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I've been getting increasingly bugged by driving to one place for no other reason. So when ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ojouchan says she needs a ride, it's generally a signal that I'm going hiking. Since I was taking her into the center of the valley, it didn't seem right to then double back and do the Santa Monica Mountains. Instead, I geocached my way north through the valley to O'Melveny Park. Since I spent a lot of time caching (and because it was very, very hot, I only did about a mile and a half, but it was beautiful up there. I'll have to get back in the morning some time. Sadly, I didn't have a good record with the caching: 6/13. I'm pretty sure that two of them weren't there, one was being watched too closely, and another two I didn't go for because I coyote kept circling them. The other two were probably just me being dense. Still, I was hoping to hit one hundred fifty today, instead I'm one shy.  TueNYTX: 4. Solved without trying to guess the theme, because the tie-together clue was too long. Tags: geocaching, hiking
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I had a doctor's appointment today, but I was feeling the effects of having slacked off on exercising for a while. So I resolved to head into Griffith Park for a quick hike. There is a new trail of caches, and I needed to get a new peak. See, I'd tried to get to the top of Mount Bell before. And I thought I had. Except I didn't actually have very accurate information about where it was, so I pointed to the wrong place in Google Earth. On the day I came back from supposedly climbing it, I discovered, too late, that I had climbed what one hiker called "Mount Taco." waah waaaaaaahSo this new trail was going right by Mount Bell; I figured I'd grab some caches and reach the top. Easy peasy. Unfortunately, I let myself be sidetracked by some Mystery Hunt business, so I got out a lot later than I expected. I ended up in Griffith Park a bit after 11 a.m. But I figured I'd still have enough time to get up and back to the doctor's office at 2 p.m. But once again, I forgot how long it takes me to look for caches. As it was approaching one, I was close to Mount Bell, but still not there. I knew I should go back, but I was so close; I couldn't let Mount Bell defeat me again. Last time, I'd come from the south, and there wasn't much elevation gain. This time I'd climbed up a thousand feet. And it was close, damnit, my GPSr said it was less than a quarter of a mile away. I mean, I knew it was longer by trails, but I could speed up and do it. And besides, I could go faster on my way down. I wouldn't be diverted by geocaching, and I'd be going down, which is always better than up. So I hurried up, I hustled. I'd been in the area before; I knew the trails I was looking for; I knew I had to climb up, then do a long circling of the peak before I'd make my way to the south side, where the game trail to the top was. And from there, it would just be a quick jog to the top. The video would have to be short, but I could do it. I started jogging, despite being in hiking boots. I sped up to a run when I could. And I pushed up that hill. I kept checking my watch, seeing if I was making it far enough. I had to make it to the smaller trail by one, I knew. I watched the minute hand crawl, while I pushed higher. It's those kinds of times when you're shocked to remember how much you can do in a minute, how far you can go. And so as I got closer and closer, I managed a pace that made me sure that I could make, and made me sure that I couldn't. I rounded one switchback and made my way back. I was right by it. If there were a trail, I could go up right now. But instead I had to trace an achingly long circumference while my GPSr told me that the peak was 500 feet away—never more, never less, a vicious circle. And then I was on the south side of the ridge. The wildflowers were right were the were supposed to be. I started running. In my massive hiking shoes, I was probably the most unlikely jogger in Griffith Park. I passed people with dogs. And I was there. But the moment I saw the small trail again, I knew that I couldn't to do it. There'd been a lot more growth. And the rattlers had come out (I'd seen one earlier). I'd have to be more careful picking my way through the brush. My speed-demoning had been for naught. If I went higher, I'd be late for my appointment. And as much as I love hiking, I hate being late even more. Of course, now I was in a quandry. I should have turned back about fifteen minutes ago and enjoyed a leisurely stroll back to the car. Now, I had about a half hour to go back the two miles it had taken me 90 minutes to climb. So I started running again. When you weigh over two hundred pounds, momentum is more enemy than friend when going downhill. Oh, it was fun sometimes—careening down the fire road with the power of science propelling me, letting my the magic in my legs do as it would, flying—but at a certain point, I couldn't ignore the fact that I wasn't in a high school cross-country race anymore, and if I did twist an ankle, I'd miss my appointment (but have a date with an emergency room). I cooled down a bit, but I kept checking my watch, and the "instant speed" display on my GPS. Oh, the math! "If I average four miles per hour, I'll make it back to the car in half an hour. Hopefully sooner because I won't have detours. But if I let the average slip down to three m.p.h., it'll take fourty minutes!" I ran, I jogged, I racewalked, and strolled purposefully, and ultimately, I made it down that hill. With no problem. Tags: hiking
Current Music: DJ Magnet, "Love Comes Running Up That Hill Quickly (Placebo vs. Pet Shop Boys v
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Like I said, I've been slow to update my maps. For a while, Google Earth was crashing on me, so I lost work and got pretty disheartened. Also, the trip that I'm working on, to Temescal Peak, was pretty long and has a bunch of stuff to fiddle with. In the meanwhile, here's the media from that hike. First, there's the pictures from the hike: Then, I took some pictures of selected pages of the register for Temescal Peak: Finally, I uploaded the video from the peak. I thought I'd done this a while back, but I guess my connection froze: Now I really need some sleep. TueNYTX: 4; TueNYSX: 5:30. Tags: hiking, santa monica summits
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I've been once again finding either the time or the impetus to post from work. And things have gotten a little crazy around the house. ojouchan finished work with the film she was on much earlier than expected, and a lot of time was dedicated to keeping up her spirits. Another large block of time has been dedicated to getting her her driving permit and teaching her to drive. Hollywood streets are way too busy for us to practice, so we have to take a drive before we spend time driving and drive back. And between all of that, I've actually had some activities of my own (generally planned when I thought I'd have much more free time than I could handle). So it's been fun and exciting, but rough on internet me.
April first is already starting to bug me. I'd wanted to catch up on the Story Games forum, but they've apparently archived nearly all of their old threads in service to today's "prank."
I've been doing a lot of hiking, but haven't posted much about it. Ojou joined me for my last two Santa Monica Summits, San Vicente Mountain and Saddle Peak. Both involved short hikes which, perversely, could have been avoided by driving. But that's not the point, of course. In retrospect, the unusual number of bugs meant that we should ahve driven up San Vicente, but the hike up to Saddle Peak took us along a beautiful stretch of the Backbone Trail that were wonderful.
On Saturday, I headed east to Game Empire to play some RPGs at Nerd SoCal's March Game Day. It was a lot of fun. I played Shock in the morning, and In a Wicked Age in the evening. I'd heard a lot about both, and both were excellent. I have to say that IAWA was significantly more excellent, though. I'd like to go into details, but that would be a whole other post. I enjoy these convention and miniconvention outings. It seems like I always have enough interested friends around to do some gaming, but it very rarely coalesces into playing games. But at these gatherings, the people I've played with have been pretty uniformly awesome, and it's great to try out a new game every four hours.
One of the reasons I can't really hang with fandoms is that I can't keep a text alive within my heart very long. Fans of a show or book—I mean Capital-F-Fandom fans—just seem to be able to keep that show alive regardless of what's happening. Writer's strike, delayed book, early cancelation, none of these can dim the spirits of fandom because they keep things alive through fanfic, speculation, spoilers, art, reruns, rereads, and any manner of thing. But for me, that fire only really exists while the show is going; when it stops, everything cools. Battlestar Galactica restarts this week, and I'm having trouble remembering everything about it. I feel like this any time something I was a fan of goes away and comes back. I'll be into it soon enough, I know, but when I look at those giant ads plastered around my home, I feel disconnected. I develop fandom muscles quickly, but I let them atrophy too easily.
radiotelescope wrote a fun little puzzle called Praser 12 a little while ago (last week?). It didn't take too long to solve (though it did take a while to find the time to actually do the solving); I think I was just on Zarf's brainwavelength when it came to laying to whole thing out.
TueNYTX: 5:45. I've definitely let my crossword muscles atrophy. I agree with thedan that Nikoli puzzles work out a different part of the brain, and it's hard to keep both of them going. I need to shape up both for Hunt construction this year. Of course, I'm getting better at solving the Nikoli puzzles. I absolutely breezed through the mega-sized puzzles released today. Tags: hiking, santa monica summits
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After work (that's Friday a.m.), I'm going to attack another summit of the Santa Monica Mountains. Once again, I'm staying close to home. This time, I'm going to visit Temescal Peak in Topanga State Park. I'm going to enter from Reseda, and generally follow the path of my last trip up there with cramerica. I'm going to start in Marvin Braude, and head into Topanga SP using the Temescal Fire Trail. This time, I'll take the Garapito Trail south to Eagle Rock. From there, I'll head east to the Hub Junction. Temescal Peak is right near there, and I'm going to climb up. I come back up north using the Temescal Fire Road and the Bent Arrow Trail. Someone else has used this same trail, and he reckons it's about 7.5 miles. With the detour up to Temescal, I'm guessing about 8. I'm hoping to leave at about 9 a.m. Let's hope it stays cool again today. Tags: hiking, santa monica summits
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Yesterday, I duplicated my work in Google Earth and put together some pictures from my last trip to Griffith Park. Today, I was listening to Podcacher talk about geocoding photos, and I thought I'd detail the steps I take to put together the KMZ files for my hikes. I think a few readers might be interested, but mostly, I intend to post it on the Podcacher forums. As a result, cut tag!
( How to Create a Fancy Google Map of Your Hike with Photos and Other Neat Stuff. )
And that's it. There's still a bit more for me to learn. Sometimes I think I should enforce the ordering of waypoints by numbering them (Google Maps always defaults to alphabetical order, it seems), but I think I'd rather work to make suer that I can tell my story geographically instead of chronologically. I'm still learning how to properly break up the tale of my journey into the various textual locations (Google Earth descriptions, Picasa captions, and Geocaching logs). Soon I'll play around with embedding links to YouTube videos, so that I can include my video from Ladyface (and future others like it). But that's pretty much the method I use right now. Hopefully this information was of some interest to you. Let me know if anything is unclear.
If you decided to skip all the technical stuff, here's the Google Map of my most recent trip to Griffith Park. And here's my Picasa gallery for the same trip:
Tags: hiking
Current Location: Home
Current Mood:  pedagogical
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Yesterday, I was thinking about joinging Hike the Geek, but a series of plans changing, then changing back, then changing again left me unwilling to rush to drive all the way out to Agoura. (Sorry guys.) Instead, I went to my own backyard (as it were) to hike up to Cahuenga Peak. Here's the Google Map, and here's the Google Earth file. I spent some time organizing my geocaches and GPS and eventually settled on a route from the Hollywood Reservoir area to the west. It meant a short hike, but a kind of brutal one: I'd be gaining about eight hundred feet of altitude in three quarters of a mile. The ascent was as rough as I expected, and expecting it didn't make it feel any better, but I was amazed when I finally made my way to the top of the ridge. You see, the whole way up, I was walking through the standard Southern California chaparral—the same stuff you'd find on any hillside in LA. But when I got to the top, in addition to a stunning view of the Valley, there was a huge landscape of black. See, the fires had completely wiped out the north side of the hills, but the south side, where I was climbing, was untouched. So as I walked east to the peak, I could see a normal landscape to my right and a wasteland to my left. Most of this you'll have to take my word on, though, because I left my camera at my parents' house during Thanksgiving. Still, I think I need to go back up there on another clear day when I do have it. Tags: hiking, santa monica summits
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accomplished
aggravated
