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.

Hawaii - The Big Island

We spend the last week in Hawaii with our mum's. Travelling with your mother in law, you'd say? Well, we have great mum's and besides the trip was meant as a way to thank them for all the work they did to organize our Belgian wedding. Among the highlights of the trip were:
- swimming with sea turtles, pygmea dolphins, and other colorful critters
- poking flowing lava with a stick
- surfing the killer waves of Kona (or at least their little sisters)
- drinking pina colada out of a coconut

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are
149,000 words worth of blog, as well as a couple movies.

Vegas Baby: Part Deux

Almost exactly a year ago, I learned the meaning of the expression "I thee wed" in the beautiful setting of The Little White Chapel's "Tunnel of Love". The opportunity to celebrate this anniversary was too good to miss, so we headed out to Vegas last weekend. Our agenda was rather simple: party, sleep (some), drink (a lot), and repeat in random order. We started out Friday night with dinner at Mon ami Gabi (Paris), followed by Studio 54 (MGM Grand). The party was alright, and most of us left the club in reasonably decent shape between 2 and 4AM, the married boring people heading for their hotel room, the young bloods going for the craps tables. Long story short: everybody ended up getting some sleep, and by 2PM the next day, all of us had made it to the Paris' pool.

The following night was planned out by mastermind Turco. We formed a party of ~30 people and went to Simon (Hard Rock) for an amazing dinner after which off to the Body English, where Turco had arranged for a private lounge with drink service (pretty high performance organizing).

As far as I remember, the Body English is highly recommendable, we had a lot of fun and most of us where decadently intoxicated by the time we followed the natural urge to go home and snuggle in our covers. On Sunday we went to Red Rocks Canyon with Alex and Jules, and pretended to do some climbing. We (=Alex) were able to set up a grand total of 1 top rope and after I miserably failed to set up a second one (~5.10+) we rushed back to the airport in order to catch our flight to SFO.


Some picture links:
Misha's
Andrew's

More Tahoe snow

We went up to the cabin again this weekend. It was a full house (Julie, Ellen, Mark, Sarah, The Ginsberg brothers, Mike, Alex, Siobhan, Marcus and Monique), and most of us went skiing at Alpine Meadows on Saturday. A storm moved in on Sunday, so we decided to pig in for breakfast instead of going skiing, and headed back to the bay before the traffic got too crazy. Donner Pass was already snowed in when we passed it around 11AM. On the way back, Maureen and I stopped in Berkeley to get me some Telemark boots. To Maureen's delight, it took 1h30 to get them fitted. I can't wait to try them out!
It will be a long season, most of the resorts have 10s of feet of base, and there is more snow coming in this week.

Randonnee Skiing - Ostrander Hut

This weekend we went to Yosemite. Maureen had wanted to try backcountry skiing for a while, so we decided to head out to the mountains once again. After a little bit of research, and because the weather forecast for Tahoe was rather bad we chose to go to Ostrander Lake in Yosemite (altitude 8550ft).

Marie-Catherine and Goeric left on Thursday night to get a head start, and Maureen and I were planning to meet them on Saturday afternoon in the mountains, silly enough to think our cell phones would be working up there. I had Friday off (Good Friday), so I went to Berkeley’s famous Marmot Mountain Works store to get gear for our expedition. The picture below shows our packing list:

- Randonnee ski package (K2 Shes Piste + Diamir Titanal + Garmont GSM boots)

-Telemark ski package (K2 Instinx + Scarpa T2 boots)

- Avalanche gear rented from Marmot and Alex Roetter, Inc.

- A pack full of heavy stuff (18lbs)

- A pack full of heavier stuff (32lbs)

- An all wheel drive 225-hp 6-speed manual Audi A4 quattro + 18 inch rims

Friday night, we slept in the beautiful town of Groveland, CA and got up early the next morning to drive to the park’s only ski resort (Badger Pass) where our trailhead was located. We started the 10.1 miles (16.5km) trail at 9h30AM. At 9h37AM, Maureen discovered what every generation of first-time randonee skiers have discovered before her: randonnee boots are not comfortable. The following hour or so was spent re-adjusting, re-tightening followed by re-loosening Maureen’s boots. To be completely fair, we did make some progress in between the boot-adjustment sessions, and we were hitting a swift (under these circumstances) pace of 2mph.

After ~5 miles on relatively flat and groomed terrain, the trail turns into single track and the serious climbing begins. The weather was perfect with absolutely no wind, and the fresh snow made for a beautiful scenery. Maureen’s feet were toughening up (or was she getting tired of complaining), and we (I?) started fully enjoying the wilderness (we did not meet a single skier all day) and the magnificent views of the valley.

We reached the Lake at 4h15PM, but Marie-Catherine and Goeric were nowhere to be found (but then again, they are always late… :). I started following tracks in the snow hoping to find their tent and stumbled onto the two of them napping in what would be our base camp for the weekend. We enjoyed the rest of the daylight setting up our tent and preparing a comfortable pit for dinner.

In the morning Goeric and myself left at 7AM for a quick downhill run in the morning snow. The snow conditions were rather poor (crust) but the setting made up for it (see Goeric’s pictures). A 60 feet drop into a beautiful, 30 deg slope (the tracks are visible exactly above Maureen in the background of the picture with the two girls). This was my third time on Telemark skis, which made the whole thing much more interesting.

We were back at the base at 9AM and ready to leave by 10AM. The first half of the trail (single track) had some great tree skiing, and then came the groomed part… a gruelsome, 2-hour hike on boring semi-flat terrain really tested our mental stamina. We reached the cars at 3PM. Maureen’s blisters had at that point developed in lovely 2-inch diameter pouches. In retrospect, a 7-hour climb on your first time backcountry skiing could have been considered as daring.
For more pictures, click here or here

Tahoe Storm

Maureen and I drove up to the cabin on Friday night, where we met Otto (the swedish contingent of the house) and his friends Anika and Tobias (and little Linus). Julie, MM. Ginsberg and Jahr drove up later that night as well. There were a few snow showers at Donner pass, but nothing to write home about. It started to snow gently overnight and we spent Saturday playing in powder at Alpine Meadows. It was rather windy, and since we were soaked form the falling snow, it got very chilly, and we decided to head home for Julie's now famous warm chocolate. Albert and Kristin had come up that morning with their front wheel drive Jetta (this fact is of no significance at this point, but may well be later...).

Things got serious that night. When we woke up, it was snowing hard, and 12 (30cm) inches of new snow were covering our deck. Unfortunately for Albert's Jetta our deck was not the only thing covered with a thick layer of snow. After numerous but unsuccessful attemps to get the car moving in any direction other than downhill with the car had to be towed to the highway. Check out the attached pictures of this white inferno (taken Sturday BEFORE the bulk of the storm hit)!

Despite the storm and the fact that most lifts were on windhold, we headed to Squaw, where the lower mountain, and most importantly KT-22 and Olympic lady were running. it had snowed close to 20 inches (50cm) by that time (storm total 34 inches), and for little people like me, that meant knee-high power pleasure. The winds and the near-zero visibility could not spoil an amazing day on the slopes. Unfortunately I did not take any pictures that day, because it was technically too challenging to operate my camera in this blizzard.

After warming up a bit at the Chamois, we decided to hit the road. We drove 2 hours in the snow, and progressed a grand total of 6 miles. Being Engineers, we quickly calculated that at this pace, it would take us 60 hours to get to San Francisco, hence our quick (?) decision to turn around. We had dinner at Wolfdale's and slept at the cabin, hoping the traffic would clear up overnight. The next morning at 6AM Highway 80 was still covered with snow and stranded trucks were piled up from Reno to Truckee, but the friendly Caltrans people let us pass through chain control thanks to the quattro logo on the grille (the ultra-low profile performance tyres luckily went unnoticed).

We were at work at 10h30 that day.