Sunday, November 26, 2006

happy boulders, Bodie

We spent the morning climbing at the Happy boulders



Where we started out on a sorta tall problem right near the slowdance cave, then on to Blood Sample, then on to Heavenly Path, then Chicken head and the Hulk (not sent) and Solarium, checked out the beautiful but way hard "Morning dove white", and ended up on some of the easy pocket climbs to the right of Action Figure. By noon we could barely touch the rock, let alone pull on holds because we had lost so much skin and were so tired from hauling ourselves up the volcanic tuff. After a dusty trudge back down the hill to our car, we ate some thanksgiving leftovers and hit the road.

We drove north past lake Crowley and Mono


and took the turnoff to Bodie, a gold ghost town which is now a state park. It was now brutally cold, but Bodie was beautiful. We were both surprised to see that some of the park staff actually live in some of the restored Bodie houses!








Saturday, November 25, 2006

road trip!

Chloe and I left early (6:30 AM) for Bishop this morning. According to the recorded message on the Yosemite Park conditions number, Tioga pass was still open, so we decided to drive through the park rather than the typical northerly or southerly winter routes. It was slow going on 120, and I wish someone would explain to me why so many people tint their car windows; the only thing it seems to accomplish is to make it impossible to see beyond them. Are we supposed to be filled with awe and intrigue about what's going on inside? Grey Poupon, cocktail weenies and champagne, I presume?

Anyway, Tuolomne was spectacular as usual, but cold
.

It took us ~6 hours to get to the Peabody boulders from Berkeley, and we warmed up on the Buttermilk Stem

then went on to the "Get Carter" boulder and finally to the beekeper boulder in the Pollen Grains area

where we climbed until it got painfully cold and our muscles were too worn out to continue.

Unfortunately, "The Outdoorsman" is not $54 anymore. In fact, it's not called "The outdoorsman", but is now a "La Quinta inn" and costs $89 including breakfast and taxes. We had dinner at Las Palmas, where I had a really good Asada plate, then headed back to the hotel, thankful that we werent in the climbers campground that night.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Thanksgiving




We had thanksgiving with the parents, who cooked a great meal, and then went to see the new Bond movie -- Casino Royale. It was the best Bond in a long time, and Daniel Craig is a great 007. And that's even factoring in all the female tittering you have to put up with whenever he shows up on screen in a Speedo. My only complaint: not enough screen time for the Aston Martin DBS.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Bishop on Friday!

Chloe and I are going to Bishop on friday, hopefully by way of Tioga pass ... if it stays open!! The forecast looks good with light winds, and daytime temps in 50's. The nights are forecasted to get well below freezing, but shhhhh don't tell chloe (we'll be car camping).

Monday, November 20, 2006

rotenburo testing for realz

Today was the big day: testing off the rotenburo with non lukewarm water. The problem is simple: the water boiler design makes it so that you cannot empty the bath fully while it is still hot (or the heater gets damaged). This means that to fill the rotenburo, you need to fill the bath to the maximum, get it as hot as it will go, drain the top 1/3 so that the heater is still submerged, and repeat until the rotenburo is filled. The other complicating factors are that the stones in the rotenburo are really cold, and heat is lost through the thin hose walls. All of this means that you need HOT water, which is no problem with enough wood. We did several cycles of heating the water to ~125 degrees and then emptying it via the hose into the rotenburo.... and the tub not only held water, but the water was hot!

Doesn't that look inviting?! We made a small granite chair (lower right) for clothes etc.

Soaking in the rotenburo is everything I had hoped: gentle river noises, maples illuminated by soft indirect light -- what could be better

here is Chloe enjoying it


On the way back, we decided to go to Nevada city, where we walked around,

had a nice espresso

and looked around in the shops, and checked out this gigantic ore crushing machine


In sacramento, I met up with a guy who I had arranged to buy an Ozone snow kite. We talked for a while, and it turned out that he used to be a Mammut rep, and does a lot of backcountry boarding, so hopefully he will be able to hook me up with other split boarders this winter!

Sunday, November 19, 2006

The Saddle

We checked out a new bouldering area (new for us, that is) with an interesting access method. For a long time, the trains that brought produce east out of the sacramento valley ran through snow sheds perched on the sides of the mountains overlooking Donner lake. I didn't realize this until very recently, but those snow shed don't accomodate trains anymore; the tracks have been pulled up and trains go instead through a tunnel through Mt. Judah. Anyway, it's spooky but fun driving through the sheds and small tunnels with high beams on, fording the water filled pools. Chloe was reading about how the roads beyond the tunnels have very deep gravel, and that it was excellent rally driving training. I feigned disinterest, but the truth is that I had seen that description, and I have to admit that it was part of the reason why I wanted to check out The Saddle. You see, my eyes brighten at even the mention of rallies, and I jump at any chance to get our 250 hp subaru slightly sideways on a gravel road. The big ditches on one side and rolling hills which don't stop until Donner on the other side curbed my enthusiasm a bit though.

The Saddle itself had some cool boulders, but most of it was way out of our league. Theres a beautiful V9 called Nazgul there which, with a little human growth hormone, I could totally do. We headed back after a few hours.

Heres a view of the tunnel entrance going back west:


We stopped at the snowshed boulders so that I could spend a little more time getting rejected by my favorite project
, then went back to Alta for baths and dinner.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

rotenburo testing

We decided to leave earyl because of the rain, but I was determined to test the rotenburo after its required 24 hours (well, almost!) setting time for the mortar. The water held, but we didn't have time to really heat the water, so I got into a tepid bath full of water for a few minutes for pictures and then ran like crazy for the cabin and towels. The good news is that all the patching seems to have paid off.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Rotenburo, Alta

The parents came up to Alta with us for the weekend (although we ended up leaving early because of non stop rain) and they were able to enjoy the rotenburo

Chloe and I got up there early on friday, and tested out the rotenburo soon after our arrival. Unfortunately, we discovered fairly quickly that our precious tub leaked like a sieve! We got down to work patching, and decided to put a mostly ornamental rim of smooth river stones around the top. It turned out very well, but the rain and the mortars setting time precluded having a warm bath ready for the parents. They seemed to be impressed anyway:

Friday, November 10, 2006

Kenjis show at the Triton

We went down to the opening of a a show at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara which had a few of kenji's paintings on loan from his gallery in San Francisco.

. Chloe and I were famished and quietly inhaled most of the pizza served at the reception, as well as the mini chocolate muffins and wine. As part of the reception, a docent was leading a tour around to the various paintings, and Chloe and I were surreptitiously spying and waiting for a description of Kenjis work. It took a little longer than we expected, and by that time the docent got near kenjis paintings, Kenji himself had shown up and was perusing the little blurb that they had written about his work. The docent herded the tour group a little closer Kenjis work, did a double take at Kenji and then somewhat self consciously started describing Kenjis work. He described Kenji of one of the bay areas "treasures"! Here is some video (4 MB, with terrible audio)
video

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Rotemburo

Today Chloe and I started a secret project which we will surprise Gail and Kenji with on their next visit to Alta. The idea came from our stay at the spa at Asamushi. The spa had an outdoor tub made of smooth river stones. When I stepped in, it was still raining from the storm that had caused us so many problems. It was dark out, and the light rain falling into the rotemburo, the wet black rocks and steam rising out of the tub was beautiful and relaxing. I decided that we should try to build something like it, but on a much smaller scale in Alta. I knew the perfect location too: right next to the river so that you could compose Haiku, sip sake and wait for inspiration while the water flowed in front of you.

The engineering of it was another matter however. I didn't want to have to spend the same amount of time designing it as with the other tub, but one major advantage we had was that we already had a source of hot water: Tub #1! In fact, we already had a hose running down from the first tub to the site where I wanted to build the rock tub. In theory, all we would need to do would be to fill the other tub to the very top, get it very very hot, and drain it down into the rock tub. It remains to be seen whether that will work or not!

As far as the tub, as usual we under estimated the amount of mortar we would need and only bought two 80 pound bags initially. On the first day we dug a hole in the ground, which turned out to be back breaking work. The soil is full of stones and required a lot of hands-and-knees-cursing work, but we eventually had a hole that was big enough (notice a selection of the stones that we had to pull out by hand at the lower left):



Next came the mortar, the carrying and mixing of which also turn out to be back breaking work. We poured a ~1.5 inch floor and pressed smooth river stones into it, and were able to build a row of rocks before we ran out of mortar.

Exhausted and dirty, we took baths in the working rotemburo on the deck. I used our new Hinoki bathing stool and bucket to wash off japanese style before getting in the tub. It's a beautiful time of year to be up there, and even more enjoyable to be in a deep bath! We grilled sausages for dinner and walked up to the oak forest to see the light in the trees


The next day after bouldering we went back to Hills Flat Lumber in Colfax for FIVE eighty pound bags or mortar. Let me tell you, it was no picnic getting these down to the river. We built up the walls, and got a lot better at choosing rocks and mortaring. It's a shame there weasn't some way we could have practiced beforehand, because the bottom is a lot sloppier than the top. Oh well.




The real questions now are a) is it big enough and b)will it leak. As I said, the bottom wasn't done all that well. I guess we'll find the answers to both questions next weekend. We might have to build it up a little higher, but we have the mortar to do that. All in all it was pretty inexpensive: ~$40 for the mortar, the stones were free, and $18 for a small stainless steel drain pipe. I managed to get some mortar into the drain so I'm hoping that it isnt clogged! I don't imagine Drain-O can dissolve concrete.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Rainbow Boulders

We got an early start and headed out to the Rainbow Boulders today.

this one will have to wait until my rotator cuff heals... but it's a very cool looking problem

Friday, November 03, 2006

Google Earth Winds

I've been trying to find places to snow kite near Alta along I80 for this winter, and the idea I had was to look at historical wind data and overlay it on google earth via placemarks. The first version of the program was a bit crude, and only supported METAR data grabbed from weather underground. The problem is that the number of sensors in quite limited (they are mostly at airports). For the next version, I used the university of Utah's RAWS data, which includes over 1700 sensors in california alone. However, I was unable to find a nice comma delimited (or something like it) data stream and had to write a HTML parser for their pages. Additionally, their web site is slow, so most of the work was in making a caching system rather than getting or processing the data.

Since weather patterns shift a lot with each season, I restrict data to December through March during the day. You tell the program how many days backwards you want to go, and it starts picking random days in that range, downloading and caching the data and generating KML files for Google Earth. Because this can be a long process : 1 data point per hour, 8 hours per day, N days, 1700 sensors, data is written out incrementally. It's pretty frustrating encountering a divide by zero which you forgot to trap three days into a run! Also, to save time, the output is only done every few thousand data points or so. This is important considering how large the cache files can get.

The KML file which is generated has averaged sensors wind speed sorted by value, makes extruded polygons with heights proportional to their average wind speed, color codes them and makes a link to the current wind and weather conditions. It looks like this:



the latest KML file is available here

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

RAWS

I've been playing around with a program to download weather data (specifically wind speeds) and generate a KML file for Google Earth. In the course of this, I discovered a cool device called a RAWS, Remote Automated Weather Station which various agencies install in ... well, "remote" locations. The stations run off of a solar charged battery and transmit data in real time to satellites. pretty cool.

life in Grenoble, France as an expat postdoc
life in Grenoble, France as an expat scientist
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