Southern California 2012

Suz and I returned from Southern California late in April.  Once again, we had an awesome time exploring and visiting!  We stayed in Solana Beach, a small town just north of San Diego.

The first couple days we toodled around the seashore close to home.  One day we took the light rail train down to San Diego and across the ferry to Coronado Island.  Beautiful neighbourhoods with every house very  different from each other but sharing a common passion for landscaping.  Oh to be a gardener in that climate!  We biked around for the day exploring the beaches and were treated to dozens of sailboats flying up and down the strait.  The harbour is a fascinating place filled with navy battleships (the famous Midway aircraft carrier is there) fishing boats, cruise ships, and many historical ships such as the Star of India pictured below which was the boat used for “Master and Commander.”

Again this year we made a trip out to the desert, this time via the wine country of Temecula.  The wineries are all very close together so it’s easy to drive in to a few along the way.  Each one has tasting galleries where for a small amount of money a wine expert will walk you through a tasting.  I don’t know much about wine but having an expert passionate about what they do walk you through their wares is always a treat for me.  The tastings are very social places as you may imagine.  Interesting conversations with fellow meanderers and locals peppered the experience.  I found it odd to catch myself remarking that “I prefered the blend over the Cabsav as well.”  Sometimes it’s hard to take myself seriously!

One winery we visited had a lovely cafe set among their grapes.  We were constantly reminded how big food portions are in America.  Above, Suz is about to dig into some California cuisine at a roadside winery.

The desert was not as blooming as last year with very few cactus in bloom at all.  After much roaming around, I could only find one bloom in the historical Box Canyon, the overland route to Yuma.

We stayed the night in Borrego Springs, an oasis in the desert.  There was something very surreal about the place.  Sand, rock and desolation and suddenly being  surrounded by palms and flowers with the sun lighting the hills aflame.  Being off-season, the town was mostly deserted and consequently we got an obscenely good deal at a spa/resort.  As desert travelers are often thirsty, we meandered to the lounge.  The lounge was very nice and seemingly untouched since 1968 which made the scene even more odd.  The atmosphere seemed like you were transported into a 60′s spy movie.  The uniformed, older and  talkative bartender told a few yarns while we had a bite to eat.  It reminded me a bit of The Shining only the whole place had a wholesome inviting vibe.

Above: The view from the outdoor lounge of the Borrego Springs Resort and Spa.  A wonderful place to have a drink and watch the sun set on the desert mountains.  One of the staff alerted us to an astronomy event happening that night.  The dry desert air and remote location is very conducive to sky watching.  We were told to go behind the tennis courts after dark and there were some astronomy experts with some powerful telescopes.

Very fortuitous as I had been thinking about the stars after passing by Palomar Observatory on the way here.  After dark the hotel turned off all its lights and there were practically no lights on in the small town anyway.  Two guys had some huge telescopes set up and were giving tours to the dozen guests consisting of a half dozen retired couples and Suz and I.  The two experts had super powerful laser pointers that allowed them to point directly at individual stars as they talked.  Through the telescopes we saw Saturn’s rings, Mars, Venus and some Nebulae as well as some new stars being birthed in Orion.  A wonderful surprise.

The next day we drove out to the Salton Sea mostly to indulge my curiosity.  The Salton Sea is a landlocked saline lake in the desert that at one time was going to be a huge resort  but something went wrong and it never took off and money poured into Palm Springs instead.  The sea itself is beautiful in an eerie Red Sea way that doesn’t seem quite right.

Even more odd is the gridded roads, power lines, street signs and not a single house to be found!  It was like driving around in a twilight zone movie or a nuclear holocaust scene.  In fact the place reminded me of how I imagine parts of the old Soviet Union must be like.  Below is an attempt to capture the scene.  If you look carefully, you can see the other street signs in the distance.

Above:  Grand vistas like these abound with little to no signage and not a soul about for miles and miles.  We would never have found this place but for a photographer we met at the aforementioned Borrego Spa lounge who had been coming out here for years to take sunset pictures.

After the desert, it was great to get back to the coast.

This year, we graduated from our super huge learners surf board to  normal sized boards. The first day neither of us caught a single wave!  The swell was disorganized which made the waves difficult for sure but the smaller boards were much more demanding.  By the second day though, I was starting to figure out the advantages of the small board.  I was really starting to like the short board as I could adjust my weight front to back very quickly which allowed me to get “falling” down the wave face better to get enough speed to pop up and ride.  Weight too far forward and the nose dips in and 2 tonnes of water crash on top of you.  Too far back and the wave passes right through you.  My big obstacle is still picking the right wave which is an art form that locals tell me takes a long time so don’t get discouraged.  On one afternoon, I was about to pop up (quickly going from prone and paddling to standing and riding) when a second, bigger and faster wave overtook the one I was on and popped me in the air like a cork!  I flew forward and the board came crashing down on my head along with a few tonnes of water!  I made my way to shore  a little dazed and had a time-out on the beach.  The swells break around 30km/hr which is pretty fast for all that mass.  It is still pretty terrifying when you feel the wave come behind you and slam you forward. But it’s exhilarating. It’s like skiing on a mountain thats moving really fast!

Above: A typical wave in front of our place being surfed by an experienced local.

Once again Southern California was fantastic.  I really love this place.  We had a great visit with my parents who spend a month down there as well as my Aunt and Uncle who live there half the year.  Also by coincidence, Suz’s Aunt and Uncle were in Carlsbad so we nipped up the coast and had a great visit with them as well.  Fresh seafood and lots of Mexican inspired food filled our bellies.  Our bartender at the post-surf bar we frequented said there was skiing just 2 hours away.  Hmm, almost perfect!

More pictures at my picassa gallery here

Decaffeinated Biking

Today marks one month without coffee.  Not sure if I’ll do another month or not.  I suspect as work begins soon, the coffee will flow once more.

This is a fabulous time of year in the Bow Valley as you can ski and bike in the same day.  Last night was the first North Face riding group trip of the year.  Sketchy weather scared a few off I think.  I did a 15k warm-up around Canmore mostly on flat ground before heading over to Banff with Suz.  We did the Tunnel Mountain trails which gave me a good chance to play with my new mapping GPS.  After my nightmare on Mt Balfour, I decided I earned a new tool.

My new Dakota20 shows me where I am on a topo map and has a built in compass and barometric altimeter for super accurate elevations and weather forecasting.  Most GPS show you where you are but the real problem in bad light is often where to take your next  step.  With the mapping GPS you point to the spot on the map you want to go and the digital compass points the direction to go.  A huge advance over older GPS units.  Riding around gave me a good chance to play with some of the features.

One of the riders in our small group was Peter who runs Bikepirate.com and the author of the bike trail guide for our area.  I stuck to his back wheel for a while and admired his technique.

Above l-r: Christina, Suz, Peter, Marc, Randy, Me

Above: Don’t look down! Christina skirts the top edge of the Hoodoos

Above:  Taking a breath at the top of a big climb.

I downloaded the GPS info and made some cool maps: click picture to enlarge

I really liked the speed information which I got graphed out: click picture to enlarge

A great first ride of the year with great company.    After a very rough up and down 20km ride I was ready to call it a good day.  Many thanks to the North Face Banff for organizing another year of rides.

A little more skiing is in the works though, Suz and I are skiing with friends at the hill over the weekend and then Hugo, Emile and I are going to search for the elusive Peyto Glacier ice cave next week.  We’re also hoping to get one last summit in but as always, the weather will decide.

5 days on the Wapta/Waputik Traverse

Recovering from the big trip last week.  I’m putting together a little ebook of the trip as it’s worthy of more than a simple blog post.  The short version was that it was the most intense experience I’ve ever had.

Above: Typical scenery at 10,000 feet.  Horizon is several kilometers away as scale is visually impossible to gauge without a map.

For the curious I have a few pictures online here.

How to Deceive with Stats: the CBC’s guide to Canadian weather

According to the CBC  today “the area of Canada covered by snow at certain times of the year shrank by a third between 1972 and 2010.”

Another scare story devoid of context.  For most of the west, snowfall amounts depend on the La Niña/El Niño.  Here is a brief history of those events.  You can see that 1972 was a strong La Niña bringing above average snow.  2010 was a strong El Niño bringing less snow and a warm winter.  Have you figured out the trick in the article and why they chose to compare those two years?!

To create an inane headline, pick any el niño year with the lowest snow, from any large la niña snow year, and kapowie, instant alarm!  To the uninitiated reader, the choice of the two dates in the “study” is arbitrary leading them to imagine something is wrong.  To the student of weather history, the dates are specifically chosen  to create an imagined trend that does not actually exist. It is a dishonest and flagrant attempt to con the reader.  I’ve pretty much had enough of this.

For example, why not compare 1998 and 2011?  Because that would show “snow cover is increasing” to use their reasoning.  But that statement is just as misleading.   This fraudulent cherry picking isn’t all that’s misleading.

The infinitely complex mechanisms that cause snowfall in different regions of  Canada do not follow a linear trend.  Any trend calculated is a statistical artifact that has no meaning in the real world of cause and effect.  The record snowfall currently around the west further undermines their nonsense claims and shows why mechanism trumps trend.

Above is the automatic snow sensor up the highway from me with the current year in blue.  Does this bear any resemblance to the nonsense claim of declining snow cover?   See more stations here.

The article goes on to suggest that snow cover is a key variable for measuring climate change.  If that’s the case then what does the data indicate?

Here is the data from the Rutgers Snow Lab.  Globally, snow cover is in fact trivially increasing, but not beyond  the noise of the data.  From these numbers I can make all sorts of meaningless statements such as 3 of the last 5 years were the snowiest in 30 years which hardly fits the global warming hysteria presented by the CBC.  Or I can perform the same dishonest journalism practiced by the CBC and suggest that snow cover in the northern hemisphere has increased an average of 160,000 square km per year between 1981 and 2012!  Run for the hills, the ice age is upon us!  Or not.

Things like trend lines will often confuse as it implies a mechanism.  Back to the present story, Canada is so utterly massive that the whole concept treating 10 million square kilometers as one thing is nonsense to begin with.  The mechanisms that ebb and flow to make it snow in Abbotsford have nothing in common with what makes it snow in Baffin Island or Nipigon.  The peaks and valleys of the weather in these distant regions can be measured, added to together, and averaged- but this number is no longer a physical thing.  It has divorced itself of any physical phenomena that produce it.  If we averaged Goose Bay snow cover and Manchester England snow cover, no one would take it seriously.  Yet Manchester is closer than much of BC.

I can sum up CBC’s logic thusly:

If it was sunny yesterday and raining today, on average, it’s getting drier!

As always, the worst part of CBC’s apparent campaign to convince me the world is ending(??!!!) is that I pay for it.  At least I’m soon to be paying a little less for it!

screencap from CBC’s “science” page:

 

 

 

Mt Field part 2

I just came back from a second failed attempt at Mt Field with the usual suspects.   We definitely made some classic mistakes though not in the safety department.  Above: The route starts at the TransCanada and follows the summer road up to Takakkaw falls before going straight up Mt Field.  After 5 km trailbreaking through fresh snow we  headed through the trees up our (incorrect) ascent gully.  Perhaps it was because I was already tired (left at 5:30 am!) and overheating, but I followed the lead right up the incorrect gully and didn’t even notice!  It’s always difficult to be vigilant about the route when following.  This may seem hard to understand but it’s particularly tricky in the winter when it’s tempting to just look at your skis so you don’t fall over.  

Above:  Yoho valley in background as we slowly climb off course.  We were all in t-shirts to keep cool from working so hard climbing in these conditions.

As we climbed, the slope became so steep we could barely make any progress in the waist deep snow.  We would take turns leading which was so exhausting not just physically but mentally.

Above: Switchbacking our way up through the treeline.  After leading for a while, I fall to the back to get the advantage of a more packed path.  By the time its my turn again though, I’m still pretty tired!   A short time after this picture was taken, we found ourselves beneath a very steep wall that blocked our way.  From snow stability tests we did along the way, we determined that the steeper slope wasn’t stable.  Our tests earlier in the day were showing us that the load layer became unstable at angles greater than 40 degrees. A dead end.  My instincts  told me to veer climbers left.  I mentioned this a couple of times but being tired, I didn’t insist on it when it wasn’t received well.

At the dead end, we decided it was unsafe to continue and that we should descend.  At least what made it so hard to go up made it amazing on the way down.  Waist deep snow and really steep terrain made the run down to the valley incredible.  Back down in  the valley, we could look up and see where we had gone wrong.  My instincts were correct to continue left which would have avoided the dangerous wall and placed us where we should have been all along!  When you aren’t 100% sure of something, it makes it difficult to champion your opinion which would have been useful in this instant.  At least we had a good debrief in the valley about the mistakes we made and how to improve for next time and what things we should do differently.  It does mean that a third attempt on this mountain is in the works.  Next year.  

Above:  we took some short cuts down the Takakkaw falls summer road on our way back to the highway.  A nice bit of excitement on the long trudge back to the cars.  As fun as the descent was, we were all a little disappointed not to summit especially since this was our 2nd attempt this year on Mt Field.  

Hugo catches some sleep as we make the long trudge down the summer road back to our cars.  We found it pretty easy to obey the posted speed limit!

Below: Randy in “the white room” bombing down Mt Field.  Picture taken by Emil.

Sask Film Tax Incentive Over

The Saskatchewan Government made some news this week when it ended subsidies to the Saskatchewan film industry.  Naturally many Can-con celebrities have lined up to lend support and arguments for keeping it.  What really puzzles me are the economic arguments.  An online petition claims:

 -The film industry created 1200 jobs in 2009/10 alone.
- It’s not money out, it’s money in.
- Don’t eliminate the SFETC!

“Every dollar of tax incentive for the film industry returned six dollars in economic activity,” Steve Wells, Ph.D. & Clyde Posey, Ph.D.”

It pains me to have to point out that taking money from one person and giving it to another has not created anything!

 The imagined jobs come at the expense of the ones that could have been gained by individuals keeping and spending their money in the first place.  Only a PhD, a politician or an actor  could be so self-absorbed not to see this.

In fact, its worse than just a “one for one” trade-off since money going into this industry creates a false signal to other economic participants.  Labour and capital ends up being lured away from productive activities into non productive activities.  From the Star Phoenix article: “the change will force him to move his family and business elsewhere.”  This seems like a bad thing since one less person is spending money on things.  But if everyone else is paying to keep him here, they are all better off (economically) without him.

Also incomprehensible is how an industry can be so economically valuable yet experience a death-blow without tax money.  The death-blow only serves to prove this is an economic drain and not an economic asset.

The final bizarre argument is the notion that the tax incentive encourages outside money to be spent here when it otherwise would not have: “it’s not money out, it’s money in.”  By that logic, we should be offering all tourists half-price vacationsin Saskatchewan  where taxpayers pay the other half of the bill. See how long it takes for that to make us rich.

I will gladly listen to arguments supporting a subsidy because it has cultural merit that benefits everyone.  I may or may not agree with that but at least it’s not based on an economic falsehood that insults my intelligence.

 

Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue Course

My touring group has some trip plans for this year that involve travel over crevassed glaciers.  In order to negotiate these obstacles safely, we hired a certified ski and rock guide to train us over three days in safe glacier travel techniques and crevasse rescue.  Steep learning curve, no pun intended.

We first practised setting up crevasse victim extraction systems on easy, flat ground.  The steps involve building improvised anchors, transferring the victim’s rope to the anchor (so you are no longer the only thing holding them up)  and then building mechanical advantage pulling systems.  All with just rope and carabiners.  The anchor is built by removing and burying your skis with a short rope tied to it.

Digging this slot is difficult as I am  pinned to the ground under the load of the person fallen into the crevasse.  A folding aluminum shovel is part of the avalanche rescue kit we are already carrying.  After filling in the snow, this new rope can now take the load and free me.

Above: The red rope is attached to my buried skis and I’ve tied the yellow rope to the downhill load rope so the victim is now supported by the anchor.  This allows the people on top to get up and build something to pull the victim out.  For the knot curious, from left to right is: figure eight on a bight, double overhand and out of frame is a triple prussic wrap.  After anchoring the victim, the person behind me can repel down to me using a prussic wrap to their harness.  Together we set up the pulley system which can look very complicated but is elegantly simple.

Above: Emil and I set up a 2:1 pulley system using rope and carabiners.  The complexity arises out of building a system that can only pull in one direction and locks when we stop pulling.  This protects the victim from falling if something fails or we let go of the haul rope.  Complexity also arises from  transferring rope loads while under pressure.  This picture ought to give some indication of why these techniques are difficult to learn from books or videos!

On Day 3 we skied up the Victoria Glacier to test our skills.

Above:  We left from the famous Lake Louise Hotel and set out across the lake.  Some tour bus denizens stopping to take their obligatory Lake Louise pictures were snapping pictures of us getting ready.  We did look like we were off to do something pretty serious but we couldn’t help feeling like a herd of  elk getting their picture taken!

Above:  Our instructor at the toe of the glacier.  Understanding how topography influences glacier  morphology allows one to predict where the crevasses are more likely to be hidden under the snow.  All this goes into chosing your route to minimise hazard exposure.

Above: Hugo, Peggy and Guide Doug roped up on the Victoria glacier while Doug tests the strength of the snow bridging the crevasses.  The conditions were perfect for learning as it was a blizzard and near total whiteout conditions.  Under conditions like this, it becomes really hard to tell if you are facing a vertical wall up or down.  For testing glacier route finding,  it’s ideal to  experience bad conditions under supervision.

After taking turns leading on rope, we found a big cornice (the snow cliff pictured above) to simulate someone falling into a crevasse.  Randy and Emil were on my rope and Emil wanted to hurl himself off this 15 foot snow cliff.  Emil is indestructible but I was concerned that Randy and I could be really hurt getting yanked forward under the stress but Emil suggested that it was better to test things out for real here rather than find out when you are 5 days from help!  I reluctantly agreed and it wasn’t so bad.  The jerk was unpleasant, and holding him while the anchor gets built is very unpleasant as the weight pulls the harness into your kidneys something awful.

While Emil hung in the abyss, I built the anchor and transferred the rope load off of Randy and I and onto the anchor.  Randy repelled to the edge and we built our rescue system and had him out in about 15 minutes. Considering we did it in a whiteout blizzard with cold hands, we were pretty pleased with our success.  The instructor gave us a passing grade though we all agreed we would have to practice till we could do it in our sleep.  Even under difficult conditions like these, it’s always easier than when you are under the stress of a real incident.

Above: Peggy initiating a rescue of instructor Doug who is hanging at the bottom of the rope.  Flat light completely hides the abyss he is in!  Here you can see how the rope under load will cut into the edge.  This creates so much friction that pulling becomes impossible.  This is why you need many different techniques and skills to overcome this problem.  This picture also shows how slowly one must travel and the safety precautions like roping up one must practice to avoid invisible features like this.

Above:  Hugo and Peggy are all smiles after successfully rescuing Doug from his snowy abyss.  The blizzard lets up briefly to see the wall of giant Mt Victoria.

 

Above: Randy and I setting up a rescue system to pull Emil out.  With the bad light it’s hard to tell that Randy (in blue) is perched on a 15 foot vertical drop.  This isn’t a trick of the camera, it really can be hard to tell up from down!  Randy uses a folding probe to feel his way to the edge like a blind man.  The yellow cord is a sliding knot that locks in place under pressure.  This allows him to safely inch his way towards the edge.

It was a great course that gave our group the skills we need to navigate through crevassed terrain.  Hopefully, we will never need to perform a rescue by using good route management and techniques.  But having simulated pretty accurately what it would be like, with proper techniques, it really isn’t a high consequence incident.  In fact, we’ve already made plans to lower each other into some crevasses in the summer time for a picture taking trip.