More Tahoe Snow

Tahoe was hit by a much needed storm this weekend. We headed up to the cabin (along with Mike & Wei, Benjy, Marc and Ovi) for two days of great powder skiing. The drawback of the storm was a 6-hour drive through a mess of stranded 2-wheel drive vehicles (an ancient type of automotive technology) and hibernating trucks at Applegate. The snow kept falling all weekend, and strangely enough for a holiday (today is commander-in-chief day), there were no lines to speak of at the lifts. Happy Birthday Wei!

Bay Area From Above

(posted by Maureen) This Sunday I went flying with Cedric for the first time. We flew around the bay right over San Francisco, enjoying amazing views of the city and the Golden Gate. The trip to Napa takes less than half an hour this way... I am looking forward to Cedric finishing his license to go travel around California.

Bear in Mott Canyon

I forgot to mention Ray and I ran into an adult black bear while skiing at Heavenly's Mott Canyon last weekend. The poor fellow was sitting in a tree in the middle of the skiable terrain, probably scared up there by the first skiers of the day. It spent the whole day at about 10ft off the ground, balancing its massive body on a 10 inch branch. Incredible...

New Year - New Ski Season

I spent last week at Ray's place in Stateline. The snow cover is still thin, but we had a lot of fun playing on the slopes. I got to try a Stalmach snowbike - pretty cool stuff! On Friday, we picked up Maureen and Misha in Ray's pimpin' plane (see pix here). I got to fly this Mirage over Lake Tahoe at night, which is an experience which cannot be described without audio effects and uncoordinated hectic hand gestures by the narrator (me). The long-awaited storm finally hit on saturday, and after a day of skiing in Heavenly we headed to our cabin in North Lake and met up with Mike and Wei to eat at an excellent italian restaurant recommended by Amy. We spent MLK skiing at squaw (1-2ft of powder) and headed back to the Bay Area on Monday night.

Go Bears!

Dear reader (I originally wrote readerS, but then I figured I might be overestimating my audience), the last post was 3 months back, and you may wonder if nothing worth blogging about happened since then. Well, quite the opposite: since July, Maureen discovered charming Zurich, I became a student once again (Cal - hence the title of the blog), we donated the very first vehicle we ever owned to charity, our team won the DARPA Grand Challenge (no comment on my share of the $2M...), roughly in that order. I just finished my first set of classes, which means I have a two day break which I am spending 15 precious minutes of to write this blog. More good news: we got a crew together for a house in Tahoe this winter, we can't wait for the first storm to hit the Sierras.

California Road Trip

Thomas, Didier and myself took a short road trip across central California. We started out in Monterey (aquarium) and camped in Big Sur. The next day, we drove down the coast on Hwy 1 (where we saw some elephant seals) and headed inwards to Death Valley, were the temperature was a cool 122 deg F (50 deg C) at 7h30PM! We spent the night sleeping in wet clothes to try to control our body temperature, as the thermometer never went below 105 deg F (40 deg C) during the night. The next stop was Yosemite National Park where we hiked from Tenaya Lake into the Valley, climbing Cloud's Rest and Half Dome on the way. During our 2-day trip, we had to fight off ferocious mosquitoes, set up a bivouac under a rock (we deemed our tent flys superfluous, a thunderstorm taught us we were wrong...) and although we were prepared to fight off bears with our camping sporks, we did not see any, to the great disapointment of the belgian contingent. In the Valley we had arranged to meet up with Goeric who drove in from the Bay Area. Our plan was to get a wilderness permit to climb Mount Sill . We hiked the approach on Friday and set up our base camp at 10100 ft (3030 m). The next day we got up at 4AM and headed for the summit. The climb was mostly rock-scrambling and some snow-hiking up to ~13,000 ft. Then the serious climbing began: 50 meters roped climbing, followed by 5 "real" pitches to the top at 14,153 feet (4,314 meters). The face of the Mount Sill is VERY steep, and we enjoyed some rather airy moves, ratings range from 5.7 to 5.9 (French equ. 5-6a) depending on the logs you read but most of the climb is moderately easy and offers sufficient protection, the hardest thing is to forget about the void beneath you and dealing with the effects of high altitude.
We returned to our base camp at 6h30PM. In the meantime, a storm had moved in and the 14+ hour climb had taken its toll on me. I collapsed into my sleeping bag immediately upon reaching my tent, only to wake up the next morning for the descent. The hike out was easy, although we got lost several times, and the mosquitoes were as aggressive as ever. The drive back through Yosemite was uneventful, except for a speeding ticket for Goeric, and an all-American Applebee's experience that did not suit our Belgian friend's digestive system too well (or was it the stop at Soda Springs to taste the naturally carbonated water). I am sure Goeric will put up pictures as well, so go check out his post.

Back to Blogging

I have not been very consistent with this blog since May. It's not that nothing happened, it's just that we were too busy to report. After 4 weeks in Germany (Cedric) we moved to San Francisco on July 20th, and enjoyed the company of many visitors: Maureen's brother (2 weeks), Kenneth & Anne (1 week) and Thomas & Didier (2 weeks). We spent some time in San diego on the Spriggs' boat , went oyster-grilling and kayaking in Point Reyes and generally took our role as a tour guide very seriously.

Sailing on the Bay

While Goeric and myself were playing in the snow, Maureen was living the good life, sailing on the San Francisco Bay. Pictures of this trip can be found here.

Mount Shasta Skiing

Goeric and I decided to do some serious backcountry skiing this weekend. We headed out to the beautiful town of Mount Shasta on Thursday evening, and spent the night at the very authentic Mountain Air Lodge.
After talking to the local Ranger Bobs in the Morning, we drove to the "trailhead" (actually, the road was cut off by excess snow, and we had to hike 2.5 extra miles to get to the official start of the trail). We were the only ones leaving that day, as the weather was somewhat unstable, and avalanche danger was considerable. The climb on Friday was uneventful. We skinned a gentle slope all the way up to base camp and pitched our tent on a small plateau at 8,300ft. I was feeling rather miserable with a light case of altitude sickness kicking in, so I rested in the tent while Goeric went on to conquer a slope next to our camp. The next morning, we left for the summit at sunrise. We were making good progress on hard snow, keeping a reasonable pace of 1,200ft/hr. At 11,000ft the snow became very unpredictable, varying from too icy for the skins to grip, to too soft for crampons. I switched back and forth quite a bit, and I really got to love the fast adjustment of the Black Diamond sabretooth crampons that I had borrowed from Roetter Outdoors Works, Inc. Everything was going smooth, the mountain was beautiful and the cloud ceiling well below us offered amazing views. Then (at around 12,000ft) I suddenly started choking and our climbing speed dramatically decreased. At this point, I had to face the fact that I would not make it to the summit safely, so I decided to dig myself in at the top of the most skiable terrain, at 12,600 ft. Goeric went somewhat further (we were on a rocky ridge at that point, so there was no avalanche danger). For the full story on this beautiful trip, Goeric put together a movie available here. You can also find pix here.
The mountain humbled us this time but as true as our Governor is a 6-time Mr. Olympia: we'll be back!

Tahoe - The Last Stand

This was another Tahoe weekend. On Saturday morning, we met up with our very own localite Mr. Sidney, and headed for the sunny slopes of Squaw Valley. May skiing in California is a interesting experience. The snow was surprisingly good in the morning and some of us applied what they learned in flight school (FlyingRoetter), others just chilled in the gigantic base camp hot tub after a good day of skiing: pix here . The day ended with a nice BBQ on the deck, and we headed back on Sunday for the bay area.