Elephants in Manhattan

The Ringling Bros. Circus came to town a few months ago. The tradition is to drop off the elephants in Queens and walk them through the Queens Tunnel to Manhattan down 34th St to Madison Square Gardens. We patiently waited for them until 1am along with many others. For anyone that has seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind you may remember the elephant scene. They filmed that when the elephants were coming to town. 

Random Update

Over the past few weekends, Elizabeth and I have been driving north from NYC to spend time in the snow. In early February, we spent a weekend in the Berkshires, near the border or New York state and Massachusetts. We snowboarded at a small mountain called Catamount which had a family friendly vibe where everyone seemed to know one another. The following weekend - Superbowl Sunday actually - we took a bus to Hunter Mountain. In short, we will never ride at Hunter again. Aside from the horrible conditions, the other skiers and snowboarders made the day miserable. There were tons of people smoking outside the lodge and on the runs. Nothing like some brisk mountain air a cigarette to kick start a run down the mountain. After our dreadful Hunter Mountain experience though, we we rewarded on the subsequent weekend with excellent powder at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire.
On this particular weekend, we stayed in Conway, New Hampshire with Becky, whose son Casey started Couchsurfing. Becky made sure we met up with her friends who assured us that Bretton Woods was the place with the best snow. Always trust locals when it comes to snow or waves. Aside from snowboarding, we also attended the Mount Washington Valley Ice Fest in North Conway where Elizabeth and I took a glacier travel and crevasse rescue course. At the ice fest Elizabeth ran into some girls who were in her ice climbing course in the Adriondacks a few weeks earlier. In the evenings we attended a series of slide shows and short films made by climbers about their recent journeys to the various mountain regions of the world. On top of all this fun, Elizabeth bought $20 worth of raffle tickets and ended up winning a new Mammut coat and climbing rope. At some point during the month, Elizabeth contracted pink eye (photos not show in this post) and we spent one day walking through Riverside Park. Within Riverside park, somewhere in the 90's, we found a very long stone wall that would be perfect for basic balance and rock climbing (first photo in this post). More recently, we had our first big snowstorm in NYC. We brought out the camera and snapped off a couple of images from Central Park. The best of the bunch include Zib running (pictured above) and Stuart (my morning running partner) and I posing in front of the reservoir (below).

Adirondack Mountain Festival

Cold Axe Bitches: l. to r. Naz, Emilie ( guide), Annie, Shyana, me, Uly, Hannah, & Becky (guide)

After an unusually warm week in the Northeast, we feared our weekend in the Adirondacks may be canceled due to a severe lack of ice (a very important component when ice climbing). We took our chances and headed north for a weekend away if nothing else. We took the opportunity to couchsurf with a native Californian (also from Sonoma County) now living in Saranac Lake, just outside Lake Placid. We arrived Friday evening to Jacob's wonderful apartment above a shop on main street in Saranac Lake, and to our pleasant surprise he informed us all the beginning ice climbing classes were still on for the next morning.
The festival was sponsered by an array of outdoor companies that provided demo gear for our ice climbing adventure. After gearing up, Alex & I split into groups of our respective genders. My all womens group had been cleverly named "Cold Axe Bitches" and was headed up by an incredible woman climber Emilie Drinkwater. Emilie appeared to be dancing up the ice as she gave us a quick demo at our first climb "Lions on the Beach." My group was comprised of women who all had at least some rock climbing experience and a few with some ice climbing exposure. As it came to my turn on the ice, I discovered climbing ice was much more difficult than Emilie made it look. I successfully climbed the two routes at Lions, and was sufficiently soaked after my last climb. The "frozen" waterfall that we were climbing was actively melting, adding a very cold and wet element to the climb. After each having a few goes at the climbs we decided to give the guys group an opportunity to switch routes with us. They were just a short walk from us at another location called "Happy Hour," which stood at approx. 30ft compared to the first wall at about 80ft. This allowed us to get some more climbing in on an easier wall, with our already sore and tired arms. In addition we were able to experience climbing ice that was more solid requiring a slighlty different swing of the ice axe. I stuck around the first wall so I could snap off some photos of Alex climbing.
Alex took to ice climbing with relative ease as he does with most things he tries. He also managed to stand out in his group as he was one of only a few guys that had any climbing experience at all. One of Jacob's friends, a fellow journalist named Mike, was enrolled in Alex's group and ended up writing a piece for the local paper. You can check it out here.
http://adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/articles.asp?articleID=10008
We were told by Jacob that a photo of Alex was included in the final print. We have yet to see it for ourselves so we can't confirm, but it is possible that Alex is a big star up in the small Adirondack town of Saranac Lake (pop. 5000) There are some photos below of Alex climbing at "Lions on the Beach."

New Year's 2008

A belated Happy New Year to everyone. We spent the New Year's weekend visiting Matt and Beth in Vermont. Once again we took the train and stayed with matt and Beth in Essex Junction. Elizabeth continued to build up her snowboarding skills during the two days we snowbaorded at Bolton Valley and Stowe. We also spent a day driving around northern/central Vermont and stopped by the Ben & Jerry's plant, a Cabot cheese outlet-type place, and a cider mill.



The day we rode at Stowe (with Matt as well), was a bit chilly and snowy, but with plenty of fluffy powder. We arrived at Stowe and ate one of the worst meals we have had in a long time at a small inn adjacent to the lower part of the mountain prior to riding that afternoon. We rode excellent but cold conditions for about 5 hours. As we hopped on the lift for our last ride of the day, Matt noted that the guy a couple of chairs ahead of us was his boss and inventor of snowboarding, Jake Burton Carpenter. At the top, we followed the route called, "Toll Road", which is a meandering and incredibly fun 3.7 mile run that brought us back to where we started five hours earlier.



New Year's eve was spent playing a video game "Rock Band" in Matt and Beth's basement with a handful of their friends who came over to celebrate for the night. Pretty much anyone who has played Rock Band or Guitar Hero knows how addictive these games are - even for people like Elizabeth and I who are generally averse to video games.



This is a clip (about 2:15 in length) of Zib ripping up the bottom of the Toll Road at the end of our day at Stowe. We used our Canon digital camera's video feature to make this short movie. And, because the temps were somewhere in the mid-teens (F not C) my hand was about to fall off from the cold. Enjoy!

Savannah, Georgia

Forsyth Park

Alex & I spent an amazing weekend in Savannah, Ga back in November. I am just a little late with this post. The initial motivation behind our trip was to visit a childhood friend of Alex & Bryans. Travis (aka Captain Krug) is stationed at Fort Stewart anxiously awaiting the completion of his service to this country. He lives just outside Savannah with his lovely wife Annie and their new adorable son Finley. Bryan & Jane were planning a trip out there so we decided to coordinate our trips. When deciding on our mode of transportation, we threw around the idea of taking the train. Alex & I have become big train advocates since living in the Northeast, in addition to all other alternative modes of transport. Upon further investigation we discovered you can rent a "roomete" on Amtrak for overnight trips. I was sold, sleeping on a train in my own little compartment, too cool! The train tickets were comprable to a plane ticket, plus an extra $150 for the room, which we justified by thinking we would have to rent a hotel room for the same price if we arrived in the evenning anyway. Plus the pain and suffering of air travel would be avoided. All we had to do was take the subway to Penn Station, hop on our train and 15.5hrs later we would be in Savannah. The price of our tickets included dinner and breakfast in the dining car and our fabulous little room, equipped with sink and toilet in addition to our bunk beds. I claimed the top bunk and struggled to sleep through the excitement of our train adventure. We left Penn Station (NYC) around 3:15pm and early the next morning at 6:45am, we pulled into the station at Savannah. Train travel is definately the way to go. Far more enjoyable then dealing with the security, delays, and hassles of air travel. Now if we could just figure out this ban on bikes situation we would be huge Amtrak supporters.
Due to the early arrival time of our train, Alex & I had much of the morning to explore Savannnah before Bryan & Jane arrived in the afternoon.
As I am a big fan of the book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" by John Berendt, I was already somewhat familiar with the town of Savannah. For those of you who have not read the book or seen the movie, starring John Cusack and Kevin Spacy, I'll give a brief explanation. The book is written by a nyc journalist who went to Savannah and fell in love with the quirky charm and spent many years there. While he was living there a man, Jim Williams shot and killed his young boy lover in his grand home, the Mercer House on Monterey Square, shown in the photo to the left. The majority of the book describes the charm of the town and all the eccentric characters he meets while living there. Of course, this meant I had to go visit the Mercer House. Once Bryan & Jane arrived we took a tour of the inside of the home, where Jim William's sister still lives to this day. The town of Savannah is divided into 21 squares, which are basically big garden roundabouts every few blocks. The historic distric is quite small and very easy to navigate when wandering around town. Bryan had arranged a rental home for the weekend and once they arrived we were able to settle into our wonderful little apartment which was directly across the street from The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. An amazing location with a wonderful little balcony that served us well during the Veterans Day Parade, which started in front of the cathedral.
Our friends Annie, Travis, & Finley soon arrived to wander the streets with us and join us for dinner. Finley was just born at the end of August, making him just under 3 months when we were there, but by the look of him you'd think he was closer to 6 months. It looks like Finley is going to be a big boy like his daddy.

We had a wonderful visit with everyone and plenty of time to explore the intriquing town of Savannah. We took a ghost tour one night, a barbeque at the Krugs another evening where I tried alligator tail and kicked Alex's butt at ping pong, and enjoyed the Veterans Day Parade from our balcony. We stopped at Wormsloe Plantation, but due to limited time just took this cool pictures and then were on our way.

I can't forget to mention Sammie and Cooper, a Sharpei and a Boxer who are members of the Krug Family. As many of you know I am crazy for dogs as is Alex, so we spent much of our time rolling around on the floor with the dogs. I think they were enjoying the attention. Bryan & Jane had to leave early Monday, but our train didn't leave Savannah until 7pm so we got to spend the day with the Krugs. They took us to Fort Stewart, the base where Travis is stationed, and showed us around the area. When it was time for us to leave, I didn't have to dread all the hassles of air travel. We were dropped off at the train station, settled into our little room on the train, had some dinner, went to sleep, and the next morning we were back in the city. How can you not love the train!

Bryan, Jane, Annie, Travis, Finley, me, & Alex

The Boys

W.80th Street, International Short Film Festival

A few weeks ago (on 20 October, I think), a friend of mine from high school, Stan Cho visited us in NYC. Stan came to NYC in part to see us, but also in part to see a couple of his friends from Mexico - Raul and Carlos.
So, on Friday night, we went out to dinner as a group and were talking about how cool it would be to watch everyone's films. We decided to use our projector and host a small short film festival on our roof. During the summer, rooftop films are all the rage in NYC. Although this one was little late in the season we decided to go for it anyways.
On Saturday we called a couple of friends and let them know that we were planning to have a festival of short films that night. As a result, in addition to the filmmakers and their hosts our crowd included Assaf, Nivi, Marta and Clint. Basically, I work with Assaf and Marta and they also happen to live in NYC. Nivi is Assaf's wife and is an accomplished artist here in NYC. And Clint is our neighbor, above whose ceiling the festival occurred.
Assaf, Nivi, and Marta brought a cornucopia of fruits, and we busted out the rare belgian beer collection from the back of the fridge. A few blankets and pillows - Voila! everything was set up.

We started around 11pm and finished sometime after 2am. by the end we were all pretty sleepy but the final scene in Carlos's film (Brief Story) was incredible. We'll screen the film at a future festival so we don't want to ruin the surprise ending in text.


Anyways, the films we screened that night were:
A Happy Man by Carlos Morelli
The Last Night on Earth by Carlos Morelli
Una Larga Sombra (A Long Shadow) by Raul Lopez Echevarria
Mallory by Stan Cho
Nevertheless by Stan Cho
Brief Story by Carlos Morelli

Thanks to the filmmakers for sharing and thanks to the small crew of people on hand to enjoy the brisk air and big screen on our roof.

Yosemite and the Eastern Sierras

As the previous post points out, there will eventually be a post about our post wedding adventure. A month after the fact is as good a time as any.
Picking up where Zib left off...
We left Jarrod and Sarah's house pretty early in the morning and drove north on the 41, stopping for gas along the way. Into Yosemite we drove, no crowds. This was the first time I had been to Yosemite since I have become more serious about climbing, and Elizabeth hadn't been since she was a wee short person. Hiking in Yosemite is cool and the valley is pretty to see. But having rock climbing on your mind and driving into the valley - its what I imagine speed to be like. Our heads were whipping around looking up at every cliff, trying to find the famous wall we have been reading about for the past year. Every time we saw cars parked along the road, we anxiously looked up the trail and through the trees to catch a glimpse of climbers enjoying the most famous granite in the world.
We left the valley and drove up to Tuolemne Meadows where we planned to jump onto the John Muir Trail (southbound) and make our way up Cathedral Peak. We wanted to ascend Cathedral Peak via its easiest route as the first step of getting used to being in real mountains - once again - and being prepared for our attempt at Whitney's summit later in the week.
After going off-trail towards Cathedral, we ascended the huge slabs of granite to a series of ledges near the summit. We put on our rock climbing shoes for the last 20 meters to the summit. However, with about 10 meters to go, the wind picked up and the thunder/lighting that was once across the valley had finally arrived nearby. Some climbers who had climbed up from the other side quickly took our photo and made a hasty retreat down the route we had just climbed. A moment later, a light shower made the rock pretty slick and the thunder kept getting louder. So, we decided to get off the mountain ASAP. Looking around the corner, to the route to the top, we could see some serious exposure and a 5 meter crack in the rock to get to the top. Considering the weather, and knowing that we didn't want to be a statistic in the next issue of "Accidents in North American Mountaineering", we gave up our attempt at the summit block and turned to head down. The slick rock made our descent more treacherous than coming up. Fortunately we brought some rope and were able to rappel/lower off the upper ledges of Cathedral down onto less vertical granite - wherein we high-tailed it back down the JMT to the truck. Here is our route from the John Muir Trail up and back down from Cathedral peak. After driving over Tioga pass we went south on 395. In high school, I spent quite a few hours driving 395 from Valencia to snowboard at Mammoth Mountain and June Lake. Driving in the dark reminded me of how much I miss that part of the country. We drove south past Mammoth to a turn off I knew of, where I could surprise Elizabeth with some hot spring dipping. After an easy night of sleep, we woke in the morning to a brilliant sun rising over the White Mountains to the east. After driving for a bit and stopping to have breakfast next to a stream meandering through a meadow, we finally found one of the hot springs... thank god! This made Elizabeth's morning.
Cleaned up and ready to roll, we made our way down to Bishop for some supplies and to get a permit for climbing Whitney. After discovering a great running shop for women, Sage to Summit, we drove up through the Buttermilks to the North Lake trailhead and jumped on the Lamarck Lakes Trail at around noon. We hiked to Upper Lamarck Lake and set up camp just before dark. After a yummy dinner of dehydrated Tasty Bites prepared and pawned off to us in Berkeley by Sayo, we took in some more sleep. After a night at about 10,000 feet (approximately 3050 meters) we woke with the sun and headed up towards Lamarck Col. Once we dropped into the valley beneath the Col, the icy wind swooped down from the top of the pass and introduced itself to us. A few hours later, we had battled a stiff wind but made it over the col (click here to see our route up to the top of the col) and descended (click here to see our route) in to the Evolution Basin. Staring up at Darwin and Mendel I Elizabeth conviced me that we would be crazy to try to get up either peak that day. So, we settled for a close view and and tough-ass hike back up to Lamarck Pass. A short glissade down the Lamarck Glacier helped boost our spirits in time to catch sight of a trail runner and encourage us to jaunt on the downhill sections. Once back to camp, we broke everything down and were back to the car by 4 in the afternoon. Back to Bishop for some Mexican food we had spied the previous morning and then down into Lone Pine to pick up our permit at the night drop box.
My first time up Mt. Whitney I went up the Main Trail with Adam Zimmerman and another firend, Miles, from UCSB. When we hiked the 20 miles round trip, we went up without a permit. We were stopped about half-way up by a couple of rangers who were intent on sending us back down the trail to our car. After 20 minutes of discussion, we worked out a deal to clean the solar toilets and pick up human shit (and toilet paper) from the rocks around the solar toilets. Ahhh, but on that day victory was ours because we happily cleaned up the rocks and toilets and then went on our merry way to the summit without ever having to get a permit.
Also, that day was September 12 2001. The other half of the day we eneded up telling various hikers and campers about some planes that had crashed into some buildings in NYC.
On September 13, 2007 Zib and I woke up at 4 am to get a good jump on our ascent of Whitney's Mountaineer's Route. Following the route was pretty easy except for missing a turn at Upper Boy Scout Lake. But, we corrected ourselves after about 20 minutes of walking the wrong direction. Iceberg Lake sits at the base of a 1000 foot chute which is the heart and soul of the Mountaineer's Route. At Iceberg Lake, we fueled up with gels and Clif bars and chatted with a couple of climbers our age who were going to do the East Butress to the summit of Whitney. As they departed for their route, we left for ours. By and large the chute is filled with scree and lots of loose rocks. However, by staying to the right side we were able to have an enjoyable scamble to a small saddle just below the summit. From the saddle, we traversed around towards the backside of Whitney before finding ourselves on the WINDY slope to the summit. Five minutes later we found oursleves watching a couple of bodies rise from the edge of the abyss that is the eastern edge of Whitney's summit. The bodies belogned to the young climbers we had talked with at Iceberg Lake. Some small talk revealed that one fo the climbers had in fact traveled on a bus to the small town of Lee Vining with an old roommate of mine from Durango, Jamie Harris. Like many other communities climbing circles can get quite small.
After a few photos and some chasing of a resident summit Marmot, we began the trek down the main trail. We will never hike on the main trail again - IT IS LONG, with a ton of switch backs. Aside from a couple of mildly exposed sections, the Mountaineer's route is far more direct, and less crowded than the main trail. If anyone is considering going to the top of Whitney, climb the Mountaineer's Route - you don't need gear (at least at the end of summer anyways) and you won't be disappointed. We spent the night in a small motel in Bishop before bailing the next morning headed for NYC in the truck.
Aside from being stuck in traffic in Loveland Pass in Colorado due to a multiple fatality accident that shut down the interstate, and watching the Nebraska vs. USC game in North Platte, Nebraska, the drive was uneventful.
So, after Bishop we stayed in Green River, Utah. Then we made it to North Platte, Nebraska and the following night we were in South Bend, Indiana before finally arriving back home in the big apple.