An electrifying experience....

One week to go (almost). I'm through training other than my usual long walks, and work-outs in the gym. I'm as fit (or unfit) as I'm going to get.

I have had been thinking about a new / specialized pair of shoes to wear on the granite, something that sticks like spiderman’s feet. Rock climbing shoes! I used to have multiple pairs for different types of climbs, and the ones for steep slopes were great. I once did a free (unroped) pre-climb up a 50 degree ramp, relying on my sticky shoes for a few hundred feet of vertical. That would work for Half Dome. So, off to REI again to use my $20 bonus coupon from buying the new pack. One thing I did not count on though - changes in technology and shoe sizes in the decades since I gave the sport up. I tried on a few non-aggressive pairs in my own size, and my feet immediately cramped. Climbing shoes were always uncomfortable (painful really) but these were much worse than I had encountered in the past. I considered a pair of approach shoes which can be used for smearing on steep slopes, but $250 for hiking shoes. Really? I think not. So, I opted for a new pair of hiking shoes to replace my Keens’s, which are a bit worn out, and which have a newer Vibram sticky sole (“megagrip”). Comfort and a bit more grip sound like a good combination.

The problem with the Park Service lottery, is that you submit a bunch of dates that might work, and then hope one of them is picked. I picked a bunch of dates in July, and one in August in an attempt to hit it during the dry season. Of course, I was awarded the one in August, but I figured I’d be safe since it was early in the month. Not having anything to worry about now that I have conquered all of my hanging fears and bought all the gear I need, I started looking at the long term weather forecast for Yosemite. Sunny skies, warm, 0% humidity until the 29th. We then go from party cloudy, to scattered thunderstorms with a 50% chance of precipitation….until the 3rd. Crap. I can now worry about hiking 8.5 miles to the start of the cables, and getting getting a big thunderstorm role in. I have had enough lightning experiences in the Colorado high peaks, including close encounters of the electrical kind where everything is sparking, and the granite starts humming. Really, it happens. I've also been stuck on a rope when a lighting storm rolled down the canyon, half-way up a climb, with lots of metal climbing gear on a sling around my neck. I levitated the last pitch. 

So the thought of holding onto a steel cable in the middle of an electrical storm, does not resonate with (or through) me. Hopefully, if we start early enough, with our trusty headlamps shining brightly, we can get to the top early enough to miss any storms. That and the weather forecast keeps changing. I'm not going to worry, I'm not going to worry....I'll keep repeating that until Monday night.

One more entry before I leave.

How to scare yourself out of going...watch Youtube videos

The problem with the Web, is that you can find just about anything about anything, and what you find may not be what you were hoping for. For example, I enjoy tormenting (well deserved by the way) a co-worker with links to very graphic videos of the surgeries I have had the past few years. He no longer opens e-mail that have a subject line of “You gotta see this!”.

When I bought my pack the other day, the very nice and knowledgeable person at REI mentioned that the Park Service frowns upon hikers clipping into the cables, so I did a search on that. I found one helpful site which said to definitely clip in, citing all the possible ways you can die if you don’t. Great. Then I found a NPS video clip on hiking Yosemite, which was created I think, to scare the bejeebies out of most people considering the hike.

https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=F891355F-F836-4D0A-7305CFA1E09D497A

It did nothing but reinforce my plan to use a harness and clip my way up and down the cable. It is my life after all. I then found a video from a group that did clip into the cable - much safer, especially going down. Built up my confidence after the first video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFdA58m-AWw

But Youtube has tons of videos taken on the cable route, thanks to GoPro (I plan to use mine, with a new chest harness that I bought). This last video is probably not the one to watch at all for anyone planning the hike since it describes a woman’s miraculous survival of falling out of the cables, and bouncing down until she hit a vertical rock which kept her from falling the rest of the way to the valley. She had to be rescued via helicopter, in really bad weather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GarBqz_Kfo

I watched one more clip from a guy who did a video of going down (his first audible comment other than sounds of hyperventilation was “Holy Sh*t”) - really, really steep, but survivable if you hold on tight. Incredibly steep - it is definitely 5th class on the rock climbing scale, something like the 3rd Flatiron in Boulder which I’ve done a million times. But always climbing up, not down. The two free hanging rappels from the 3rd look much safer than sliding down the steep stretch.

So the bottom line is - wear very good gripping gloves and the heck with the rangers, I’m clipping to the cable both ways. Better safe than paste.

Gearing up and other things to worry about....

Funny how fast summer goes by. There are only 28 days left until Half Dome Day (HDD? Sounds techie). No hikes this past week, but a lot of long distance walking, and workouts - they have a cruel machine at the gym I belong to, a Jacobs Ladder trainer. Five minutes on that get’s you about 400 feet worth of pain, in all the places you get on steep trails. My goal is to get to 1000 feet without tearing anything (muscles, tendons, not clothing).

With less than a month to go, I have started stressing about gear of course. I always need to stress out about something, and I’m an admitted gear junky. I had to have all the latest, weird chocks when I used to rock climb, some of which did not work too well but looked really cool. I bought every size of Friend when they first came out. I was a living lightning rod when I was on the lead end of the rope.

In this case, I was concerned about the size of my day pack (no Donald Trump jokes here) - really nice for short hikes, and holds a 3 liter water bladder. But with my camera, food, water filter (more on that later), clothing, climbing harness stuff, two bottles of champagne and flutes (just kidding about that), the pack was getting a bit over stuffed. A perfect excuse for heading over to REI to buy a new pack! Which I did. I now have a REI Traverse 48 pack - perfectly fitted, hideous rust/orange color,  with room for all kinds of gear. Lot’s of adjustment straps, which all the latest packs have. It will give me something to waste away time in the cabin tent. Oh boy.

The new pack + odds and ends

Speaking of water, liquid is the heaviest part of the load for hiking - you really do need to drink a lot of fluid, especially at higher elevations. There is a lot of water along the trail in Yosemite, but for the past few decades, we have been warned about the dangers of giardia, a nasty parasite

which wildlife poops into the water (too many things to remember in the wilderness - don’t eat the yellow snow, and don’t drink the water either). I’ve never known anyone who had it, but the description sounds a lot like the stomach flu or the what stuff you drink before a colonoscopy does to you...same effect. Luckily, I found a compact water purifier I bought a few years back when I was still fantasizing about backpacking - never been used, and it will be perfect for the trip. We can refill our bottles and bladders (the plastic ones in our packs, not the other one which I guess will be filled as well - what goes in must go out). Saves a lot of weight in the pack.

Finally, the best news of the week is that we have another adventurer for the hike - another retiree who is an avid hiker and who has done the cable route before. It will be good to have someone who can keep my ex-boss from pushing me over the edge...I still worry about that.

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Training in luxury ...hiking at the Ritz

My training for the past few weeks has been limited to long walks at lunch time or on the weekends, and a “hike” up the trash hills along the South Bay trail. Good for fitness, but not quite enough to get me up and back on an 18 mile round-trip, up a 8800’ peak. Lucky for me, my wife (aka the saint) wanted to go to Lake Tahoe for her birthday - lots of trails, and lots of 8-9000 foot peaks to hike. We had three full days, not a lot, but I reserved one morning (not on her birthday of course) to get some miles and elevation in.

We stayed at a hotel situated at 6800” - not a bad start to get used to elevation again. Plus the hotel (Ritz-Carleton) is at the base of a ski area (Northstar), just out the back door, with lot’s of trails open for hiking. I tried my luck on an easy trail first - really boring, and I found myself huffing and puffing at the onset. I was really concerned with that, until I realized that we had made a critical mistake when checking into the hotel. We upgraded to the club level - free drinks. Really good drinks, and after sitting in traffic for 6 hours on Friday, having a few really good drinks seemed like a really good idea. It was, but not for hiking the next day. Chalk that one up as something not to do again.

After chatting with some of the wonderful staff at the hotel, I decided to take one of trails a short drive from the Ritz, which go along the Tahoe Rim Trail. The hike starts on Brockway Pass, and runs up to the rim trail with a number of relatively high peaks along the way. I had limited time, and did not want to push it too far, so settled on Martis Peak - a nice 10 mile (round-trip) hike, up to almost 8700’.

Once again though, the Club Level and my wife’s birthday dinner forced me to imbibe a bit more than I had planned on. You absolutely need to have a good bottle of wine with a good steak (really good wine of course). And if the restaurant offers free champagne for the celebration, you cannot turn it down. And as the evening winds down, you of course need to have an after dinner drink (I really do not do this very often). At any rate, I still managed to get out early, and hit the trail at 8:30 with only a slight head-ache.

The hike was really excellent - not too steep, nice long stretches with easy elevation gain, and just a few points with elevation loss. Plus, when you hit the open areas, the views of the lake are awesome.

The view from the top, looking back at Northstar was not too shabby either.

The odd thing about hiking in this area, is that there are roads criss-crossing through just about everywhere. For this hike, there was a road that runs up to the fire tower on top of the peak, which branches off to another road that parallels the rim trail for quite a ways. When I had finally trudged up to the top, there were a number of pickup trucks and SUV’s there. Slackers! I did think about hitching a ride back down but only for a moment since that would have been cheating - this was a training hike. The other fun part about hiking around Tahoe, is sharing the trails with mountain bikers. Not a problem going up (they were passing me of course) since they are going slow, and the biker can call out a warning. Going down was another thing, since most of them were careening down at high speed - not much warning. Listening to music could be a fatal mistake.

Overall, I was pleased with the results - I did not have any issues with the altitude, and I managed to avoid tripping on anything this time. No falls. My pace was not great though, over four hours is pretty slow, but then again, I had a lengthy interrupt from a couple of ladies who were arguing about which trail they were on, and must have thought I knew where I was going. That, and I did stop for quite a few photo opportunities. I’ll be doing that in Yosemite as well, so need to work on walking at a faster pace.  

I’m hoping to get a few more hikes in next month, but it will be impossible to get to the Sierra again, so I’ll be working on distance and steep inclines instead of elevation. I think I can handle the altitude now. Maybe I still have a few extra red blood cells from my decades in Colorado.

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Going it alone....or not. Are you out of your mind?

My intention all along has been to hike with a small group - my permit is for a party of three. I had one uncommitted friend (young, strong, capable of dragging me to the top) and some thoughts for a third, but had also considered just going alone.  After all, there will be hundreds of hikers on the trail, so it’s not like I’d be climbing the cables by myself. Right. I have a history of near disasters from climbing high peaks on my own, from almost walking off a cornice in a snow storm on a 13K peak, to dislocating my ankle on the way down from a winter climb on Longs Peak (14K). That was fun - I  had to hop on one foot for a mile to the parking lot and drive a manual transmission truck down a canyon with one foot to get help. Maybe doing Half Dome on my own is not a good idea based on past history. I'm not sure how many strikes I get at this game, but I've got be be pretty close to the max by now. 

So, when my uncommitted friend informed me that he had work related conflicts, I was back to going solo. My long-suffering wife  aka "the saint", who has an aversion to camping and long, arduous outdoor adventures (something to do with hiking with me I think - "lets go cross country skiing when it's 10 below...it will be fun") volunteered to come along so I would not have to make the long drive by myself. Given that we would be staying in a tent-cabin, without electricity, and sharing bathroom and shower facilities with hundreds of other guests, that was a huge offer. 

Fortunately for her, she will not have to suffer the primitive conditions - a former boss, who I've known for quite some time and who should definitely know better than to join me on this adventure, has agreed to join me on this adventure. So now I have a two-some, and the search is on for a third. 

Coming from the tech world, every project, application and conference room is given a strange tag (what the heck is a Rarog?) usually based on obscure movies, TV series, books or music that I have never heard of. I stopped listening to new music after Keith Moon died, so I'm really behind the times. Maybe I should get a Twitter account and start tweeting progress - #foolsonthehill or #therealthreestooges. Nah, I'll stick to the blog - I could never limit myself to so few characters.

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Falling off of Half-Dome....

Thousands of people make it up (and back down) the cable route safely each year - after all, it's only 400 feet of angled granite, and you have a nice, firm cable to hold on to. But, sometimes things can go wrong - the granite surface is worn slick, and you can trip, slip, or get jostled by someone behind you. Or, you can just get distracted, something I am very prone to. I trip over small items on a regular basis. There are cases of hikers falling out from the cables - the lucky ones manage to grab something or someone grabs them, but the unlucky ones slide off of Half Dome. It's a long way down without a parachute.

Having experienced the joy of short distance falling as a rock climber, with one not too short fall that landed me in the hospital for a long time, my sense of self-preservation will probably win out over pride. I'm planning to clip into the cables both ways. I found my old harness (anyone ever here of Forrest Mountaineering?) and a pile of carabiners and bought a few new slings.

I will probably be ridiculed by small children and hikers young and old during the climb - look at the sissy wearing a climbing harness. I have 7 weeks to come up with some snarky come-backs.

Next Post - Gearing up (unless I do another hike)

The first warmup hike...and near disaster (June 8th)

My plans for getting in shape for Half-Dome were pretty simple:

1) Start running and working out more than I had been for the past year
2) Decrease my wine consumption (bummer)
3) Lose some weight (dependent of course on #1 and #2)
4) Start hiking, in early June, increasing my distance, elevation gain, and degree of difficulty SLOWLY.

I was doing fine with the first three steps the last few months, especially once I joined in on the Global Corporate Challenge at work - a team based event where you record your activity each day with a Fitbit type device, and attempt to beat your targets for 100 days (which coincides nicely with the August 1st schedule for the climb). I have been hitting the treadmill at work four times a week, avoiding the elevator at work, playing tennis, and taking long walks - I actually do feel more fit after the past month of increased activity, although this may be wishful thinking. And #3 has been rough sledding - dinner is just not the same with a glass of sparkling....water.

So here it is, early June, and I needed to start hiking. Yes! I had to take a vacation day (use it or lose it), so planned my first warmup at Pinnacles National Park, which graduated from a National Monument a few years ago. I last visited the park quite a few years ago, and remembered a relatively easy hike up a switch-back trail - four miles or so round-trip, with a 1700' gain. Nothing serious, a good warmup to get my legs used to going uphill again.

I hit the road early, and since I was going against the flood of traffic, cruised down 101 to the Hollister exit quickly. The rest of the trip down to the park was great - cool, foggy, and nice scenery to boot. There are a lot of new vineyards on Route 25 (I did not stop to sample.....not on my new diet). The park was not quite open yet when I arrived - no rangers at the entrance, and I did not have a map (I am definitely out of practice), but I did manage to make the right turns, and wound up more or less where I wanted to be. There was a park volunteer heading towards a trail head, so I asked for some advice on which trail to take, and he pointed me towards the High Peaks Trail - said it was a nice loop trail, which goes up to the rim and eventually heads back towards the parking lot. SGTM.

Off I went - my new REI pack with a camelback bladder (no more stopping to pull out water bottles), a couple of PB&J sandwiches from work, sunglasses, hiking sticks - ready for anything.

The first few miles were great  beautiful scenery - I had to stop once in a while to take a few photos.

Once you hit the High Peaks trail, the climb is a bit more difficult but not too bad...and the scenery is quite spectacular. The rock formations are quite unique - great for climbing if you are into that sort of thing (not me anymore).

Aside from doubling back once when I thought I had missed a cut-off, the hike was pleasant, not too difficult, and devoid of people - a rarity in the bay area. Apparently, word has not gotten out yet about this little treasure of a park. I eventually determined I was still on the right trail, and it started turning off in the direction back to the east entrance (there is a west entrance ). After another mile, the trail abruptly ends at a rock face - I looked up and noticed steps cut into the rock, with a railing along the side. I had heard about this, but did not realize this was the only way to continue down the trail.

What the heck. The holes were fairly well spaced, and the railing sturdy enough. Seemed safe even for a klutz like me. The trail continues up, over, down, up and eventually down again through the pinnacles for quite a ways - it's safe, but not for anyone prone to acrophobia. And don't try it in the rain. Or at night.

The rest of the trip down was uneventful - there are a few side trails to take, one climbing up to another pinnacle (nice place for a PB&J break), and then a long stretch of switch backs. When the trail levels out near the bottom, there are quite a few rock walls for climbers..it's easy to get distracted, and look up at the rocks instead of the trail. I have a history of being easily distracted, which can be a moderately dangerous habit if you are a rock climber. In this case, I missed a step down on the trail and fell hard on my knee. On a rock. Many bad words were uttered (this is a PG rated blog).

After rolling around in the dirt for a while, the pain subsided enough to get back on my feet and limp back to the car. I assessed the damage which was not too bad (scrapes and bruises), and some nice couple gave me a bag ice which really helped. Aside from the pain from the knee, everything else seemed to be OK - it was a lot longer hike than I was planning on, well over 7 miles, with a lot more elevation gain and loss. All in all though, a good start. Except for the distraction/falling thing. I'll have to work on that before Half Dome. Not a good place to be distracted.

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