The Racetrack, Death Valley

Last year, one of the highlights of our road trip was an unplanned side trip to Death Valley. This time we planned to go through the Valley again on our way to Bishop, but we didn't have any specific ideas for where we wanted to go within the park. Keep in mind that the park is more than 3 million acres, so we had some narrowing down to do. I had read and seen pictures of a famous (and famously inaccessible) playa called The Racetrack (highly recommended link). Having never had a 4 wheel drive car before, except for my extremely low clearance Audi A4, I had never had the opportunity to see it. Since we just bought an Outback 4x4 with 8 inches of clearance, now seemed like the perfect time to go. The one problem is that the road to the racetrack is BAD. Here is the NPS Caveat:

Racetrack Valley Road
High clearance 2WD. 34 miles of loose gravel, washboard, some protruding rocks. Moderate and long uphill grade (2400' in 9 miles). Sedans, vans and campers do negotiate this road occasionally but are not recommended. Posted 4WD, high clearance due to changing road conditions and irregular maintenance. Flat tires are common on this road; be sure your spare is in good shape. No camping first two miles or from Teakettle Junction to the southern end of the Racetrack

After taking a brief look at Scotty's Castle, we headed out on the road south from Ubehebe crater:

The conditions at the information shack in Beatty had warned of "extreme washboarding" (washboarding=undulations in the road which makes driving a jaw rattling experience), and the road did not disappoint:


It's been my experience that if you can keep the car on the road, going faster is usually better on washboards, and the Subie didn't have any problem at all doing that. We overtook a couple of SUVs on the final few miles from teakettle junction to the playa, and pulled over near a rocky outcrop sometimes called "the grandstand". Our car was pretty dusty, but survived without a scratch or bump. Thankfully, it was only afterwards that I learned about the reputation of this dirt road to explode shock absorbers, flatten tires, bend wheels and generally destroy cars.


We wandered around the beautiful cracked mud surface for a while and took some pictures






It's sad, but we could see places where morons had dragged rocks across the surface to simulate the natural movement of the rocks over the lake (discussed at the wikipedia link above). Since most of the moving rocks can be found at the southern end of the playa, we continued south, parked and wandered from stone to stone. Even without the intrigue of the moving rocks, the racetrack playa is a stunning place. The yellow-brown cracked mud and multicolored rocky mountains are spectacular. I took quite a few medium format shots, but also some digital shots to give you an idea of what it is like:






Going back North turned out to be much faster, and I got to test the rally bred subaru technology with nice drifts and a few lock ups of the ABS. Heres a little quicktime movie clip
(5 MB)
Interestingly, our car seemed to do much better on the dirt road than SUVs in their supposed natural environment. I like to think about how mystified those guys in Yukons and Expeditions were to see a little red Subaru coming up behind them at twice their speed! I guess the joke will be on me if things start falling off our car.

When we got back to Ubehebe we had a look around the crater




And then perhaps foolishly, took the "road" North that said "Big Pine, 75 miles:". At this point we had traveled at least 50 miles on pretty bad dirt roads. The road up to Big Pine is actually a slightly better, but still dirt and washboarded road.

We actually saw quite a few chunks of cars along the way, and I took over the driving after Chloe augered into a big rut in the road and got us airborne on the bounce. There were also sections of soft sand where washes intersected the road. After miles of this, it got dark and the road started winding up a mountain, just to add a little steepness to the mixture. We were both relieved to see pavement near the top of the grade, which turned out to be hanging rock canyon. The smoothness of the road was wonderful after ~80 total miles of dirt roads, and we were both in high spirits until it abruptly ended and spat us out onto more dirt road! I'm not sure why that section of road in particular is paved, but I'm sure there's a good story. I always thought that people built roads out from their ends, rather than picking a point in the middle and building outwards, but hey.. it's death valley. Finally we made it to a bona fide road, which looked very familiar even in the dark, and I realized that it was the same road that my friends and I had driven many, many times almost twenty years earlier in order to look for lizards and snakes. Half an hour later we found a hotel in Bishop (The Outdoorsman) for $54 with free wifi and a great free breakfast. Just next door is the Creekside Inn, which wanted $200 a night!! This seemed like a particularly bad deal considering that we stayed at a castle for $50 less. My only complaint was that we were right next to the ice machine. Even when it is below freezing outside, people still apparently need their ice at 2 in the morning. Luckily I had earplugs.

Red Rocks Day 2

We liked the Stratocaster wall so much that we went back for the whole day today. We made the mistake or warming up on Vile Pile, which seemed a lot harder than 10b, but whatever. We went on to do the fabulous Footloose,

which chloe did with only one hang, and then we went on to ?? just left of Marshall Amp, and gave Stratocaster Direct a quick try, but couldn't pull the hard move after the second bolt: back to the gym I guess. Since it was recommended to us, I gave Running Man a try but got thoroughly spanked on it.

Red Rocks Day 1

We woke up to the inspiring sight of cancerous suburban and casino sprawl (which we were helping to pay for of course!)


hastily ate a $2.50 breakfast (pancakes, eggs, bacon), stopped at the Albertsons for water and disgusting sandwiches. I should point out that until this point, our re-entry into the processed and bland world of American cuisine had been deferred by the fact that we live in San Francisco. A quick tour of the Summerlin food options brought us back to the reality that is American food (for most of the country). Anyway, Chloe noticed some spectacular clouds over Red Rocks Canyon on the way out

We went to the "Dog Wall" and unfortunately had to try to warm up on a 11c. After another, much harder 11c and then a nice 10b, we headed out to try to find the Stratocaster wall. This required a few missed turns, thanks to an error in the guide book, but we didn't mind too much since we got to scramble amongst the beautiful red sandstone boulders






We did a beautiful and long climb called Marshall Amp (a vue!), watched some guys on the neighboring climbs, and then headed back to Vegas


Still reeling from the horror that was Senor Miguels, we consulted some of the pages that I had printed out about climber recommended restaurants in the vicinity of the Sun Coast. One place that got glowing recommendations was a Thai restaurant on Sahara Blvd near Rainbow. It turned out to be excellent, if strangely located (in a mini mall). The woman working there was very welcoming and nice, despite the fact that Chloe and I were pretty grubby having come directly from the crag.

we were hoping to learn how to play my parents favorite game: craps, but were too exhausted to do anything other than go to our room, tame baths and watch Law and Order until we fell asleep at ten. Party down.

Drive to Las Vegas

Today we made the loooong drive down to las vegas, which was painfully boring, and took us almost 10 hours with the traffic. In the future, if we're planning on staying just in vegas we'll definitely fly in and rent a car. We found a relatively inexpensive room at the Sun Coast Casino which happens to be much closer to the climbing at Red Rocks than the strip. We were so exhausted after the long drive that we ate at the in house Mexican restaurant called "Senor Miguels" which was, as expected, awful.

road trip

We're just getting geared up for a big road trip to Las Vegas, Death Valley and Bishop.

Xmas was great, and we scored a Zojirushi induction heating fuzzy logic rice cooker and a bunch of other cool things. A lot fof our presents for other people are with our shipment from france which, after 10 weeks is still not here. For the amount of money they are being paid, Allied/Sirva is pretty pathetic.

Traffic

When I first got here, I looked around for a service that would allow you to try to find out what time of day was best on a given commute (based on historic data). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any. However, since commute times are readily available via 511.org, I decided to write a perl script using LWP::Simple. 511.org is polled every 5 minutes and the results are written to a flat text file.


I wrote a second script which does some simple mining of the data: It calculates average commute times as well as standard errors, and produces a plot like on the left for south san francisco to albany. The data is only for weekdays and should exclude holidays (the only one so far is thanksgiving).



Similarly, in order to try to figure out when the best time to leave and come back for the weekend, I started gathering data on 80 west and east between albany and fairfield, as well as between albany and Livermore and albany and Walnut Creek (below).




Although I doubt I will find anything interesting, I also create graphs for each route across the hour, regardless of time of day. This would in principle allow you to see if there were any overall rules of thumb for leaving at :00, :15, :30 , :45 etc. So far things look pretty flat though.





Last weekend, I realized that averaging the data probably is an overly lossy thing to do. Better would be to be able to see a histogram of all the recorded commute times for a given route and time of day. My first idea was to image map the plot of average times vs. time of day to histograms. However, this is ugly and clunky. A better way to express this third dimension of data is with color. The idea is to have a color coded histogram of data for each time of day such that extremely frequently observed commute times get one side of the color spectrum (black for example) and infrequently measured commute times get another (white for example). It took a really long time for me to figure out how to get PM3d to work correctly, but I eventually did it. The major problem was actually just formatting the data. Another important trick is to make sure you have the same number of data points for each "slice" (= time of day), even if the data hasn't been measured... just make a lot of bins with zeros. The results are actually kind of beautiful and are beginning to show clear patterns where the average plots showed none. Some examples are shown to the left. It is important to note that because I am not smart enought to figure out exactly how PM3d works, the color scale is relative rather than absolute (i.e. even if the scale goes from 0 to 1.8, the number of observations in the black bin might be closer to 20).

If you have an interest in the project, drop me an email.
Some more data

Power Outage

We woke up to no power this morning. We found out later that a huge eucalyptus had knocked down some power lines near our house. Here are some pictures of the mess

Exploring

Went for a bike ride over the Golden Gate and down to Kirby Cove today. I never get tired of looking at that bridge.






Later on I ate incredible bulgogi and kalbi with gail and kenji

Bishop

I'll slowly start making updates on our new life in San Francisco. We moved into our apartment in the Presidio and bought a Subaru Outback XT. In celebration of our new non Renault car, we decided to take a trip to Bishop. It was windy and cold, but we got in a little climbing in at the Sads before my skin got removed and we chickened out








we slept in the back of the car, which was MUCH more comfortable than the back of my dads pickup.

on a plane

left from Lyon St. Exupery today. A bientot!

Leaving Party and Dinner

We had our "Work" leaving party today, to which we brought all of our remaining alcohol (Chartreuse VEP, nice Sake, Ouzo, wine by the case, etc etc). People really loved the cheese plate, and in particular the Camembert au Calvados. Surprisingly, the second and third packages of party time crabs were also a big hit! Earlier in the day, we had managed to set up our mail forwarding to the US (very farkin expensive) and sold our Clio 1.4 RT for a song to a postdoc at the IBS.


The giant cheese plate had been ordered from les Alpages, and we had picked it up earlier that day. I had almost started crying when the Fromagiers at les Alpages pointed to my show announcement up on the wall and asked me how the photography was going. I realize that some explanation is necessary, since those of you who know me probably realize that this is a somewhat atypical response on my part.

When I had first arrived in France in 2002, I had immediately fallen in love with Les Alpages. We lived a block away in Place Vaucanson, and even though I spoke two words of french, it was the first store (apart from boulangeries) that I managed to summon the courage to enter alone. I spent a not insignificant amount of time preparing for my first unaided visit, having looked up the words in the dictionary and gotten advice from Chloe. I picked a time of day during which I had hoped that very few people would be in the store, and moved in for the kill. As I trudged forward in the line, I rehearsed my lines to myself. I looked at all the cheeses that I would NOT be oredering because they were outside my script. I paid attention to the feigned nonchallance with which the old ladies ordered their cheeses : I knew that they were just as terrified as I was. Everything was going according to my plan. However, when I finally got to the counter, I panicked and asked for 500 kilograms of comte instead of 500 grams. After the large bald fromagier in a white apron burst out laughing and asked if I wanted to buy the whole store (500 kg is about a half ton of cheese), I turned bright red and said 500 grams please! By that time, a huge line had built up behind me which stretched out the door. They were all laughing and enjoying the mental picture of this American walking out of the store with a wheelbarrow full of cheese. Then I took a month off from cheese buying. Little by little things got easier, and although we moved further away, I still managed to get back there from time to time. I learned that it was "Comte de Montagne, and not Comte de la Montagne, and Tomme Crayeuse, not Tomme cremeuse. My relationship with the store was a kind of abridged and poetic version of my stay in France; all the heartbreak, embarassment, frustration and joy of expat living in little snapshots punctuated by the ringing of the bells on their big glass door. I will miss you, les alpages.

Leaving Dinner

As our going away present, our lab had generously bought us a meal (they even included the wine!!) at "L'escalier", a restaurant in Grenobel across from the museum. The meal was great, and the portions were BIG.

omlette in an eggshell with caviar


foie gras


seared tuna (this was a little too big for me)


excellent and perfectly cooked steak


the cheese plate


and dessert





Everything was fantastic except the cheese plate, which was a little too avant-garde. It features a parmesan mousse, and horrifyingly, a blue cheese ice cream!!