To the top... of something

Sunday was my last chance to go for a hike before heading back to work after the Christmas break. It was a beautiful day so I had to go do a little more exploring. My cold had me feeling a little drained, though, so I wasn't planning to do a lot of climbing. I was just going to wander around in the area I had been over the past few days.

This picture is from a previous hike. I was looking in this area and thinking I should go explore over there some time. That's where I headed today.

I decided to make a halfhearted attempt to get on top of a ridge I was looking at a couple of days before. Amazingly, my semi-random decisions about which way to go resulted in getting to the top fairly easily. The view was great from up there.

I was on a north-facing slope, so there were natural terraces.

Terrace building plants.

A view from the top. I was so high up, I could see the curvature of the Earth. Just kidding.

My i-gotU GPS data logger didn't log much data on this hike. My SPOT didn't seem to perform too well in the same places, so maybe the mountains didn't permit visibility of enough GPS satellites. My program discarded 90% of the track points. A lot of pictures could not be correctly geotagged by the @trip software and I wound up re-positioning them using Picasa. I had to kind of guess, but at least I knew which side of a mountain I was on.

I was on top of that. Unfortunately, there is nothing for scale so you have no idea how big it is.

As you can see in the previous picture, there are cliffs on 2 or 3 sides when you get to the top. From up there, they seem like very tall cliffs. I wanted to peek over the edge, but I just could not make myself get closer than about 6 feet from the edge. Since I couldn't stand on the edge, I wanted to lay down and slither up to the edge and peek over and get some pictures, but there weren't any spots at the edge with patches of bare rock that were big enough. A patch of bare rock big enough to lay on is necessary. Have I ever mentioned that it seems that most plants in the desert have thorns? Those thorns fall off the plants all the time. They are all over the ground. You don't spit into the wind, you don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't allow your body (or backpack) to come into contact with the desert ground. The two exceptions are 1) if the ground is bare rock that is obviously free of thorns (and cracks that could be hiding scorpions, but that's another subject) and 2) loss of consciousness.

This makes nice wallpaper.

On an unrelated subject, it has been a little over 13 months since I bought my SPOT satellite messenger. I've been pleased with it. Actually, I've been more pleased that I haven't had to use the 911 button on it. When I first got it I was kind of bummed to see that it requires the use of those expensive lithium batteries, because they're expensive and I'm cheap. My first use of the SPOT was a trip to Texas. I had the SPOT on in tracking mode (transmitting to a communication satellite 3 times every 10 minutes) for about 40 hours that week. I was sure that would drain the (expensive) batteries, but it didn't. I've used the spot on every hike I've taken since then, so it's been on and in tracking mode for from 3 to 10+ hours a week, ever since I bought it. I carry spare batteries in my backpack, but I haven't had to replace them yet.

My SPOT in its usual position on my backpack.

The SPOT has a single belt clip thingy for attachment to whatever (sorry about all the technical terms). I clip it on a loop at the top of my backpack. The first time that I lifted my back pack out of the truck after a getting back from a hike, the SPOT came unclipped and went clattering across the garage floor. It's very rugged, though, and that didn't bother it at all. It did bother me, and not just because my fancy new electronic gizmo that cost a lot more than the expensive batteries it contained was clattering across the garage floor. If it can come unclipped so easily in the garage, I could lose it in the desert. In the picture, you will see that I've added a lanyard that clips to another location on the backpack (in case the strap the SPOT is clipped to fails; I'm a belt and suspenders kind of guy). There have been several occasions when I've found the SPOT swinging by the lanyard. It's a darn good thing I put that on there.

This is a perfect illustration of one of those "that's good / that's bad" things they used to do on Laff In or Hee Haw or something years ago. It seemed bad when I dropped my SPOT, but it was actually good because it kept me from losing it later. That also applies to my La Barge Canyon misadventure. I got careless, I made some bad decisions, and I put myself in a sticky situation. Fortunately, I just got a little wet from sitting in the lake (hey, I got a new wallet that is much smaller and doesn't hurt my hip!). I'm now careful to observe all of my hiking-by-yourself-in-the-desert rules so I don't find myself in a similar or worse situation again. My backpack sure is heavy from all the water I carry, though.

Yes, the La Barge Canyon misadventure was a good thing, though it was not much fun at the time. Some hikers are not so fortunate. There was an article in the paper this weekend about one of those less fortunate hikers. Though Bryce Gillies was just 20 years old, he had a lot more hiking training than me and had youth on his side. He wasn't a brash young kid doing stupid things, though. He did made a series of bad decisions, and there was no way out for him.

Click here for the EveryTrail map and below for all of the pictures.

BC_2010_01_03

Fixed (maybe)

I got my @trip PC software working again late last night. I'm sure that the problem is with it and not the data logger, because I tried loading tracks saved on the PC and the software still crashed. The second time that I un-installed and reinstalled the software (I know, definition of insanity, but I was dealing with Windows so you never know, and it worked), it started working. Whew. I was really bummed about not being able to use the data logger, but I'm back in business now.

Several things

I just remembered something today. The reason I hike as much as I do in the heat of the summer is because the air is clearer then. When the weather cools off, the wind doesn't blow as much. All the pollution generated in the valley just kind of sits there (or here, I guess). The brown cloud is much more noticeable.

Ever since my last attempt at getting to the Broadway cave, I've been thinking that I need new hiking shoes. Mine weren't worn out. They were just too flimsy for trails like the one to Broadway cave. I had bruises on the bottoms of my feet after that hike. When I hiked on the trail at the end of Meridian a day or two ago, it seemed like I could feel every rock and bump through my shoes, as if I was wearing thick socks instead of hiking shoes. I knew I had to get something with stiffer soles.

So yesterday I went to Big 5, my favorite store in Arizona. I looked through all the hiking shoes, with my only criterion for selection being the stiffness of the sole. I found some that seemed like they would work. The employee helping me even brought a golf ball over for me to stand on to test them out. I decided to get them even though they weren't on sale. This would be the first time I had bought shoes there that weren't on sale. This would be the first time in at least 6 years that I had bought any shoes that weren't on sale, but I needed them. I was using un-birthday money, so it was OK. I went up to the register and they rang up with the sticker price of about $80. Gulp. Then another employee standing there said something like, "Oh, let me fix that." He pushed some buttons and said, "Oh, look, they're on sale!" Now they were only $50. Wow, what a deal; my own personal sale! I like Big 5 even more, now.

OK, now I have these nifty new hiking shoes (Hi-Tec Odyssey, BTW). I have to try them out, and what better place than the trail that convinced me I need them? I didn't get to the Broadway trailhead until about 5, which meant I had less than an hour of daylight. It was enough for a decent trial, though. I really like the shoes.

When I got back to the house, I decided to try out the i-gotU trip documenting software. I discovered that it also allows you to shift the time of your pictures if you don't have your camera time set exactly right. My camera time was still very close to exact, though. So I created a "trip" using their software and uploaded it to their website. This is another case of me taking pictures just to be taking pictures, and not having done any post-processing, and putting all of the pictures, good or bad, in the trip. You can click a play button and a car moves along the trip track, displaying pictures taken along the way. I wish it was a hiker instead of a car, but you get what you pay for.

It was a very nice evening for a hike. Upper 80's (which feels cool in the desert because the humidity is so low) and not even the slightest hint of a breeze, which is why I started this blog entry talking about the brown cloud. See how these seemingly random things eventually come together? I took too many pictures of the brown cloud, but like I said, this trip shows everything, no editing. Click below to check it out.