went up a mountain and slid down on my butt

7:45 am : in the restaurant at paradise inn, bleary-eyed, sleepy and hungry

8:00 am : chomp on oatmeal pancakes and wash it down with coffee

8:10 am : walk to the ranger station. ask the ranger "how does one get to camp muir?"

8:11 am : stare ranger in the eye while she gives you the "just another dumb inexperienced climber without a clue" look

8:12 am : wish she'd quit giving you the "just another dumb inexperienced climber without a clue" look

8:13 am : pick up trail map and smile at the updated weather forecast which predicts partly cloudy weather

8:14 am : walk back out into the mild rain and figure that the other part of the forecast probably means "partly sunny". ignore rain

8:15 am : lock car and hit the "i don't need to do this hike, i can just go back home, watch a movie and tell everyone i did the hike" moment that always precedes a hike.

8:20 am : start up the trail. hit previously mentioned moment 4 minutes into the hike but trudge on



the first part of the hike is along the skyline trail upto pebble creek. this is a really picturesque hike which i'm sure is spectacular in summer. it has alpine meadows on both sides for a couple of miles. it's all good until pebble creek. the snowfield starts a few hundred feet from pebble creek. this is also the end of the trail. there's a sign there with a picture of 2 hikers hidden in falling snow with the caption "this could me you". it goes on to say "in good weather many climbers have been known to have reached camp muir safely but even experienced climbers have died since the weather changes quite fast".

just as i stood there eating a power bar, a squirrel hopped energetically up to me. he looked eagerly at my power bar. considering there were even hardly any plants around i guess power bars are his staple diet! he was a frisky little critter.


the path through the snowfield is marked by small, frail flags which more often than not are on the ground partly hidden under falling snow. it was snowing (mild) when i reached the snowfield and i couldn't see too far (visibility around 60-70 feet). after a few hundred feet i couldn't see the trail. i was one of the first few hikers and so had no footprints to follow. i walked about there for about 20 minutes trying to find the trail. i decided to wait for the next set of climbers and go up with them failing which i'd give in to the 8:15 am impulse. i had to wait there for almost a half hour till i saw the next set of hikers come up.


me : yo. i'm a moron who decided to do camp muir alone

craig, pat, dale, phil : yes, you're a moron

me : can i tag along with you guys?

craig, pat, dale, phil : yes, we're being nice to morons on this hike. tag along.


and so we hiked up with me bringing up the rear, struggling to kick my feet into the hard-packed snow that was partly ice. i slipped and struggled until craig gave me his pole to use. if they could, my calf muscles would have crawled up the slope and thanked him.


the weather stayed overcast through the entire climb with pat trying his "it's really partly cloudy joke" till we were ready to push him into a crevasse. after a while he started singing. by then we were looking for a crevasse to throw ourselves into (i'm just kidding here pat!). craig did an awesome job of finding the flags and leading us up.

	this sign just before you enter the snowfield isn't terribly encouraging. i stood there for a few minutes before moving on! (click on images for larger views)
	phil and me on the way. my lips were frozen and i was slurring most of the way up.
	we plodded our way up in some pretty crappy weather. this is about when pat broke into song
	after what seemed like hours we saw muir. my feet cramped up a few hundred feet below muir and i slowed everyone down. a bunch of rocks never looked so good
	dale, craig and pat (in order). pat told us about craig's date with a marmot on the way down. we saw a few while descending.
	the way back down was easy, we sat on garbage bags and slid down a lot of the way!
	how did we feel when we got back down? this pretty much says it all!

and that folks, was the hike upto camp muir and back. i'm looking forward to heading back there sometime soon.

thank you but i have my own power bars

ages ago i wrote a lament about climbing mt.si without enough power bars and almost snatching one from a passing kid. but i bought my own power bars yesterday. a lot of them. and since i had enough power bars i hiked up to camp muir today. the weather was crappy, there was sleet and ice falling constantly, visibility was about 50 feet and the wind blew icicles in your face and eyes and lips. it was a ghastly day but an amazing hike. i drove out from redmond at 4:45 am (the first sunrise i've seen in ages!) and i've had a grand total of 5 hours of sleep this weekend (which explains the slurring when i type). muir is at 10,105 feet and the total altitude gain from paradise point is about 4600 feet. not much really but most of it was through hard-packed ice up a 40 grade incline. sliding down a glaciar on your butt using your boots as brakes has got to be the most fun thing this side of martian lizard-hopping. more details when i get some snaps.

strum those strings granpa

i went back and re-read a few chapters of 'neuromancer' by william gibson yesterday. when i first read it i had mixed reactions. gibson's need to be cutting edge seemed to get in the way of the creative muse occasionally - or at least it seemed that way to me back then. i've since read 'count zero' and 'pattern recognition' and i can see that it's just gibson's mind at work. i can imagine him to be the kind of guy who talks in a stream of consciousness mode, constantly switching topics and rhythms in a stacatto nasal tone. pattern recognition was a let-down. my first reaction was "he's lost it". gibson seemed to be groping in the dark to catch up with the internet and online communities. the central theme of the book, an online bulletin board where footage-heads post messages is quite lame. in a way it's pretty funny - the man who coined the word cyberspace and whose description of a wired world excited geeks and technologists alike in the 80's hasn't grasped what's out there right now. someone load up a copy of napster on the man's machine. i'm sure he'll get a mini-series out of that! lance olsen has a pretty good piece about gibson.


a bunch of us went to see thin lizzie, joe satriani and deep purple at the white river amphitheater yesterday (why would anyone build a concert venue in auburn? there're more cows there than rockers). the show was great but the audience mostly consisted of forty-somethings with beer guts, long stringy hair and harley davidson t-shirts jerking sporadically in tune with the music. occasional drunken shouts of "yeah baby, it's rocking" threatened to tear a hole in the time-space continuum and take us right back to the 70's. joe satriani - the man is a genius. there's no way anyone can make their fingers move that fast. this man was actually doing that and making a musical instrument (sorry meatloaf) "play notes that i had never even heard before". he was absolutely brilliant. the deep purple folks should rename themselves 'preserved by cryogenics'. there's no way that someone that old can play a musical instrument.


i watched 'true colors' (john cusack) a few days ago. easy to watch movie, slightly prep-school and with corny music. oh why oh why oh why did i have to miss the harold and kumar movie? big studio heads, if you ever do read this, please put it on dvd. please, please.


it started out to be a warm sunny day but it's clouding over and weakening my resolve to go biking today. the burke-gilman trail gets windy, cold and terribly unappetizing on days like this. so instead i think i'll give mt.si another go. the last time around they were renovating the lower 2 miles of the trail, hopefully they're done with that. thank god for the ipod mini and wind-proof jackets.

the mystery of the broken screen door

it's been a while since I posted anything here. crazy partying, social climbing, furniture matching, wild raves and hanging out in rooms filled with other pot-heads doesn't leave time enough for something as prosaic as a blog. but i'll trudge on nevertheless.


a bunch of us saw robin williams at the showbox last week. the show was called 'working on new material' but i'd say the material was pretty much ready. the show was a riot. they were checking id's at the entrance. and it wasn't because they were serving alcohol; it was because of the jokes.

robin williams is a very dirty man. very, very dirty man. given that he's about 800 million years old already, he's a very dirty old man. the man shouldn't be allowed to grace the covers of movies like mrs.doubtfire. he would have been more appropriate for the r rated version - "mrs.doubt on fire - the uncensored version". the man uses the f word like punctuation, always makes sure that the dirty words are preceded by a dirty adjective (point to ponder - is the word 'f***ing', used before a portion of the male anatomy, an adjective?). and here's the clincher (pardon the pun) - he keeps grabbing his crotch. and i don't mean in a gentle michael jacksonish stylistic way. this is downright, rude, fingers clenching, jaw clenching grabbing. at first there was a point to the grabbing. towards the end of the show he just went at it like disc brakes on michael shumacher's car in the middle of a race. somewhere down the line he had a fairly long conversation with previously mentioned portion of this anatomy.

the show was extremely funny though. the funniest bit had a heavy indian accent on the phone - "hello, thank you for calling outsourcing, what can we code for you today?".


the next day a few of us watched city of god by fernando meirelles. it ranks right up there with amores perros by Alejandro González Iñárritu for it's vivid imagery, amazing choreography and the sheer simplicity of violence. definitely not for the oprah book club lovers.


and finally after holding my breath for a really long time it was time to head out for the long weekend. and so friday saw 16 of us headed out to lake chelan for some wild partying at an amazing vacation house that had more electronic equipment than a pearl jam concert (just got told that i'm going to a deep purple concert at the white river amphitheater this friday. yaay! thanks rags, and thank god for cool people from austin).


16 people with many crates of alcohol and wild part instincts that were coming up with a vengence make for a fantastic weekend. the weekend included me getting drunk on an extremely small intake of alcohol (damn this low tolerence for liquor thing i'm cursed/blessed with), some funny dancing, board games, lots of table-tennis, some tennis, some ultimate, lotsa swimming, stargazing, holding onto dear life on a small jelly-doughnut shaped float while being dragged through the water at 40 miles an hour behind a speedboat driven by an extremely repressed surgeon (don't ask!) and jumping up and down on a trampoline set on the water a hundred feet from the shore. did i mention the really nice roads for driving? or the really good food that some of the more efficient folks loaded up on at costco? and i've not even mentioned mr.pj's amazing barbequeing/tea-making skills.

the highlight of the trip was obviously the screen door that features in the title of the post. it happened like this: first off, imagine d very drunk, very happy and cheerfully boisterous. somewhere down the line d decided to prove to me and s that he really was wearing boxers. we maintained that we believed the hypothesis and that there was no need for experimental analysis. but d proceeded to prove his theory. but the experiment went out of control and so d ran towards the porch to pull his pants back up. to this description i must add the crucial bit that d was wearing sunglasses inside the house at about 10:00 pm. the sunglasses made it hard for him to see the screen door and he promptly put his foot through it. next he put a steadying hand through the screen door which fell off the frame and ended its short life on a conveniently located deck chair. apart from the hilarity and potential for ribbing, the only other good thing that came off this encounter was that d proved his theory. qed.


these guys brought out a cake for my b'day (if you're reading this, thanks n!) which was delicious. most people had to take n's word for it being delicious because the cake played an important part in another of d's escapades - the upside down cake episode.


after the usual huffing on the candle and the cutting, d picked the cake up and began prancing around the hardwood floors. somewhere in the middle of this idyllic prance, he decided to feed the wall-clock some cake. the next few moments are shrouded in mystery but the cake ended up face down on the floor. i think we still managed to get a few good bits out of it though!


and since she had missed out on the chelan trip g convinced b, u, k and her sister to take me to dinner at an italian joint where i unflinchingly performed d's 'save the cow' joke (don't ask, you have to be there to appreciate it). i bought myself a cool watch but g kept making fun of it over dinner. although it just enforced my internal 'this watch is cool' factor, i exchanged it for another today.


and that's it for today. classes start end of the month, i'm trying to con them into letting me take an 'independent study' class instead of the core classes. i'm starting to miss the 'dear respected sir' form letters we bulk-mailed while applying to grad school!


i'd like to end with a quote (possibly the worst macho-bulls*** i've ever seen) from the punisher. so this guys family was anihilated (again, don't ask why - you have to be there to appreciate it) and he's all decked up to kill some bad-ass guys. a completely under-utilized witch-doctor calls out to him "go with god" and the man goes (dripping so much machismo that the spot boy had to clean up after him on the sets while filming that shot) - "god will have to sit this one out".


bleep.