Back in the hospital?

So all kinds of shit is numb now, and I'm debating whether or not to go back to the hospital. I emailed my neuro, which is like pissing in the wind, and asked her to call in a course of steroids for next week...at least this way I have a few more days to decide and if it gets worse then the drugs will already be in the cancer center.  Sick.

I tried to do the cross training class this morning but just got upset because it's hard to run when your feet are numb.  I bailed and bouldered instead, which made me a lot happier.  Bouldering doesn't bother me - stomping around on my numb feet bothers me.

On the bright side, I feel pretty strong and a few people have said that I've lost a few pounds...

The drawback of the steroids is that it's 5 days of feeling like a cancer patient and sitting still for 3 hours while you get a drug that will make you temporarily insane. And it might not work. At the moment I'm not feeling any weakness, so I count that as a positive.

On the minus side, admitting that I have a problem and having a doctor call in drugs sort of blows my coping mechanism to smithereens.  My coping mechanism is to just pretend like I'm "totally fine."  And really, I am totally fine.  It's just numbness...I'm still planning on hiking up Middle Pal with John this weekend - I mean as long as I can walk, why not walk? If it makes no difference at all, why worry? On the other hand, if the drugs are going to reduce the inflammation in my spine/brain and prevent any further damage, then what's the harm?  Other than the copay and losing a week out of my year. Time is precious - going to the infusion center for a week just disrupts everything. The drugs make you feel like shit, it's hard to be active, it's hard to think and it's hard to sleep. Plus facing head on the fact that I'm "sick", and realizing that I may not be "fine" forever.

On the other hand, we're all going downhill, and none of us ever know what shit lies beyond the next minute. I just have a diagnosis.

Oh yeah - emails and calls of encouragement/advice are welcome.

Food journaling

I've always wanted to keep a food journal for a little bit just to see how I eat over time.  My cross-training instructor suggested dailyplate.com and I'm very impressed.  It's free, very well organized, automatically does an autofill search for what food you're logging, can do any serving size, automatically produces stats of what you eat over different time periods, and more. I've already turned a couple of friends on to it...but don't take my word for it, try it yourself.

hee hee!

Jason sent me this video:


MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

shorter and harder

Just got back from the hulk with Ethan. We did Positive Vibrations, and it is definitely a great route. However the wind and being freezing all day crushed me.  I was wearing a hat under my helmet, a lightweight down coat, a softshell and long underwear, and we were in the sun and I was still freezing. Fortunately we both climbed well and everything went smoothly.

Highlights include me gagging at a belay because I was dehydrated, didn't eat enough, and my body wasn't happy with the altitude, seeing Lucho and Matt on Airstream, helping Ethan get his alpine multi-pitch groove on, and watching a forest fire that broke out near our camp.  Oh yeah, and getting 175 dollar tickets each for not having wilderness permits.  Whoever left their campfire unattended has bad karma coming to them, because it ruined everyone's good time.  I've already resigned myself to setting aside a certain portion of my income for these situations, since it's practically a natural law that if there is busting to be done, I'll be the one that gets busted. At least our shit didn't burn down with the forest - my car keys were in there!

The Hulk is a gorgeous piece of granite and the rock quality is AMAZING. Justifiably, it's popular now and there were quite a few climbers up there.

I didn't bring my camera since Ethan had a helmet cam and a regular cam, so I'll direct traffic to his blog or have him send me some of the footage and photos.

It was a long day. We could have gone faster, but even still, almost every pitch is 160 to 200 ft. We were psyched to have an 80 meter rope...we definitely used it between the pitches and the rappels.

cloud seeding?

Good to see that the Bureau of Reclamation has a new way to sustain itself now that dams are no longer in vogue.

Also a good thing I got funding for Walker Lake tui chubs before there's any proof that cloud seeding will reduce salinity in Walker Lake...I have a feeling that even if cloud seeding worked, the water from the Walker River would still be WAY over-allocated. 

There's got to be another solution.

butterflies!

A coworker came by my cube today and asked me what I was doing tomorrow, because he had the opportunity of a lifetime.  Since my plan was to sit in my cube all day, I was listening...

So tomorrow I'm going to the Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge to count butterflies for my 8 hours!  YAY!  So psyched.  I get paid to look for butterflies.  Not too bad. It's been a good summer for field work and getting outside. I think I'm starting to like this agency gig.

And I'm getting a new cubicle, away from...things I'd like to be away from.  Maybe I can not have my ipod on all the time now to drown out...things I'd like to drown out.

Additionally I climbed for the first time in 2 weeks or so.  Jake and Jared and Stacy were there.  It's fun to watch Jake and Jared talk about work - they're both electricians.  Jake is so animated he could tell me about the weather and I'd laugh. It's awesome. Tomorrow another cross training class, and then maybe on Wednesday or Thursday I'll head back to the east side to do some climbing on the hulk.  Who knows, things like that tend to have a high bail factor.   I'm definitely psyched though.

One thing I'm worried about is that the last few days I've been wondering if I'm beginning to have an MS flareup.  The top of my left foot feels weird, I'm feeling a little like foot drop might be coming on in my right leg...I don't want to think about it too much, but I don't want to ignore it either. I'll be so fucking pissed if I have to go sit in the infusion center and lose time in the mountains.  Shit sucks.  I'm sure I'm fine though. I mean what am I going to do? I'm not going to change my plans, unless I absolutely cannot walk. I wonder if I'm feeling weird because I had 2 weeks of traveling, and I forgot my auto-injector in the backcountry, so I was slack on the injections. When I got back on Friday night, I pretty much slept through until Saturday night. Is being that tired normal? I've also had a little bit of personal stress.  But my diet has been good and I've been getting good sleep, so who knows.

Lauren left for Kenya yesterday.  To say goodbye, we went with John to play croquet in a park. She got me excited about going to Africa again. Now that I've been spending more time at elevation hiking I'm a little more excited - I just need to keep it up. Tickets are 1500 bucks at the very very cheapest though, and it takes 2 days each way to get there. It's not a trivial thing to get there and back. Still thinking though. I try to take every opportunity like that that I can, just as a general policy.

password protection?

I'm thinking about password-protecting this blog.  Please comment if you have any thoughts...

Silver King Creek 2010

I'm back from Silver King Creek, and I'm exhausted.  I have so many photos and stuff to write that I should probably break it up into at least 2 posts.  Here's a start. 


View Larger Map

Above is a map of the pack station where we met up on Monday morning to drop off gear up for the packers to pack onto the mules.  I have a secret crush on the guy who runs the pack station, Joe.  I could totally see living there in the high country above Coleville and riding horses all over the Carson Iceberg wilderness.  Plus, he is totally interested in the restoration of the Paiute cutthroat trout (despite potential reduction in his business because of fishing regulations), as well as mushrooms.  Ethan said that asking me about mushrooms is practically a marriage proposal.  So true.

But that's neither here nor there.

The crew consisted of me and 7 guys, mostly over 40. Some USFWS guys from Reno, some CDFG guys from the Sacramento area, a guy from Utah who works for Utah Division of Wildlife who was just there to see the Paiute cutthroat trout and help out, and a guy from the USFS in Reno. Most of these guys have been involved with the project for many years, so they had the logistics for the trip on lockdown. I made it clear that even with only one woman on the trip, the X's still outnumber the Y's.  Har, genetics joke.

We left our crap with the mules and 4 of us set off for Corral Valley Creek.

This was our camping destination, Connell's Cow Camp:


View Larger Map

Damn you can almost see the cabin on Google maps.  Crazy.

Highlights of the walk in include some wildlife, some mushrooms, taking dead batteries for the electrofishers and waiting for the pack train to bring fresh ones, the oldest juniper in California, and some spectacular views of Corral Valley Creek and the northern high sierra. 

View of Corral Valley Creek, a tributary to Silver King Creek. Silver King Creek is a tributary to the East Fork Carson River.

 View of the pack train coming to rescue us

Above are some pictures from the hike in.  A nice giant sawtooth mushroom, the oldest juniper in California, Panther amanita (I think), a nice cluster of pine drops, delicate stream orchid, and a view of the peaks west of Silver King Creek.

Top is red columbine, and bottom is marsh mallow (Sidalcea spp.). The Sidalcea was EVERYWHERE.  Fields of it in the meadows - super pretty.

We got back early enough so that the people who were on the clock (not me) could clean out the rat infested cabin. I wandered around looking for boletes (I remembered them from '08), set up my tent, and looked for fire wood. I scored some boletes from right behind the cabin and we cooked them up with Bill's tri tips for dinner.  Check out how delicious this looks!

Nice little caveman dinner

Day 2 was a long day, because we were sampling Upper Silver King Creek, but it was nice because it was right in front of the cabin.  The conductivity of the water was low, so the electrofishers had to get closer to the fish to shock them so we could collect data and fin clips.  Here are some photos of Upper SKC:

Lots of sierra tree frog metamorphs in the valley.

Dinner was fajitas - pretty damn tasty. I went to bed early, after drinking beer, wine, and some of Bill's $60 Irish whisky.  Pretty standard for me.

Day 3 was 4 mile canyon creek, which was a delightful bushwack through an aspen forest (have you ever done this? It's not ideal).  I saw some species of mushrooms I hadn't seen before, an aspen bolete and scaly pholiota amongst the aspen:

Unfortunately in my excitement over photographing the mushrooms, I set down the bucket I was carrying.  Oops.  So I had to traverse the heinous aspen forest in my waders (!) until I relocated it.  Not cool at all - waders do NOT breathe.  At least I recovered it... after much shouting and cursing and expressions of "this sucks".  Here are some photos of fish workup on 4 mile canyon creek:

Photos of the Paiute cutthroat really don't do them justice.  It's always disappointing to see photos when you've had them in hand. Also a cool photo of a tree eating a "closed for fishing" sign.

Fly Valley Creek was up next, and on the way we found an arborglyph by the original rancher, Joe Juanseras, from 1916. He was the one who transferred the Paiutes upstream of Llewellyn falls, which is a fish barrier.  This saved the fish from extinction by hybridization because the downstream portion was later stocked with pretty much every form of rainbow and cutthroat trout you can imagine.  Here's a pic of the arborglyph:

I didn't take that many photos, but there were tons of monkshood, larkspur, lilies, and other wildflowers.  Here's a pic of ranger's buttons and a bee:

Ok I can't really think of anything else for now...I'll spare everyone a billion more mushroom and flower photos.  I know they suck, but like I've said before, I'm not even pretending to be a good photographer.  I could probably do a good job of pretending to be a decent botanist though...

Hero-worship of the super-athlete

This worship of men who are super athletes only makes them douche-bags.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/weekinreview/08sokolove.html

Homeward bound, but not for long.

I'm sitting in the Columbia airport shell-shocked after the family vacation.  Lots of people (lots of kids!) in a small space.  Kind of intense.
I did get to tag the highest peak in South Carolina (Mt. Sassafrass).


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Which was largely uneventful, and I'm not even sure if I was on the actual summit, since there was a paved cul-de-sac rather than any sort of distinct summit.  Which I did actually have to hike to, since the public road was blocked about 100 feet short of the cul-de-sac. Here is the public road:

Kind of scary, no?

See the gate in the background? I had to hike to the top from there. It was a long and grueling 100 feet.  I was worried about altitude sickness. So there.

The best part of the drive was that I could be alone for a few hours, even though I was in backwoods South Carolina, which can be scary.  I played Lady Gaga for protection.  Which seemed to work, because even though I saw this at the summit:

I was not bothered by the flying monkeys.  I think most of the flying monkeys are back in California anyway. Or at least their sister species, the rock monkeys are in CA.

The other best part of the outing was that I saw lots of cool flowers, including this terrestrial orchid:

 Platanthera ciliaris

Carolina lilies (state flower of North Carolina):

Lilium michauxii

Of course, lots of mushrooms!  So many mushrooms:

And some more cool flowers:

So that was Thursday. Well, and then I got drunk with my cousins, got high with them, we cried a little bit, and my Dad told me about when he dropped acid (I'd already been born!).

Flash forward to a slightly hungover Friday morning.  I played in the lake with Gracie, while she sang the boing boing song.  This had the added bonus of getting me away from the toddlers, who were driving me bats.  Seriously. BATS.

We finished the puzzle (despite Gracie and Sean saying "you will never ever finish this, there are like a billion pieces. It's impossible.")

Then a thunder and lightning storm hit, and a bolt of lightning struck the front yard and blew out two transformers.  No power, no a/c. So I decided to help get the boat back on the trailer to take back to Columbia.

So Uncle Mike and Jennie and I loaded up the boat and were on our way to the public boat landing to meet my parents we ran out of gas.  Whoops. Fortunately a nice family rescued us and towed us to the marina so we could fill up.  But the boat broke somehow and we couldn't start it.  We had every Good Old Boy in sight trying to figure out how to start the damn boat. Meanwhile my Dad was on his cell telling us to pour gas down into the carburator. Whatever. As it turned out, breaking down near the marina was actually a great stroke of luck because not only was there another boat landing, but there was a tiki bar.  So we could get drunk and eat free chips while my parents found their way to the marina. And the toddlers were still back at the house! Mwah hahahhaaa!

The power eventually came back on around midnight, and fortunately southerners know how to make their a/c as strong as their moonshine, so the house cooled off pretty quickly.

I'm glad to be in the airport, and I'm glad to be heading back to California.  There are better road signs there.  Trust.

So tonight Karrigan picks me up, then I sleep, wake up, shop for Silver King Creek, pack up the car and drive to Coleville to Little Antelope Pack Station.  Monday morning we are off the Connell's Cow Camp/Upper Fish Valley to sample the fish for a post-doc.  Should be a lot of fun. So so psyched to get on the plane (my mom got me a first class ticket!!) and sleep.

I'll leave you with a photo of some road signs near our rental house.  Never made it to World of Energy, but it sounds SICK (Duke power company!).  I didn't make it to the Church of God of Prophecy either.  There's always next time.

South Carolina!

So I'm at Lovely Lake Keowee where the accents are as thick as the air, and the water is as warm as if a billion babies peed in it.

Fortunately I had the foresight to bring a hippie puzzle that I bought in Vermont, so I've gotten sucked into that:

I am a puzzle-putting-together-ninja.  It's true.  Don't doubt. Hey isn't that a confederate flag in the background?

So I have a cousin Jennie, and her husband Mike, and their two kids (Grace, 8 and Sean, 11) plus another aunt (who's actually my half-aunt because my grandfather remarried someone 40 years younger and had 2 kids) and her 2 kids who are a a 1 year old and a 3 year old (Leyton and Brewer).  And then there's this gnarly little yorkshire terrier named Levi. And my Mom and Dad. And then of course Auntie Mandi.

I went kneeboarding for the first time, which is WAY easier than waterskiing.  I didn't lose my bottom or get a Lake Keowee enema, so it was a successful kneeboarding session. At Lake Champlain I kept my bottom but got the enema...hmmm.  Water sports: not for me.

One thing that's pretty cool is that somehow I've become "cool Aunt Mandi."  Yessss.  They are just too young to know any better.

This morning Jennie asked me I'm gay.  I said "no." and she said "no, it's ok, you can tell me if you are."  I have to laugh.  Now I just embarrass her by talking about how gay I am.  She's like "you're going to blog about this aren't you?" I'm like "yep." She's like "oh my god I'm so embarrassed."

At least now I have the right to marry someone if I am gay, right?  So that is good news.

Damn the churches are big here. My mom does this thing where she looks in the phone book for random stuff, and she took note of an entire yellow page in the phonebook just for Baptist churches alone.  How would you ever even pick one? 

Anyhoo, here are some photos of the trip:

This is the first photo I took when I went outside. It's so humid the camera immediately fogged up.  I just wanted to give everyone a vision of the humidity here.

The top photo is my Dad teaching my cousin how to shoot a bb gun, the bottom photo is our lovely view (the camera fogged up again).  You can't see it, but my mom was feeding the fishies.  All is right in the world when my dad is shooting stuff and my mom is feeding stuff. And the great circle of life is complete.

The only way this could possibly be better is if J-Kruk had shat on Cedar's head

http://verticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2010/08/boogie-til-you-poop.html

Addendum

The moth is a Pandora moth. Here's what Shapiro had to say:

Pandora Moth, Coloradia pandora (family Saturniidae). The larvae feed on needles of Ponderosa, Jeffrey and Washoe Pine and occasionally cause widespread defoliation. The life cycle takes two years and some areas have only odd- or even-year populations. The very large caterpillar has stinging spines. It pupates in the ground and in outbreak years the Paiutes would dig pupae by the thousands and eat 'em roasted--they're said to be very nutritious. I've seen hundreds of adults attracted to lights in NE CA and Nevada, usually at remote gas stations! There are a couple of much less common congeneric species, and Pandora also occurs in the Klamaths and the High North Coast Range; I've seen in at least S to Goat Mountain. Cheers...

Also, Sonora Peak is 11,459 feet.  So we made about 2000 feet of gain from the parking lot.  You know, I thought it was higher than 10100.  hmph.

Awesome weekend! And it's only Sunday...

This weekend was supermuchfun. Ethan and I met up Friday morning in Manteca and headed out to Column of the Giants.

Ethan sent the crag, except for some of the easier stuff. Yawn.  I tried to send 1 route.  I did onsight the warmup though - yay!  This is a good thing because I'm not a very good onsight-er.  The route I tried to send was a .12a/b route that I wanted to try because John and Shannon flashed it (this was an egregious mistake in judgement - they are way better rock climbers).  I tried it a few times Friday and twice on Saturday, but no dice.  Melted off the slopey top portion.  I also tried the "steepest .12a in California."  Also no dice.  I'm not a huge fan of the horizontal route climbing.  It can be fun bouldering, but in routes...hmmm.
The first day we had the crag to ourselves, which was awesome.  The conditions were perfect, the rock felt great, the climbing was fun.  Saturday more folks showed up, but I knew them all.  Ethan was over it, since he'd one everything, so he kindly walked up the hill to belay me.  I should mention that Ethan might be my favorite belayer right now. 
Saturday was also pretty fun, but I was cooked. I really need to sport climb pretty regularly to climb well.  This has not been happening.  Oh well, it's mountain season anyway. We also found this rad moth that had just emerged from metamorphosis on the hike down from the climbing:

I'll have to ask my professor what the species is.  Whatever it is, it was still filling its wings with blood/hemolymph so it couldn't fly away yet. The photo doesn't do it justice in terms of color and size.  The abdomen was about the size of my thumb.

Since we were already near the pass, I pulled out a hiking guide and suggested doing a short hike to St. Mary's Pass and then to the top of Sonora Peak.  Ethan was game.  Holy cats there is a lot of rock up there. here are some roadside photos:

Does anyone know what the above feature is? It's viewed from 108 facing south.  Looks pretty cool.

The hike was really nice, and I'm glad that we rallied.  Great trail, short hike, nice elevation (about 9000-10,500 feet), and the wildflowers were at their peak.  Here are some photos of the hike.  I mostly let Ethan use the camera until he dropped it in the dirt and the lens cover stopped working without a flick of the fingernail. I couldn't be too pissed because I dropped his head camera off his crash pad on Friday. Photos follow:

Nice trail, great views.

 After we hit St. Mary's pass, we were mostly above treeline, and the trail was cross country.

 

Me walking up to the pass marker.  From here you turn south to walk to the top of Sonora Peak.

 

summit shot!

signing the summit register

 

View on the way down

Now I'm sore.