Adventures in Onionism

I won't make a pun using the word "dam" instead of "damn," but I am stoked about this story. Four dams are coming down on the Klamath . UPDATE: This story seems to be part of a series. A few days ago there was bad news about possible future construction . I heard about a new long distance trail, the Bigfoot trail , from a friend named Squatch (because he's so into bigfoot stuff). I've looked into a route like this before, because there is public land all the way from Clearlake, CA to the Oregon border through Mendocino, Shasta-Trinity, and Klamath National Forests. However, it seemed like a lot of roadwalking and real danger of running into pot farms. Normally I discount that danger (and all other "dangerous" outdoor things like bears) but maybe not in this region. For years I've been dreaming of an AZ-UT-ID border to border route. I mostly kept it to myself, even though I knew it had been done before. I just didn't know it had been d...

I spent the weekend at a camp in Oregon near Mt. Hood for the 2009 ALDHA-West gathering. It was like most all hiker gatherings. At first, you're a little bummed because hiker X didn't show up even though he lives only an hour away, then you see some cool presentations, and then before you know it, it's two in the morning and you're doing one-armed pushups and cheerleading stunts while your friend is regaling a room full of people with a hilarious account of his vasectomy and train-hopping and so on and so forth. Then the weekend ends and you have to go home and your football teams lost and you have to go back to work. So fun, so bittersweet.

I finally finished reading Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water . If you have not read this book, you absolutely must. I guess people that have both never been west of the Mississippi and don't care about the environment probably won't be interested (but then, why would you reading my blog?), but everyone else must read it. It's pretty dense at times, so it took me a long time to get through it, but that's basically because it's very well researched and thorough. Summary: William Mulholland and LA stole (legally, mostly) all the water from the Owens Valley, the Colorado River has been thoroughly violated, and the Bureau of Reclamation (in competition with the Army Corps of Engineers) built way too many dams using absolutely fraudulent cost-benefit calculations and now sell the water to corporate farms (that are far larger than the legal size-limit to be allowed to purchase the water) for $7.50 an acre-foot ( far less tha...

Like I said in my last post, I went down to San Jacinto to a trail work training session. I puked on the drive down (bad gas station deli hard boiled eggs or just really windy dirt Black Mountain Road), then spent Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday learning to work a griphoist . Basically this is a fancy winch device capable of controlled tension and release of a wire rope under up to 4,000 pounds of pressure. Anchor the griphoist on a tree, attach the wire rope to a big rock, crank the handle, and the rock moves. If the rock is really heavy, put a block (pulley) on the rock, thread the wire rope through the block and anchor it back on the same tree in order to get a 2:1 mechanical advantage. Or instead of doing a direct or directional pull, you can set up a high line or high lead and fly (a very generous term, they're not actually flying or even moving that fast if you're being remotely safe) big granite boulders down a slope. Anyway, I had a pretty good time. The training...

I'm headed to San Jacinto to get some training in rock-based trail work from the SCA. I think I'll probably end up thinking that I'd much rather be doing brushing or logging for hikers than rock work for donkeys, but I assume I'll still enjoy it. I'll actually have AC for this drive. Thank goodness I didn't need a new compressor and got what was actually wrong fixed for pretty cheap, and my car mechanic (thanks VM for the rec) says I got new brake pads just in time.

I turned 30 years old yesterday. I don't know how I feel about that (I haven't done squat for research since orals and it's not looking like I'll get much of it done this semester with all my teaching, this isn't great for morale), but I had to teach until 7 PM, then I went out for a ~5 hour run in the dark. I haven't been in a while, so my right knee acted up a little/lot. I saw a bunch of raccoons and a grey fox (the only canine that can climb trees). Why haven't any of my running friends told me how fun night running is? The only times I've run or hiked at night is after having run or hiked all day long, so I was really tired at night, but if you don't start until 8 PM, it's actually pretty cool. It certainly doesn't hurt to have the killer views of the SF skyline and the fog.

Chicago econs respond to Krugman. Krugman non-responds to the response because he's traveling and hasn't had time yet.

1. I saw Ponyo this weekend. Why is it that only Pixar can make kids movies that aren't agonizing for adults to sit through? 2. I took a sea kayaking lesson on Saturday from the UC Aquatic Center . Learned basic strokes, a few rescues, etc. I enjoyed it (especially the few minutes in which we went outside the breaks of the marina and rode a few waves) enough to think about buying their last used kayak for $300. (Despite saying you should definitely, definitely try out many kayaks before buying one, the instructor also said I could easily resell this for more than I would pay for it.) My concern is that I'm too lazy to go kayaking with any regularity. I have ignored several outdoor sports (kayaking, cycling, rock climbing, ice climbing, skiing, snowboarding, fly fishing, basically any sport that's not running/hiking) for years and viewed them as "techie gear dork" sports, meaning it was more about the machine than the man. Part of me likes the beauty of low/no...

Paul Krugman had a great article in the NYT magazine explaining the history of the last 70 years of macroeconomic thought in relation to current events and reminding me once again that I am so glad that I didn't go to the University of Chicago. (Many thanks to the Chicago prof whose first words out of his mouth upon my admit visit were: "How can I help you Garret, and why aren't you just going to Berkeley?") I have never been a particularly big fan of macro; I remember once being incensed upon learning the Real Business Cycle model (explained in the article) and being told that I didn't really observe involuntary unemployment, I just thought I did. However, I'm now teaching my second semester of macro and given the horrible times we're experiencing and the views of the professors here, it's certainly more interesting.

"The Enchanted Gorge is where intimidation and challenge meet head on. This is not a place for the faint-hearted, the poorly conditioned, or the unadventuresome. Here is the proving ground for the Ultimate Sierra backpacker." --Phil Arnot, blowing smoke out his rear-end in his High Sierra: John Muir's Range of Light "The only thing "enchanted" about Enchanted Gorge is its name." --R.J. Secor, telling it like it is, is his must-own The High Sierra: Peaks, Passes, and Trails I spent Labor Day Weekend doing an off-trail backpacking trip in Sierra National Forest and Kings Canyon National Park. ( Skip the words and look at the pictures .) I read about the Enchanted Gorge in Steve Roper's Sierra High Route guidebook (he calls it "one of the wildest canyons in the range") and I immediately wanted to do it. I started Friday at Florence Lake and hiked maintained trail following the South San Joaquin up Goddard Canyon to Martha Lake. I camped on ...

Later today I'm headed to do a gnarly x-country route for the weekend. Starting at Florence Lake, up the Muir Trail, up Goddard Canyon to Martha Lake, east over Goddard Creek Pass into the Ionian Basin, down Enchanted Gorge, up Goddard Creek, over Reinstein Pass, back down Goddard Canyon, and if there's time over Hell for Sure Pass and back to Florence Lake. It's 22 miles on trail to Martha Lake. Enchanted Gorge is around 7 miles long, but I expect it to be hellishly slow and choked with thistles and nearly impassable brush. Good times. Back on Tuesday, most likely.

I moved into a place of my own for the first time since June 1. I was a little underwhelmed with my new place at first, but then one of my roommates pointed out that the vacuum actually did work, I just had to switch it to the floor as opposed to the hose setting. Then he offered me good beer and homemade seitan, and I decided I really liked the place. I bought a wireless router to go with our newly installed Comcast Interwebs. It was slightly frustrating that I couldn't find a single router with uniformly positive reviews, so at some point I decided to stop caring and just ordered a D-Link DIR 615.

Thanks to OO for sending me this video about two of my favorite things: long distance hiking and facial hair. The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo . If you're curious, I haven't cut or trimmed my hair since June 1. It's starting to bug me a little.

Somebody left a copy of Candice Millard's book River of Doubt in the truck my sister gave me, and I just finished reading it. It's about a river trip Teddy Roosevelt took after he lost the 1912 election, in which he mapped a previously unknown 1,000-mile long tributary of the Amazon. I am not a huge fan of TR (he seems to be a really big fan of war) but I appreciate the fact that he was a tough dude. Like pretty much every adventure narrative, it diverges from the main story to describe the science or history behind the obstacles the adventure faces, but it does so in a slightly repetitive manner. The Amazon has lots of crazy insects. I get it. Anyway, I'd say the book is above average adventure narrative, but not amazing. It was interesting to read about a politician doing some serious adventuring, and it was interesting to learn something completely new about somebody you've obviously been hearing about (but for different reasons) your whole life.