Kenjis Opening

Chloe and I went to Kenji's opening today

toast

I've been settling into our new life slowly. We've been here three months now, and I'm aching to start doing some exploring. What I'm realizing is that because of the long distances in between things compared to europe, a weekend jaunt is a lot less feasible: The Drome used to be two hours away. I'm not sure what is two hours away from the Presidio! Anyway, I'm hophing to have more updates in the coming months as Chloe and I organize trips and find a way to get out of the city. Lately I've been so tired from work that when the weekend arrives, I'm happy to just sleep in! Case in point:
this morning I waited fifteen minutes before I realized that our toaster was unplugged

Adieu, Chaps

I just read that Pierre Chapoutot died a few days in an avalanche. He was a pioneering rock climber and mountaineer, and his first ascents are ubiquitous and numerous, particularly in the Oisans. He maintained a fantastic blog about his adventures which I enjoyed greatly. One of his first ascents was a route up the Bastion Centrale of La Meije, and he generously provided me with detailed information on the route. Here is an excerpt from his emails

If you want a long and beautiful climb without any people, in a splendid atmosphere, you can choose the "Bastion Central" route + upper part of Dibona-Mayer. It is in the same grade as the Pierre Allain, but longer and more sustained. Equipment : all the belays, and few pegs or spits (6 in all !) in the pitches. It ends between 2d and 3d Tooth between the Grand Pic and the Doigt de Dieu, and from this point it is not easy at all to reach the Grand Pic (horrific rappel from 1st Tooth to the Breche Zsigmondy !). So, it is reasonable to choose the way back on the Doigt de Dieu. I think that this route is the most beautiful on the whole South Face... mais c'est un point de vue très personnel


Unfortunately I wasn't able to round up a partner for La Meije before I left, and now I'll never be able to email him back and tell him what a fantastic route it is.

Cable Graveyard

I'm a cable pack rat. Things were better for me in France when I knew I couldn't accumulate too many bits and pieces, but since I've been back in the US, I've reverted to my old ways. The problem is that I've had a big box of cables that I've been carting around since college with all sorts of cabulature in it; it has been living in my parents garage for the last 4 years, so clearly most of the cables aren't really necessary (I also have my Power computing powertower pro in there, and an ancient powerbook 520c in drawer). Anyway, there was the usual fare: many Ethernet cables, RCA cables, RCA to stereo min (somehow I had like 6 of these!), coax, USB, firewire, 2 wire telephone, 4 wire telephone and on and on. However, there were also some really funny things in there which I've documented below. Test your computer savvyness (or age as it might be) by identifying them. Answers are in the nonworking rollovers at the bottom.
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Half Moon Bay

Today we drove south to Castle Rock for a little bouldering, but the rocks were saturated and it was FREEZING. Instead, we wandered around looking for undiscovered boulders and stumbled upon Summit Rock, which looks like it might have a days climbing as well.

We continued on along Skyline blvd, where we came upon power lines which had fallen across the road. A traffic jam was developing, and SUV people were proudly and happily going into FULL OFFROAD MODE and driving around the road. It was magnificent. Chloe and I returned to the last intersection and had a hot dog while we waited for the lines to be cleared. Unfortunately, the lines were still down when we got back, but by now there was a large dirt road from all the off roadin'. On a whim, we took the road down toward the pacific and ended up parking in the fabulous Ritz Carleton Half Moon Bay parking lot (We assumed that they only allow the riff raff in because of some agreement they signed). We walked along the beach,





tried to figure out what was going on with these columns in the headlands


and watched birds get doused by waves

Canons

Living in the Presidio, we drive past canons every day... canons at the gates, canons on the lawns, canons in the parking lots, canons in the front yard. We never really stopped to look at them, but the detail on some of them are amazing, and well, bizarre:

Stereo

Back in high school I would sometimes go to high end audio shops just to see what kind of crazy things were being offered. I don't know how it started or what my motivation was, since there wasn't really anything that I could afford. Occasionally if the staff were bored they might let me "audition" the latest McIntosh amps, or huge electrostatic speakers, or any number of other ridiculously priced components. On those occasions I was shocked by how life like, smooth and "present" the sound was. Previously I had no idea that a sound system could possibly sound that good. But I did know that even if I someday acquired $20,000, I sure as hell wasn't going to spend it on a stereo.

Fast forward to one year ago, when a chance posting on a climbing discussion board alerted me to the presence of a different way to get excellent sound: the Do it Yourself (DIY) community. It turns out that there are people all over the world who assemble their own amplifiers from kits or raw components for under $1000 which sound *almost* as good as their $5-10k brethren. As soon as I discovered this, I immediately set out to find the best deal among a bewildering array of designs and kits. There were the push-pull amplifiers, the in vogue Single Ended Triodes, the fancy looking Output transformerless amps and on and on. All of the amplifiers that I was looking at were based on old but beautiful sounding vacuum tubes. I settled on a kit from DIY Hifi called the Joplin, and bought a set of speaker drivers from Bastanis speakers. The components arrived while we were still living in France, and although I was able to start the wiring for the speakers, I never got a chance to complete them. They require cabinets of course, and despite my best efforts I was unable to get a carpenter to build them for me. I was in contact with two carpenters who said they were interested in the project and would get back to me soon with price quotes. Well first of all, what "project"?! Its a BOX! And second, they never got back to me. So when our things finally arrived last week, I was excited to rewire the amp for US voltage, get the speakers wired and build the cabinets. The amp rewiring took about 30 minutes, as did the speaker wiring. The next day chloe and I went down to Ashby Lumber, ordered a 4x8 sheet of MDF and described what sized pieces we wanted it cut into. Amazingly, their cuts were almost perfect to the millimeter (except one or two panels which were good to 3 or 4 mm), the guys working there were all helpful and knowledgeable and they were done in 15 minutes. No talk about "projects", no meetings or faxing, just 16 pieces of MDF cut to order in a quarter of an hour for $35!

After we got home I went into full "project mode" which I think Chloe was a little taken aback by. "Project mode" is a state of mind that I enter when building things which means no breaks and intense working until things are finished. The first cabinet took around three hours to build, but the second one took a lot less time since we pulled the measurements off of the first cabinet (The plans for the cabinets were in metric which led to some quick calculations at the lumber yard). When we brought the finished speakers upstairs and fired up the amp I think we were both amazed by how good it sounded. Here's our setup:

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.