We have arrived in Tanzania successfully, despite our initial flight from Amsterdam to Arusha getting all the way to the southern tip of Italy before turning around and flying back due to a failure in the plane's weather radar.
Spent the last two days doing game rides in a couple of the nearby national parks. There will be good photos when we return.
We start climbing Kilimanjaro tomorrow.
Note that the spot "OK" messages that send out emails to the list don't seem to be working (thanks Spot), but the tracker is working. So the webpage linked in a previous post should still show our progress as we work our way upwards over the next week.
Nina and I are leaving next week for our big safari/mountaineering/zanzibarring(?) adventure. I'll have a Spot Personal Tracker with me, so if you want to see where we are, you can check out this webpage:
There won't be anything on there until I activate the device, which I probably won't do until the day we leave (the 27th). Also, if you'd like, I can sign you up for the list of people who will receive emails and/or text messages whenever I hit the button on the Spot. I'll do this whenever we arrive somewhere new (or, when we're on the mountain, every time we stop to camp for the night). The message you get should include a link to a google map showing our current position. Of course, the link above will always have the latest info as well, so really it's just a question of whether or not you want to get spammed with position updates or if you want to check up on us at your leisure.
Anyway, if you want the emails and/or SMS, send me an email (anything at mouser.org will come to me) and let me know which you'd like. Otherwise, keep an eye on the above link during the first couple weeks of November and see us reach incredible new heights!
I will not likely have email or web access of any kind until we get back, so don't expect to see anything here until mid-November. At that point, expect to get inundated with photos, videos, and me rambling incoherently about acute mountain sickness and how I threw up in Nina's hair.
Things have been pretty busy up here and I've fallen behind in my daily updating duties.
Day 3 didn't offer anything new weather-wise; the winds were not as fast as the previous day and the summit was still ensconced in cloud. As a result, I didn't go outside much and instead concentrated on my cooking duties. Made an enormous Indian meal with chicken vindaloo, chana masala, samosas, dal, and rice. It was a big hit.
Day 4 was again cloudy, though some of the observers wanted to get out of the building for awhile so we went for a short hike along the auto road and taped some "goofing off in the wind" footage for their video library. Dinner was pasta carbonara, a caprese salad, and some spiced spinach.
Day 5 I awoke to discover that the sky was clear for the first time since we had arrived at the summit. I took my camera outside and took a bunch of sunrise pictures of the summit facilities and the views looking down into the valley. It was great to finally be able to view everything in context. After a quick breakfast, I immediately set out on a hike. I headed north along the Appalachian Trail to Mount Jefferson, about three miles away. The wind wasn't bad once I had dropped off Mt. Washington by about 1000', and the temperatures were in the mid 20's, so it was quite pleasant.
Unfortunately, I was still wearing my full summit gale kit, so I got really warm during the hike and sweated way too much. Also, at some point during my return trip, I felt like my right foot was blistering up really badly. When I looked down, I saw that my boot lace had let go at the center and the bottom half of the boot was essentially untied. Yowch. The biggest let-down of the hike was that my camera seems to have frozen itself in macro mode, so all of my landscape shots are out of focus. Which is a shame because the views were spectacular. The valley is in peak fall colors right now and the visibility was extremely good. I could clearly see the major mountains of Vermont, Meganic Mountain up in Canada, etc. All in all a great hike, I'm sorry that I don't have more pictures to share it with you.
Dinner last night was Mouser-style Chili, a garden salad, and some cornbread. I made way too much chili, but it was well-received.
Day 6 (today) is just beginning, but we're already back in the cloud. They tell me that it might clear up later, so we'll see.
I woke up at sunrise, which is to say at the time when there was a slight brightening in the all-encompassing fog. The wind was relatively light in the morning, but the observers indicated that the forecast for today was that it could get extremely windy and we might see it top 100mph.
I made eggs-in-a-basket for the crew, and they were well received. We went through most of our whole eggs (as opposed to the cartons of premixed eggs that we have in the freezer).
The winds steadily increased throughout the day. With no visibility, hiking anywhere is pretty much out of the question. So the only outside entertainment is experiencing the wind. Every time the average wind speed would be 5mph faster than what I had previously experienced, I'd go outside and see what it was like. There was a lot of rime ice forming on everything, so the observers started an hourly ritual of going up onto the sensor mast on top of the observatory tower and breaking ice off the wind instruments with a crowbar. I took this video of Stacey doing her thing:
Right after that was taken, she let me go up there and finish the job, breaking ice off and having it sail off into the wind. It was a lot of fun. I felt like I was on the frontier of science, or something. Anyway, check that one off my list of goals. While we were up there, the wind gusted to just shy of 90mph, which was really impressive.
Today was New Mexican night for dinner, featuring red chili enchiladas, green chili cornbread, posole, soft tacos, and an apple strudel for desert. The enchiladas were something of a total disaster, as I discovered too late that we actually have no cheddar cheese here at the summit. We have a ton of swiss slices, a small amount of provolone slices, and some American slices. So the enchiladas were made with provolone and American... and I think they were gross. Didn't get any complaints from the crew, but maybe that's because they don't get real enchiladas up here too often. The posole was probably the best I've ever made. Yum.
After dinner, as the wind continued to get faster, we sat around playing a game of Cranium, wherein we learned that 1) I can't hum The Girl from Ipanema and 2) none of my teammates had ever heard of the song. Despite this tragedy, the game was a lot of fun. Periodically throughout the evening, we'd check the wind-o-tron-5000* to see how things were going. The high gust of the evening registered as 98mph. Steve, the head observer, insists that the pitot tube that is up there right now reads a bit low and suspects that we experienced winds in excess of 100mph last night. There was much rejoicing.
*a technical term.
I wanted to see what 90+mph winds felt like, so I went out with Mike, the night-shift observer, while he did one of his de-icing duties just before I went to bed. It is difficult to convey the experience. It was dark. I had a headlamp, but there was no visibility so I could only see the handrail right in front of me. The only word I can think of that can describe the sound is fury. With no real visual input, my mind focused on the overwhelming presence of the wind. This manifested itself both as a deafening roar of white noise that seemed to come from everywhere, as well as a physical force lashing at me constantly. The gusts of wind didn't hurt per se, it was more like getting socked hard with a pillow over and over. They were frequent, greater than once a second, and they seemed to come from different directions each time, which made retaining any sort of meaningful balance a futile effort. Standing up to the wind, even while holding on to a rime-encrusted railing, was a punishing physical effort. And all the while, that unending shriek. It was difficult not to anthropomorphize the wind. It was intent on demonstrating its fury, taking out its anger on me.
So I demonstrated my ability to go back inside and have a hot chocolate.
Based on the current forecasts, this likely to be the highest winds I see on my visit here this week. Though I would have liked to have tried for the century club, which requires sustained winds above 100mph, I'm glad I got to experience upper 90s gusts. I was suitably impressed.
So I got up at 4:30 (mountain) on Tuesday to catch my 6am flight out of ABQ to Boston. Arrived there in the evening to low ceilings and light rain. This bodes well for my desire to see the worst possible weather at the summit. I did some last-minute grocery shopping for items I wanted to bring up that weren't in their inventory. Spent the night with the Lanzas.
Woke up at 4:30 (eastern) yesterday morning to drive up to Mt. Washington by the 8:15 meeting time. It had rained all night and was continuing to rain during my entire drive up. As a result, I was about 10 minutes late arriving, but it wasn't a big deal. Unfortunately, the weather had steadily improved as I got farther north; by the time I was at the base of the mountain, the cloud ceiling was above the summit and the rain had stopped. This made for an uneventful ride up the auto road in the MWObs van. Got to chat a bit with the observers and interns, and they all seemed like fun people.
The summit was quite windy, but not unusually so for this particular mountain. I think the winds were in the 40mph range. We unloaded the van, loaded up the down-going stuff, and then went inside. There was a quick meeting between the two crews to discuss the coming week's events and any old business. Then I went to work unloading all of the fresh food that had been brought up and familiarizing myself with the facility.
At some point while I was doing this, the summit plunged into the clouds again and never came out. The winds picked up as well. In the mid-afternoon, I put on my full waterproof kit and went outside in a 65mph wind and about 20' of visibility. I walked up to the summit, from which I could see exactly nothing. The wind was tremendous. Luckily my gear kept me completely comfortable; I could see this being a nightmare for someone lacking in a top-notch windproof/waterproof kit.
In the evening, the wind died back down but we never did get out of the cloud. For my first dinner, I made a chicken jambalaya and corn/bacon macque choux along with a green salad. It seemed to go over very well.
After dinner the crew and I watched Iron Man in the lounge area. Having not gotten a lot of sleep for the last two nights, I sacked out at 9.
I'll be spending the next week acting as volunteer chef and housekeeper for the folks at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire. My main role will be to prepare dinner for the eight people who will be living at the summit for that week (including myself). They will be subjected to my various jambalayas, samosas, pasta carbonaras, etc. Or who knows, maybe I'll just get sick of it and it'll be canned pork 'n beans every night. But I doubt that.
In addition to cooking meals that they will hopefully enjoy, I have some additional goals for the week:
1) knock ice off of something with a hammer in the furtherance of science.
2) conditions permitting, become a member of the century club.
3) not succumb to the crushing effects of such low altitude (MWO is hundreds of feet lower than my house; sorry guys). :-P
If anyone who reads this is in the northern NH area over the next week, stop by and enjoy some heinous weather!
We were going to go backpacking this weekend, but the weather forecast looked really bad, as in thunderstorms constantly starting this evening. The weather this morning, however, was prefect. So I had Nina meet me at the Santa Fe airport, I rented one of their 172s, and we flew up along the Sangre de Christo mountains for about an hour. The aspens are just starting to turn bright yellow. They aren't in full effect yet, but it's still quite beautiful.
I had hoped to use this as an excuse to familiarize myself with a couple of local airports I have never been to, Taos and Questa. However, we only had the plane for two hours. We could have just done it, but there wasn't enough fuel in the plane when we got there to do a two hour flight safely. So I called in for more fuel and we waited. Forever. After half an hour, the available flight time was such that the fuel margin was now sufficient so we just left. Only made it about half way to Taos before turning back; oh well. Those airports aren't going anywhere.
I'm definitely enjoying the freedom to just get in a plane and fly somewhere I want to go. I know I'm just getting started, but this is going to be a total life-changer, I can tell.
