This past weekend was the big group camping trip to El Malpais which Jessica organized for her birthday.

The way these people camp is largely antithetical to what I think camping should be. Despite agreeing on a hike-in camp spot, people brought coolers (filled mostly with beer) and spent most of the time at camp drinking and talking about drinking. When we left the campsite was a wreck and it wasn't even where we were supposed to be camping, according to the park.

Those annoyances aside, I did get to take some new GPS points at the lave tubes in the El Calderon area and we climbed Mt. Taylor, the 11,301' highpoint of Cibola County. The trip report for the climb is here.

Richard once again astounds me with his level of preparedness. When we went to go climb the mountain, he was going to bring raw hot dogs for lunch because he hadn't brought anything except grill food and oatmeal for the whole trip. I lent him my spare lunch of peanut-butter tortillas. On the hike, he wore jeans, cotton socks, and a cotton sweatshirt. No wind layer and nothing synthetic. By the end he was very wet and uncomfortable.

But aside from all this bitching, I am really happy that I got to climb that mountain and succeed, although I was sucking pretty hard on it due to a cold sleep the night before and a lack of eating. I'm all jazzed-up about highpointing again. In May, when Nina goes to her college reunion in Massachusetts, I'm going to drop her off at the airport and then go highpointing on my way down to Slaughter Canyon for some caving.

If all goes as planned, I'll bag the highpoints of Socorro, Chaves, and Lea counties all in one day. I've got my eye on Sierra Blanca and Elk Mountain for future trips too. Oh, and this coming weekend I'm going to try to climb Caballo - finally doing the highpoint of the county I live in!

Here's some dorky highpointing statistics I drew up.

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I put some more thought into my arcade cabinet project and redesigned the website for it. I think once we get moved into the new place I'm going to make finishing that a priority.

This weekend, Richard, Nina and I went on a trip throuch south-central New Mexico. Nina and I left Los Alamos after a breakfast at Chiliworks and went to Santa Fe to pick up Richard at his parents' house. He had a new tent and sleeping bag which he had never used before and was anxious to.

Our first stop was REI in Albuquerque to stock up on a few supplies. I bought a pair of fleece pants so I can finally stop mooching off of Robin's, a windbreaker that will allow me to go out in the wind/rain without having to use my huge mountaineering parka shell, a couple of new bulbs for my caving headlamp, a stuff sack for my thermarest, a protective cover for my GPS, and a couple of dehydrated meals (chili-mac, of course).

Then it was on to Socorro for the Mud Bog, organized by Dan. The whole concept of the mud bog is somewhat ghetto and very redneck, but it was a blast. They had dug a long trench with a front-end loader and filled it with about 100,000 gallons of water to make a huge mud pit. Then people would take turns trying to drive their vehicles through the pit as fast as possible. Most of them were suped-up 4x4s, but there was the occasional silly entry like a beat-up conversion van and a subaru hatchback. In 2000, one of the entries was a snowmobile. The winner ended up being one of the new H2's, which I learned are actually just a modified Tahoe. We all got mud sprayed onto our clothes, hair, etc.

After saying hi to Dan, who was very busy overseeing the event, we were off to the Trinity Site for the first of its two public days of the year. As we drove there the weather deteriorated into a serious wind/sand storm. The wind was picking up so much loose dirt and sand from the desert basin that the visibility was drastically reduced. Richard and Nina had never been to Trinity before, so we did the full walking tour of the site. The wind really detracted from the event.

During the drive from Trinity to Carazozo, we were assaulted by a lot of tumbleweeds flying across the road in the high winds. One of them we hit seemed to have gotten stuck in the wheel well and was making a lot of noises. We drove by the Valley of Fires, where the caving regional was taking place. This was the same place that the last regional sucked at because of wind and dust storms. I guess I picked a good one not to go to.

At Carazozo, we looked under the car to see what was making all the noise and it turns out some of the plastic wheel-well walls had torn free of their mounting screws and were rubbing the wheel. I did a little surgery on it with Richard's knife and removed a few of the offending pieces of plastic. Not sure if that will have negative effects on the car, but Dan says it'll be fine.

At Whitesands, the weather hadn't improved. The campsites were curiously full, with only three available when we showed up at about 4:30pm. We went straight to campsite #7 and started setting up camp. Sand makes for lousy purchase on tent stakes. That combined with the extreme wind made for a challenge getting the tents up. Especially since Richard hadn't used his tent before and was therefore not very profcient with getting it set up. He didn't have stakes for his guy-lines which he desperately needed. It took far too long to get the tents up, but eventually everything was stable.

We ate the chili-mac I had just bought but cooking in the sandstorm meant that sand was in everything. By the time we were done with dinner it was 8:30pm and very dark. The star watching was sub-par because of the sand in the air. We went to bed early and got up at about 5:00am to watch the sun rise. It was unusually cold in the morning. Richard was somewhat disenfranchised with the whole trip and I think he wanted to just call it a day, so we packed up early and left without much in the way of hiking or dune-jumping.

We met up with Dan in Socorro for lunch at The Hat (El Sombrrero), which is a great resteraunt, and then went back to REI in Albuquerque so that Nina and Richard could buy the things they realized they wished they had during the trip.

The trip ended with ice cream at Richard's place in Santa Fe. Nina and I went shopping for rocket stuff (Hobby Lobby is closed on Sundays to allow for the employees families to rest and worship *puke*) and glider stuff. We got the ladies some live crickets for food. It was Carnage Night in the cage. The gliders are definitely natural born killers.

I went mountaineering last weekend. It was sort of a disaster. Read about it here.

Caving at Hell's Below the week before that was good. Sunday we spent ridge walking, looking for new caves. I love using my GPS now that I have the map software in it. I am a waypoint-taking freak.

Upcoming events: This weekend I'm taking Nina down to the Trinity Site; it's only open two days a year and we accidentally missed it in October. After that we're going to drive down to Whitesands again and camp out for the night.

The following weekend Nina will be in Amarillo because, somehow, the one-act play she was in actually won the one-act competition here in Los Alamos. So she's at the regional. I'll be spending that weekend camping in the El Malpais lava flows and possibly climbing Mt. Taylor.

The third weekend in April has a rocket launch on Sunday, and Mark is trying to get me to climb Kachina with him so that he can ski down on Saturday. I'm hoping I can convince him to do a mountain I haven't already climbed like Caballo or Elk.

Nina and I started what I hope will be a regular ritual of running in the evening yesterday. Still recovering from the trip up Blanca, I was hurting and only ran about 1/4 mile before my legs and lungs were complaining and I had to take a short breather. We ran from the house down to 42nd St., around the park to the path that cuts through the middle, then back on 45th to Urban, to 44th, and around the loop to the house. It's probably a half mile loop total and I had to take a break, which is embarrassing. But I'm going to get my endurance up (and recover from climbing) and try to log my progress here.