Yosemite 2024: Mist and Vernal Falls

 

For the Veteran's Day long weekend this year we decided to visit Yosemite National Park, having never been there in the Fall. On Friday night, we drove out to Oakdale, staying there for dinner. I'd forgotten my belt and ended up paying absurd prices at a local Tractor Supply, but it saved time hunting for a belt.

Arriving at the park at 9:45am, we flashed our Every Kid Outdoors printout and exchanged it for a plastic card for the free entrance. We were told that the parking lot for Happy Isles might be filled up, so we parked at Camp Curry instead and walked the extra 0.5 miles. Getting started at 10:30am, we were immediately impressed by the fall colors in the valley leading up to the Vernal Falls footbridge.

Past the footbridge, the trail climbs along side the falls. In the spring and summer there would be mist from the falls, giving the trail its name. In the fall, the waterfall is but a shadow of itself, and the trail was completely dry. It was crowded though, and frequently we had to pause to let hikers past us from both sides.

At the top of Vernal falls, I took out my stove and we made lunch --- instant noodles. After lunch I made the mistake of showing Boen the top of Nevada Falls and told him we were headed to the top. He immediately threw a temper tantrum and refused to keep walking. It took quite a bit of cajoling and bribery to get him to keep moving. The thing is, the top of Vernal Falls is already more than half way up to the top of Nevada Falls, so it actually wasn't that long before we got to the top.

At the top, we got good views of half dome, Mt Watkins, and Clouds Rest. From there, we would descend the John Muir Trail down to Clarks Point. It was already getting pretty dark, and we were already in shadow at this point.

By the time we got to the car it was already past sunset, and we headed straight to our lodging for the night, Cedar Lodge, which had a restaurant serving mediocre food, but had a heated indoor swimming pool that Bowen and Boen had a great time playing in before bed.

I'd wanted to do the Four Mile trail up to Glacier Point and back, but then realized that we'd done enough elevation today that I was likely to be met with protests the next morning. I did some research and realized that Glacier Point was open, so we could do a loop I'd never done before, which was Sentinel Dome, Roosevelt Point, and Taft Point loop. It was a short easy loop and would give us time to explore the valley before sunset.

Review: The End is Always Near

 The End Is Always Near purports to be a history book about apocalyptic moments from the past. In practice, the apocalyptic moments it discusses don't feel that bad. For instance, the black plague reduced the population of England from 6 million people to 2 million people. That's terrible for the people who died, but as the author explained, 6 million people was the carrying capacity of England at the time! So the people who were living were in fact barely subsisting, and in fact the survivors of the plague ended up with a much better standard of living afterwards (for about 300 years) since the manpower shortage meant that the poorest of the poor now had land, and serfs could raise a middle finger to their lords if they were mistreated. Now you know why folks like Elon Musk are worried about a population decline --- the modern day oligarchs might have to pay a living wage if population declined sufficiently!

There's a strange chapter about how in the past effectively child raising techniques are so horrifyingly brutal that all persons were raised in an abusive environment:

Lloyd deMause quotes a piece written by the chief of police in Paris in 1780 estimating that of the, on average, 21,000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. (Marie Antoinette, writing in a letter to her mother, noted after her daughter recognized her as her mother in a room full of people, “I believe I like her much better since that time”—which suggests she hadn’t liked her all that much before. (pg 25)

 I'm not sure how this has to do with apocalypse.

Finally, there's an entire 1/3rd of the book about the deployment and use of the atomic bomb, including the Cuban missile crisis. The examination of the mindset by the air forces involved at that time is interesting.

One item I found strangely missing is any mention of the pre-historic severe population bottleneck, where the human population we reduced to about 1280 breeding individuals. Obviously we don't know much about that time, but not even mentioning that in the book is kind of strange.

I did get interesting insights from this book, but I'm not sure I can fully recommend it. Maybe the author's podcast is more interesting.

Yosemite 2024 Index Page

 We visited Yosemite for Veterans Day. It was our first time there in the fall.

Photos

• Mist and Vernal Falls
• Sentinel Dome, Roosevelt Point, Taft Point
• Mirror Lake Loop

Review: Kiki's Delivery Service

 I of course enjoyed Kiki's Delivery Service as a Hayao Miyazaki movie, but I never realized that it was based on a book of the same name until Amazon served me an add.

Unlike the movie, which has an actual, relatively coherent plot. this book is actually a series of vignettes about Kiki, who's not very different from the one you see in the movie. There's a slight hint of romance between Kiki and Tombo, but there are no scenes with bicycles, and no drama in which Kiki loses her power, which makes the movie much more powerful than the book as a coming of age story.

That said, it's clearly a kid's book and if you have kids who enjoy the movie this is a good book for them to read after they've seen the movie.

Review: Tapped Out

 I remember enjoying American Shaolin, so when I saw that Matt Polly had a follow-on book called Tapped Out, I decided to check it out and read it.

Matt Polly is a funny guy in writing. For instance: 

When I was at the Shaolin Temple, I studied iron forearm kung fu, which involved repeatedly banging your forearms against a tree trunk for thirty minutes a day in order to make them tough enough to block a full kick without injury. When I returned to Kansas, my father saw me practicing against a tree in the backyard. After I finished, he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “I don’t know what we did wrong raising you, but whatever it was, I’m sorry.” (page 95)

Unfortunately, the topic, MMA isn't actually as exciting as it sounds. Matt Polly has a hard time explaining the differences between the martial arts styles, and his performative incompetence doesn't make you feel like it's  a sport worth watching or participating in, despite him stating near the end of the book writing that his blood pressure went from 145/100 to 118/80 in 2 years of serious training for his fight.

Throughout the book, Matt Polly name drops what are obviously famous people in the MMA world. Unfortunately, those references were lost on me. I guess I'm not really the audience for this book. You pretty much have to already be a fan of MMA to thoroughly appreciate this book.

Review: Barking Up the Wrong Tree

 Barking Up the Wrong Tree has the feel of several dozen blog posts turned into a book. But I noticed that it was a WSJ best-selling book, so plenty of people must think it's good reading. And to a large extent, Eric Barker is entertaining and breezy. For instance:

managing what your boss thinks of you is far more important than actual hard work. A study shows that those who made a good impression got better performance reviews than those who worked harder but didn’t manage impressions as well. Often this comes down to something we’re all very familiar with: good ol’ ass kissing. Is flattering the boss effective? Research has shown flattery is so powerful that it works even when the boss knows it’s insincere. Jennifer Chatman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, did a study to see at what point flattery backfired . . . but she couldn’t find one. (kindle loc 802)

Later on in the same chapter he mentions that if the entire company turned into the kind of people who just ass kissed and nobody did any work, it suddenly became a much worse place to work and the company would tank eventually. (Unless you're Google of course, which has so much revenue coming in it doesn't matter that ass-kissing is the normal work ethic.)

 Barker notes that the entire point of fiction is to paint an unrealistic picture of the world:

Research shows that fiction makes us more “prosocial”—that is, kind and giving. It does this by making our vision of the world less accurate. Just as religion and stories of personal meaning help us cope, so do movies, TV, and other stories. Stories not only engage our minds but also quietly slip a pair of rose-colored glasses on our heads. (kindle loc 1508)

 You get the idea of what the book is like. There's a ton of references to say Robert Wiseman's work, and even a side mention of American Shaolin. (I never realized that Matt Polly wrote additional books other than that one, so this book caused me to go look up the other books!)

Each chapter ends with a recap and a bunch of summaries, and of course every "on the one hand" advise comes with an "on the other hand" advise. Ultimately, there's one saying that comes to mind over and over again when I read this book, which is to know the enemy and to know yourself. If you've already internalized that saying, you do not need to read this book. But you should read it anyway for the entertainment.

Review: The Wild Life of Our Bodies

 The Wild Life of Our Bodies is a book about the relationship between our bodies and their evolutionary partners/predators/symbiotes that modern life has changed. It is surprisingly wide ranging, from discussing various diseases (such as Crohn's disease) that have symptoms largely alleviated when some patients deliberately infect themselves with various parasitic worms in their intestines. In fact, one postulate in the book (not backed up with evidence) is that the modern epidemic of obesity is because historically humans have always had tapeworms and other parasites in their bodies absorbing nutrition that are no longer widespread in developed countries, and now that those parasites are no longer in our bodies our super efficient metabolism now causes obesity.

There's one particularly keen observation about lactose intolerance and how few people (globally) actually have the gene that allows them to process milk as adults, yet the USDA food pyramid encourages consumption of dairy products:

That our bodies respond differently to the same food as a consequence of our ancestry may seem obvious. Yet we ignore such realities every day. The USDA food pyramid still has as one of its main items “milk,” along with fruits, vegetables, meats, and beans, even though most humans worldwide cannot digest milk. Milk is just the beginning of the unraveling of the idea that any one species of plant or animal food (or processed version thereof) might do us all good. (pg 132)

There's a discussion of why we have a natural, instinctual aversion to snakes, and why we ended up as being the only hairless ape. (body lice and ticks are a major reason, and in fact we can stop the spread of headlice in schools if we could get all parents to get their kids' heads shaved!)

Rats, pigeons, cows, antelope, and monkeys groom. When pigeons are prevented from grooming, they grow speckled with lice. Cows prevented from cleaning themselves have four times as many ticks and six times as many lice as those left unhindered. Antelope have a specialized tooth called a “dental comb” that seems to serve no purpose other than to aid in grooming away ectoparasites (evidence of yet another case in which ectoparasites seem to have posed a cost that was significant enough to cause animal bodies to evolve).4 Many animals groom themselves and each other even though the lost time such efforts entail is costly. (pg. 220)

The book ends with the observations that urban infestations (cockroaches, rats, pigeons and other undesirable weeds) are a reflection of the ancient human predilection for living in caves. That those creatures fare best in caves is also why they fare best in cities. I'm not sure I 100% buy his argument, since plants like dandelions also do well in cities but I've yet to find a dandelion in a cave. Similarly bats do well in caves but we rarely see them in cities.

Nevertheless, this book gives you lots to think about and is worth a read.

Review: The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs

 I wish I had known about The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs back when Boen was in his dinosaur phase. This book is an encyclopedic dossier on dinosaurs, fossils, the history of dinosaur research, the big asteroid catastrophe (and how that theory was formulated and later proven). Each chapter has a beautiful illustration of a dinosaur, and full illustrations of the various fossils are depicted in photos.

The book has several details about dinosaurs that taught me new things:

Maybe you’ve heard the rumor that T. rex liked its meat dead and rotten, that Rex was a scavenger, a seven-ton carcass collector too slow, too stupid, or too big to hunt for its own fresh food. This accusation seems to make the rounds every few years, one of those stories that science reporters can’t get enough of. Don’t believe it. It defies common sense that an agile and energetic animal with a knife-toothed head nearly the size of a Smart car wouldn’t use its well-endowed anatomy to take down prey but would just walk around picking up leftovers. It also runs against what we know about modern carnivores: very few meat-eaters are pure scavengers, and the outliers that do it well—vultures, for instance—are fliers that can survey wide areas from above and swoop down whenever they see (or smell) a decaying body. Most carnivores, on the other hand, actively hunt but also scavenge whenever they have the chance. After all, who turns down a free meal? That’s true of lions, leopards, wolves, even hyenas, which are not the pure scavengers of legend but actually earn much of their food through the chase. Like these animals, T. rex was probably both a hunter and an opportunistic scavenger. (kindle loc 2338)

 It taught me the pterosaus/pterodactyls were not dinosaurs (I always associated them with dinosaurs but they're actually reptiles). Birds by contrast are dinosaurs and have lungs that are very different from ours:

The lungs of sauropods were very similar to those of birds and very different from ours. While mammals have a simple lung that breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide in a cycle, birds have what is called a unidirectional lung: air flows across it in one direction only, and oxygen is extracted during both inhalation and exhalation. The bird-style lung is extra efficient, sucking up oxygen with each breath in and each exhalation. It’s an astounding feature of biological engineering, made possible by a series of balloonlike air sacs connected to the lung, which store some of the oxygen-rich air taken in during inhalation, so that it can be passed across the lung during exhalation. Don’t worry if it sounds confusing: it is such a strange lung that it took biologists many decades to figure out how it works. (kindle loc 1357)

I don't think this is as good a book as The Rise and Reign of Mammals. (This is a case of the sequel being better than the original)  But if you like dinosaurs and can't get enough of them (there's a whole chapter about T Rex!) this is the book to get!

Review: What Makes This Book So Great

 You do not need to buy What Makes This Book So Great, because you can go back and read Jo Walton's columns on tor.com. But I really enjoyed having everything on my kindle, which is still a much better experience than reading on a laptop or a phone. Unlike a collection of book reviews, these are all books that Jo Walton has read multiple times (at least twice anyway) and appreciated. Jo Walton goes all fan-girl on these blog posts and her enthusiasm is infectious, causing me to read-read other books as a detour while perusing the pages of this book.

Walton notices things I didn't notice when I read those books (such as the connection between the title of each book and the story in the Vlad Taltos novels), making clear that she's a much more careful reader than I am. She's also faster than I am, which means that she can read an entire series in quick succession, allowing her to make connections between books that I couldn't. She's also capable of reading books that I found unreadable (such as Midnight's Children) which means that I don't have to read those books any more --- I can read her re-read review instead. I've been told by some people that they treat my blog that way.

I love the last few pieces in this book where she defends certain series or authors who aren't taken seriously in the mainstream literary criticism. (Why is Samuel Delany worthy of mainstream attention while Lois Bujold isn't?)

The best thing about this book is that it can easily be re-read in search of more books that I should have read but somehow bypassed. Recommended!

Re-read: Yendi

 Yendi is the second book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series. Rather than being a direct sequel, it's a prequel, telling Vlad's story about how he met his wife during an gang war in his district. Vlad Taltos is not a very nice guy, so there's lots of murder and mayhem as well as an extremely convoluted plot. This is something I wouldn't have noticed without Jo Walton's book What Makes This Book So Great: each book in this series is named of an animal in Brust's mythology, and the Yendi is supposed to be this super devious animal capable of extremely convoluted plots.

Overall, I'm not sure the plot is all that believable, though some of what makes it unbelievable (why does Taltos have such loyal and engaged Dragaeran friends, who will risk their lives for him?) is apparently explained in later books. The book is eminently readable --- Brust's first person narratives always are. But by the end of the novel I had had enough of Taltos.

Review: Abanen Quick Fit 22mm Elastic Band for Fenix 47mm watches

 For years, Arturo and I have joked that the heart rate monitors built into Garmin watches are random number generators. We would kill ourselves and the HR would read some obnoxiously low reading, like 120bpm. We would start a descent, and the HR would give us an absurdly high number like 144bpm. This occurred across multiple generations of watches and sensors. People with white skin do not seem to have a problem.

I tried switching to the Schosche Rhythm 24 as an external HRM. While that HRM was much more accurate, it was subject to multiple dropouts from the Edge 840. If you read various forums, that dropout is usually blamed on Garmin's firmware. On the other hand, the Edge never experienced any dropouts from my Fenix watches.

I then theorized that the reason the cheap $30 HRM would outperform my $700 watch was positioning. The wrist is a poor position for an optical HRM. Not only does it not get signal from blood vessels easily, but (especially on thin-wristed people) it's subject to vibration and noise. The upper arm position that the Schosche Rhythm 24 demands probably contributes to its improved accuracy. My solution was to look for an elastic strap that would let me wear the Fenix like a Schosche during workouts.

The Abanen Quick Fit 22mm Elastic Band was on sale during a Prime day for around $17. That's half the price of the HRM. The quick fit works as advertised, and the band itself dries quickly even when submerged in water.  I adjusted the strap so that it could be used both on the wrist (albeit suboptimally) and on the upper arm. The difference was immediate and visible. Any moderate effort would push the HR reading on the Edge to 120. A tough climb at 200W would slowly drive my HR up to 150, and a sustained push beyond that will get it to 170. Garmin's connect app stopped complaining that I had a high aerobic shortage.

It took me years to figure out the problem, but now that I have, this setup cannot be beat for touring. I have a HRM for rides, plus a hiking GPS and step counter off the bike. And of course, it also means that things like HRV are probably suspect if you're wearing your watch on the wrist as you sleep!!

Needless to say, the Abanen comes highly recommended!

Review: The Rise and Reign of Mammals

 For whatever reason, Boen demanded a Kindle Unlimited subscription. We signed up for 2 months, so I might as well use it. I checked out The Rise and Reign of the Mammals.  This is an unexpectedly great read. Just the pictures alone illustrating the evolution of whales from a 4 legged land animal to the leviathan of the ocean is well worth the read. What's even better is that Steve Brusatte's text evokes the sense of wonder that adults too often lose as a result of too much adulting:

The blue whale is the most extreme of these “extreme mammals.” It is not merely the largest mammal alive today, but the largest living animal, period. Nobody has ever found a fossil of anything bigger, which means that the blue whale is the all-time record holder, the heavyweight champion of the history of the world. It’s a simple but profound statement that bears repeating: the biggest animal that has ever lived is alive right now. Of all the billions of species that have lived during the billions of years of Earth history, we are among the privileged few that can say such a thing. How glorious is it that we breathe the same air as a blue whale, swim in the same waters, and gaze at the same stars? Blue whale mothers birth three-ton calves the length of a speedboat, which bulk up by about fifteen tons during their half year of nursing. Adults can dive to depths of more than 1,000 feet (315 meters) and hold their breath for well more than an hour and expel a two-story column of water from their blowhole when they come up for air. With one gulp of their expandable mouths, they can take in a backyard swimming pool’s worth of water, which they do several times a day, in order to gather the two tons of krill—little shrimpy crustaceans—they need to power their metabolism. They’re smart and social, and their low-pitch vocalizations are the most powerful sound in the animal kingdom, able to reverberate for over nine hundred miles through the abyss. But all is not well. It is estimated that 99 percent of the blue whale population was exterminated by whaling over the past couple of centuries. Of a community that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands at any given time, only a few tens of thousands of individuals—at most—remain. (kindle loc 3122-3135)

It is books like these that made me want to become a scientist, all those years ago, and it's sad that we live in a post-literate society, where books like these aren't common reading amongst children.

I love the questions and answers posed by this book, such as the exploration of what delineates a mammal. When I was a kid, the textbooks talked about the definition of mammals as being creatures that gave birth live (not true it turned out --- the platypus lays eggs), fed its young milk (true, but it turned out that this feature arose late),  was warm blooded (also a relatively late development). The book traces the evolutionary development and points out that the development of a jaw that could pulverize leaves and plant matter (thereby starting digestion early in the food intake process) was when the split happened. What's even more interesting is the evolution of the earbones in mammals!

The ring, hammer, anvil, and stirrup enable one of the most advanced neurosensory skills of mammals: our ability to hear a wide range of sounds, particularly high-frequency ones. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians can all hear. They can all take sound waves and convert them to liquid waves in their cochleas. But they can’t hear anywhere near as well as mammals, and across such a wide range of frequencies, because they have only a single ear bone to do it all—the stapes, the equivalent to the stirrup. (kindle loc 1473)

Other questions addressed include why land mammals never became as big as dinosaurs:

Why didn’t land mammals get as big as dinosaurs? As huge as they were, Palaeoloxodon and Paraceratherium were still not even half as heavy as the most enormous long-necked dinosaurs. There’s no easy answer to this conundrum, but I suspect it has to do with the lungs. Mammal lungs are tidal; breaths go in and out, as the lung expands and contracts. We feel this every time our chest goes up and down as we breathe. Birds are different: they have a flow-through lung, as air can go through it in only one direction. This feat of engineering is choreographed by balloonlike air sacs, which connect to the lung and funnel air through it in a precise sequence. When a bird breathes in, some of the oxygen-rich air goes directly across the lungs, while the rest is shunted into the air sacs. Then, when the air sacs contract, the still-oxygenated air inside is passed across the lung during exhalation, meaning birds—and the giant dinosaurs with the same lungs—take in oxygen while breathing in and out. This means dinosaurs got more oxygen with each breath than a similarly sized mammal. And there’s more: the air sacs extend through the body and even into the bones, acting as an air-conditioning system, and lightening the skeleton. The end result: large dinosaurs were more efficient breathers, could cool their bodies easier, and had lighter and more limber skeletons. This, I think, is why no land mammal has been able to approach their titanic sizes.  (kindle loc 3268)

What this book illustrates is how modern science is inter-disciplinary. The research crosses paleontology, genetics (DNA analysis was what allowed the origin of whales to be determined),  geology/earth sciences, and climate science and ties everything together to form a coherent story about the evolution of mammals. The book also covers the location of many fossils and may give you a reason to visit what you used to have considered flyover country. Even something as mundane as teeth in grass grazing animals is explored in detail:

Because grasses grow near to the ground in wide open spaces, they are a magnet for dirt, dust, and other windblown particles. Many grazing mammals today ingest an unholy amount of grit as they nibble. On average, domestic cattle swallow about 4–6 percent dirt, compared to less than 2 percent for leaf-eating browsers. Sheep, which crop grass closer to the ground than cows, have it worse: in New Zealand, they have been observed to consume 33 percent dirt—in other words, one ounce of dirt for every two ounces of grass. The dirt and phytoliths function as sandpaper, filing down the teeth of grazing mammals as they eat. This is not a trivial concern: grazers today lose about three millimeters of tooth every year, the enamel literally scoured away. That might not sound like much, but consider this. My molar teeth are about a centimeter (ten millimeters) tall above the gum line. If I ate nothing but grass, my teeth would barely last three years. (kindle loc 3860)

My one criticism of this book (and I suspect one reason I will find it tough to make my kids read the book) is that it spends a lot of time giving credit (and telling the story) of the various scientists that the author knew and interviewed and interacted with. I understand the intention and the respect the author has for these scientists (who were frequently his colleagues, mentors, students, and friends!) but frequently these vignettes disrupt the evolutionary/scientific story he's telling and caused me to want to skip pages in impatience to get to the good parts. That the book has so many good parts (and I've only covered a few of them --- there's so much more --- go read the book!) means it's worth it to bear with those sections. After all, some of these stories might inspire a kid reading this book to go on to become a scientist! 

Needless to say this book comes highly recommended and is likely to be my recommendation for the book of the year!

Review: CycPlus Tiny Pump

 In the interest of keeping Xiaoqin's Ritchey Road Logic as light as possible, I opted not to install a regular air pump, but instead to stuff a CycPlus Tiny Pump into her saddlebag instead. We bought one during Prime Day for $72 (which is expensive but cheaper than many competitors), charged it up, tried it to see how it worked, and then forgot about it until September, when she had a flat tire during a ride.

To my surprise, the device was still charged and happily pumped up a spare inner tube that we had with us to full operating pressure (which admittedly was only around 50psi for 700x32mm tires). It saved me a bit of pumping on a hot day, and I'm impressed that the charge stayed good for so long.

The caveat with these pumps is that you cannot use them with a TPU tube --- the heat of the electric motor running would melt the plastic valve stems on those tubes. That's a small limitation in my book. If you're hooked on TPU just install them on your bike and then carry a standard tube as a spare and you can have the best of both worlds. Or you can buy an extension hose (which is not very practical to store or carry!).

Recommended.

Reread: Jhereg

 I ended up re-reading Jhereg once again because of Jo Walton's What Makes this Book so Great. Indeed, this book is great. The voice of Vlad Taltos is perfect, just the right amount of cockiness and self-assurance. Taltos is not a great person (hey, he assassinates people for a living), but he's a great story teller. The novel is a lot like a heist story --- there's a setup (we're giving you a ton of money to get rid of this one guy), introduction to the characters are just enough to get you inclue'd but not long enough to bore you or drag in a lot of exposition, and the action is fast.

There are many places where just like a mystery novel or heist story, Taltos explains the plan to his buddies but doesn't explain them to you, only showing you the plan as it is put into action. This feels like a conceit, mostly because you would never do that when you tell a story to someone else, but Steven Brust does it with such finesse that you're willing to go along with it.

I enjoyed the book enough to keep going in the series. I guess I'm yet another victim of Jo Walton's.

Mt Tamalpais Birthday Trip

 

Xiaoqin found a hotel on Mt Tam and decided it would be a great birthday present for me to do a trip with her. I mapped out two rides and we drove up on Saturday and rode the first, an ambitious 38 mile loop with more than 4500' of climbing, taking in RidgeCrest, Mt Tam summit, and Highway 1. It did not disappoint.

While the valley was shrouded in fog, on Panaromic Highway and Pan Toll road we were in the sun, with gorgeous views of the sea of clouds below us. You might think things couldn't get better but when we descended down to Ridgecrest, the gate across the road was closed!

We saw plenty of cyclists coming the other way so we knew it was passable by bicycles so we rode around the gate and onto the car free highway. The views were nothing short of phenomenal, and we could use the entire road because no cars were going to be on it!

Once the road descended enough, it was foggy and mysterious but the pavement despite being wet didn't splash any water on us, and the road was still car free so we could dodge around wet spots and avoid construction debris. On the other side of the gate a group of cyclists stopped us and asked if we could help with their broken chain. While I had an 11s quick link they clearly needed a chain tool and I didn't have one with me. Fortunately, they had a radio and radio'd their parents for help.

The descent down into Bolinas was gorgeous if cool, making us wear our jackets. At the bottom we turned left and headed along the Bolinas Lagoon, which was beautiful even on a cloudy day, with fast flat curves that denied the right to cars to drive at full speed but were perfect on a bicyle.

At Stintson beach we stopped at the Parkside Cafe for some seafood tacoes to brace ourselves for the inevitably trafficky climb up Highway 1 towards Muir Woods. A hostile hitch hiker told us to block all the traffic going southbound. Usually it's the motorists who are rude but I guess anti-bicyclist sentiment extends to many hikers as well.

At Muir Woods we stopped to use the bathroom before climbing up the Muir Woods road to four corners. The sun came and went but it never rained and the temperatures were warm though not unpleasantly so.

Back at the car, we loaded it back up and drove to Mountain Home Inn, a tiny hotel with just a few rooms. Rather than miss the sunset, Xiaoqin had the smart idea to bring instant noodles and we could eat dinner in our rooms and then drive back up to Ridgecrest for the gorgeous sunset.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and then drove to Point Reyes Station to start an easier ride along parts of the Marshall Loop.

In retrospect, I should have reversed the route, since the traffic on the return was much worse later in the day while traffic on that part of highway 1 was relatively light. Nevertheless, we had gorgeous views of Tomales Bay before turning inland.

Once inland past Tomales it got warm very quickly. Unfortunately Xiaoqin suffered a flat at a rest stop from a thorn. We quickly fixed it thanks to the Cycplus Pump that was on her bike. Despite my never having topped up the charge it happily pumpped up her tire after we installed a new tube.

The return via Wilson Hill Road followed by Hicks Valley Road and then Pt Reyes Petaluma Road had  a lot of traffic but the road mostly had wide bike lanes and it was mostly downhill. It could have been cooler, but we got to Point Reyes Station and our car before 2:00pm  and could buy a nice lunch and sit outside before going home. What a wonderful birthday present from Xiaoqin!

Re-read: The Snow Queen

 After A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, I was so impressed that I decided to go back to re-read The Snow Queen, the 1981 Hugo Award Winner that I read as a kid. I had vague memories of it being good.

Unfortunately, some books don't age as well over time, and this is one of them. The analog with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale was well done --- I have no issue with that, but the idea of a trans-star wide computer that uses humans as input output mechanism (but that results in the human medium unable to even recall what was transmitted through them) doesn't work as well. (For one thing, where does the power source come from?) I did enjoy the use of the biological hazard symbol and the virus-infection method of transmission, but again, that doesn't seem very robust, and then there's the old trope of ancient mechanisms still working hundreds or thousands of years in the future without bugs seems very unlikely.

The characters now feel like they were jerked around like puppets on strings. I can see how at the time the book was written female protagonists that rescued the male would have been considered innovative.

I don't think I'll bother with the rest of the series.

Capitola Weekend Trip

 

For labor day weekend we decided to ride to Capitola and back for the Saturday and Sunday. The kids were pretty happy about going to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, the first time Boen would attend in which he's tall enough to do all the "fun" rides.

We cheated by driving to the Lexington Elementary school, parking the car, and starting up Old Santa Cruz Highway. This is by far the easiest way to ride to Capitola. We'd booked the Quality Inn in Capitola. The ride to summit road was fairly easy, and then the nerve wracking ride along summit road to the Summit store, where we ate lunch. It was surprisingly warm, and we were happy to start descending Soquel San Jose road.

That road was fast and furious as usual, and at the bottom we found the Quality Inn. Bowen needed new shoes, however, so we rode over to REI to discover that the Santa Cruz REI had a very poor selection of shoes and their sales did not apply to shoes! We bought a very expensive pair not having much choice and then rode back to the inn to put on shoes and then call an Uber to the Boardwalk.

The Uber driver dropped us off not at the boardwalk, but across the bridge, which was a very short walk and bypassed a ton of traffic. There, the kids did 3 rides, but Boen bailed on the last one so I had to do it with Bowen. Then we took an Uber to the Capitola beach where we ate Tacos at Mijo's Taqueria. After that we had ice cream and a walk along the beach and then back along the Soquel Creek, stopping at Gayle's Bakery to buy more dessert.

The next morning we had the hotel breakfast and left to ride across Santa Cruz to get to Graham Hill Road. Graham Hill Road made us glad we decided to bring the tandem.  The road was busy and uphill, but once it dropped us off on East Zyante Road it became a lot quieter and we had a good ride.

At the only grocery store on East Zyante Road we had a snack before tackling the climb, which was steep. In fact, at one spot we had to stop to rest. Of course, Xiaoqin didn't have any trouble at all with the climb and was forced to wait for us.

Once at the top of Zyante Road we turned right onto summit road to ride over to Mt Charlie Road. On the intersection over 17 Xiaoqin had a very slow-motion fall as she had to dodge a car. But despite that she was fine and we all made it back to the Lexington School in time to visit Chickenlicious for a late lunch.

MTB Whistler Day 6 & Epilogue

 On Saturday Bowen was too hurt to keep riding, so I rode by myself. This time I resolved to ride every lift in the park except Fitzsimmons Express. To my surprise many of the trails were closed --- Midguard was closed, parts of Unamoss and Blue Velvet was closed. I tried a few more tech trails but as I got more tired I switched to riding more flow trails and dialed it back on the jumps. Still, by the time I returned the bike my hands were sore and I was so tired I couldn't even contemplate swimming. 

On Sunday, we checked out of the AirBnB, walked back to the Legends hotel and waited for our shuttle back to YVR. While waiting we saw a group of Asian cyclists loading up a car with bike boxes and spoke to them. Turned out that they were top end competitive MTBers from Hong Kong, able to clear A-line and Dirt Merchant. They spoke to us about various events and soon we had to get onto the bus.

The bus dropped us off at YVR around 3:00pm. We got to the hotel and checked in, and went to get food, first at Dim Sum Now inside a food court on the second floor of a non-descript building. The dim sum took some time but it was made fresh and quite yummy.

Then we went to Prata-Man for Satay and Hainan Chicken rice. The Hainan chicken rice was great but the Satay was disappointing.

On the way back we stopped by the supermarket. Bowen bought Longans and then we found every flavor of popping candy we could for Boen, plus a few bonus candies.

The stay at the hotel was non-descript but their shuttle service was efficient in the morning and we made it home with no problems.

Review: Veken Temperature Control Kettle

 The Veken Kettle was $17 on Prime Day, and I've been looking for a temperature control kettle for a while but never could justify the $60+ the gooseneck kettles (which are ideal for pour over coffee) cost. Being able to get the kettle to turn off precisely at 195F is pretty useful for making coffee in the morning. Not only does it just get to temperature fast, your coffee tastes much better without over-extraction.

The downside of the kettle is that the sides aren't transparent so you can't easily see how much water is in the kettle as you're filling it. On the other hand, after a few tries you'll get a feel for how much water you did put in. The kettle is no longer available on Amazon, but I'm sure you can find reasonable clones. For the price savings over the $65 kettles it's well worth the purchase.

MTB Whistler: Days 4-5

 On Thursday we spit our time between technical trails and flow trails again, this time riding Call Me Maybe (too hard) and Palm Corners and Earth Circus.  I was developing callouses on my hands from the pounding I was getting from the bike. I told the bike shop I suspected my suspension was bottoming and when they checked it they said no, it's the opposite --- there was too much air in the tires! I guess the big advantage of owning your own DH bike is that you can get the bike dialed in. But there's no point owning a DH bike in the Bay Area --- there aren't any ski lifts and every ride starrts or ends with a massive climb. I've even got to the point where I'd rather ride my Roadini off pavement! 

On Friday, we got our lesson with Tommy --- he had agreed to meet us at Creekside. There was a bit of drama in the morning as Bowen had lost his goggles. I would later find the (after buying a new set!) at the top of the lift sandwiched between Bowen's back and his backpack! Bowen and I got a lesson in technical bike handling on Devil's Cup, and it was quite enlightening to see how slow you could do this.

Then we got a jump lessons. "We've been doing it all wrong." said Bowen. Apparently as you approach the lip of a jump you're supposed to push down with your arms and legs to compress the suspension and then rise up smoothly as you hit the lip and let the bike come up to you. Bowen did a couple of beautiful jumps on crank it up while I fumbled and flustered like the old uncool Dad that I was. Then I had to wait a long time at the bottom of Crank it up because Bowen had crashed. He made it down safely but he was too beaten up to ride the rest of the trip. We took the bus back to Creekside because the park was now closed because of lightning, and then returned the bikes. Bowen and I went to the Samurai Bown for dinner because our lunch was a grocery store lunch at Whistler village. 

Timemore C3 Coffee Grinder

 I bought the C3 Coffee Grinder as a travel grinder, and it turned out that I never brought it on any trips for the 3 months I've had it. I did end up using it at home for single cup aeropress use. Compared to any previous handgrinders I've had it's pretty smooth. The defect is that grounds tend to stick to the upper part of the grinder, but the kit comes with a brush to brush those grounds into your aeropress. Various folks tout this grinder for camping, but unless you're car camping I think the additional weight of the grinder would be prohibitive.

What I do like about it is that it grinds very nicely and is quite quiet. That means I used it far more than I expected, even when I'm not traveling. Recommended.

Whistler MTB: Rest Day

 On our day off, we took the bus to Whistler Village and the shuttle to Lost Lake, where we jumped into the lake for a good swm and then hiked around the lake. We went over to Samurai Bowl for lunch and to our surprise it was quite good and not as expensive as the grocery store depending on what we ordered. After lunch we walked to Alta Lake which was only 8 minutes walk away albeit a painful 8 minutes along a fast moving highway. There, we rented a double kayak and after that I went for a swim. 

Wayside park had ominous signs saying the swimmer's itch was a thing. I asked the kayak rental staff and they said if you rinse off right after it should be no problem. I would swim for the next couple of days at Alta Lake for the afternoons were super hot. 

Whistler MTB Trip Index Page

 I took Bowen to Whistler in August this year. This is the index page for the trip report.

• Prologue
• Days 1-2
• Day 3
• Rest Day
• Day 4-5
• Epilogue