Yosemite trip

Just before flying back to England, some friends and I made a trip to Yosemite for the weekend. We headed out there after work on Friday, setting off at around 7pm with the car full of enormous sandwiches, bourbon and sleeping bags.

The 200 mile drive took about 4 and a half hours, including a couple of stops, so we arrived pretty late, just wanting to set ourselves up and get some sleep ready for the big day to follow. However, before we could do that, we had to empty all food and smelly stuff from the car, or face a $5000 fine for tempting bears into camp; there was a special bear proof locker outside all the tents into which we threw the aforementioned monolithic sandwiches, chocolate and toiletries.

After a few hours sleep, we woke up at about 6:30am, to be met by this view:

Note the angle of the trees – I was craning right back just to get that cliff in the viewfinder… And that started a day of incomprehensible scales and impossible vistas.

The plan was to hike up Half Dome, a mountain nearly 9,000 ft high. Although the campsite was already roughly as high above sea level as the tallest mountain in Britain, we still had a 5,000ft climb up to the summit. To make this clearer, if Robert Wadlow, world’s tallest human, was as big as Half Dome, we would have been camping near his crotch, while Ben Nevis would be up to his belt. Meanwhile, the Eiffel Tower would be halfway up Wadlow’s shin, or at the shoulder of Gul Mohammed; world’s smallest man. Basically, although we were starting high, there was still a long way to go.

After bagels and cream cheese for breakfast, we set off. I was carrying 5 litres of water, a sandwich the size of the Indian subcontinent, a few Snickers bars, a hat, a jumper, waterproof hat and waterproof trousers, as “the weather can turn quickly at high altitudes”.

I quickly came to realise that I’d made a grave error. As we moved up out of the valley on the Misty Trail, and into the sunlight, it became obvious that it was going to be a scorching day, and that I had about 10kg of useless on my back. Undeterred, we pressed on up and to the side of Vernal Fall.

By this point, things were getting a bit warm, so the blast of misted snow melt from this waterfall was very welcome!

From Vernal Fall, it was on and up to Nevada Fall; an enormous waterfall onto slanting rock. 20 feet before the fall itself, the river looks completely innocuous and harmless – quite a transformation!

By the time we reached the top of Nevada Fall, it was around 10:30am, and we were roughly halfway to the summit. The next hour or so was gentle enough climbing up through pine forests, with the imposing bulk of Half Dome itself appearing to our left.

At about 11:30am, due to a few too many Snickers and energy bars, and burgeoning sunstroke, I thought it would be a great idea to run the rest of the ascent, so off I shot, aiming to get to the summit for lunch. This actually went better than could be expected, and although I was basically dying, I did manage to catch up with the leaders of our expedition (who had continued while we were messing about at Nevada Fall).

As we neared the final ascent – the side of the dome itself – we could see a little line of ants on the side of the huge lump of granite; ants that gradually turned into tourists from Nebraska.

Now, I’ve never had to queue for a mountain before. And although in principle I’m a big fan of The Great Outdoors being popular enough for there to be congestion here and there, the fact that you were expected to wait for an hour and a half before starting the final ascent was a bit strange to me…

Still, I sat and took an inconsequential feast from a sandwich the size of Michael Jackson’s remembrance book, and waited for everyone to catch up. By now, it was really hot. We were way above the treeline, so there was no shade, and the white granite was bouncing back the intense sun from all angles.

The final pull up to the summit was very steep bare rock – maybe a 55° slope – so a pair of metal cables have been run to the top, the idea being that you pull yourself up to the top between the cables. It was this “between the cables” bottleneck causing the queue, so we decided to go up the outside of the pair, using just the one cable and bypassing the delay.

The summit was barren and indescribably hot. Hot, hot, hot. We heard afterwards that it was 110°F.

The views from the top were amazing; the globular granite mountains seemed so extra-terrestrial to me. But it was the sheer 1,500ft drop off the front of the dome that was most striking.

After an hour or so mincing and recovering on top, we started down the mountain. The descent proceeded without incident, stopping only to refill water (making it 7 litres that day, in total), and get a couple of pics of Half Dome with Nevada Falls in the foreground.

Burning Man

Last week, a group of us headed east to the Burning Man festival. As the organisers say:

trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind.

The general idea is that tens of thousands of people journey out to a dry lake bed desert in the middle of Nevada, build a huge collection of art installations and shade structures, put on hundreds of displays, talks, shows and performances, listen to awesome music and generally try to survive for a week.

The conditions really are as harsh as the warnings issued by the organisers suggest; the main challenges are the temperature, dust and the wind. During the afternoon, it regularly beat 38˚C in the shade, and dawn was close to freezing because of thermal inversion. The surface of the desert (called the “playa”) is basically dried sediment, which all too readily turns into super-fine airborne dust which is strongly alkali. As it’s completely flat and there is zero natural life, the wind rips across the playa unimpeded, and you need to anchor down tents with foot-long rebar.

The whole week was just so epic that I can’t begin to describe the whole thing, so I’m just going to pick out a few of my favourite photos and give a back-story to them.

After getting some distance onto the playa, the wind whipped up a whiteout dust storm, reducing visibility to a few feet at times and coating everything with a thick layer of what looks like cement powder. This slowed down the dome-building a bit, but by the end of the day we had it up and covered by a parachute. There were quite a few geodesic domes around; a group from Colorado who were living across the street made one with slightly thinner tubes than us, which unfortunately collapsed mid-week. I slept in a hammock dangled from the dome.

Every day was packed full of scheduled stuff to do, but there were just as many, if not more, interesting things happening that you stumbled across.

Left to right is our brilliant Australian neighbour, Becca, eating Vegemite ice cream (more on that in another post), Pat setting a record on the slip and slide, and an awesome dance party called the Deep End.

The Deep End was my favourite place in all of Burning Man, and that is saying something. It was just the most ridiculous place I’ve ever been; a faux wild west town, filled with steampunkers in Jules Verne outfits, goth girls in gas masks, and you can see a big guy in a pink tutu there. No matter where you looked, it was an assault on your sense of reality.

The nights were pretty fun too, as you might expect. Most of the art installations were set up to blossom in the dark – lots of them were fire-based, or had big luminescent elements. There were also loads of rave / club / party things going on – all free of course – including a roller disco.

Left to right: Pat in a pretty tasty outfit, Christoff with a killer wig on, the Roller Disco, the Man (which is burned at the end of the week), sunrise viewed from the top of the Man’s platform and the Temple (an amazing gothic, morbid building) at dawn.

Another huge part of Burning Man are the vehicles, from pimped-out bikes up to three storey pirate ships. Every night, the playa was covered in glowing, fire-breathing, music-playing mobile parties. We didn’t get pictures of some of the best – one which really stood out was the Shagadelic bus which headed off from the Deep End when that party wrapped up at sunset. It was a converted double decker bus entirely covered in thick fur which could change colour at will. It also had a trailer full of speakers at the back, and a ship’s air horn on the front.

Friday was a great day. I got a pedicure, a man gifted me the shoes off his feet, my neighbour, Scout, did some awesome body painting on me, then we had a huge night at a party called the Opulent Temple on the other side of the playa.

Left to right: stickmen (they had el-wire attached to black suits and looked absolutely incredible), a random chap with a nice hat and a laser display, me, James and Christoff feeling fragile, and James watching the sun rise in his manly hat.

Saturday was the culmination of the whole week, with the Man burning in the evening. The whole burn was nearly flummoxed by another dust storm, even worse than the one on Monday. At one point visibility was so bad that they indefinitely postponed our little pagan ceremony. However, the air cleared after sunset, and the man went up with a huge fireworks display and mushroom cloud fireballs.

It all came to a close on Sunday evening, when we drove back to San Francisco. If there’s one thing Burning Man could do better, it’s traffic control on the way out. Although 50,000 people need to get onto a single-track road, a 5-hour wait still seems excessive.

There are so many little (and large) stories I’ve not even touched on. I am now going to Burning Man every year I can until I die or it does. Probably the best week I’ve ever had.