Archive for the 'hiking' Category
Today’s going to be a slow day, with a bit of pottering about town (groceries, new novel), sitting at home (laundry, reading, writing), and working on some physics things here and there. It’ll be good to slow down. I went on another long hike yesterday, back in my more usual solitary mode. Last week’s to Willow (see a couple of earlier posts) was with my friend and colleague Albion Lawrence who I’d not seen for a long time, and so we spent a very pleasant time catching up on things (mostly sharing about books and film, as we do) as we walked.
Yesterday’s hike, following (initially) the West Maroon trail, was taken up with conversations with myself, both internal and external, and that’s something I enjoy a great deal. I thought I’d spend a lot of time thinking over various issues in physics that I’ve been puzzling over in my work, or that I’d learned about from various conversations and seminars while here at the Center. But I did not, surprisingly. Or not much. It was a very physics-free day, even though I was out there struggling along in the West Maroon area for over five hours (out and back to the bus).
Part of this might be because due to the large amount of snow on the ground in places, I lost the trail, and so spent a lot of time following the river trying to pick it up Continue reading ‘Recovery Time’
Very crunchy bit of mountain, on the final approach to the overlook of Willow Lake this weekend. It’s like a reward of a giant piece of Cadbury’s Flake after a long hike over Continue reading ‘Crunchy’
I don’t know what they’re called [update: glacier lillies*], but they were so lovely, I thought I’d share:
They look a lot like little street lamps, if you look closely, having a lovely curve to their Continue reading ‘Yellow Lamps’
Imagine my surprise (a couple of weeks ago) when this fellow - all four feet or maybe more - passed in front of me just ahead on the path (click for larger view). It was so sudden that I could hardly get the camera out in time, even though it was attached to my belt pack. I was hiking in Runyon Canyon for a short spell on a Sunday morning. It is quite busy at that time, with everyone and their dog (for real) out and about. Continue reading ‘Crossings’
It was hard not to notice yellow all over Griffith Park this weekend. There were several Continue reading ‘Yellow Fields’
Spring is in full flow here, and there were lovely contrasts to see on my hike in Griffith Continue reading ‘Renewal’
There’s really nothing like a sweet potato roasted in the heart of a wood fire. A wood fire lit out under a clear big sky with a full moon. After a long day of hiking. A day of hiking in the desert on a super hot day of vivid blue, brown, and gold. Delicious flavours, textures and colours.
I spent most of last week on retreat in Death Valley. It was Spring break, and I was Continue reading ‘Potato, Moon’
Lovely layers in the distance on a hike at Runyon Canyon this morning, looking North East. There’s breadth and depth here. You have the Hollywood sign on the left, all the Continue reading ‘Layers’
I decided to do Griffith Park for my Sunday morning hike today. It’s been a while - I’ve mostly been doing Runyon. I thought it would be nice to see how things were doing up there since I last went and saw them dramatically spraying the hydromulch to protect the ground from erosion until regrowth from the fire damage (see here and here). The (very) occasional rain we’ve had in the last couple of months seem to have begun something wonderful - there are hints of green everywhere. I saw this beautiful photograph at one point - which sort of says it all - only to find that my camera (which seems to be on its last legs these last few days) had died again. So I had to take it with my camera phone, and so it is a bit below par:
I think this is wonderful (blurriness aside) - it has the striking image of the burned tree Continue reading ‘Hope Comes in Yellow and Green’
(Shooting stars, that is. In other words, meteors. I’ll get to them eventually [or jump].)
The evening started with a 10:15pm movie at the Arclight. I saw the excellent biopic “Talk to Me”, (all about Petey Green and his manager Dewey Hughes) which 
happened to star two actors whose work I like a great deal, Don Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who both seem to grow and get better and stronger with every performance. I could be very wrong, but they’re also both among that (much) shorter list of actors who seem to me like people it would be interesting to get to know and talk to as well (missed a chance earlier this year with the latter, who was rumoured to be one of the people they were trying to get to take part in that New York shoot for King Magazine I told you about here and here).
Then, at 12:30am I wandered over to my “local” (well, they treat me like one, which is good), and favourite English pub outside of England - the Cat and Fiddle. Said hi to and chatted briefly with the guy at the door (about Stephen 
Donaldson books, of all things) and then ordered my customary thirst-quenching Hoegaarden and sat in the lovely courtyard for a while, reading some detailed notes of a series of what turned out to be startlingly excellent computations by my student Jeff Pennington. (Well, I don’t know if I should not call him my student any more. He’s graduated now and is off to do graduate work up North.) The Cat was relatively quiet (as it can be late on a Sunday night - it’s a very conservative town when it comes to staying up late; my theory is that it is partly because of all those early starts for shoots - and everybody seems to be connected to the Industry in some way), although I did get treated to the conversations of a group of people at the table near my bench. It seemed that all of a sudden, I was immersed in an episode of Entourage. The five women, dressed in severe (for a Sunday night) regulation “high powered 30-something person out on the town in Hollywood” outfits - more of the scary heel height and mercifully less flesh than the 10 years younger equivalent - seemed to be unabashedly discussing their various liaisons with members of the opposite sex, and two of the men from the group stepped aside (in my direction) to have a conversation about “the deal”, where one guy seemed to be seeking reassurance that he could pull off asking someone for 60 million. Ah, yes. It’s good to be back. Been several weeks since I intersected with this stuff.
The next stop - meteors. There’s nothing like a romantic evening under the stars - even if it’s a solo outing. I went to Runyon Canyon Park of course, getting there at about 1:45am. As I’ve mentioned before, it is another of those LA gems that most Continue reading ‘Stargazing’
[A friend of mine in LA told me today that she was planning to go with a group of friends to do some observing up at the big telescope on Mount Wilson. This put me in mind of a post that I did on CV two years ago (how time flies!) about some of the science done up there at the Mount Wilson Observatory, thoughts surrounding, all combined with a hike up to it that I felt compelled to do upon seeing it from the air. I thought I'd bring that old post back for you to read, with enlargeable pictures as a bonus. Enjoy. -cvj]
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As you know from an earlier post, I left Aspen on Friday and headed home. This involves changing planes at Denver, and then flying over the strange, beautiful, and changing landscape West to Los Angeles. It only takes about a couple of hours. I was thinking hard about our discussion about the Greatest Physics Paper! and trying to think of those forgotten examples of great work. The people who’s songs are seldom sung. The unglamourous “bread and butter†works that seldom get written up in the newspapers near the time that they are produced, if ever. These solid works are examples of what every scientist should do as a matter of course: You look at the evidence you have before you, gather more if necessary, make some assumptions, form a hypothesis, and test it against the data. Next, come to a conclusion, and report your results as clearly and honestly as you can, and so on.
Whether or not you have some vision about what it all means does not necessarily qualify or disqualify the resulting paper as a candidate for being a great paper. It can still take its place in the tapestry that is the sum of efforts of generation after generation of physicist to make sense of our world, and find its meaning there.
So I was thinking about this all, and my mind switched to some recent reading I’d been doing. Simon Singh’s excellent book, “Big Bang†had been on my bedside table recently, and although I’d not had a lot of time to read it, I was curious to dip into it from time to time. This is partly because, while I know several of the stories and the history that he tells, it is always of great value to see how another tells those stories. I always learn something, either in the facts or in the telling.
As we’d been discussing before, Einstein’s papers are modern examples of work that changed our entire view of how the universe that we inhabit is really put together. How can those fail to be top candidates for the best physics papers ever? Same thing for Newton, and for Galileo, etc.
However, it’s easy to forget that for several years after Einstein’s breakthrough with General Relativity [see a later post I did here], the world still thought that the entire universe was just the Milky Way Galaxy. It was not until the year 1923 that Edwin Hubble (in one of his many great contributions) established extremely cleanly that the Andromeda Galaxy was several times further away from the center of the Milky Way than the edge of the Milky Way itself. This was a truly shattering change of perspective Continue reading ‘The Walk Up Mount Wilson’
Some of the results of last Saturday’s wanderings. The wildflowers are in evidence nearly everywhere you look. Hiking through entire fields of them stretching off into the distance is such a pleasure:
The view toward Snowmass lake (you can just see it) that you can get from being on Continue reading ‘Clearing Out’
Yesterday afternoon, feeling a bit down in the dumps for a variety of reasons, I decided to head for the hills to clear my head. A good hike often helps these things. My other mission was to begin the painful task of breaking in some new boots. The fantastic repair job that I got done on my faithful old boots that died last year (see here for the full report) held up marvelously, and in fact still holds up, but I will admit that they lost a fair bit of flexibility with the new sole, and although they are great for the medium grade sorts of hikes I do in the immediate surroundings, I’m not really sure that they’d be great on the longer ones. I have not taken them up Mount Wilson, for example. The repair extended their life for quite a bit longer, and they will still be useful, but I decided last week that I should start breaking in a new pair to last me (I hope) another 15 years or so. I decided to try to get something as close to the ones I had as before, and so the Asolo TPS 535s were the ones I got (supposedly the natural successors to my Asolo AFX 530s). So I laced them up (already unhappy with the wimpy laces they have as compared to the big rope-like ones on my old boots) and set off from the trailhead in Topanga.
My goal? Eagle Rock. A favourite of mine. There it is in the photo on the right (click for larger). It’s a relatively quick hike, about 3 miles out, along the Musch trail (not the fire road) and a 1000 foot elevation gain, with mostly nobody around since it is insanely hot at 2:30pm and only mad dogs and Englishmen (so the Noel Coward song goes) go out in the midday sun. I’ll leave you to decide which I am (remember, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog). So I was able to speed up the mountain to the Rock and stay there for a while, only meeting four other people heading that way the whole time.
You might wonder why it is called Eagle Rock. I did for a long time, as probably have Continue reading ‘Boot Camp’
Fantastic hike yesterday. More later, perhaps, but now I want to write about a couple of other things. In the meantime, here are some lovely butterflies that obligingly posed for the blog on some (type of sage?) flowers:
Continue reading ‘Chalcedon Checkerspots’
If you’re looking for a day (or half day) out today in the greater Los Angeles area, let me suggest a trip up to the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). (Details here.) Their open house (held today and yesterday) is rather fun…. you get to learn about some of the grand space missions of yesteryear (like the 1977 Voyager missions… both craft are still actively sending data from beyond the solar system now), or of the moment (like Cassini-Huygens, for example sending wonderful pictures of Saturn and Titan back for us to learn from and marvel at - see e.g. here), or to come soon (like WISE (an infra-red telescope which will help broaden and deepen our understanding of planetary systems, galaxies, and the universe at large), or Dawn (a mission to go and orbit and study two large asteroids).
You can learn lots of things about the science these missions are teaching us about not only far away worlds, but about our own world. There are also missions which are studying earth directly (making observations about our atmosphere, oceans, and so forth), so even if you don’t care about space, there’s something for you.
You can visit special exhibits for each of the missions, talk to scientists and engineers, and even visit the large warehouses where the spacecraft are made, and where they are assembled. There are the control rooms to visit, 
a dome with giant robots (I’ve no idea about that one), an extra special exhibit about Mars exploration, and lots of stations with all sorts of entertainment for kids! They’ve done a great job providing a lot of material for everyone to take away, including packets of information for teachers to use in their classes too!
Continue reading ‘JPL the new Disneyland?’
I went for a nice hazy-then-sunny hike this morning in Griffith Park, and decided to try a way up that I have not used in a while. I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to approach the Griffith Observatory using the trails directly below it.
It’s such a majestic building! - A lovely backdrop to some of the hike up to the peak Continue reading ‘View from the Trail’
At about 12000 ft up a mountain, near the supremely beautiful Willow Lake (my destination… I’ll tell you about this and why I was doing it in a little while, now that I’ve managed to get the pictures off my ailing Mingus) my faithful companions of 14 years -my Asolo AFX 530s- decided to disintegrate on me. I’ve had those boots since 1992/3 when I started hiking and backpacking properly in the USA, doing some trips up from Princeton (where I was at the time) to the Adirondacks in upstate New York, occasionally disappearing into the wilderness there for a few days with just enough equipment to do the job reasonably comfortably. They’ve stuck with me through thick and thin all these years, and I’ve given them a lot of work to do, especially in the mountains in the Aspen area.
Well, that last half hour sprint/hike after the waterfall over sharp rocks up to the lake was the last straw for one sole, and it shattered into pieces, and continued to shred to the footplate just beneath my left foot. Upon closer examination, the right sole was also cracking and leaving the boot in some places too. It was as though they’d both had enough and agreed to end it all together.
Some hours later, I (with two other members of the party - the others stayed at the Lake to camp overnight and then make an early assault on the 14000ft + peaks of Kit Carson and Challenger point) hiked back down toward the 8000ft point from where we bagan (near the village of Crestone, Colorado), and within 25 minutes were overtaken by torrential rain and a wonderful lightning storm, which had settled right on top of us. We hiked down the mountain for the next couple of hours or so in silence, broken only by the sounds of grand pianos falling down the stairs (thunder and lightning) and -at least to my ears- the loud squelching noise of my soggy-socked foot (now sticking out of the boot) as it sampled every puddle and rivulet made by the downpour.
Being sentimental, I brought them home back to California. Here they are:
Yesterday I decided that it was time to begin the arduous search for a replacement pair. I was not looking forward to this because: Continue reading ‘Rebooting’
The wild flowers seem to have peaked a lot earlier this year, probably due to a change in the rainfall pattern. Up on the way to Buckskin Pass yesterday, there were more deadheads than blooms. Perhaps other trails were doing better (such as the Cathedral Lake trail… look at the flowers I saw almost exactly the same time last year at this link).
Anyway, I’ve forgotten what these are called, but here are some lovely yellow flowers, just past their peak (but still lovely to see dotting the landscape here and there):
-cvj
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