Recently in hikamping Category

all righty then, it's back to the camping hobby. but i'm a roadie! oh my, i can be both: i bought me a (pair of) touring bike(s) and a bunch of panniers. stuff the panniers full of camping gear, and suddenly i'm a bicycle tourist.

here's the plan for tour #1: http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/343546

30 easy miles, as long as old la honda under touring load is your idea of easy. i mean, i have no problem going up it with my light racing bike, how hard could it be on my steel frame touring bike with 60lbs of gear and a tummy full of hangover?

we didn't really plan a return route because it is likely we'll simply die on old la honda road.

so right after biking mightily for the first time in years, after squatting 295 (yeah, kinda poorly, but the 275s were solid and the argument still stands with 275) for the first time in months, i walk into the climbing gym and notice shoes on sale.

get to my changing seat and whip out my own shoes -- doh! a hole in the rubber! time for new shoes, and how convenient that they have some on sale. not a mighty sale, mind you, but a sale.

and, what's more, the shoes they have on sale just happen to be (if my memory serves) the second-choice shoe that i had when i selected my current (now old) set of shoes, which are pretty much out of stock everywhere or i'd have another pair.

so i purchase a pair of the shoes, a half size too small (maybe). and then, i proceed, after a 5.9 warmup, to climb a 10b, a 10d (my very first!), and 2-3 more 10b's.

my best of late has been a bunch of 9s and a 10a if i'm lucky. i dunno if it was the shoes or something else, but in any case, i'm suddenly biking, lifting, and climbing above my level, in the span of 3 days.

then i went home and had some Desert Heat, and realized i'm also brewing above my level (heh).

out of scotch first night
second night enjoyed by some
fire speaks: DNR

now i've been to yosemite. hops had a 2 day workshop to attend there, and wanted to meet with the chief ranger, so i came along. we slept in curry village, where the cabins have no showers, toilets, or level floors. as soon as i opened the door a lizard ran across the tiny floorspace and, i suppose, exited the cabin via a hole.

i spent the first night ill from one thing or another: the travel, the altitude, the food, some stress -- i'm not entirely sure. by late PM i was better and by morning i was fine. morning was 7am or earlier, and i'm still on the early morning schedule, which is odd after having adjusted to a late morning schedule.

anyhow, since i didn't have a workshop to attend, i was on my own for 1 and a half days. i didn't want to do anything terribly strenuous since we were planning to hike half dome on friday+saturday. so the first day, i hiked along the valley floor, from yosemite falls (stop #6 on the shuttle) to el capitan. i was seriously unimpressed with the quality of both the map and the trail markers -- it's not that i got "lost", since the trail runs pretty much parallel to the road. but i certainly "lost" the trail multiple times, and encountered a half dozen unmarked forks. as i muddled my way through, i managed to take some photos, which, really, seemed pointless at the time: yosemite is among the most photographed places in the world, and i haven't much to add to that with my point-and-click.

i reached the base of el capitan and hiked up and down it trying to figure out what the climbers were doing, it certainly didn't look like climbing to me. it turns out that they were all (several unrelated groups of them) aid climbing. they were all either off the ground or german, so i couldn't discuss it with any of them. eventually i came across a group of old timers and a younger guy lead climbing a route that actually looked climbable (the aid climbers all seemed to be in spots that were inhospitably smooth). with a bit of conversation, i learned that most teams apparently use a combination of free climbing and aid climbing to get the job done, with multiple ascents/descents of each pitch : one ascent to set the rope, and a lot of up/down to retrieve gear (especially as it gets stuck). i suppose having once free climbed a pitch, folks dont care to do it again when they can aid climb it instead.

one of the old-timers claimed to be the first person to have rappelled el capitan. my google-fu isn't up to the task of confirming this.

anyhow, that hour of standing around and learning a thing or two about aid climbing turned out to be more or less the hilight of the trip. i hiked back using the new trekking poles i'd bought just for the trip (since hops' tent requires trekking poles to stand up, and hers aren't up to the task, being old and busted) (which, of course, went on sale the day after i'd bought them). they helped with the descent over the rough terrain but did little of note on flat ground, which comprised the majority of the return trip.

crummy buffet dinner, a little sitting around, and then it was back to the dirty old cabin for another sleepless night. the morning brought rain and hail.

the plan was to wait for hops' conference to end then hike up to little yosemite valley, camp overnight, and then hike to half dome on saturday. while she was at her conference, i checked with the rangers, who said there was definitely snow at LYV and a fair to good chance that there'd be more overnight. sat. was to be sunny.

armed with this news, and the evidence of rain and snow all around us, and the cloud obscuration of half dome itself, hops and i spent a good 2-3 hours waffling and then finally decided to go home, since we were averse to the idea of snow camping, and even more averse to the idea of spending another night in curry village or the like.

on our way out we encountered what seemed to me like quite a lot of snow, at pretty much the exact elevation of LYV. we got out of the car for a while so i could experience being in a snowstorm. i suppose i've been in a snowstorm before, but it's been about 20 years.

so now i've been to yosemite, and i've been in a snowstorm, and i've been in a snowstorm in yosemite. that's three checkboxes i can check.

anyhow, here are some of the better photos i managed to take. since yosemite is the most photographed place in the world (or so i ungoogled assume) i reckon you can guess the subjects of each photo: you've seen them before (in photos if not IRL).

perhaps it was just the difference between front-country and back-country. perhaps it was the lack of a plan for my time there. perhaps it was the food, the lodging, or any number of things. my first evening there, i was unimpressed, and while after a while, i got some of the majesty of the place (standing beneath el capitan helped), overall, i remained underwhelmed.

in judging a place or a thing, comparison helps. perhaps if i'd visited yosemite before being here:

or here (which is, of course, the same place) :

i'd have like yosemite better. or maybe, if it'd been immersed in it instead of simply being "in it" (again, the diff, i suppose, between front and back-country), i'd have liked it more. maybe i'll think more of it next time.

as i lay on the floor thursday night, trying and failing to manage to either harf or go to sleep, in a haze of quadruple-threat (hard-breathing allergies, piercing headache, immobilizing gut spasms, and almost-but-not-quite-enough nausea) full-system decrepitude (and possible poisoning from ingesting 7 year old pepto bismol (immediately after having thrown out month-old PB on account of it "was expired" but having forgotten to check the date on the other bottle)), i realized: i'd forgotten that hops' birthday was the next day.

my experience with the roids has definitely been a negative one, and one that i'll seriously think twice about before repeating. sure, the rash went right away, but for more than a week i couldn't lift, couldn't think straight, had hot flashes, flushes, and constant nausea, difficulty sleeping, and a zillion other unpleasant side effects. with the urushiol, there's just one effect and it's All Natural. the best course of action, of course, is to avoid the poison in the first place. short of that, i'll stick to caladryl next time.

worst of all, i haven't had a gorram drop of beer in well over a week. that's bad enough, but i'm a homebrewer fer chrissakes! how can i relax and don't worry if i can't have a homebrew?

also worst of all, i couldn't cold-turkey the roids because, they say, that's actually much worse than what i did, which was to gradually lower the dose from day to day. day today was the final dose and i'm still not exactly feeling tops. but i'm feeling better than when i had Lots Of It In Me.

bleh.

not only am i sensitive to poison oak, molds, trees, animals, plants, and just about everything else, i'm sensitive to the meds that docs like to prescribe to treat such sensitivities. case in point: the junk they gave me for the poison oak.

now, i was skeptical about it from the start. after all, it's an anti-inflammatory, which is fine and dandy for ceasing the swelling and itching and leatherskin and all attendant goodies, but what's that got to do with ridding my body of the pathogen? not much, as far as i can tell, and in fact, as my dosage lessens i am beginning to regain some itches here and there.

but that's not a big deal. the upset stomach, the shakes, and the General Malaise, now those are the problems. would i prefer the maddening, sleep-nullifying, mind-crushing itch and the icky leatherskin heatpads? actually, it's a tough call.

as far as i understand it, i'm done with the "effective dose" of the stuff, and now i'm just slowly weening off of it so as not to throw my system into even more havoc. after day 2 the rash was pretty much (amazingly, considering its size) gone. so now i get to enjoy the nausea just so that i won't havfe more of it.

bleh.

on the plus side, i ended up with new birks because there's a good chance the old ones are covered in urushiol -- the pattern of re-infection on my feet suspiciously matched the outline of birkenstock straps. how the substance U managed to get on those shoes I'll never know, since i washed my feet between hiking and wearing the sandals. but they're a decade old and a local sale just ended so it was time to get some new ones.

man, i'd forgotten how uncomfy these things are until they're broken in.

the blisters were not from kettlebelling, no, they were poison-oak re-infection. best i can tell, there was urushiol on my shoes, or leftover in my socks, which ended up all over my feet and my hands.

now, if you search the internets for poison oak rashes, you'll come up with a range of images: people have varying sensitivity and varying reactions to the poison (it is not a histamine reaction, apparently. the mechanism is different between allergies and poison oak, with the poison oak being a far more powerful irritant: cortizone cream is helpless against it). when you come across the image that makes you say, "dear god, that looks awful!" that's what my reaction looks like. if you just think, "ouch, that looks horribly itchy," keep looking. that ain't me.

so i suffered through this for a week without resorting to the medical profession, but the reinfection brought me into the docs office. really, there are only two places on the body where it'd be worse to have poison oak than the feet. when it hurts to walk, that sucks. but aside from that, i wasn't sleeping, and my body was in a constant state of heightened itchyness. this is actually quite fatiguing over time (try it!) as the body struggles to set a new ceiling threshold for receiving pain signals. i can't imagine how bad it must be have a real injury.

anyhow, the doctors threw steroids at me, as they tend to do. i asked the doctor if he sees much PO, and if so, where mine ranks. he said he does, and that mine is about as bad as it gets. lucky me. but not surprised me.

after 2 days of the prednisone, my feet are still quite unhappy but they feel like they're approaching some degree of betterness. that's the nice thing about a "course" of meds: they sort of put a date on when you can expect to be better, unlike waiting for it to "run its course" which could be weeks or months. after 2 days, i can now wear my wedding band (finger was too swollen to get it on this morning) and that's a bonus.

for all the unpleasantness, at least it gave me something to write about, eh?

with admission of temporary defeat on the deadlifting front, my life has welcomed the return of weekly hiking, initiated two weekends prior with a short haul up montara mt. and trending this past weekend with a trip through the quicksilver mines of wherdjacallit. didn't see any quicksilver.

i dont talk as much as i used to on the trail -- although, to be fair, i do talk as much as or more than i talked on many of my hikes of yore (the solo ones). in any case, not much talking. after all, i'm no longer out there to meet people ;)

i'm still swift and sweaty on the uphills, and grim and grumpy on everything else. and after, i have hankerings for video games, pizza, and "lost". good times.

way back when, in the olden days, when i did solo hikes, i found myself once challenged by the challenge of how many phrases i could construct that began with "when in doubt" and ended in a meaningful, rhyming suggestion for how to deal with doubt. this endeavour was inspired, no doubt, by a breakfast-time encounter with spoilt milk, which surely (i'm speculating here, because my memory isn't that sharp) would have brought to mind the maxim: when in doubt, throw it out.

here are some of the others that i came up with:
when in doubt, scream and shout
when in doubt, flail about
when in doubt, frown and pout

and so on

but of course, it wasn't until this very afternoon when i came up with the most useful remedy of all:

when in doubt, drink my stout

those folks hiking the dog poop trail when it's cool aren't my people.

those folks up there with us today when it was 95F and sunny, those are my people.

the ones with no water bottles.