Colin in California

My slightly epic birthday backpacking trip marked the traditional end of the summer; that is to say that after my birthday is typically when I realise that it is the autumn term and that i really better do some work. So, there has been a bit of a shift in emphasis from hiking to sitting in front of a computer. Slightly before my birthday I submitted an abstract (“The Global Nitrogen Budget and the Faint Young Sun Paradox”) to the AGU Fall Meeting, which is just up the road in San Francisco. Then a bit of a sideways shift onto intercomparison of radiative transfer codes. This was a “side project” that rather took over my life for a year or more. I’ve got a paper in submitted on this to QJRMS. The first round of review came back (fairly positively) and I spent about a fortnight responding to the reviews and resubmited it on Wednesday. I’m happy to have it off my desk agian. Now, I’m back working on nitrogen and climate, trying to run some line by line code for high N2 atmospheres (I think I might have found the bug…).

A good thing here is that there is quite a variety of places accessable for dayhikes. Last Saturday, I did a 17+ mile walk Marin County, just north of San Francisco. I wasn’t going to go walking at all this weekend, but then this morning I realised it was essential. So I went up our local hill, Black Mountain. The tricky bit was finding parking at the bottom, but then there is a good (if sometimes steep) path to the top, about 4.5 miles and 2200′ ascent. I saw a runner on the way up and down – he took 1h12min today, slower than his PB of 1h02min as it was a hot day…

View from Rhus Ridge trail on Black Mountain over Mountain View to Moffett Field (NASA)

Then the excitement this afternoon was a block party – in english, that is a street party, with tables in the road and everything. Of course, this being America, a two permits were necessary (police and fire departments). It was really nice meeting more of the neighbours.

Mountain View Ave, 500 block, party

Now, I should have photos of both the view from the day hike and the block party, but I’m at home and my internet here is desperately slow, so uploading does not happen. Tomorrow hopefully… [now done]. But I have created another google map with where these all are.

Not enough visual content, sorry – but try this video from the Guardian. It blew my mind. Note to Mum: no I don’t plan to try that.

It was my birthday last Friday, so this had to be appropriately marked. What pleasant, relaxing thing did I come up with to do? A three-day, 54 mile solo backpack, mostly above 2500m. Actually, it was quite hard.

Here is a map of where I went (if this link does not work, someone please write a comment to that effect; I can’t test if it will work if it is not me logged into google as I am using google wifi… Note that google lie about distances (they also lie about driving times).

I’ll put some photos up, but this requires slightly more activity and organisation that is possible now. and I need some sleep.

So it was that I was wasting time on the internet, and due to change of what I had bookmarked in firefox, I looked at Rupert Read’s blog (Rupert being a friend and co-conspirator of mine in Norwich some years ago). And news there was: namely, that another one time co-conspirator and friend of mine, Adrian Ramsey, is now deputy leader of a national political party. Congratulations Adrian. As a sure sign of up-to-the-minute internet commentry and Adrian’s modesty, Adrian’s blog is currently leading with how reprehensible the Norwich South MP, Charles “Two Pizzas” Clarke. Not content is Mr Clarke to have brought us the Terrorism Act when he was in the home office (making permanent vast encroachments to civil liberties as Irish terrorism was on the decline – law that has been used against anti-war protesters amongst others) and tuition fees for universities when he was Secretary of State for Education (he is supposed to represent a university constituency – though the certain members of the University Branch Labour party are notoriously anti-student, so this is “on message”), he now apparently wants to dismantle the welfare state free at point of use. In the last local elections, the Greens polled more votes than anyone else in Norwich – suggesting Adrian has a non-zero chance of becoming the first Green MP (which I gather he has wanted to be since age 2). Adrian: you have my vote.

All this local politicking made me try to recall when the next general election should be. The last was in 2005, which suggests the next will be in 2010, so I will still be in the US then. So, in the mean time, I must make do with the US elections. This week’s excitement has of course been the appointment of Sarah Palin (trivia: she was reelected Major of Nowhereseville, AK, in 1999 with 909 votes. Adrian Ramsey took 1899 votes when he was reelected as Nelson Ward Councilor). Who knows what this will bring. On the way of all this, I discovered some history I was wholly unaware of: (some) universities used to have their own constituancies, whereby graduates got to elect a university MP as well as a geographic MP. This all ended 60 years ago however.

Politics will relate to policies? Misguided. Buoyed on by all the politicking, I tried to look at what the science policies of some of the parties were. The Greens were all a bit wishey-washy, and lumped it in with culture and sport; I was disappointed. But the Labour, Tories, Lib-Dems… nothing! Hmmm…

Whereas the trip to Brewer, with the local Sierra Club Peaks Climbing Section, was clearly going to be a fairly hardcore trip, the trip to Trinity with the Stanford Outing Club wasn’t going to be (okay, so it was billed as strenuous, but I know how to do sums of distance and ascent). And the SOC is a much younger crowd than the Sierra club, which was nice.

The trip was another “out and back” trip; we walked in one day, camped in the same place for two nights, then walked out the next day. There were five of us on the trip. On the middle day, the trip organiser and his girlfriend went fishing. The other three of us tried to go up a mountian. From the camp at 1600m, we went up to about 2200m and had a good look at the mountain which was 2500m. It looked possible (probably), but probably a bit knarley and it was too late. We didn’t try. So we did a big traverse at 2200m, to see if we could get down to some lakes at the end of the valley (we couldn’t), came back and went back down to the camp. No rocks landed on my feet. Here was what it looked like…

Update: There are now a whole load of photos of this trip on my flickr page.

One of the advantages of California is the (relative) accessibility of big mountains. So, not wanting to waste any time, the last two weekends I’ve been to to them. The two trips were really different; here goes with a description…

Mt Brewer, 4136m. A rather big mountian deep in the Sierra, in Kings Canyon National Park. Some photos…

Now, I like mountians. This should not come as a surprise to anyone reading this (unless you are a random stalker, in which case see the about page). I like being in the mountains, climbing up mountains and so on.

So, it came as a bit of a surprise to me to find that going up Brewer was not a whole lot of fun, and that really, I would rather have not been there. In brief, the problems were these: someone in the group that I was with was slow on the way up and that way up was quite complicated (a lot of granite shoulders). So it was getting pretty late by the time we were near the summit. Then the penultimate bit of the ascent was up a steep bit with lots of loose rock. One of said bits of rock (dimensions approx. 2 by 3 feet) was not as well attached to the ground at the person in front of me thought it was. It landed on my foot. Fortunately, I have fairly hefty boots, otherwise I wouldn’t have walked out. Rather too close a call.

But positives: I did get to go up into the High Sierra, which is beautiful, and get a feel of what it is like up there.