Hiking Half Dome

Got the chance to hike Half Dome in Yosemite the other day with my Dad, Andris, and Lucas. It's a pretty burly hike (9 hours) and I haven't decided if
a) the Park Service is insane for letting people up there or
b) it's natural selection in action.

There are currently 1000 fires burning in CA, hence the smoke in the air.

A Weekend Back in Good 'ol Oregon

Last Friday afternoon I left the office early and hopped on a plane for Portland (I know, not very green of me). I meant to make a quick visit and potentially pick up my truck.

I managed to make it to another LatinX Night in Corvallis, where it seemed like people weren't all that surprised to see me (it's only been 3 weeks). But that was a good time, and Saturday we went out in Portland for a friend's going away party.

The weather for the weekend turned out nice, and it made me miss the Cascades with their snowy glacierness. I guess I'll just have to deal with surfing before work and hiking Half-Dome next week instead.

Needless to say, I didn't get my truck back. That's an ongong saga that seems like it will never be resolved.

Anyway, back to work...

Now Living in San Francisco

Climbing at Castle Rock State Park - June 14, 2008

Ok I know, that's a dramatic cut from my last post, but everyone keeps telling me to update my blog. So here it is: the update!

I just moved to San Francisco on June 1, 2008. It was a dramatic move, typical Clayton style with getting up at 4 am and having to time everything perfectly to get the rental van back in one day, but I made it. I gave a girl from Switzerland a ride all the way from Portland. She was couchsurfing (couchsurfing.com) and we had a good 10 hour chat about traveling and everything else.

Anyway, I made it, and got moved in here with my best friend David. We've got this ridiculous 1100 sq. ft. apartment behind the mint in Haye's Valley/Lower Haight area. I wouldn't normally have opted for an apartment this large, but for the same price we could have gotten a dungeon, so it was an obvious choice.

We've been spending some time nabbing furniture from various yardsales and craigslist posts. Today we scored a love-seat futon for the 'green room' - yes, we have room themes!

Work has been crazy busy. Check me out here: http://greenoptions.com/about.

The best part so far? The beach is only 20 minutes from our front door, and I've been surfing 3 times already (once before work!). I've also met some climbers already, and we went out to Castle Rock State Park this weekend.

Thing are going well, just have to try and establish some balance. Doesn't seem like there's enough time in the day, but I'm having fun.

Coming Home: Buenos Aires To Oregon

It´s 3:15A.M., and I´m waiting for my taxi to the airport. Due to a major cluster$%&# of airplane reservations and general bad planning, I´ll be changing planes no less than 6 times over the next 36 hours. Oh well, it will be good to get home.

I just finished a Tango lesson and the opportunity to dance at a Milonga in Argentina. Talk about sink or swim, after a one hour lesson we were thrown in with a group of top notch dancers. Only 2 of us ended up dancing - if I remember it took me 4 months of salsa dancing before I would go out to show off my moves.

Anyway, now might be a good time to outline our second hike.

My dad and I bussed down to Osorno, Chile, where we started to see some plant life and the typical Patagonia topography. The next day we cruised over the Andes to Bariloche, meeting Andris and Jamie for standard Argentinian fair.

From Bariloche we hiked to a refugio on Mt. Tronador - a massively glaciated peak reminiscent of Mt. Hood. With no technical equipment, the summit was off limits, but we managed to see the most epic sunset I´ve ever seen, and spent another 4 days hiking.

My dad and I just about ran up another peak to see the view: mountains as far as the eye could see. Definately worth further exploration.

The end of almost three weeks of hiking came too quickly, and 5 days in Buenos Aires was enough to erase it all. But this is a fun city. Come here if you want to learn Spanish and have a good time. Definately the best Latin American city I´ve been to.

Buenos Aires: The City That Never Sleeps

These people are insane, and I mean that in the most bittersweet kind of way.

Last night we had dinner at 12:45 A.M. (yep, that´s technically breakfast), and the restaurant was packed. At 4 A.M. there were still lines out the door to get in to clubs. Long lines; the kind where you get that sinking feeling that this isn´t going to be your night. But nobody seemed to mind. I asked a cabbie when the people of Buenos Aires sleep, and he lauged:

Nunca.

Fair enough, but how do people function on this kind of schedule? Here´s the deal (and this took a while to figure out): grab your watch and set it backward by 3 hours. That´s the only way to make sense of it.

8 A.M. is really 5 A.M., as the hue of the morning sun makes apparent. 11 P.M. (when most people have dinner here) is really 8 P.M. And 6 A.M. (when most people go home from the clubs) is really 3 A.M. (a more sensible).

But you have to hand it to the porteños: they know how to party. I took our small group to a local salsa hotspot which happened to have the best salsa dancing I´ve seen outside my home´s local salsa group.

And I´ve got 3 more days to burn here before flying home. God help me.

On the Way to Buenos Aires; Part I of the Hike

Today I´m on my way from Bariloche, Argentina, to Buenos Aires. It´s been hard to keep up with anything here, since 17 of the last 24 days were spent backpacking in the Andes and Patagonia.

In short, this trip has consisted of two big hiking trips: one in the Northern Chilean Andes (11 days), and one in Southern Argentina (6 days). Both trips had major highlights and included a lot of walking (over 100 miles on the first hike), but beyond that the similarities stop.

The first hike took us to Copiapo, Chile, which is roughly the same latitude as the middle of Baja. As it turns out, everything north of Santiago is basically desert - miles and miles of it - and bus rides are long. The ride from Santiago to the beach town of La Serana took us 5 or 6 hours, and the next day was another 5-6 hours to Copiapo.

From Copiapo we took a bus up a long winding road checkered with raisin plantations. Imagine the mountains of the basin and ranges of Nevada but add one important factor: the mountains are well above 15,000 feet - enough to capture significant amounts of precipitation in the form of snow. As a result, there´s enough water in the valleys to encourage a great deal of life in an otherwise barren desert.

Anyway, this was a trek in the truest sense. After begging for some gasolina for our stove, we walked for 5 days, for an elevation gain of 10,000 feet, all the while hiking through the same canyon. Desert, rocks, canyon, and water. That was it.

But things started to get interesting at 15,000 feet. Most importantly, because of our slow, five-day approach, the usual signs of acute mountain sickness were held at bay. No headaches or sickness, but all three of us suffered from some very unpleasant Cheyne-Stokes breathing (this occurs when the lack of CO2 being exhaled prevents the normal breathing response - basically you stop breathing). There were more than a few nights that I woke up gasping for breath so many times that I just gave up trying to sleep.

However, having broken all previous altitude records for myself (I took pictures where the tops of Mt. Hood, Adams, Shasta, and Ranier would be), I was still enthusiastic about the hike. After five days we reached the crest of the Andes - big mountains that don´t even get started until 15,000 feet.

We managed to top a 16,800 foot cindercone before descending out of the hellish winds of that kind of altitude. Another 3 days in the wind had us all but insane, but we dropped several thousand feet and got back into summer pretty quickly.

Although the hike was mostly a desert slog, it had the particular highlight of allowing us to get to nearly 17,000 feet with no technical equipment. We were also able to follow one drainage from the crest of the Andes, all the way out to the Ocean (on the bus of course).

That´s part one...

Safe and Sound in Santiago

Well, I´m not sure how it all worked out, but I made it. No sleep for a few days, a lot of last-minute packing, and 24 hours of travel; somehow everything seemed to fall together.

Highlights from Sundance 2008:

• Meeting one of the two survivors of the ¨Alive" crash who after 62 days walked for 10 more out of the Andes.
• Meeting Josh Tickell, author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank and long-time promoter of biodiesel.
• Seeing LL Cool J in concert (I guess this was a highlight?)
• My hot tub plus -10 degrees F at night.
• Spending some quality time with my friends in SLC.

I realized I´ve been absolutely insane since last October, with going to Costa Rica, quitting my job, visiting family for Christmas, moving out of my apartment, going to the Midwest twice in one week for work, then Sundance, and now. . . Chile. The last three were all one big pack job, and so far, I didn´t forget anything.

Today we had some coffee, met Mr. X (he requested I use this instead of his real name - if you know my dad you´ll know who he is), and did some shopping. I let my dad pack our dinners back in the states, which are just Mountain Home prepackaged dinners from REI. From the looks of it, we´ll be eating a lot of mashed potatoes and Kung Pao chicken.

We also stopped by the¨embassy¨ for lack of a better word, to check on permits. It takes a hell of a lot to get permission to cross into Argentina outside of the 6 security checkpoints along the border. As it turned out, Argentina hadn´t responded to the Chilean request to lets us pass into the country. Chile told us that if we wanted to hike into Argentina, they would have to supply us with an ambassador, which for food and expenses would cost $3,000 U.S.

The meeting would have made great T.V., but we left amicably enough, and decided on another route: one that would take us to 16,000 ft. along the crest of the Andes, but wouldn´t cross the border.

So all that was left was packing, and my 50 L Black Diamond Predator is absolutely maxed out with food for 12-14 days and anything else we might need in the high-altitude wilderness we´re about to ascend into.

Tomorrow we head north, with a potential stop at La Serena, a beach town I´ve had the good fortune of visitng once before. Since it´s in the 80s, a beach stop might be in order, and I might even grab a surfboard if I have the chance.

On the topic of revisiting this area, it turns out that the Hostel we´re staying at in Santiago is the same Hostel I stayed at almost 7 years ago, when I was studying abroad in nearby Valparaiso. I´ve closed the cirlce, somehow, in a strange but meaningful way.

This may be the last post you´ll see from me for two weeks. If that´s the case, have a great February.