Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

White Mountain Summit

Phil — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:31:16 +0000

Looking back on the research lab

The alarm went off at 4 am. That’s what it needed to be so I could make the drive from Bishop and be at the White Mountain Summit trailhead when the gate opened at 6:30 am. After our experience a couple of days ago on our hike to Sam Mack Meadow, Karen had decided that I would make this hike alone (at least she wasn’t coming along). Today was one of two days a year when the UC White Mountain Research Lab opens the gate and lets people park at the lab—two miles closer to the summit than usual.

There is a school of thought that spending the night at the gate is a good altitude acclimation technique. I decided I wanted a good night’s sleep, so I stayed in Bishop. It worked for me. I thought I might see traffic on the drive to the gate, but I don’t remember seeing another vehicle until I stopped at Schulman Grove for a potty break. It was another story when I got to the gate—dozens of cars, and many had already driven up to the lab. Clearly I wasn’t going to hike alone.

The summit weather had been a concern to me. The research lab maintains weather instruments on the summit, and on Aug 28, the average wind speed reached 80 mph and the temperature was between 30° and 35°F. On Aug 29, the high temperature was 25°F. Luckily the weather stabilized and for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd the high temperature was about 50°F and the wind was 10 to 15 mph average. Then the summit weather station failed, but I believe today’s weather was about the same. When I started hiking at about 7:30 am, I guess the temperature was in the high 30’s. When I got out on the trail on a more exposed ridge, I had to pull on another long sleeve shirt.

White Mountain

The lab sits at 12,470 ft (that’s the highest I’ve ever driven my truck) and the trail immediately climbs a short hill. Oh my! It took a while to find the right walking pace to not drive me into oxygen debt. After this first 250 ft climb, the trail descends nearly back to the lab elevation. I was thinking about how difficult the return trip might be climbing up that last hill with 10 miles of hiking under my belt. There was another steep descent at 3.5 miles to 13,000 ft and then just a steady climb to the summit at 14,252 ft.

White Mountain is the third highest California peak and is my third fourteener. I’ve been on Whitney twice and Shasta once. This means I’ve been on the first, third, and fifth highest peaks in California.

After a short break on the summit for photos and lunch, I started back down. It took me 4.5 hours to go up and 3 hours to come back down. I started to see folks suffering from the altitude. I stopped to see if I could give any energy bars to one guy who was really hurting, but he had essentially the same stuff I had.

There is no water on the trail. I carried 130 oz., and used 100 oz. I also carried more Clif Bars than I needed, but I don’t regret carrying the extra water or the extra food.

White Mountain Summit — 11.2 miles

by EveryTrail

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A rest day in the eastern Sierra

Phil — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 03:36:21 +0000

Given that yesterday was a 13 mile hike up to Sam Mack meadow, and tomorrow is a planned hike to the summit of 14K ft White Mountain, today needed to be a kick-back day. After a leisurely breakfast and then coffee and goodies at Erik Schat’s Bakkery, we headed up to Tom’s Place and then up Rock Creek.

What a zoo! So many people. We took the last parking spot in the overflow area a quarter mile from the trailhead. We ambled up the trail, enjoying the views of the various lakes. At Heart Lake, the trail crosses two creeks in rapid succession. Earlier this year, the first creek crossing was difficult for Karen because of high water—most of the stepping stones were underwater. For the first time, I realize that the topo map shows this creek as very short (maybe a quarter mile long) and apparently originating in a spring. On our next visit, we need to go investigate this.

The second creek tumbles down a steep slope. We climbed up a little ways along this creek, just exploring where it came from. Interestingly, the topo map shows it originating in Ruby Lake, easily reachable by taking the trail to Mono Pass. Next time up there, we need to check out Ruby Lake.

We hiked on to Long Lake, sat on the bank, and ate our lunch. Treasure Lakes are above Long Lake. I wonder if there is a use trail—will have to check it out.

After hiking back to the trailhead, we stopped at Pie in the Sky to see if they had Pecan Chocolate Chip Pie (they didn’t) and then drove on to Mammoth Lakes and had an early dinner at Angel’s Restaurant.

Attacking Sam Mack Meadow

Phil — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 05:04:10 +0000

Glacial fed lake, north fork Big Pine Creek

Today our hiking led us up the north fork of Big Pine Creek to Sam Mack Meadow. On the edge of the meadow is a geocache with a particular difficulty and terrain rating that I need for a geocaching challenge I am working on. It’s not a particularly easy hike, and I had originally planned on going alone. Karen, however, decided she would go with me. She does love the eastern Sierra, but was a bit intimidated by the description of this hike. The starting elevation is approximately 8,400 ft and the meadow is 6.5 miles away at just a little over 11,000 ft.

On regular walks, Karen’s natural pace is faster than mine. Even on our hikes along Rock Creek (over 10,000 ft elevation), she usually walks ahead of me. Today, however, she was slower. We are not sure if she was just having a bad day, or if the steeper climbing was a factor. By the time we got to First, Second, and Third Lake, she was tired.

From Third Lake, the trail climbed steeply to the meadow. We discussed her waiting for me at the bottom of the climb, but that was more disagreeable than the effort of hiking on. Even though I told her the GPS said the cache was less than 0.5 miles away, I’m sure she felt the climb was never going to end.

While Karen cooled her feet in the stream (right off the glacier), I hunted for the cache. I found it fairly quickly, although there have been folks who have been unsuccessful. It was about 2 pm when we started back—later than I had wanted it to be. I’m sure Karen was hurting, but we made it back to the trailhead by 6 pm. She says she will never do another hike like that, but she really had a lot of perseverance to push through her tiredness and discomfort.

The area is in the shadow of the Palisades, a series of 14K ft peaks, and just below the Palisades Glacier, the largest glacier in the Sierras. It’s all incredibly scenic, and I was surprised by the turquoise lakes fed by glacial melt water—very pretty. I’d like to go back and climb just a bit farther to get a good view of the glacier. We could not see it from the meadow.

I realize now I did not take many photos. I was just too occupied with getting us up the trail to the meadow. That’s another reason to return—to capture the beauty in photographs.

We got back into Bishop around 7 pm, and were starving. We went right to Whiskey Creek for a meat and potatoes dinner. Pretty good, although pricier than we usually do.

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Off to Bishop for some hiking

Phil — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 05:30:33 +0000

Because the UC Barcroft Lab near White Mountain is opening the gate on Sunday (shortening the hike to the summit by 4 miles round-trip), we decided to brave the holiday crowds and traffic and spend the weekend in Bishop.

This little locomotive has seen better days.

Instead of following our normal route on highway 120 into Yosemite and over Tioga Pass, we stayed on highway 49 at the base of Priest Grade and went to Coulterville, which is in Mariposa County. It turns out I have never logged a cache in Mariposa County. There is an easy cache at this old mining locomotive. We also tried a multi-cache (because it was in an old cemetery), but it proved too time consuming hunting for the intermediate way-points.

Bennettville, near Tioga Pass

Just over Tioga Pass we parked at the turnoff to Saddlebag Lake and hiked up to Bennettville, an old mining town that still has a couple of buildings being kept in a state of arrested decay. The geocache here was easy to find, and the location was pretty. We continued on up the creek to a pretty little lake. This area deserves another visit and a longer hike up the creek to more lakes.

We stopped at Whoa Nellie Deli for a late lunch/early dinner and shared a plate of fish tacos, which didn’t strike our fancy as well as it has in the past. Then, after checking in to our motel in Bishop, we had a nice dinner at Amigos.

A few photos of the twins

Phil — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:00:42 +0000

I shot a few photos of the grandtwins yesterday.

They are so cute. Elizabeth was a bit more cooperative than Carolyn.

Elizabeth

That’s funny!

Carolyn

What big eyes Elizabeth has

Vacation: Ash Creek Butte

Phil — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:30:59 +0000

The objective of the day was to summit Ash Creek Butte and find the geocache there. Our approach was off of highway 97 on Military Pass Road. This is the same road taken to access the trailheads up to the Mount Shasta glaciers. We had gone about a mile when we encountered U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers. They asked if we had any woodcutting equipment, what we were going to do (in general), and where we were from (in a conversational way). Then they warned us to be careful because there would be trucks loaded with wood coming down the road. I’m sure permits were required to cut wood, and it makes sense to me that they would check those permits. But I didn’t get why it would take six armed officers to do that. I’m wondering if they weren’t checking for some illegal leafy plant material to be coming out as well.

Military Pass Road was rougher than I expected it to be so we had to drive slowly. After we passed the turnoffs to the Mount Shasta trailheads, the road smoothed out a bit. Eventually we joined Deer Mountain Road, which is graded gravel. We stayed on this for a few miles and then turned eastward on a logging road that dead-ended at 6800 ft elevation on the flank of Ash Creek Butte.

There’s the summit

From here we had a steep 600 ft climb up to a ridgeline. It might have been better to park at a different dead-end road north of Surprise Lake. It was 200 ft lower, but accessing the ridgeline would not have been so steep. Once we achieved the ridge, we simply followed it as best we could to the summit. The ridge, of course, is the lip of the volcano crater, although one side of it seems to been blown out.

We came from down there

We never had to walk on unstable rock, or put ourselves in danger of an extreme fall. About three-quarters of the way up, I took this photo looking back at the ridge. Mount Shasta dominates the skyline to the west.

Some rugged lava

Beyond the summit is some really rugged stuff. We didn’t go over there.

On the summit

On the summit, we found the geocache and signed the log. It has gotten one visit a year and we were the first to log it this year. We also signed the summit register, which has many more signatures in it than the geocache. Interestingly, the previous entry to ours was someone from Pleasanton. The summit of Shasta was wrapped in clouds. The peak finally popped out in the late afternoon.

Mount Shasta’s glaciers

Shasta and its glaciers are so impressive. We could easily see avalanche tracks and huge crevíces. I am actually still amazed that I have stood on the summit of Shasta by climbing a route up one of those glaciers. I couldn’t have done it without some great snow and ice climbing instructors and guides.

Our descent was anticlimactic. We exited the area on Deer Mountain Road out to McCloud, and then headed home.

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Vacation: Alturas to Weed via Tule Lake

Phil — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:40:58 +0000

Today was primarily a day of checking out Lava Beds National Monument. I was tired of lugging the camera around, so there are no photos.

From Alturas we backtracked to Canby and took 139 towards Tule Lake. We took the back way into the Lava Beds, stopping at a couple of geocaches near interesting lava features. I don’t think we saw anyone else while in this remote part of the park. After stopping at the visitor center, we went into a couple of the numerous lava tubes. Frankly, we weren’t too interested. We’ve been in several long lava tubes in Bend, OR, and one lava tube cave seems much like the others.

On the way north out of the National Monument, we hiked around a couple of locations where the Modoc War of 1873 occurred. After years of disagreements and skirmishes, Modoc leaders were meeting with U.S. peace commissioners on April 11, 1873. After discussions were fruitless, the Modocs turned on the commissioners and killed most of them. This location is now marked by Canby’s cross. A couple of miles away, we hiked through Captain Jack’s Stronghold, an area of natural lava ridges, cracks, depressions, and caves. It provided the Modocs a very strong defensive position. In a fight at this location a couple of months before the ill-fated peace negotiation, the Modocs killed 35 soldiers while taking no casualties. There was a predictable eventual outcome, of course. The Modocs lost.

Farther north we stopped for a roadside geocache and discovered the site of a POW camp used by Italian and German prisoners during WWII. It is not open to tour, but does have a small descriptive sign.

We followed the California-Oregon border west to highway 97 and took that back to Weed and our motel for the evening.

Vacation: McCloud to Alturas

Phil — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:45:51 +0000

Middle Falls

Spending a night in McCloud was certainly a quiet experience. Even though our B&B room overlooked the main street, there wasn’t any traffic after about 8 pm. Since breakfast (a voucher at the café in the McCloud River Mercantile building) was served from 8 to 10 am, and we were up early, we decided to go for a hike to the three waterfalls on the nearby McCloud River. We started at the lower falls and hiked quickly along the river, through the campground, past the middle falls, and climbed up out the gorge to view the upper falls. We hustled back to the pickup, logging a bit over 3 miles hiking, and made it back to the café for breakfast by 9:30 am.

Mount Shasta

We stopped briefly for a view of Mt. Shasta (this mountain just dominates the horizon from numerous locations in north-east California) before heading on to Burney Falls.

Burney Falls

At Burney Falls State Park, we parked by the visitor center and used three nearby earthcaches to guide our hiking. Earthcaches have no container or log, but take you to geological features where you must gather some data related to that feature. The river here is primarily spring-fed, with huge amounts of water gushing from layers in the lava rock (much like the Metolius River in Oregon). We hiked down to the base of the falls, and then continued on downstream to Lake Britton. When we returned to the parking area, we had our picnic lunch and then continued on toward Alturas.

Semper Fi

Somewhere around Adin we passed some marvelous welded sculpture and I had to turn around to get a photo.

Sunset at Modoc Wetlands

We arrived in Alturas just before dinner time. The Best Western Trailside Inn was a comfortable motel. After dinner, we drove out to the Modoc wetlands viewing area. We didn’t see many birds (a few geese) but heard quite a few as they were settling in for the evening.

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Vacation: We start in McCloud

Phil — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:20:37 +0000

On our first day of a short vacation to the north east part of California, we headed north on I5. A few miles south of Redding, Karen saw the sign for the historic Cottonwood district, and since it was a good time for a lunch break, we took the off-ramp. In the mid-1800’s Cottonwood was a stage stop. The historic area seems to be about 1 block long, and looks a bit dreary. We stopped in the shade at a small park across the street from the Post Office. While munching on my sandwich, I checked for a nearby geocache using my phone and saw there was one less than 100’ away.

A special GPS geocaching exhibit was at the Turtle Bay Park museum in Redding, so we stopped to go see that (GPS Adventures Maze Exhibit). When Karen saw the admission price to Turtle Bay Park she elected to stay outside and read her book (actually she stayed inside the visitor center because it was air conditioned, and it was a hot afternoon). I zipped through the maze without looking at all the details so she didn’t have to wait for me too long. After getting coffee nearby, we headed north again.

Sacramento River at Sims Road

I stopped at Sims Road for a geocache at an old steel suspension bridge over the Sacramento River. I believe it was the first major project completed by the newly formed Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. The parts for the bridge were delivered without any instructions on how to construct it, but the crews figured it out. The banks of the Sacramento frame Mt. Shasta here.

There is another nearby cache (Sims’ Big Brother) that I am interested in, but it would be a slow 4×4 drive and we didn’t have time.

Continuing north, we drove into the town of Mt. Shasta and found the headwaters of the Sacramento River. It’s a good size spring pouring out of the side of a mountain.

McCloud River Mercantile

We stayed the night in McCloud at the McCloud River Mercantile. It’s a nice B&B with rooms upstairs and shops downstairs. All of it has been extensively refurbished.

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Glenn County High Point

Phil — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 05:47:37 +0000

Track followed

It turns out that on my last trip into the Mendocino National Forest west of Orland, I didn’t go far enough west to find a geocache on page 65 of the Northern California Delorme map. I remedied that today with a fun trip into the remote parts of Mendocino National Forest. My destination was a cache on top of Black Butte, which is also the high point of Glenn County, but I intended to search for a number of other caches along my route.

I headed west out of Willows on highway 162, which turns into Alder Springs road. This eventually becomes a well-graded dirt road, but it does continue west all the way to highway 101, through Covelho in Round Valley. I found a couple of caches along the pavement part of the road before hitting the dirt. Black Butte is just about 60 miles from Willows.

Black Butte

A dead-end track leads up the side of Black Butte, then it’s about 0.5 miles of easy hiking to the summit on a clear use-trail. The geocache hadn’t been logged since July, 2007, and apparently folks were having difficulty finding the cache and were signing the summit register instead. I found both the summit register and geocache together in plain sight. Unfortunately, I could not open the cache. PVC pipe with a screw plug just seems to get welded together as time goes by.

I drove a little farther west to Mendocino Pass and then turned north to join up with route M4, which I roughly followed back east to Paskenta.

As I was approaching one cache location, I paused at an intersection to consult my GPSr and a forest service fire crew rolled by and stopped. One of the crew hopped out to inquire if I was OK—ie. do you know where you are and how to get out of here? I assured him I was fine—really. I’m not sure he completely believed me. Anyway, I made the turn I wanted to the next cache, which described the Nome Cult Trail—a “trail of tears” of sorts for the Maidu Indians around Chico. Four hundred and sixty one Indians were forced to relocate from Chico to the Round Valley Reservation on foot through this rugged terrain. Only two hundred and seventy seven survived the trip.

Upset because I woke it from its nap

In the late afternoon I was getting pretty tired, but wanted to find the last caches in a series. They were harder to find than I had hoped, and then I came upon this large rattlesnake sunning itself in the road. After taking a few photos, I decided I didn’t want to poke my hands into any more rock crevices, so I called it a day.

I got a hamburger at Burger King in Corning, which was unremarkable except it was the slowest service I have ever had at a fast food restaurant. Finally got home about 10pm—it was a long day.

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