Yesterday, Lukas informed me that he wasn't going to be able to come on the 4th of July trip. His business is going through some rough times, and he needs to be there. Then today, less than 24 hours before the trip is to begin in ernest, Camille writes to tell me that her boss just forced her to move her vacation back a week; now she can't come either.

I was just about ready to unveil the humorous title of the trip, the Tour de Fourth... but now it has become the less-extravagant Tour de Four. Grant, Mike, Erin, and I will be bringing MIT nerdiness to the desert. It'll still be a blast, I'm sure, but I'm really feeling bad that Lukas, Allana, and Camille can't meet my other friends and won't get to see the things we're going to do.

So it's been a hectic day of rearranging the trip logistics.

Add to that the fact that a wildfire seems to have broken out in the vicinity of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and I don't quite understand what's being implied here.

Anyway, Erin and Mike are already in town. We played some frisbee today and ended up at Dan's place with Ali, Mac, Nate, and Havi playing DDR and SSX and Tekken Tag, munching on snacks, and watching "Club Kill Yourself 2000" (CKY2K) again and cracking up. The more I hang out with Dan the more I think he rocks. And he kicks some serious heineken at DDR too.

We tried to do some more meteor watching again tonight, but it was cloudy and drizzly and we just ended up sitting around on a picnic table getting wet.

Tommorow, we pick up the rental car, drive to Albuquerque for supplies and Grant, then drive to Carlsbad and the fun begins. Time to get my beauty sleep.

Today was such a great day. I made good progress on Titan, sure to appease the Dimitri gods. I had lunch with Mike's friend Ali, after work the three of us watched Princess Mononoke which I had never seen. We all went over to Dan's place where I got further hooked on rally-style racing and watched some hillarious video made by the people that make that "jackass" show on MTV. Dan has the largest collection of movies on his computers. Everything from car crashes to car demos to, well, car ads. He's sort of a car guy.

Anyway watching some old Monty Python's Flying Circus over there, we went down to White Rock and watched the shooting stars. There was one that left a big ion trail across the sky and had what appeared to be a major explosion on the way down, leaving a big bright dot in the trail. It was magical. I made a wish.

Plasmic honey's rock yo... (don't ask).

Frob.

Mike and I finally made it back to that lava tube I mentioned earlier and started digging it out. At the request of a certain Ashley, I have taken a bunch of pictures of our efforts.

We went to the supermarket on our way to buy hairspray, lighters, and a trashcan. We used the waste basket to haul rubble, and the hairspray as blowtorches to get the black widows our of the picture. Maybe this is a little mean... but they're femme fatales and they deserve it.

We succeeded in hauling out about half a cubic meter of rubble, significantly increasing the size of the bottom alcove in the cave. The wind coming out of the cave was strong as ever, and all of it came from this one portion of rubble.

No major breakthroughs or anything, but it was still very exciting. We're going to come back (maybe with a few more people) and continue the job later.

I met this woman called Courtney at a party Jamie and Cam's threw last year. We kept in touch for awhile, always saying that we were going to go dancing at Circle sometime. But we never got around to it and then I had my surgery which basically killed that plan. And we lost touch.

As I was cleaning out my inbox at the beginning of the summer, I noticed an email sitting there from her that was months old, so I decided to write her a hello and apologize for my being a bad correspondant. In doing so, I mentioned that I was in Los Alamos for the summer. It turns out, coincidentally, that Courtney is from Albuquerque and was going to be in town this week. So today I drove down to spend the day hanging out and hiking with her.

After managing to dump and entire container of Burger King fries all over the bronco, I made it to her house and met her mom and brother. Her mom is a painter which implies that their house is really arty and cool. Wait a sec, my mom is also a painter and my house is lame. Maybe there's no corellation there at all. But the point is that her house was really nice.

We drove out around the back of Sandia peak and up the road to the ski hill. Sandia is weird because on the Albuquerque side it's really steep and jagged, but on the ski side it's a gentle wooded slope that doesn't look all that imposing. The road winds up through the mountain and eventually reaches the crest, offering a great view out over the city.

Also present is an impressive collection of radio antennas. There were so many I had to take the picture. Call me nerdy. Anyway, we hiked along the crest towards the tramway until we got to the CCC stone house about half-way inbetween. Sat around and watch the chipmunks. It was really nice out there; much cooler on the crest than down below in the city.

Driving back, I selfishly convinced her to go to REI with me so I could pick up some gear for next week's big camping trip. REI, it turns out, is right across the street from the "Old Town." We took a stroll through; it reminded me of a combination of Santa Fe and New Orleans.

Back at her house, her step-dad cooked steak and corn and potato salad for us. It was great. We ate outside in the yard as the sun set. Very nice. No bugs - it's too dry. The remainder of the evening involved driving around Albuquerque, playing pool very badly, drinking a white russian or two, and breaking into her old highschool ("The Academy" hah) to find hundreds of rabbits. By the time I left it was 1:30am, which put me back in Los Alamos by 3:00am. Long day.

The major theme of conversation of the evening: Boston so pales in comparison to the southwest. We find it humorous that so many people out there can't understand why we can't wait to get back here.

I had this really weird dream where Ashley and I were in Cincinnatti (?) and there was some sort of explosion at a research facility that sent a bunch of really high-velocity debris flying through downtown and all around us. And all of the debris came in the form of Platonic solids. Little dodecahedrons flying through windows at us.

I have nerd dreams.

Somestimes, the only thing you want to do is scour the web for photos of Laurence Larry Fishburne's character from Pee Wee's Playhouse - Cowboy Curtis.

Which of these games is more exciting than watching someone else clipping their toenails? Trick question.

Do you remember those commercials? Did you know that George Plimpton is now doing commentary for ESPN? Did you know that sports games for the Atari VCS are just about the crappiest excuse for entertainment ever? How did we ever ever EVER find Atari Baseball fun? And additionally, did you know that there is a techno remix of that Intellivision commercial!?

Got up at 4:00am to go pick up Jon and drive to the Santa Fe ski hill in time for a 6:00am sunrise.

Hiking through aspens is really great. And the trail we were on (Windsor) ran along the side of a very steep mountain, so that there was a 45 degree grade on either side. It was disorienting. The first 4.5 miles of the trail were very easy. We crossed a few streams and hiked along a genearlly flat trail.

After the meadow in Peurto Nambe, however, we were faced with miles of switchbacks and an ever-increasing slope to contend with. The total slog of a climb was offset by the frequent wildlife. Deer, rabbits, songbirds, some big white-headed birds that we had never seen anything simiar to, chipmunks, and the odd lizard. After about three hours, we reached the saddle which marks the beginning of the one-mile summit push of Santa Fe Baldy peak.

We stopped here for lunch, and only then did other hikers catch up to us. The first guy was a weird old man wearing blue slacks and a button-up windbreaker. For some reason we referred to him as "home-slice" for the rest of the trip. As we started up the impossibly steep ridge to the peak, we were passed by a number of trailrunners.

They were running up to the peak. Yes, running.

We were making our way up in little 20m increments, separated by long periods of rest. They ran up to the top and back. I don't understand these people. And they had little tiny squirt bottles of water.

But anyway, 2.5 hours after leaving the saddle, we made it to the peak. I felt dizzy and rather nauseous. But once we got over the last bit of steep ridge and onto the rather flat summit, I felt great. It was a serious accomplishment.

We spent an hour and a half up there just laying around, throwing snow, looking at Lake Katherine 2000' below, and bothering the marmots.

The marmots were really cute. And they weren't very afraid of us if we weren't moving. They look sort of like beavers with different tails. And they make a really obnoxious loud chirping sound like some enormous bird. And they're super lazy.

I'd never seen one before. But I'm a big fan of marmots now.

When we were in the car arriving at the ski hill, Jon estimated our arrival time at the summit within one minute. Weird things are afoot.

Anyway, we had lunch on the peak, looked at the lake a little more, and I fell down a snow slope. That's about it. Going down the steep slope was hard on the toes and knees and thighs, but was infinitely faster than ascending. It only took us three hours to get back to the car. By the end my feet were really torn up and I was definitely running on fumes. 15 miles and thousands of feet vertical rise is about my limit, I think.

The last guy we saw on the trail looked kinda like Guy Spivey - all white hair, formally dressed, with a bad pink & blue plaid shirt and white slacks. He asked us where we had been and when we told him, he asked us if we had seen any good mushrooms up there. (?) Then he said, "That's a good thing that you did today." as if we had done some good deed for humanity. "Good for your heart." Oh, ok, so he's a health guy. I can respect that. "Spiritually healthy."

Oh, he's from Santa Fe.

I took a break from work today to drive down to White Rock with Broxton, who had just recently arrived in town. We had been talking back at MIT about places we had been around here and he mentioned that when he was a kid growing up in White Rock, he remembered finding some little lava tubes in Pajarito canyon.

We parked the car near the canyon and hiked down into it and along its length looking for said tubes. Predictably, they were much smaller than he remembered them. We found a few little lava caves, less than two meters in diameter and going back not more than three meters.

But the last one we came across was interesting, not only because it was the largest, but because there was a huge amount of very cold air rushing out of it. This is indicitive of a very large underground space. The constant subterrainian temperature creates a pressure difference and causes large caves to "breath." The larger the volume of the cave and greater the temperature difference between the cave and the outside air, the more it breaths.

This cave was breathing enough that when we walked by it in the center of the canyon about five meters away, we felt a cold blast of air. Investigating the innards of the cave, we found a 1.5m entrance hole and a space that went back and down about 4m. There was one side cavity that went steeply upwards and dead-ended. At the very back of the lowest part, the wind was coming up through the rubble that constituted the floor.

The rocks are lava rocks - not very heavy, relatively small, and easy to break with tools. Clearly, someone had discovered this cave breath before and had begun excavating; there was a large amount of lava rock debris strewn around the canyon outside the entrance.

The one creepy thing about this mini-cave is that there were black widow webs in it. We couldn't find any spiders; the webs looked old. I did, however, read up on treating spider bites when I got home. Turns out widow (and brown recluse) bites aren't usually deadly like I thought they were; they just mess you up. And antidotes are available. Good to know.

This whole "lots of wind from a small cave" story sounds a lot like Lecheguillia. Just because it's exciting and because we have no sense of probabilities, Mike and I are going to go back with gloves and try hauling out more rubble.

So I'm at ultimate last night, and I'm talking on the sideline to some of the other summer students about where they go to school. When I tell them I go to MIT, one of them starts talking about some of the more nerdy things he's heard of going on at MIT. Specifically, he brings up the EC washing machines which you can finger to see if they're busy, and the coke machine, etc. Then this other guy chimes in and says:

"I hear one guy there is actually building a real railgun."

It was so awesome. Umm, yeah, that would be me. So on a short list of wackiest things going on at MIT, somehow the railgun project made it. That is so great.

Today some of my office supplies arrived. And I can't help but surrender to the urge to unleash a huge gut laugh at the inadequacies of the federal government. First of all, the order (which was placed all at once) arrived incomplete in three shipments to two different locations, neither of which I have physical access to. Dimitri had to wheel the boxes out of the secure (getting searched along the way) so that I could have my stapler, etc.

Next, because of the ordering system, it was not possible to get exactly the quantity of items I asked for, so when one pencil jar was not available, they sent me two. And when one stack of post it notes wasn't available, they sent me a gross. Not a gross of post it notes, but a gross of stacks of post it notes. A huge box filled with nothing but stacks of post it notes.

The one thing they did get the right quantity of was the highlighters. I asked for one each of green, pink, and yellow [catalog shopping leads to these sorts of gratuitous purchases]. And they sent each one individually packaged in a giant transparent plastic bag, easily two feet on a side. The giant bag with just a pen in it was too funny; I couldn't open it...

...but I could use one of my 5000 new push pins to stick it to the wall of my cubicle for future entertainment.

Today Carolyn and I climbed Lake Peak in the Sangre de Christo mountains. Twelve-thousand, four-hundred and nine feet.

I had to wake up at 4:30am to drive over to Santa Fe to pick up Carolyn. The drive to the Santa Fe ski hill is a great winding road through the mountains. Had I gotten more than three hours of sleep, I would have enjoyed it more I think. We were on the trail by 7:00am.

We parked at the ski lodge (10,300') and hiked up trail 254 to the entrance to the Pecos Wilderness. This segment of trail goes up about 400' to the saddle between Aspen Peak and Raven's Ridge. Just outside the wilderness boundary fence, the Raven's Ridge trail heads east, rising steadily as it makes its way over the top of three pine-covered peaks. Why they couldn't have the trail go around the side of the mountains rather than right over the top I don't know. But the end result is a trail that makes the most difficult possible path over these peaks.

Eventually, the fence stops when it runs into a cliff overlooking Nambe basin. Although Nambe lake was not yet visible, it was a spectacular vista. Around this point large banks of snow began to show up in the shadows below the pines. Some of them were six or seven feet deep, and often obscured the trail. Because the trail follows the ridge line between the peaks, it is generally pretty easy to figure out where the trail should be, because there is only about 20' of flat ground before the mountain starts dropping away on either side.

After several miles, the Raven's Ridge trail begins to climb Deception Peak. By this time, the trail elevation is above 12,000' and the trees are all midgets. It was not long before we broke through the timberline and got a good look at Deception and Lake peaks, as well as Nambe Lake far below. The wind was suddenly very strong, and we had to pause to put on windbreakers.

From this point, there isn't a proper trail, you just make your way up the barren slope to the top, and that's Deception Peak. This vantage point gives a great view north of all the major peaks in the Pecos Wilderness - Lake Peak, Santa Fe Baldy, Pecos Baldy, and the Truchas peaks. South is Tesuque Peak - the top of the ski hill with its radio tower farm, Santa Fe, and in the distance we could see Sandia Peak and Albuquerque. Looking west, we could see the Jemez and Los Alamos. The east offered a good view of Penitente peak.

Lake peak was now only a few hundred meters away across a rough ridge, and we immediately made our way across. Here the wind was intense. There were sharp drop-offs on either side, and the rough terrain required some minor bouldering in places. The wind made this somewhat creepy.

Getting to Lake Peak was so great. Neither of us were sure we could do it, and it felt like a major accomplishment. It took us five and a half hours to get there, and we were very tired. The view was so worth it, though. We could see everything, it seemed. We could see over the Jemez mountains, all the way down to Albuquerque, up to Taos, etc. Tremendous view.

After a half-hour of rest, it became apparent that there were storm clouds brewing in the east that would probably head this way, so we needed to leave. We found an easier way to cross the ridge to Deception Peak - a low trail that ran across the eastern side of the ridge. It alleviated any need for creepy rock crawling, but required a steep descent and ascent to get to the trail from the peaks.

Going down is so much quicker than going up, but it hurts your feet, knees, and quads infinitely more. Usually, when I go somewhere round-trip, the return trip seems shorter. Here, because we were clearly moving much faster, I expected it to seem like a shorter distance back. But the pain in the toes from the extreme slopes made the return trip seem to take forever. Despite this, we made it down from Lake Peak to the car in three and a half hours - two hours quicker than the trip up.

The car ride back to Carolyn's place was a haze of exhaustion. We were both just sitting there commenting on how utterly tortured our legs were, how bad we smelled, and how hungry for non-trail food we were.

After cleaning up a bit we drove to Gabriel's for some of their amazing guacamole and dinner. I inhaled my taco salad and was still hungry. This has never happened before. Having eaten, the only thing on my mind was sleep. I made it home by 7:15pm and fell promptly asleep for twelve hours.

Well my package finally arrived, only 6 days late. So now I'm fully equipped for some overnight backpacking. And I finally have more than five days worth of clothes.

Yesterday was the LANL student picnic, where every year the ~1,000 student interns working at the lab get together at Urban Park and hang out with the people they already know, clustered in little groups in the shade beneath the pines. I went with Carolyn, who I hadn't seen in over a year. The picnic organizers humbly request that we bring our own plates, and I continued my running tradition of eating out of a frisbee. This, unfortunately, led to the coating of my disc with a thin film of potato salad that made throwing the disc a little challenging.

I ran into several people I hadn't seen since the summer before last. Sleazy-T, Pete, and assorted others, as well as a host of people I've met this year at Ultimate.

Carolyn is going to accompany me on my hike this weekend, and John from ultimate might as well. I'm planning a trip to Lake Peak (12,409'), overlooking Santa Fe Lake and the Aspen Basin. It's a short trip, but it has lots of vertical change and is very high altitude, for me anyway. If we make it up Raven's Ridge without totally exhausting ourselves, we then have access to several other peaks without much vertical work.

I am writing this over the internet from a laptop with no wires. Just got my 11 Mbps WaveLAN in the mail. John has an 802.11b accent point in his apartment, so I can go wherever I want and still be online. I know all of this seems painfully trite and uninteresting to everyone but me, but this is my first time going wireless and I'm still feeling pretty excited about it. So bear with me.

Tomorrow is the X-division breakfast, which is usually a fun occasion to get together with all the other groups and hobnob. Hobknob? I have no idea. Anyway, the group leader of X-1 died in a tragic swimming accident this morning - got caught in the riptide in Florida. Rip tide? Again, no idea. So this is basically a huge tragedy for the division, and the breakfast "party" tomorrow promisses to be odious.

So, bad news aside, back to the good things in life: my new secretary in the X division office, Pearl, is awesome. I met her this morning for the first time, and she said on the phone I would recognize her because she would look like a lime. I didn't know what she was talking about until I saw her dress. Very much a lime.

She gave me a catalog for office supplies and told me I could pick out anything I needed and LANL would buy it for my cubicle. So I got to go catalog shopping for staplers, post-its, binders, etc. Again, somewhat trite. But it was fun. And all free. And as I was waiting for her to come out from behind the fence to get the catalog and my list, I sat in the afternoon sun outside the badge office and watched the hummingbird moths and butterflies feast on the flowers.

Hummingbird moths are somewhat creepy. But there was this one giant butterfly that came down and was drinking from flowers about two feet from me. It was probably 6" in wingspan. Bright yellow and black, striped like a zebra, except for a few deeeeep blue spots at the base of its wings and four small orange lunes. It's body was yellow and black as well. Very bright. The wings, along the edge that is attached to the body, were actually furry. Bright yellow hairs coated in the dusty wing pigments coated its back, some almost a centimeter long. If only I had had a camera with me, I could have taken some amazing photos of it; I was that close.

Ran into David from Tetazoo in the cafeteria today. Had no idea he was working here for the summer. Invited him and the guy he was sitting with to tonight's untimate. Tonight's game got started late, but was the most well-attended yet. At the peak we had 23 people. Fun game. I'm still pretty slow, but am having a good time and not experiencing nearly as many problems with the old lungs as I have in the previous two summers.

OK time to go back to work, which is to say, to have the laptop in front of me while I watch the Matrix, and pretend to be busy. Because I can.

I got up yesterday at 5:30am and drove up to the ski hill, arriving just as the sun rose over the Sangres. I had packed then night before, but i neglected to take the PB&J sandwiches out of the fridge, so my diet for the entire hike was apples, granola, and raisins.

Quemazon trail was closed for awhile after the Cerro Grande fire, and to make sure people didn't try to go there, they piled boulders and dead trees all over the first few hundred meters of the trail. Now those boulders and trees have been pushed to the side and the trail is marked with treadmarks from the caterpillar used to do it.

Quemazon skirts around the base of a mountain that is not named on my map, and then runs between it and the neighboring (also unnamed) mountain. For the sake of easy description, we'll assign them creative names like Mountain 1 and Mountain 2. So, inbetween mountains 1 and 2, the trail runs into a huge open meadow, about two kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. This meadow is actually called "Meadow 1" but for the sake of creativity we'll refer to it as "Cañada Bonita."

Cañada Bonita had pine trees here and there, but mostly it was just full of wild irises and dandelions. By the time I had hiked there, the sun was still low enough in the sky to be obscured by Mountain 2, so I got to watch the sun rise again here. This was all very serene until I noticed I was standing right next to a huge elk skeleton whose neck and head had been separated from the rest of its body. And there's something un-serene about that.

Rounding the far side of Mountain 2, Quemazon meets up with "Pipeline Road," a road which leads to this ridge from Los Alamos and follows a buried gas pipeline. At one point, the road goes right next to a cliff facing west, looking out over part of the caldera.

Trail 282 branches off from Pipeline Road and follows the ridge between the caldera and Guaje Canyon. Just before descending into the canyon, the trail goes out along a high peninsula which sticks out into the canyon, and at the end there is a rocky prominence which gives a fantastic view of upper Guaje.

The trail turns and goes down switchbacks into the canyon before the end of the peninsula, but climbing out onto the rocks is easy. As I climbed farther out along the point, the sides became steeper and steeper and the rock narrower until I was on a big flat slab of rock about 10' square, and on three sides the ground dropped away about 250'.

There was a great songbird somewhere nearby that I couldn't see. It's song was extremely complex and it was hard to not think of it as some sort of fully-articulate language. It sounded a lot like someone had scrambled a birdsong for security reasons. Maybe the bird was a spy.

The morning sun was warming the rocks and creating thermals for birds to play in. I was surrounded by a group of swallows that were thermalling on the sunny side of the peninsula, then shooting across and doing acrobatics on the cool side, then flying around and doing it all over again. They clearly weren't feeding or doing anything useful, they were just playing around.

The birds had black tops and heads, white undersides, and a white stripe around the base of their tail. The most distinguishing characteristic, however, was the irridescent green patches between their necks and tails on their backs. As they soared in the sunlight, they would turn to just the right angle and suddenly they would be bright mettalic green. [I looked them up when I got home; they are tree swallows.]

I sat there and watched the birds for a long time. And after awhile it became clear that they had grown curious about me. They were flying within a few feet of me and as they shot past they would turn their heads and look at me. A few of them got more courageous and would fly straight towards my head, then flare their wings and stall about three feet from me. For a breif moment, the bird was basically stationary in front of me - so close I could almost touch it. And I could see its little eyes looking me over, head tilting to the side. Maybe I'm just personifying too much into their behavior. But I felt like an animal at the zoo and the little kids were trying to figure out what my deal was. It was the most amazing sensation - to come face to face with the consciousness of another animal in the wild. It's something you get from pets all the time, but I've never been in the wild before and had an animal clearly come up to me to examine me.

They didn't exhibit any fear of me, just a sense of great curiosity. And as their airspeed dropped to zero, they would turn and heave off with their wings and fly away. I could hear the sound of the air catching in their wings like little sails finding a new breeze, and sometimes a little squeek of exertion as they pushed to regain their airspeed.

The experience was so magical that I just sat there with the birds for a couple hours. It was one of the most supremely peaceful moments of my life. Nothing but the sound of the wind in the pines, the songbird, and the tree swallows.

Eventually I felt very rested and left the birds to continue the hike. My destination, Caballo Mountain, was clearly visable across the canyon.

I worked my way down the switchbacks alongside the peninsula, which was very painful on the toes. In the canyon, the character of the trail changed dramatically, shrinking to only about 1' wide and working its way through high underbrush.

The center of the canyon was occupied by a gentle stream which had pooled up into a sort of swampy morass in several areas. I had to cross the stream, luckily at a more stream-like than morass-like region. Reaching the intersection between Guaje Canyon Trail 282 and the summit trail (Caballo Trail 277), I was beginning to notice the density of thorn bushes alongside the trail. There was no way to avoid touching them, and I had no pants. So my calves were really getting torn up.

Eventually, I had to turn around because of this inadequate legware. Besides, the specter of having to ascend the 1400' to Caballo, only to turn around and descend again and then come back up the 1000' out of Guaje canyon was a real demoralizer. It's probably a good thing I turned around, too, because the ascent out of the canyon was brutal. I had to stop every 100' or so and let my heart cool down. The air at 9500' is just too thin for my Boston lungs. I have not yet fully acclimated, and that left me wheezing and dizzy.

Eventually I made it back up to the top of the peninsula and started the trek back towards the ski hill, but my legs and feet were now complaining vigorously. Every little incline, even just a few degrees, made me break out in sweat and start gulping for air. So I'm a big un-physically-fit wuss, I admit it. But I'm working on it.

Walking back was different for two reasons. One, the temperature had risen about 20 degrees and it was not officially "hot." Second, the sun was now high in the sky and everything looked different.

I saw a hummingbird up on the ridge near Pipeline road, and numerous giant moths. Apparently, it is butterfly season. They were everywhere. In places I would walk through the grass and clouds of them would be disturbed. At one point I got a great closeup view of a big moth eating from a dandelion. I could see his little spirally mouth thing that I had only seen before on TV.

Returning finally to the car, after 6 hours of hiking, I was exhausted. Great hike tho. And without the descent into the canyon, would have been pretty easy. I'll definitely come back here from time to time and hang out with my tree swallow buddies.

John left for Carlsbad at about noon and I opted to stay behind to get a bit more work done with Jean, as the progress this morning did not go as well as I had hoped. Dimitri, Jean, Don, and Dimitri - the four people I work with here, are all gone or busy for the weekend and I'm here by myself, so this means it's time for weekend #2 of me hiking off into the wilderness by myself.

Tomorrow it's a drive up to the base of the Los Alamos ski hill (9,200'). Here Quemazon Trail cuts across the ridge which separates Los Alamos County from the Cerro Grande and runs into Pipeline Road. From here, Trail 282 crosses a narrow mesa and then drops down 1000' to the low point of the hike, the junction with Caballo Trail 277 (8,621'). Trail 277 promptly goes straight back up, all the way to the summit of Caballo Mountain (10,496') - the highest point on the hike.

...and back again. Unfortuantely, there isn't a reasonably short return trip other than the way I came, so I'll have to retrace my steps or add about 400% to the length of the total trip, which I'm not prepared for. But regardless, I should have some good pictures and more sore muscles by tomorrow night (assuming I don't fall off a cliff or get eaten by a mountain lion). Total trip distance: ~11 miles. Elevation change: 1,875'. Wish me luck.

The three of you out there that have been reading this rubbish for awhile will notice a rather dramatic new look. Which is to say, of course, an old recycled look blatantly stolen from a previous incarnation of my online journal, the short-lived LoggyLog. [note: the background scanlines are now vertical, see, so it's like a whole new design!]

There have been a few changes other than the look. Most notably, I am no longer powered by Blogger. While I love their product, their service has been too inconsistent to justify the inflexibility of their system. Their recent reduction in staff to 1 (one) has left them incapable of dealing with feature requests from the likes of me.

I have never found myself in a position where I need to post while I don't have access to FTP or SSH, which basically nullifies the necessity of the browser-app. On the other hand, I have frequently found myself attempting to post to blogger and not being able to connect to their server. Granted, posting in raw HTML will incur a slightly higher maintenance overhead, and my lack of fancy design probably makes my "infelxibility in design" argument moot. But until they're a bit more stable, I'm just gonna fly solo.

Let's see here... oh, the archive works now (see link below). And what else... oh, the title graphic is smaller. Yeah OK so that's about it. Oh and I ditched the "time of post" information and permalinks that I don't think are particularly useful.

So, all that having been said, on to a regular post:

Tomorrow morning I beginkicking ass and taking names on the research. Jean is coming over and she's going to teach me VisualBasic, GDPro, and the new Tecolote. Then I'm going to start coding models and writing tutorials like there's no tomorrow. If there are no problems, I could be done with my contracted deliverables in a couple weeks, leaving me free to work with Dimitri for the rest of my stay here.

I bought a trail map for the Pecos Wilderness out behind Santa Fe and I think I'm going to try to put together a two-day hike for when Broxton gets here. It's sort of a tour of 12,000'+ peaks in the Sangre De Christo mountains. We'll start at the Aspen Basin ski hill and walk up to Tesuque Peak (12,045') then along the ridge overlooking Santa Fe Lake to Deception Peak and Lake Peak (12,409'), then cut east over to Penitente Peak (12,249'). Turning north, we'll go down trail 251 to Nambe Pass (11,050') then up the switchbacks to the foot of the Santa Fe Baldy summit push. A short detour over to the shore of Lake Katherine (11,742'), and then back to the summit push and up.

The ~1 mile trail leading to the summit of Baldy goes up 1,400+ feet and is described on Peakware as "very steep." After having already hiked some 15 miles before the summit push, this should be really really grueling. But well worth it, from all accounts. Santa Fe Baldy (12,622') is one of the tallest peaks in New Mexico. It's much taller than anything nearby, giving a terrific view in all directions, including a nice look down at Lake Katherine.

Going back to the car via the Winsor trail and trail 254 gives a nice easy descent. Total trip length is about 30 miles, and I'd like to get it over with in two days. Not sure if this is wishful thinking or not. I could shave several miles off the trip by only going to Baldy and skipping the rest of the peaks. But they're all right there so close to each other, it seems like a waste to miss 'em.

I guess I'll have to wait and see what Mike is up for. And I'll probably need some more exotic gear for this one.