End of the Challenge and a long drive

I finished up the Sierra Challenge with an 18 hour push from Whitney Portal. It was a long day but I did manage to squeek out a victory in the race for the polka dot jersey. Then I crashed in the back of the truck.

It is a long long way across this country

My next mission was to drive across the country for my cousin's wedding. I stopped off in Manzanar to take a few pics and my truck wouldn't start- the key would only turn a bit in the lock. After much messing and wiggling and so on I gave up and got it towed to Lone Pine to get the lock replaced. Unfortunately they had a bit of a search for a replacement. but eventually it was replaced and I could be on my way. By 7 pm I was heading north out of Bishop. I got well into Nevada before I needed to stop for some sleep. The next day I had a blowout on highway 6. It took about an hour to get out the jack and put on the spare and during that time about 5 people passed me. Between changing the tire and then buying a new one that wasted a few more hours. I was able to pick up my backpack which I left in SLC. Thanks Bob. I slept somewhere in the middle of Wyoming that night. The 3rd day was a long one, the rest of Wyoming, all of Nebraska - and it is a lot, and all of Iowa. I didn't get very far into Illinois before I had to sleep though. Then another long day taking me through the rest of Ill, Indiana, Ohio, and much of PA. That allowed me to make it to Boston around noon on Friday. oof.

The wedding was nice even if we were starting to get the front of Hurricane Irene. The next day we elected to stay home and not drive. The storm brought a lot of rain and wind and a few downed branches with about 2 hours with no electricity. It seemed to mostly hit to the west of us. My brother however had to be back for work on Monday and as a consequence had to rent a car and drive all the way to Rochester to get a flight. oof. He did make it though.

I started on my trip report for the Sierra Challenge here:

http://www.electricant.net/grundyman/schallenge2011.html

I hope to continue improving it though.

2011 Sierra Challenge Day 4

2011 Sierra Challenge Day 4 - lots and lots of sierra day hiking and peak bagging, that is for sure.

4 days, 9 peaks, lots of miles (80 or more?) and lots and lots of vertical. I am tired.

I made spot tracker pages for each day... (1 - 4 in order)

 http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view?trip_id=272783

 http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view?trip_id=272784

 http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view?trip_id=272785

http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view/?trip_id=272786

I think I have the virtual polka dot jersey for "king of the mountain" - most peaks. I am nowhere near the yellow leader jersey for the fastest times though (doing bonus peaks hurts that, so does being slow and taking photos).

so far so good, although I am tired.

upcoming suffering - the 2011 Sierra Challenge.

This year I plan to participate in the 2011 Sierra Challenge. Basically 10 days of long day hikes to mostly obscure peaks with between 15 and 25 miles of hiking and 4,000 to 6,000+ feet of elevation gain. Sounds great eh? Unfortunately about 2/3 of the way through a hike up to the top of Wheeler Peak on Tuesday I started feeling lousy. By that evening I was pretty miserable with a general weak feeling and everything from the neck up being very unhappy. I went to bed by 8 and didn't get up until 7:30 the next morning except to drink water and go to the bathroom (breathing through my mouth made me very dehydrated). I feel better today, but this isn't how I would like to feel a few days before 10 grueling days are about to start.


Some more info on the Sierra Challenge can be found here:

http://www.snwburd.com/bob/challenge/2011/

with a summitpost page here that might have updates once things start.

http://www.summitpost.org/phpBB3/2011-sierra-challenge-aug-12-21-t58180.html

I will take my spot tracker with me, so you might be able to track my daily progress here:


http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0Dc9Uh3Nfi5gSoXCZcVqStstGq6beNZ8X

I'll try to update things from time to time, but I might just curl up and go to sleep after every day rather than get online and update things.



here is my spot track page for Wheeler Peak

http://www.spotadventures.com/trip/view/?trip_id=271694

short update from Wanderlust and the OR show

Once again life has been hectic, which is nice, but hectic.

Sam walks a water line at Lake Tahoe

Wanderlust was fun, as you might expect. How can you go wrong with a yoga - music festival with a heap of Yogaslackers? Among other things we did a human anchored line over the high camp pool. Here is a link to a pic someone else took of it.

http://unofficialnetworks.com/line-week-day-pool-34423/

After Wanderlust it was off to SLC for the Outdoor Retailer show where I helped set up the Prana booth and the Rejuvenation room, wandered the exhibit halls looking at all the shiny new things, hung out with fellow Yogaslackers, and didn't get a lot of sleep.

These pictures of Sam, Paul, and Jason were all over the show

Sam and Dan do some acro on the 5th floor roof of the SLC library

We escaped a well behaved zombie apocalypse in a large SUV

then went on to pioneer the sport of acro yoga pool - here Sam breaks from bird

Next I plan on heading back to the Sierra with a stop in Great Basin Natl. Park to head up Wheeler Peak, and then try my hand (and more importantly feet and legs) at the Sierra Challenge. My prediction - Pain.

Latest doings - big day in the mountains and now Squaw Valley

Well, I haven't reported on my doings for a while. I had a big day in the mountains July 12th. I hiked in from Pine Creek up to the Morgan mine and then along the ridge over a number of peaks such as Broken Finger with a fair bit of scrambling and up to low 5th class climbing and lots of confusing and tortuous route finding. Then over to Morgan Peak and Little Lakes peak and then back to the trail to hike out by moonlight. It ended up being about an 18 hour push and I was quite tired. Someday I'll make a trip report for it. The spot track is here:

spot track for big day in the Sierras

I also did some mountain biking and scouting of Bishop Creek for packrafting - too much brush though.

Now I am up at Squaw Valley to set up for Wanderlust. Lake Tahoe was very blue, but the traffic was grim. I was getting passed by bicycles.

Lake Tahoe - very blue. I think I had the polarizer on for this pic

short Owens River Packraft (7/10/11)

I got a pretty late (Yogaslacker) start on a packraft trip on the Owens River. I parked my truck at the Five Bridges bridge over the Owens, then I biked up to the Pleasant Valley Campground with my raft. This was into a headwind and took about an hour. Then I switched to raft mode (20 minutes) and cast off downstream at 5:17 pm. The water might have been a little higher than last time, but not by much. I didn't stop at all and made it down to the bridge in about 2.5 hours. I surprised a number of great blue herons and a hawk when I came around corners, but there were less little flitty birds than the first trip. The new packraft handles well without a bicycle on the front. It is definitely narrower than my old raft was.

I also got my spot tracker back (Thanks Frank), so here is a link to the spot track from this trip. You can see how squiggly the Owens is for some of this stretch.

Link to Tom's spot track of this short Owens River packraft trip

back into the mountains - June 28 to July 2

This will be quite brief, but I hope to update it in a few days when I get more easy internet time.

I got another call and headed into the mountains. This time I headed in from N Lake up over Piute Pass. The first night it snowed a few inches and it blew a lot. In the morning it was still blowing around but I decided to get up and out anyway. I ticked off a number of smaller peaks in the 4 Gables area including what is apparently officially the 4 Gables peak as well as the more impressive peaks to the N and S. Then I moved camp closer to the next days objective - slow and frustrating with the soft afternoon snow - it is at least twice as fast with half the effort to walk on top of the snow in the morning.

The 3rd days objective was Mt Merriam (13,077'), Royce (13,280 ft), and possibly Feather Peak (>13,240 '). I managed all 3 and found a nice couloir for the descent from Feather that saved me a lot of tedious downclimbing. Once again the afternoon snow was a chore to pass. I think this was my longest day with over 4600' of vertical. Once again it snowed (and blew around) in the evening - just enough to make me pack up and hide in the bivy tent instead of drying stuff out.

For the 4th day I hiked back and climbed up Mt Humphreys (13, 986 ft) via the NW side - this had some exciting climbing - something about 4th classing past rappel anchors makes one feel both superior and nervous. From there I headed south towards the final objective.

my shadow as I hike back towards Humphreys

The 5th and last day I climbed Mt Emerson from the SW. There was some scrambling to start and a lot of talus up to the lower W summit, then I traversed and scrambled around a lot of ridge to the actual E summit (13,204 ft). This day was a lot warmer with almost no wind. I took the gully SE from the summit, I think this was a big mistake as it had a lot of loose scree and rock, and then pinched down and had some waterfalls and sketchy old snow. I was glad to have my crampons although I wasn't glad to be putting them on on a little ledge. I also had my full backpack with all my stuff. Finally I made it down to the main Piute Pass trail and back to the truck. Down at the trailhead there were a lot of mosquitoes.

I look out over Piute Pass from the SE shoulder of Mt Emerson

It was fun to recognize so many names in the summit registers. Some peaks are a lot more popular than others, with only a few ascents a year, others see many ascents each year.


Another dip in McGee Creek refreshed me, but I had to scrub and scrape the paste of dead skin and sunscreen off of my cheeks.


here is a link to a slightly more complete trip report of the Mount Humphreys Basin trip