no kiting, going to Alta

We had planned on going kiteboarding at Alameda today, but the wind was completely dead. It’s obvious, but interesting to see how your perception of everyday things can change. Before kiteboarding, I never really noticed how strong the wind was blowing, except when it got in the way. For better or worse, I find myself looking at the trees a lot these days: are the leaves moving? Are the BRANCHES moving? Which way are they moving?! Anyway, we ended up driving to my parents house in Berkeley instead, had an expertly prepared Udon by chef Kenji, and then drove up to the cabin. We waited until 7:30 pm to leave, so we beat all the traffic and were there by 9:30 or 10.

presidio cemetary

Chloe and I discovered a trail on the Bay area ridge trail which leads right to the top of the cemetary in the presidio. Theres a great view, but watch out for all the poison oak on the trail!

July 4 weekend

Holiday weekends can be a lot of pressure. With two extra days off, I usually want to make sure I make the most of them which means planning way ahead and lots of very adult "preparation". Having already planned our next xmas in advance, we gave ourselves a break and played it by ear this weekend. On Friday we had a crazy kiteboarding session at Alameda; there was actually too much wind for my 12 meter kite, and I was having to really work hard to avoid moving uncomfortably fast. Even so, it was exciting as usual, and I even got a chance to try out Chloes GK Sonic 8, which I could make work with a little fancy (well, as fancy as I am able to perform) kitework.

We slept in on Saturday, which turned out to be a mistake because there were huge traffic jams half of the way up to Alta. I think it took us almost four hours to get there. Since we still have the wonderful summer daylight until eight PM or so, I took the opportunity to try to clear out some of the overgrown forest. It was hard work, and I ended up with something like thirteen huge red throbbing mosquito bites just on my back.

The next day we headed out to Big Chief, where it looked like a tour bus of climbers had arrived. Thankfully American climbers are much weaker than their French counterparts, and we are honorary French Climbers. What this means is that we can move on to the mostly unoccupied medium difficulty climbs while people queue up for the easy ones. After a criminally underbolted warmup 5.9, we moved on to Eat the Worm, which I did on sight, and then on to Pow Wow, an excellent overhanging 11a. Finally we played around on Totally Chawsome, which I did second try. A Japanese dude there from Nagano and his friend from Tahoe were checking out the moves on "All guns blazing", and let me try out the opening moves.

After driving back to Alta, I shifted into high gear and chopped down many more trees (including a wild cherry, accidentally! aaaaagh!).

before, during, after:


me in action


and one of the three piles of cuttings

kiteboarding

Yesterday I had easily my best day of kiteboarding yet. A day later, I still get a warm fuzzy feeling remembering the feeling of skimming across the waves off Crown beach in Alameda, carving turns and finally feeling some of the subtleties of flying the kite. I think it was my fifth or sixth time out on the water, and everything just clicked; as soon as I body dragged out away from the beach, I was up on my board, heading out into the San Francisco Bay. A few minutes later, seeing not too many kiteboarders around, I swooped the kite back down and headed back to the beach. I lost track of how many laps I rode until the wind turned into a gentle breeze, and I noticed people giving up and heading for the beach. I doggedly kept the kite up, and as the wind died, I had the opportunity to try to generate my own "apparent wind" by flying the kite in figure eights as fast as possible, and eventually relented and headed back to the beach. Earlier, in a fit of optimism, I decided not to connect my board leash and ended up getting really far downwind of my board. Luckily Wes, my instructor from my water lesson happened to be out there and he grabbed and returned my board. Despite all my effort to stay upwind, I ended up a mile or so down the beach, and did the now familiar long walk back up to the shack.

Chloe also had a good day: she inflated, rigged and tested out her new GK Sonic in the water.

Big Chief

This morning we drove up to Big Chief, near Truckee. The drive up was uneventful, except for a 45 minute traffic jam thanks to some Caltrans morons who had shut the road down to one lane at Yuba Gap inexplicably. We had stopped at Ikedas earlier, and I was truly amazed at how much it had changed. It used to be a funky little fruit stand with a disgusting fly filled bathroom around back. They used to sell cheap dried fruits, nuts and their own pressed spicy tofu. These days it appears that Mr. Ikeda or his children have gotten a little full of themselves, and charge $8 for a bag of peanuts!

When we got to Truckee, we discovered that the guidebook that we had bought was utterly useless. I should mention that climbing guidebooks are typically obtuse and maddening things. The reasons for this are complicated. On one hand, guide book authors are frequently the ones who have invested their own time and money into developing a crag for climbing, so it makes sense to support them. However, guidebooks are also frequently absurdly expensive. More damning still is the fact that many (most?) climbing guides are produced with 2nd grade literacy, kindergarten layout skills and a stern focus on inaccuracy. It's almost as if the authors want your money, but don't want you to make it to the crags! Anyway, enough of that. Suffice to say that we wasted a long time searching for roads which do not exist, but we eventually made it. By the time we were at the crag, it was in the mid 90's and we almost died warming up on a "10" (according to the guide). After getting thoroughly cooked, we retreated to the south cave sector, where I flubbed the opening moves of the very fun "Realm of the Overhang" and then did "Flying High Again" on sight. Thunderclouds were rolling in during the last climb, so we walked back to the car and got swarmed by mosquitoes.

The rain started falling in sheets of huge drops just as we got back onto I80 and was deluging the freeway all the way to Alta. Along the way I discovered something very interesting: The leftmost lane (fast lane) is much, much, much smoother and quieter than the right lane! Why is that? My guess is that the road destroying semi trucks spend more time in the right lanes and basically thrash and crack them. When we got to Alta, we hacked our way down to the cabin that my parents and I had built. I was 11 or 12 when we built it, and it was a pretty significant undertaking despite its diminutive size. It took a summer of hauling sheetrock, timber, bolts, nails, rocks, cement bags, insulation, tar paper, shingles and a thousand other little bits to build. We didn't have any power tools, electricity or plumbing, either! Anyway, we haven't spent much time up there recently, and it has become the favored target of the local redneck mouth breathers. Unfortunately, they had broken in again and pried off both locking hasps to the door. Thankfully they had spared the windows this time. Chloe and I re-installed new hasps and locks as we were swarmed again by mosquitoes, and we hit the road, sweaty, dirty and dehydrated.

just another day of living in the Presidio

Cherry Picking!

We spent the morning picking cherries in Brentwood, near the sacramento delta today:






and then had lunch at Vic's

Container house

I saw an article in the SFgate today about shipping container based prefab houses, which I quickly forwarded around to my parents and Chloe. As usual, the custom designed ones are fantastic, but who can afford something like that? Maybe an investment banker, but certainly not two biochemistry Ph.Ds :) No, the prefab designs were the most interesting and one in particular really stood out: the Quik House. The floor plans are fantastic, and they really do look like a nice place to live. I found some other articles which indicate that a dozen of these things have already been ordered. Image stolen from the Quik House web site.

World Cup

I was never a soccer player. I had friends that were passionate about it in high school, but I could never really understand it. Part of it was that, having a Japanese father who never watched any sports on TV, I didn't understand the language of any spectator sports, much less an obscure third world one :). No, I was equally lost at a superbowl party as I was at a world series party, although I was somewhat more at home at the latter after years of Japanese-American little league. The soccer cluelessness stemmed from an early attempt at team sports in which my friend Keith-Mako and I were enlisted in a youth soccer league. Presaging a life of conformity, I was obsessed with shirts with numbers on them (my "number shirt phase" is the term my parents use) and was pretty excited about having a number shirt from an actual team that I actually played on! The reality of the soccer team was somewhat different however. It was endless boring drills in which the coach doted on his son, a Q-tip shaped headed big toothed giant to the exclusion of all the rest of us. With the exception of the occasional disdainful look at one of us, as we ran rubber legged past the soccer ball, there wasn't much "coaching" going on. Keith and I would fabricate various ploys to get pulled out of games, like pointing squint eyed at a microdot of blood that we were frantically squeezing out of our fingers after a fall ("collapse" might be a better word). "But I'm injured!". The one thing that kept me going was the promise of the number shirt. My number shirt. Unfortunately, our number shirt delivery was somewhat delayed, and Keith and I jealously looked at our friend Justin Holcher's new jersey which he proudly wore to school several times a week. To cries of "Luckyyyyyyyy!" we coveted the fabric with little holes for breathability, the gold v-neck collar, and the shimmery blue fabric. The coup de grace was that it was reversible for when you were the home or way team. When reversed it became gold with a blue collar. It was a perfect number shirt. This was going to be awesome, and we (maybe just I; I can't speak for Keith) would endure any amount of bodily injury for them. Our own jerseys arrived later in the season amid great fanfare. The coach brought a big cardboard box to the pitch, trailed by all of us jumping and shouting. After handing the number "1" jersey to his son, the rest of us dove in and pulled ours out. The excitement quickly dissipated. These were gold and ... Black? There were no perforations for high performance. Neither were they reversible in any meaningful way. And with the dream of the perfect number shirt of my very own shattered, so ended any enthusiasm I might have for soccer and the world cup.

Sick as a dog

I went kiteboarding on Wednesday, and somehow didn't see the signs warning that there were high levels of bacteria in the water from a sewage spill. On Thursday my chest started feeling tight, and by the evening I had a fever and headache. My this morning I was a complete wreck; I could barely move, my throat was killing me, I had a throbbing headache and a fever that just would not relent. I'm definitely going to spend the extra time researching water bacteria levels before jumping in next time. However, as far as I know, no one is testing viral levels (probably more technically difficult to do), which are also something to worry about.

Bay Area Traffic

This weekend, I finished some modifications to the Traffic analyzer I wrote. It now uses LWP and some ugly code to associate individual traffic time points with various weather parameters. Some examples are shown below for the commute between South San Francisco and Albany.

Temperature

pressure

humidity

kiteboarding

Today chloe and I had our jet ski assisted water lessons in the bay; we both had a great time and managed to get up on the board in both directions and even managed to get upwind a bit! Next wednesday we'll try to get in some more water time after work. Woohoo!

Last Day

Today we dragged our aching bodies out of bed, had a waffle breakfast in the hotel, and drove out to the Utah Hills. The access road was pretty horrendous and we didnt want to risk getting the rental car stuck, so we walked up the road to the Soul Asylum crag. The road is very rutted, particularly on the steeper sections, so we were both VERY happy to have left the car behind! About three bolts up the first climb, I heard a strange "swishing" sound behind me, and thought nothing of it, so I continued climbing. When it got louder, I realized that I was getting dive-bombed by an extremely irate bird of some kind. I didn't really have time to figure out what kind it was as I quickly retreated off the climb, but subsequent googleornithology suggests that it was a Sharp Shinned Hawk. The hasty retreat was of course motivated by a sense of respect for the raptors habitat, rather than the threat of getting my eyes clawed out. After this inauspicious start, we climbed the awesome Petrified,

the one next to it, another 10a further down the wall, and I did a disturbingly named but very fun climb called "White soul power" on site, which made my month.


The climb started on a bee filled ledge (they were sucking the moisture out of small trickles in the limestone), and in the course of setting up a toprope Chloe managed to kick a bag full of various items down on top of me. Happily, she gave me a few milliseconds notice and I didn't get clouted by it our the spinning bits of scree that it kicked loose. After this, we headed back down to the car, "showered" with baby wipes, and drive back to Las Vegas. Once in Vegas, we spent a good hour trying to find the Thai restaurant which we went to on our last Red Rocks trip, but failed. It turned out to be a block away from where we stopped looking (Sahara and Rainbow I think). After returning the car, we headed to the airport and eventually boarded our delayed flight (thank god for Chicago O'hare; Without it, airlines would lose 90% of their late flight excuses!) back to SF. We got back in around 12:30 AM or so, hastily rinsed off and immediately fell asleep.

Zion

After a morning climbing three easy routes at the Chuckawalla wall, we headed out to Zion again. This time we avoided the main canyon and drove up across the Kolob plateau and hiked along wilcat trail out to Northgate peaks trail (380 kb Park map here).

We walked back to the trailhead and drove to Lava Point lookout, then down to the West Rim Trailhead, and along the West Rim Trail for a few miles, where we saw a lot of desert horned lizards. On the way back, the light was perfect for some pictures of Cave Valley and Blue Springs Reservoir. We definitely want to go back to hike further next time!



Some medium format scans of Blue Springs Resevoir, and along the road to Kolob Plateau, respectively:

The Cathedral

Today we drove west out of St. George to Welcome Springs and the Cathedral crag, which was spectacular. The hike up takes you past a desert oasis of cottonwoods and streams and through a valley flanked by blue and orange limestone faces. After getting a little lost, we arrived at the Cathdral:



Warmed up on "Pagan Rituals", did the excellent "Worshipping the Limestone Gods", and then walked over to the Wailing Wall. At the wailing wall, I barely onsighted Rising Expectations (not me, but the correct climb):

And then got shut down on one of the 12a's to the right of it. We finished up on "Casting Asperations", walked back to the Cathedral and I unfortunately got pretty shut down on "speaking in tongues". We watched a guy (I think his name was Todd) almost send an incredibly hard looking line in the middle of the cave ("The Incredible Huck?"). There were about 8 people at the crag when we were there, and the atmosphere was great; everyone was willing to give us information about climbs that weren't in the guidebook.

St. George

Today we checked into the excellent Best Western St. George; indoor/outdoor swimming pool, jacuzzi, pool tables, video arcade and perhaps most importantly: a really excellent breakfast. After reorganizing our bags a bit, we set out for the local crag. The Chuckawalla wall is a big chunk of well bolted red sandstone about 5 minutes north of town


whic is really a blast. We worked our way left from the moderates on the right, took a burn on what I think was Armageddon and then onto "As the Crow Flies", which I grunted through on site. I then went back ro armageddon for the redpoint. We really enjoyed all of the climbs on this wall, but paced ourselves and left early to go buy the Todd Goss guidebook. From the climbing store, we continued on to Zion Canyon, but saw the crowds of people and cars and left.

vegas!!

We took an 8:00 PM flight to Las Vegas, rented the car from Payless rent a car (and got completely bait and switched on insurance, upgrade etc; we'll never go there again) and checked into the Hilton. Tomorrow we'll get an early start and head out to St. George, UT, 120 miles north on I15.

kiteboarding

After a few weeks of practicing with a Naish Xeon trainer kite, I had my land lesson today. Basically I learned how to activate the kites safeties, as well as get a feeling for sheeting the kite in and out.

it has begun

Today we saw some guys kiteboarding under the Golden Gate. It looked fantastic, and I finally am getting motivated to take lessons

Sonoma

We visited Scott, Caroline and their two year old son Gabriel (Chloe went to college with Caroline) this weekend. Scott and Carloine took us to four great wineries in Sonoma and Healdsburg: J,


which had great hor d'oeuvres and ok wine (but a little overpriced IMO), then across the parking lot to Rodney Strong, which had a very nice 2003 Zinfandel. I should probably point out that I am in no way a wine afficionado; I dont even know what kind of grapes go into Cotes du Rhone or Bourgogne etc. Zinfandels, however are a new taste for us, as are California wines in general. Here are the impressives barrels at Rodney Strong:


Using Gabriel's Bubble Power

We continued on to Christopher Creek

which also had a nice Zinfandel (2003?)

which we bought one bottle of, as well as a kick-you-in-your-teeth petite syrrah (nothing petite about it though!) which we bought a few bottles of as well. As we sped along to beat the 5:00 pm tasting room closing time, Scott told us that a lot of the culverts and ditches in this area were overflowing with rainwater just a week ago.
The bartender told us that excess water was actually bad for the grape vines, but I cant remember why... something about hardship making the vines angry and compelling them to produce better fruit. I'm not sure, because by this point, I was a little drunk and chloe was taunting me in french whispers. Actually, I dont remember what the name of the winery was or how the wine tasted.


The next day, after Scott and Caroline made us an amazing waffle, smoothie and bacon breakfast, we headed out towards Salt Point State Park for some bouldering and climbing. We drove along the Russian River and were amazed at how far out to sea the silt was being deposited at Jenner

We could only find one boulder, and the climbing turned out a little... poorly. From the tops of the cliffs, the climbs looked great:

pocketed sandstone above azure waves.. with the stunted pine trees and breeze it almost felt like we were back in Provence for a few seconds! Anyway, we followed the directions for where to rapell and ended up on a shelf of rock not very far away from the water. During the course of just a few routes, we both managed to get soaked (Chloe got hit by some impressively huge waves), as did all of our gear and jackets. For some reason there wer barnacles up most of the climbs, despite the fact that I dont see how the ocean ever got that high. Barnacles, despite their fortresslike shells, turn out to be pretty weak, and explode under the pressure of say, a climbing shoe shodden foot for example. It also turns out that barnacle guts are very very slippery, so it was game over whenever I stepped on one. After one impressive barnacle slick, I looked down and watched as my jacket, containing digital camera, cell phone and car keys began to gracefully waft out to sea, despite being laden with so much Important Stuff. I screamed, and chloe managed to rescue it. It would have been sad indeed to loose that jacket after all of the places it has kept me warm. Also, lost car keys would have been bad.