Category: monthly hike

A Few Good Goals

I always think I’m not much of a goal setter, but then I keep various little mental benchmarks in my head. Sometimes I talk about ’em, but mostly not. Might as well mention the current goal(s)…

A while ago I was able to convince some friends to plan a climb on Mt. St. Helens with me. We’re scheduled to climb on October 3. We’ve even got the permits purchased. Problem is, I’m totally out of shape and would probably keel over halfway up if I had to march up it right now. Relatedly, I’ve got high blood pressure and I’ve been at least 20lbs overweight for the last several years.

I’ve done a lot of rock climbing in my day, but the only real mountains I’ve climbed are St. Helens and Hood. That’s because when I was younger I really hated walking uphill. It’s still not the funnest thing, but somehow it has become much more tolerable as I’ve grown older. Anyway, I never summited Mt. Hood. I just got tired out and sat on the Hogsback, about 100 yards from the summit, until my friends tagged the summit and came back down. Good enough for me. And when I went up St. Helens, I was apparently in such a hurry to pack that when I got to the top I realized that I’d only brought a bottle of grape jelly. No crackers, no water. Just grape jelly. That sucked. Fortunately friends took pity on me and shared their meager rations.

So I’m kind of on a path toward redemption on St. Helens. But I still need to get in shape. I’m still overweight, and I still have high blood pressure. All this stuff was roiling around in my head when I went to see Dr. Tim, a naturopath, about my blood pressure. He said (duh), “lose weight.” But he also gave me a 3-week “cleanse” program to try out. Basically, I could eat anything I wanted as long as it didn’t contain caffeine, refined sugar, wheat, dairy, red meat, or chicken. Plus I was supposed to drink a couple of special smoothies each day, with a bunch of supplements, etc. Easy, eh? Well I stuck it out for three weeks. The coffee headache from the first couple of days was the worst.

I dropped 17 pounds and my blood pressure went through the floor. A few pounds have come back, but the BP has stayed low. BP is divided in to systolic and diastolic measurements. My systolic dropped from around 140 to around 110. My diastolic dropped from around 90 to around 73. I’m pretty stoked about that. I’ve stopped taking high blood pressure medicine for now, just to see what the readings would do. So far, they’ve stayed down.

So I’ve dropped some weight and dropped the BP. I’m satisfied with the BP, but not happy with the weight. I was at 240 on Monday, May 4, 2009 and on Friday, May 22, 2009 I was at 223. I’m hovering around 227-229 right now and I want to get to 220. Dr. Tim says I should be at 215, but we’ll see about that.

The one thing I didn’t do, that Dr. Tim said I should’ve done during the “cleanse”, was exercise. I kept meaning to, but I just never did it (aside from waking or biking to work–a flat 5 blocks). Always had a good excuse in my head. What I absolutely know is that I’ve got a big hill to climb on October 3, and if I don’t start climbing some smaller hills now, I’m gonna really be hurting.

So I mapped out a quick 2.5 mile running route that has two decent hills in each direction. The second hill is an absolute killer. It gains about 100 feet in elevation in about 100 yards. It’s steep. I can’t even run up half of it yet, but when I can run up the whole thing, I’ll turn around and start working on a second lap. I’ve also got to start planning some intermediate hikes to help get my legs conditioned to longer uphill walks. One a month between now and October ought to do it.

So there you go. Everything is out in the open now! I’ve got to start running and hiking some hills. Get the weight down to 220. In fact, this evening I told Amy that when I hit 220 I’m going surfing. I haven’t been surfing since my regular surf buddy died several months ago. I miss it, but if I can hit the water at 220, I know I’ll be feeling really good. 🙂

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Snow camping

Went camping with Jeff and Ron yesterday. Snowshoed around Twin Lakes and camped on Upper Lake. Walked out this morning. Here is the full set of pictures.

This was a humbling experience for me. Many times I felt like I was kind of at the edge of my comfort level. It gave me new appreciation for what kind of mental toughness true explorers must have. John Muir writes in his journals of spending nights in the open on Mt. Shasta, just sleeping under a log in his clothes while snow piles up around him. By comparison, we had it super easy with our modern tents, our sleeping pads and our warm bags.

The hike was about 8 miles round trip. We ended up not having enough fuel to even try boiling water, so I ate one Clif Bar the first night and another the next morning. Along with a few sips of water, that was pretty much all any of us ate. The snow was up to my waist when I got off the trail and on the trail it was still pretty powdery. Made walking feel pretty difficult. This was the first time I’d ever tried snowshoes, and the first time I’d snow camped in this tent (a true 3-season tent that was way out of it’s element in this weather). I woke up pretty much hourly to slap snow off the roof of the tent so it didn’t cave in–it’s a small single-person tent with just two poles. In the morning, the foot and head of the tent were covered and the sides were pushing in on me. Kinda claustrophobic.

Anyway, it was beautiful out there. So quiet. I kept thinking of a Stephen Iverson song: “Surely God is in this place / Holy ground.” I’d do it again, but I’d try to choose a clear night rather than one with a lot of predicted snow…

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Monthly hike page

Just started organizing the monthly hike pictures in a Flickr collection. Nice way to get an overview! Here it is. I missed a few winter months, so I may need to put the hammer down this summer and bust out more than one per month…

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May hike: Saddle Mountain

Great hike! Got some pictures and video, as well as the Google Maps track. The full set of pics are here. For the Google Earth track (you’ll need to have Google Earth installed), click here. For the Google Maps track, click here. If you have Google Earth installed, I definitely recommend using that file–Saddle Mountain shows up in 3D and it’s really excellent for getting a good sense of the route and photos.

Ron and I started late and got to the trailhead at 7:30pm last night. Busted up the mountain in just over an hour (and roughly 2.5 miles). The weather was mostly rain, but when we got to the secret bivy spot it had stopped for a bit. We put up the tent and crawled inside. Out came the iPods. Ron listened to Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In The Woods” and I listened to Mahalia Jackson. Woke up at 5am and broke camp. Took some video and pictures and went to find a geocache. Found it quickly and headed back to the car. Breakfast at Camp 18, and home before 10am!

I cobbled together a few video clips that I took on top of the mountain this morning. It’s about 4 minutes long and probably not interesting to anyone but me or Ron. Hit me up if you want the link.

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A very Good Friday

Yesterday, being Good Friday, I didn’t have to work. So I went on a hike up at the Opal Creek Wilderness. It’s was a beautiful day–around mid 70’s up in the mountains. My guidebook said the trail was a 7 mile out and back. My GPS said 6.6 when I got back to the car. But then the actual GPS track said 8.3 miles. I think the track is bigger because we walked around a bit more, but also because I didn’t turn off tracking when we stopped for lengths of time (such as at the end of the trail). I think the GPS “wanders” when it’s not moving. So I guess I’ll just call it 7 miles.

Here’s a KMZ file that you can open with Google Earth. The file will display the route I walked and it has pictures from the hike that are geocoded into the track. If you don’t have Google Earth (or don’t want to download it), here’s the same stuff in Google Maps.

I successfully did this once before, but it’s been a while so I had to relearn all the steps. Just to fill up the outboard brain with more knowledge, here are the basic steps I followed (mac-centric, but I’ve seen similar stuff for PC…hint: RoboGeo):

  • Sync GPS time and digital camera time at the trailhead
  • Enable “tracks” on the GPS
  • Take pictures while you hike. If you dawdle for very long, turn off tracks, but remember to turn it back on when you start walking again
  • When you return to the trailhead, turn off tracks on the GPS
  • Back home, download the pictures and the track from the GPS. I always have a little trouble with the track part (getting it out of the Garmin PC-based mapping software). This time I used GPSBabel, and it worked like a charm. It’ll grab data from your GPS unit, and it’ll convert that data into a TON of different formats. Very useful.
  • Once you have your track and your pics, you’ve got to combine the data streams. I use GPSPhotoLinker. It has a few different options for matching up the timestamps on the track and the pictures. Great software. It also has an option for pulling tracks off the GPS directly. I never got that working, so GPSBabel to the rescue!
  • Now that you’ve got your pictures geotagged, you can use the iPhotoToGoogleEarth plugin for iPhoto. It’ll output your geotagged photo into the KMZ or KML format. If you’ve already got your track loaded in Earth, just drag/drop it into the new photo “Place” to combine track and photos. DONE!


Edit: once you have your Google Earth KML file, you can stick that thing on a server and view it through Google Maps just by putting the URL of the KML file into the Gmaps search box and hitting enter. If you are displaying images you’ll need to provide references to images available online. Flickr works well for this. Just edit the KML file in a text editor.

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November’s hike: Mt. Mitchell

Monthly hike: Mt Mitchell

November’s hike was Mt. Mitchell, near Mt. St. Helens in Washington. Pics are here. The pictures make it look pretty gnarly. It didn’t feel as gnarly as it looks.

I compiled a Google Earth file, but something is amiss with the track and/or geotags. The photos are all on the trail, but they’re in weird spots. Not sure what the problem is, but next hike I’ll run two tracks: one going in and one coming out. That way I should be able to better narrow down any problems.

Anyway, the hike was fun, even though there was significant snow at the summit (around 3 feet in the drifts). We anticipated a wet hike, but the night before we left I checked the weather and it was calling for snow. So I just figured we’d get some flakes at the higher elevations. Apparently it’d been snowing up there for quite some time. The mountain was shrouded in fog at the top, so we couldn’t see the summit from the road to know that there was snow up top. I brought gaiters, but left them in the car–a choice I later regretted, but only marginally. My pant legs were pretty wet near my feet, but my feet stayed warm and dry the whole time. Ron’s feet were soaked by the end–his pants were a little shorter, leaving his socks exposed to the snow.

Saw a TON of elk hunters in the area. Ran into one old dude as we were coming back down the trail, near the bottom. He asked whether we’d seen any elk sign. We hadn’t. We wondered to ourselves, once we were out of earshot, what this 70-year old dude would do if he actually shot an elk. There’s no way he could’ve hauled it out alone. Back down at the trailhead we ran into his hunting partner, who wasn’t actually hunting. I think this partner guy was the muscle if the old guy shot something.

Overall, it was a fun walk in the woods and we snagged three geocaches in the area post-hike. Looking forward to December’s hike!

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New camera

New camera came today. It’s tiny–the size of a deck of cards! That’s not what I’m most geeked about, though. It’s waterproof to 10′–I can’t wait to get some cool underwater pictures of the kids swimming!

It’s also going to be nice on the monthly hikes. I was a little worried about taking Amy’s camera out in the woods. I’d be so busted if something happened to that thing. This new camera, in addition to being waterproof, is shockproof for drops up to 5′. That came in handy when it fell off the counter when I unpacked it. 🙂

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King’s Mountain hike

UPDATE: Forgot to mention the pictures I took. Look for the “map” link to see exactly where on the mountain the picture was taken.

Took the day off of work today (legitimate vacation day, not the sneaky “personal day” with sick leave) and hiked King’s Mountain with Frodo. I’d been up once before and I remember it being painful. This time was the same. It’s about 2.19 miles from trailhead to summit. The trailhead starts at like 600 feet and the summit is at 3200 feet. Very steep. The last half mile is the absolute worst.

Frodo did really well. This was kind of a test for him to see if he could do something this steep. Now I think I can take him on almost anything I’d go on. He has a nice mellow pace. Or maybe he was just humoring me.

I took my GPSr and camera and figured I’d try geotagging pictures. Still working out the kinks with that, though the eight pics I took are up on Flickr now and they’re geotagged and mapped. I used the “tracks” feature on the GPSr and that’s really cool. It’s basically digital breadcrumbs. If you’ve got Google Earth, you can grab this file and it’ll show you the climb we did. There’s an option in there for a USGS altitude map overlay, which you can turn off. Pretty cool. If you don’t have Google Earth, well…why not? You might notice that at the top of the mountain it looks like I’m stumbling around in a couple of places. There was a geocache (members only cache, I think) near the summit that I grabbed–that’s the reason for the tracks over on the right side.

I did all this because I rolled 39 earlier this month, and I’m pretty much in the worst shape I’ve ever been in. So I’ve resolved to, at least, be in better shape when I roll 40 than when I rolled 39. This hiking thing is just one part of my strategy. I’m going to do at least one hike a month–that is, I’ll plan one serious hike but may end up doing other easier ones if the family is into it. The other part of my strategy hasn’t been working out so well, but I’m figuring out how to make it work. I’m going to run sprints, do plyometrics and hit the gym. I’ve got a whole workout planned, based on a book I read. Now I just gotta find the right time–I want to set up a routine, so I don’t get distracted. Mornings are best, but the gym isn’t open early enough. So it looks like evenings are where it’s at. We’ll see. Definitely doing the hikes, though. 🙂

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