Thursday, June 30, 2011

habitat for humanity in haiti...

after the trail, and after hanging out with jane in northwest america, i'm intending to go and visit kellyanne borg in haiti. she sent me a link to a habitat for humanity project going on there... it costs $5000 to volunteer for a week. i haven't looked into it properly yet, it's tricky when you get to town and have to organise everything quickly. but i was pondering the idea of putting one of those donation things on this blog, and if i raised enough, volunteering, and if not giving it to HFH - or actually probably tear in haiti...

this is a link to the project: http://www.habitat.org/cwp/2011/register.aspx

although, i'm really not sure about all of this, i suspect there may be others who would be far more effective than me, and possibly i should be trying to resource them... feel very very free to provide feedback here...

hmmmm.... a lot of photos...



i kind of figured as i need to leave the library soon and i can only upload photos here i'd just get as many in as i could - cos i can add text later if i get round to it...

this is a town shot... to resupply we hitch into towns. this generally involves a supermarket stop, where we sort out our next week's food - sometimes outside the supermarket... it's often a time where we meet up with other hikers too: in this shot there's some random dude, liz, funion (obscured), miaow miaow, charlie, drop dead, annie, jamz & pellet...



this is pellet taking a nap on kearsage pass... comfy looking rock...


this is the approach to kearsage pass... (i was a bit crook this day - and ended up with a vomiting migraine - (mate, the spinach enchiladas were a mistake...), great day to be sick - we were heading into lone pine and i could rest up well...




this is the view from my bed one night.. well, one of the many good views...




and this is my bed (well - a photo somewhere down below)... note the bear can, kindly loaned to me from the bear can loan programme; not much use for such things in australia... bear cans are supposed to be waterproof, however a couple of nights ago it snowed and rained on us all night, and i had to pour about 2 cups of water out of my bear can... could have been disastrous had i not been one day out of town... the sierras are a compulsory bear can area. to be honest i usually sleep with mine next to my head, so the bear's going to have to come right over and visit to get my food... (incidentally (and mostly irrelevantly), one of the great things i have discovered here in the land of freedom, orange cheese, corn syrup and endless refills of ordinary coffee [had my first good coffee this morning - the doubters are wrong - you can get good coffee in america, you've just got to look harder] is string cheese. do we have string cheese in australia? it looks like dodgey kraft cheese sticks, but it tastes like bocconcini and you split it and 'string' it as you eat it. it's fabulous, one of the greatest things i've discovered here...) (sorry, have reverted to my old habits of multiple brackets..)

also incidentally, while sitting here (for a ridiculously long time) in the mammoth lakes library, there is some kind of blue grassy band rehearsing in an adjacent room, playing guitars and violins and banjo style things - sounds great...











some of these shots are of the sheer quantity of water. i haven't particularly managed to catch it, but there's water raging down every slope, once i saw 5 torrents meeting up, and often the track is more like a creek, or waterfall...



amongst the photos below is a mule deer. i have now seen many many mule deer, including bucks with antlers and a little baby who was surprisingly small - like a small dog, with spots - nothing like a baby foal or calf, way way smaller...

one day while eating lunch, drop dead spied a coyote far below us on a frozen lake. we watched him for quite a while, very exciting because despite seeing their scats everywhere someone told me you rarely seen them (liz has since told me she's watched two on separate occasions, fossicking for food...)



somewhere in here there's a shot of the golden staircase... you kind of have to look closely to see the track, zigzagging back and forth... at the moment the pct doubles as the john muir trail, and there's some amazing engineering which has gone into the track. it's very very impressive, although we miss most of it as it's covered in snow...




i'm not sure if this is a woodpecker or a sapsucker - when i looked it up it was called something like a red breasted sapsucker - but i'm not sure if that's a woodpecker or not... it was really close, just industrially going about its work...


um... lots of snow


this is annie and drop dead reflected in a lake as we wandered by. jamz and i walked over a section of the lake so that i could see dark water below jamz' footprints...





classic glissading shot... i haven't got too many glissading shots - i'm too busy trying to find the fastest glissading spot. think i have an excellent weight to slipperyness of pants ratio...


and lots of snow... i still get excited by lots of snow... most of my fellow hikers are over walking through it - and it is slow and tiring, but mate it's exciting...



ice axes, passes and climbing whitney


i think when i got my ice axe i thought it was pretty hilarious, like a hard core prop, that i didn't really know how to use... then it came to be a handy tool (initially for digging dump-holes, and then for traversing mountains), but then, while climbing whitney from the east and ascending mather pass, it became an essential piece of gear, critical for ascending and traversing steep snow sections...
this is a shot of jamz' ice axe i think (same as mine), on forester. it's so cold that's an icicle forming...


mather pass was my favourite because it involved some great rock climbing (we went too high and so had to down climb through crazy talus), and then a sketchy traverse ending in punching through the cornice to climb over onto the pass... so fun...
the second shot is a failed attempt to show how steep mather is - i'm above the pass, looking down on drop dead who is still traversing...

we started climbing whitney from the western side, however we'd had a pretty mixed up day previously. we were hiking with some friends who hadn't done the previous 700miles, nor been at altitude as much as we had, and the day - which was 40km of walking ended up being far too long... i thought it was incredibly fun because we came down a ridge in the moonlight (beautiful) and at one stage the snowy ridge we were descending just dropped away steeply, and i watched my friends disappear over the edge... i spent a lot of time laughing down that crazy sliding-postholing descent of insanity, whereas they spent a lot of time cursing (the snow; the night; and, i suspect, me, for laughing)... it was also great watching them ahead through the trees with their head-torches making moving circles of light on the snow...



anyway, we got into camp around 10:30 that night - i ate dinner at real midnight (not hiker midnight which is reportedly 9pm), and had no idea where one of our non-acclimated friends were. consequently our start the following day, after finding our friend, was a little tardy.

we realised mid-way up whitney we probably didn't have enough time to make the summit and return safely, so we sat on some rocks above guitar lake and shared the wine we'd been carrying for the top with some friends who'd summitted before dawn and were on their way back down... this i suspect was important altitude training. we spent the rest of the day glissading and boot-skiing back down the mountain like crazy folk, and then casually pottering around a beautiful lake/flooded meadow amongst epic snow clad mountains - definitely my favourite failed-summit experience...




the upshot of all this is that we continued walking, then when we hitched out of kearsage pass trailhead, we spent a day zeroing in lone pine (i was crook so my friends kindly switched whitney climbing days to give me a day to recover), and then climbed whitney from the eastern side, adding 2000 feet of climbing... i think we started at 8000 roughly and climbed to 14496 (kosciuszko is 7310 feet)... one section of whitney involved climbing 2500 vertical feet up a snow chute, hauling ourselves up step by step in the thinning air with an ice axe...

i saw a thing on tv last night here in mammoth on lincoln hall on everest, and it really puts whitney in perspective, still, it felt pretty epic going up...



there were a number of bold marmots and chipmunks on the summit of whitney...










(all the shots after the first 2 are from climbing whitney...)

climbing muir pass


















ok, the computer's having a weird spac attack and has suddenly decided to put all the photos in vertically when they were taken horizontally, and rotating makes them weirder, but i have limited library time so for the time being they're staying 90° out... these are not necessarily in the right order but this is climbing muir pass, a very attractive pass... (actually now it's struggling to upload any, so it might get a bit sketchy - these are in reverse order of climbing the pass)...

muir was fantastic, easy and fun (not my favourite pass - that was mather - which was way more epic)... annie (red vine) stopped on the way up to make an 'annie' sign in the snow... there's a fabulous hut at the top - muir hut - which has been built completely out of stone kind of like an igloo... no knees was there when we arrived, (he got his new name [previously garby because of the vast rubbish collection style eating capacity he has (he's 6'5")], from a failed glissade off whitney which removed all the skin off his knees), and balls and sunshine arrived a while after we got there... we cooked outside and slept in the hut... the sunset and sunrise were beautiful... while we were sitting there a bird did a courtship dance (we think) for another bird... as soon as i put my camera away he put his wings out all the way...