunday morning to catch our bus down to the starting line.

I’m not going to take the space to explain the bussing system here, but this is a point to point race up US 1, and you just have to get up that early. Fact. So we did.

The morning’s bus ride was uneventful, though it was interesting to gauge how experienced people were by the amount of excitement in their voices at 4:15am. For my part, I was trying to sleep during our 50 minute ride.

So the buses dump you at some state park (wish I remembered which) in the full-on dark about an hour before starting gun. That sounds like a lot, but with the dual necessities/lines of port-o-lets & food/coffee, it was just about perfect, and we were queuing up just past “runrise”.

This was my first time out at the marathon distance, knew that I had NOT trained properly, but for some reason was still completely calm about the whole endeavor. I did log the distance runs, though not the overall volume needed to be successful at this distance, but worse of all, I had done more than “taper” – I had just basically stopped running for the almost three weeks prior to the race. Work had been calling, and the whole week before I was locked up in a conference room in Minneapolis for work.

After some serious pep talking from the MC, we were off. Wow! There was none of the froggering for position (or less, anyway) that has been typical in every other race I’ve run. Could this just be the marathon distance? Or is it that BSIM is a favorite first marathon, and everyone was smart enough to go out slow in respect of the course? Either way, I was happy that the whole world seemed to be running within about 30 seconds of my pace, so holes opened naturally for advancement.

This course is hilly by marathon standards (i guess, though I say that as a first-time marathon runner… about 1300′ of vert. by my GPS based calculations), though you could still hear groans in the valley when the next ascent became visible. Thankfully, hills were the one area where my training was up to snuff.

So life was good, I was rolling along at a super casual pace (9:15s or so), when IT first presented itself. IT came on pretty mellow, more as a request than anything, but had the edge of a request to be honored. Portapotties were abundant on this course, so I stopped at the first bank that had no line – around M4/5.

So with IT taken care of, I was back on the road, having fun. The course is dominated by an almost exactly 2 mile/550ft. climb up to Hurricane Point. I was loving the fact that I had climbed a lot of hills in the Headlands during training, that it was a nice low grade, and that I had the good sense to stay totally aerobic on this thing (incredible how many people were trying to charge this thing like Bunker Hill. I wanted to dish advice but knew better – this is my first marathon, who am I?).

At the top of Hurricane point (aptly exactly 13.1 miles in to the course) they were dishing out free Gu. PERFECT! I’ve taken care of IT, and can use some fuel after that climb. I take, well, let’s say “many” gus, and suck 2 down right then.

Oh yeah, my first one was called “espresso love“.

So no surprise (to the intelligent reader, and I do not count myself in that group) that IT came back about 2-3 miles later.

Man, this is getting inconvenient, I think to myself – it’s not like they’re stopping the timer for me while I’m sitting in the portapotty.

But back on the road, I was again enraptured in my movement and the surroundings. From a phyisical perspective I had 3 main phases to the race:

-feeling good: miles 0-13 – self-explanatory

-seeing what was ahead: 13-20 – this is where I felt very manageable from a pain perspective, but was mentally charting the correlation between distance and pain, and saw what was coming.

-managing to the finish: 20-26.2 – around 19/20 I was playing a dangerous mental game – trying to simultaneously consider my goal time of 3:50 and conversely ensure that I did not have a total melt down if I went out too hard with too much road left to run

So back to the action at hand – miles 13-19 are passing, along with the incredible scenery, and IT is coming and going.

The vistas were incredible in the last third of the course, the first two thirds somewhat less so because of some spectacular fog. This did serve to keep the temperatures down and sun exposure manageable.

Around M20 things started changing. I had allowed myself to do run/walk intervals, and this wasn’t part of the plan. While I had taken advantage of each and every opportunity to get off the pavement and on to the grass/gravel shoulders, my knees were NOT designed for distance running on any paved surface, and they were adament in communicating that to me.

In the end I think that I was better served by walking part of each hill and running the rest: Yes, I blew my goal time – but that’s because I spent about 12 minutes total inside portapotties, but I can walk normally today, while the other person I ran with cannot.

The somewhat famed “D Minor Hill at D Major Time” was aptly named. I realllllllllly could have done without this shit hill (100 foot vert, max?) at the 25 mile marker. I was kind of toasted.

Strawberry hill, on the other hand (where locals have just set up a table and are cutting and passing out strawberries), has to be the coolest and kindest thing I can imagine at that point in the race.

Other roadside highlights were the locals outside smoking a bowl and cheering wildly around mile 2, the live reggae band around mile 24, the guys who had camped around M15 and were spinning dub reggae, etc. while they fried up breakfast on their camping stove, and the hundreds of volunteers from local schools – these kids were awesome!

Drawing across the finish line I manged to be one of the few who got a personal mention from the MC (when your chip crosses the line it shows on a screen in real time) – “Ryan Gamlin, did you have a fun race today?”.

Yes, all-in, I did.

I didn’t make my time, but I definitely ran my race. I couldn’t have gone any faster (a bit of double entendre for you there, dear reader. total IT count during the race 4! Enough of my dumb-assed pre-race nutrition). I could have trained with more volume, but I trained to a point where it occupied an amount of my life that made me happy, as opposed to begrudging my training sessions.

There was a complex mix of emotions after the finish, which I attribute to the fact that I had just run (what is for me) a fairly long ways, with a bunch of other people around (this was a great race for meeting and running with nice people), and knew that it was the culmination of a lot of hard (enjoyable) work.

No races on my calendar until Angel Island – one of my favorite trail races ever. I had told myself that this was going to be a summer to climb, cycle noncompetitively, and relax, but there’s a part of me that wants to find the next race already…

—-

another runner with a more enviable story and time shares his writeup here

Climbing Red Rocks

Hookers, booze, gambling, and…

None of the above.

See, climbing is great. Climbing big multipitch routes is great. Climbing big multipitch routes, eating buffet dinners, and sleeping in a decent bed – that’s incredible.

And even though it seems like god is emptying his trash with every plane that lands in Las Vegas, the combination of convenience and route quality came together to make for a great three days of climbing.

This was my first time to Red Rocks. Bob-san and I had hooked ourselves up with a priceline special, and though a bit of planning gave me two months to get in decent climbing shape, marathon training was taking up weekends, while spending one of every few weeks in Minnesota was limiting my trips to Mission Cliffs.

My burgeoning yoga practice, though, seemed to do something – if not for helping me to keep a clear head on lead, then through increased core strength.

Weather was variable, with one day a bit warm, one day a bit cool, and one day right on the money (insert goldilocks reference), though we did have a day of rain which kept us off the rocks most of Monday – pulling on wet sandstone is a recipe for disaster – we got in our fair share of vertical.

After a leisurely start to the day at the Palace Station Cafe (this place is straight out of the National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation), we found ourselves on Purblind Pillar. This route isn’t in any guidebook, but found on a few websites, and yet it was the single most popular route on a deservedly popular wall (Angel Food Wall, with Tunnel Vision and Group Therapy).

I managed to get skeeved on my first lead of the day (p1) after seeing bolts outside the crack. Why on earth, I wondered to myself, would there be bolts outside this crack if things weren’t going to get shitty in a hurry. Things did not get shitty, of course, as this is a 4 star route, and I was soon at the belay bringing Bob up.

Retrobolting routes borders on being a genuine problem at Red Rocks. I have no problem with retrobolting per-se. Routes are put up by different people at different times with different ethics, and sometimes a well-placed bolt is just what a route needs to bring a pitch in line with the rest of a climb, or to mitigate a dangerous runout, but Red Rocks seems to have a preponderance (sp) of REALLY unnecessary bolts (bolted cracks???). These same routes often then do you, the climber, an added favor by placing a bolt just AFTER the crux, or at an awkward stance.

Purblind Pillar is a great route, a fairly soft 5.8, but has a walkoff that I’d rather not repeat.

Sunday found me challenging the Palace Station Cafe’s Southwestern Breakfast Bowl and us getting out for Frogland. Frogland is supposed to be an ultraclassic moderate at Red Rocks, with the crowds to match. Incredibly we showed up at 9am and were the FIRST ONES to the entire wall, much less the route.

Frogland is classic old-school climbing, very real at the grade – 5.8 – (5.6 on this route felt like east coast [Seneca] 5.6 [worthwhile]), with an awesome mix of crack (perfect hands in a corner/flake for 50 feet), face (spicy lead on p5), and slab (runout traversing lead with great pendulum fall potential on p4). Four Stars.

Thankfully Bob-San pulled the crux pitch on this one and got the slab traverse. This was one of those times I’m very glad to be climbing with someone that pulls harder than me, and has the brains/guts to throw himself at something that looks, well, scary. Thanks Bob.

Sunday night saw rain low and snow at elevation, which put climbing ambitions on hold. Hitting the Whole Foods and debating what hike to do (the Red Rocks flyer you get after paying your daily fee for the loop road is incredibly informative) killed a good chunk of the morning.

We ended up taking a hike in to Icebox Canyon – a really beautiful short hike. The Canyon lived up to its name, with temperatures about 15 degrees cooler than on the desert floor, and a great diversion.

On our way out happened upon 40 feet of offwidth. After a lunch and a few tecates at the car, we couldn’t keep ourselves off the rock any longer. We set off with a light rack to do some toproping. Pluses: I’m actually fairly decent at offwidth (if that can ever be said). Minuses: I’m actually fairly decent at offwidth; I think this means that I’m going to pull even pitches on Traveller’s Buttress this summmer. Uh oh.

This trip was a great reminder of how much I love the desert. Getting back up in to the really dry air and smelling the dew evaporating off the plants in the morning makes me wonder how I ended up so far from where I thought I’d be at this age: living in a mountain town, reading more Kafka than Wall Street Journal, and living for the day, month, or season, not thinking about a 401k.

…

Presidio Recieves $15M Gift

The Haas family comes through again with a serious Bay Area philanthropic effort : $15M exclusively for the Presidio.

Can Marina home prices rise even faster with this development?

Future-state trail map

Mt. Tam – Coastal to …

Trail Run

15M

<1000 ft. +/-

(Pantoll)/Matt Davis/Coastal/Ridgecrest Blvd./Bolias Ridge Fire Road/Ridgecrest Blvd./Coastal/Matt Davis/(Pantoll)

This was the obvious choice after having such an incredible time last weekend on the first few miles of Coastal Trail out of Pantoll.

Our day started by looking for parking at Pantoll Ranger Station on a Sunday… at 10:30 am. Parking secured (.5 mile away) we were on our way.

Everything about this was just as great as I remembered it last weekend – better, even, given that we got to start out fresh on the flats this time.

Matt Davis trail is a such a fun stretch of improved trail, following along the wooded hillsides, that you don’t realize how fast you’re going until you hit the major landmark of this piece: the large stump/rock formation. There’s no way to run straight through/over this, so you do have to come to your senses, but it does let you know that you’re about to break in to the open and get the views.

Breaking out in to the open on the Matt Davis trail is one of the coolest turns you can take in California (and maybe the world). The trail goes from dense forest to a panoramic pacific view and full NorCal sun in an instant. If you don’t smile or thank whatever/whoever you thank for having a life this good (this was easter, after all) when you round that turn, you’d better reevaluate why you’re out doing this stuff.

The wildflowers have started to hit. Since I’m not much on flower knowledge, I can just tell you that they’re quite pretty, and blue. Sorry, nothing more specific than that

.

It bears repeating: this is the flattest, fastest stretch of running you are going to do on Mt. Tam (sez I). That is, of course, unless you somehow come across a group of (I could not make this up) 40-50 almost-elderly asian hikers.

I thought this was a phenomenon unique to Japan (everybody there hikes in groups, all kitted out with bear bells and engraved walking sticks, etc.), but this group was speaking Mandarin. Coastal is a SUPER narrow piece of singletrack, and passing was damn near impossible for 5-6 minutes, and then only after the people in back yelled in a mix of Mandarin and English:

Guy yelling: TO THE LEFT, TO THE LEFT!

Lady yelling: TO THE RIGHT, TO THE RIGHT!

This made for an interesting situation, but we swam through the sea of humanity, and got far more smiles than smirks. This fascinated me, because (<rant>) PEOPLE ARE RUDE ON TRAILS. If I am running and take my time and breath to say something like “hello, good afternoon, thanks for letting us pass”, etc., then the least you can do is say “hello” back to me.

This has been killing me for the past few weeks. Am I missing something? Hikers, speak up! I want to know that this brotherhood of man still exists. Smile! Be polite! We’re all better for it.

Poll: if I made a shirt (coolmax or something like it) that said:

smile back at me

would people buy it?

Upside? This was not a bad place in the world to have to walk for a few minutes. The scenery (and I hope I never tire of saying this) is off the charts.

Successfully having navigated the Easter Sunday Chinese Gauntlet, we were back at it, making our way out to Ridgecrest Blvd. I thought it better to get some road miles in – just at feeble attempt to convince myself I was actually ready to run 26.2 on pavement – and took the road towards Bolinas-Fairfax Road instead of continuing on Coastal.

Somehow I was convinced that I had never been here before, even though I’ve ridden this stretch (Seven Sisters, to you road bikers out there) many times on two wheels. Have I mentioned that this is without question one of the most beautiful runs you could ever hope to do in your life? I think I have. Good.

This run was like a greatest hits of places I’d seen while riding and never actually “seen”, so we continued up on Bolinas Fire road, which I’ve seen more times than I can count, though often while panting for breath after making the climb up from Alpine Lake on the Alpine Dam cycling Loop. Bolinas Ridge fire road cuts through Audubon Canyon Ranch on Bolinas Ridge. This is a real fire road, rough hewn and obviously utilitarian. I’d love to park at the Fairfax-Bolinas pulloff and hook this up to some of the Point Reyes trails someday.

Took in this view towards San Francisco and turned back.

Oh yeah, and then we had views like this on the way back:

We were like packhorses turned to the stables. I’ve been so focused on building distance that speedwork has faded like a distant memory. Cranking up our turnover and footspeed felt incredible – the feeling of moving at your body’s limit and damn near flying is what hooked me on running in the first place. The last stretch of Coastal through Matt Davis has to be one of the most uplifting 3 miles one can run: good footing, net downhill, and pure enjoyment. My GPS tells me I hit a 5:30 pace, and let me tell you, I am no 5:30 runner in most 15 mile jaunts. This trail will take you as fast as your feet, heart, and head will take you.

When this marathon is over I can’t imagine a better 10 mile Saturday fun run than Pantoll to the Ridgecrest gate; this is close to perfection as far as I’m concerned. Just watch out for well-meaning but slothlike groups…

tags:
trail running
Mt. Tam
Mt. Tamalpais
running

Land’s End

Out of work with enough time to ride some hill repeats near Land’s End – this is why I love where I live.

Marin Headlands – Keeping it up (the vertical, that is)

Marin Headlands and Mt. Tamalpais

Trail Running

20.6M

3400 ft. +/-

Out:

Miwok/Dias Ridge/Miwok/Redwood Creek/Deer Park Fire Road/Dipsea Trail/Coastal Trail/Old Mine Trail/(Pantoll)/Matt Davis/Coastal Trail

Return:

Matt Davis/Coastal/(Pantoll)/Coastal Fire Road/Heather Cutoff/Muir Woods Rd./Muir Beach Rd./Coastal Fire Road/Fox Trail/Tennessee Valley Trail

Another “thank god I live in the Bay Area” day, another trip to the Marin Headlands.

Starting out from the Tennessee Valley Trailhead for the first time was an exercise in patience, with equal measures cars and baby joggers out. But with parking secured, we were on our way.

I had never done the stretch of Miwok that picks up from Tennessee Valley trailhead but found it a fine enough stretch to warm up, though I have to cop to powerwalking the steeper sections. I’ve really tried to get better about managing my heart rate, especially in the first hour or so, as I work on longer distances. Has it worked? Who knows – my knees are always the limiting factor in the final hour(s).

Erm, Redwood Creek trail – I just saw you a month ago, and now you’re all gnarly and overgrown with poison oak? Nasty. The best part was seeing the old (old) lady in shorts who seemed genuinely unfazed by it while she bushwhacked. I love old people in Marin.

Redwood Creek took us to the Deer Park fire road gate and a familiar stretch of the Dipsea. It’s funny how I’m starting to put things together, spatially, in the North Bay as I run more and more trails. “Ok, so THAT’s where I am…”

Pantoll was a welcome refueling stop. After my hydration debacle a few weeks ago I was now running with fuel belt + (2) 20oz. water bottles (and electrolytes), though I realized in retrospect that without the opportunity to refill at Pantoll I would have once again been hosed. How do those ultra guys carry enough fluids?

First time on the Matt Davis trail. I’d read about this stretch a few places and saw it recommended, but this trail is 10/10 – flattest terrain on tam and the views are beyond description once you’re out of the woods. This is definitely my new go-to when friends are in from out of town and are up for an hour or two of walking.

Also finally made it to coastal fire road headed south from Pantoll on the return trip; this is another of my new all-time favorites, although I loved it even more because we were descending, and man I needed it right about then. The diversity of vegetation and awesome nontechnical singletrack were great.

Big mistake taking Heather cutoff with it’s overgrown vegetation and endless switchbacks. We would have been better served staying on coastal and getting a few more road miles in on Hwy 1. Lesson learned.

Oh, and Coastal Trail/Coastal Fire Road, ascending from Muir Beach? Screw you. Screw your endless steep-ass grade at the end of my day when I am already fried. I didn’t need that from you. Coastal is open to Pirate’s Cove, though – I need to check that out.

From the peak of Coastal (intersection Coastal/Fox) it was all downhill to the car, starting with a view of our ultimate destination, San Francisco.

Whistler 2007

The guys’ annual ski trip.

2007 destination? Whistler, British Columbia.

Weather was the major variable here, with horrible visibility and fog/drizzle most days. I’m an avowed fan of softshell technology (and was way back when cloudveil and a very few other companies were still trying to “sell” people on the concept – imagine that), but these were the days that made one long for something as waterproof as a rain slicker. We did see, in fact, a bunch of people skiing/boarding wrapped in trash bags. I guess they were locals and knew something we didn’t.

This trip also marked the most spectacularly violent ripper I’ve ever taken on the hill – on a GROOMED RUN. There aren’t supposed to be mini-fridge sized blocks of ice on a groomed run, but sure enough, there it was. Did I mention that visibility was horrible? I’ve never intentionally stayed down after a fall to make sure that 10 toes and 10 fingers were still working, but I sure as hell did after this train wreck. All this after having said that the only thing capable of ruining this trip for me was (seriously, I said this…) “a serious injury”.

Whistler lived up to its party reputation, though the spring break action was fairly muted. The Longhorn was definitely THE spot all week. We were sold on B.C. after our waitress was able to deliver not only beer but the rest of our party favors as well…

in-bounds avalanches? wow. snowpack was obviously tricky for the avvy teams with new precipitation (snow, rain, and mix) falling every night.

we did have one bluebird day, er… hour.

the whole crew rallys yet again.

this is what I saw for most of the trip – limited visibility but near-constant new snow.

john is honestly the only respectable skier in our group. oh well.

you too can pay $80 a day to experience 6 open lifts!

final day, and a powder day. nobody around and fresh tracks on every run.

hurry this shit up! The benefit of being the first one to get ready is that you get to wait…and wait…and wait…

Headlands 20 Mile Run

3/11/07

Trail Running

Marin Headlands

19.8 miles

2800 vertical feet +/-

(Rodeo Beach)/Coastal/Wolf Ridge/Old Springs/Tennessee Valley/Coastal/Coastal Fire Road/Middle Green Gulch/HWY 1/Redwood Creek/Miwok/Dias Creek/Miwok Fire Road/Coastal Fire Road/Coastal/(Rodeo Beach)

Sunny and 75 degrees in Marin – where else to run but the Marin Headlands?

I’m sunburned. And beat-down. And Dehydrated. And…

Things I learned:

1) hydrate according to distance (check) and conditions (failure). This was at least 15 degrees F warmer than any long run I’d done to date. I needed 2-3 x the water that I carried on this run – and the shortfall was all due to the fact that I was sweating 5-10x more than I would in cooler weather. Which leads me to…

2) fluids are important, but so are electrolytes. Need I say more? I bought Hammer electrolyte replacement tabs the very next day.

I was a train wreck, absolutely destroyed, at mile 17 and still had the day’s final 3 miles and 800 vertical feet ahead of me. Know what’s not cool? Cramping.

4) My Forerunner 305 is awesome, and not just because I’m getting accurate distance and altitude (… maybe), but because it’s hooking me up with cool services like everytrail.com (to stare at satellite and topo maps of what I’ve done), and programs like TrackRunner (to analyze what I’ve done and improvement over the course of a month, year, etc.).

Redwood Creek Trail (Mt. Tam) was a new part of the North Bay for me, and a very cool one at that. Running around these places in the North Bay there are constant reminders of those that tread these trails before us, and I had a special sense of Native American history as we went from these distinct and diverse ecological areas that no doubt each served different purposes in their society and individual lives: open meadows, redwood forests and creeks, and finally the ridgeline trail that bears the name of those original caretakers (owners?) of that land, the Miwok.

Spring is coming to the Headlands and Mt. Tam, and we should have a great wildflower bloom if we can get a few more days of rain in before things heat up in the north bay.

It’s all here

I’m migrating all my trail run pages over to this site – it just makes sense to have everything in one place.

I see ryangamlin.com running this format as soon as I have the time and inclination to figure out how to serve these pages from that hosting account.

You’ll find the runs categorized under the TRAIL RUNS button on the top navigation bar, though I’m sure a few honorary road runs will make it in there over time. Updates to route maps and informational links to come…

Golden Gate Bridge

Got out of work and off the bus just early enough to jump on the bike and grab this picture from Fort Point.

Carrizo Plain National Monument

Two pictures.

This place is better in theory than practice.

Theory: One of the last few true basin habitats in the US (no drainage, everything that falls/flows in either evaporates out or stays forever), salt lake, unique topography, flora and fauna. Clinton appointed this a national monument in deference to it’s unique ecology. Native american rock paintings of high archaeological value.

Practice: Starkly beautiful but oddly depressing. Kind of reminds one of a place where nuclear weapons are tested without much outcry. BLM managed (=4 wheelers and hunters, for those of you not in the know). Condition of rock paintings leads me to believe that we must have few examples preserved to any degree.

While pictures from the Spring wildflower bloom look spectacular, I would not give this place a “recommended” label during any other season.

Marin Headlands

Photos from a 16 miler in the headlands.

Interesting start to the day: alerted rangers to a hiker in distress about 1/2 mile in and helped with his evacuation.

I attempted to haul him out myself but pretty quickly saw the futility of being a tripod for a guy four inches shorter, 40 pounds heavier, and with a fully blown-out knee.

This guy had managed to fall in the water (this is incredibly rugged coast), reeked of booze, and still managed to be alive. So much for darwinism.

The rest of the run was a beautiful introduction to longer distances in the Headlands.

(Rodeo Beach)/Costal/Wolf Ridge/Old Springs/Marincello/Miwok/Bobcat/Rodeo Valley Cutoff