Real Fantasy Worlds / Real Adventures

Sweet..

May of 1995

I''m eating a sandwich in the small town of Independence, California. Isn''t Independence a great name for a town? It harks to a time of lawlessness and frontier life. This is desolate country, replete with history and legend. The now abandoned community of Manzanar lies five or so miles to the south. Manzanar has the dubious honor of being one of the main detention camps of WW II for the Japanese Americans. Over ten thousand were interned here during the War. Looming nearly eleven thousand feet above me is the mighty crest of the High Sierra. As I eat my lunch I try to locate my goal, the thirteen thousand foot southeast ridge of University Peak.

It''s a hot day, probably a hundred or so degrees outside. Blowing down the canyons into the Owens Valley is a warm, dry and dusty wind. I finish my sandwich, get in the car, and begin the winding vertiginous drive up Onion Valley Road to the trailhead at an elevation of 9,300 feet. What a difference it is up here! Brooding gray clouds have rolled in. While I change my clothing, the sky unleashes a torrential downpour. Minutes later it stops, and it appears OK to begin hiking. I proceed to finish packing and the rain begins anew, as forceful as before. Thunder rumbles. All that dry air in the valley rubs against the cool mountain air up here creating massive amounts of static electricity culminating in lightning.

The rain diminishes again, and I begin my ascent up the Robinson Lake Trail. Right from the start I get off route and I''m forced to do a dangerous and unnecessary creek crossing. Even the simplest things aren''t so simple up here. Back on the trail, I gain about a thousand feet of elevation. Patches of snow are becoming more frequent. The rain comes and goes, but mostly it''s tolerable. Thunder continues to rumble near and far. Suddenly, the sky rips open and a crack of thunder like the Fist of God pounds my senses, sending me jumping clear out of my skin. Frazzled, but none the worse for wear, I continue a little more hesitantly. More ominous and powerful bursts of thunder continue. It is like Armageddon now, all at once exhilarating and scary.

Soon I reach Robinson Lake, a small alpine lake set in a hanging valley at timberline. Granite walls rise thousands of feet to the east and west. To the south, an arduous snow climb leads to a higher alpine cirque surrounded on three sides by twelve and thirteen thousand foot ridges adorned with spires and gendarmes.

An icy wind starts to blow, bringing hail. I''m really not that far from the road, maybe three miles. But this place feels remote, lonely, wild.

Today, the mountains seem to be getting the better of me, and I opt for the pleasantries of civilization over an isolated night up here. As I retrace my route back to my car, the sun breaks through, bringing warmth and golden afternoon light to the land.

USGS topographic map of the area
http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=36.7581&lon=-118.3394&size=s&s=50

OK, this thread is not going to go away. Just to spite all of you, I will continue to post real adventures.

So what is the deal? Most of you are probably fans of sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, exploration, etc. But you can appreciate this so much more if you have a taste for the real thing. Do all of you just glue yourselves to the computer screen all day long?

How can you expect to create simulations of adventure without appreciating or participating in the real thing? Now I''m not saying you have to appreciate my adventures, but do you not have any experiences of your own?

Perhaps that is why computer games are so one dimensional. It seems if it is not a medieval/magic saga then it is a space saga. You need to step out of the mold and look elsewhere.

How about a setting with the flavor of the Sonoran desert a hundred or so years ago replete with banditos, gunslingers and cantinas? Or maybe a mysterious estate on the cliffs above a stormy New England coast? Perhaps you could draw inspiration draw from the ancient Anasazi. Or how about the lawless society of a successful silver mine?

Many real adventures to follow.

My partner Jon heads towards Bishop Pass. Mt. Agassiz is on the left.

Inset of arete

Late July of 1995

1995 is a heavy snow year, and despite it being well into summer, there is still a vast quantity of snow up here in the High Sierra. We are about five miles in from the trailhead and have opted to setup camp here below Bishop Pass (elevation 12,000 feet). Our intent is to climb Mt. Agassiz (elevation 13,981 feet) tomorrow. We didn''t bring a tent this time, instead opting for lighter weight bivy sacks. Our camp is near Saddlerock Lake, at about 11,400 feet, right around timberline. Timberline is where the environment becomes too harsh for trees and shrubs to grow.

This is a fairy-tale world up here. Granite spires rise thousands of feet precipitously above us. Green meadows flank the shores of the lower lakes.

Night settles in and the sky becomes ablaze with the light of ten billion stars. At high altitude away from the lights of the metropolis or suburbs, the Milky Way''s true magnitude becomes more evident. Your mind reels from the implications as it attempts to digest this vast and infinite vision. My eye catches a tiny dot of light moving across the heavens: a satellite. I lose it, gone from my vision. A moment later, I spy another. And then another.

In the morning it is so cold the lakes are glazed over with ice. I have to crack the ice so I can pump water through our filter. As the early light bathes the crags to the west in alpenglow, we locate the route to the top of Bishop Pass. Picture Puzzle looms to the east, a myriad maze of buttresses, spires, and chutes. We ascend to the top of the pass, taking advantage of the summer corn snow, frozen from the night before.

Mt. Agassiz''s west face rises 1900 feet above the pass in a gradually steepening slope of talus and fractured granite ridges and headwalls. The first half of the climb is mostly a tiring slog up the unforgiving talus. The altitude is unforgiving here - thirty feet, and rest, thirty feet, and rest.

At last the ascent has funneled us into one of Agassiz''s numerous couloirs. A formidable headwall presents a fearsome face to us above. After some consultation, we opt for the left hand arete above us. Up and around I go, until I gain the ridge of crumbling rock. On my right, the ridge drops into a chasm below, the very chute we were in earlier. On my left, the north flanks of Agassiz drop nearly two thousand feet to the base of Bishop Pass.

My partner ascends from below and takes the lead. Exposed now to the wind, he carefully picks his way up the arete as I follow. The arete ends, and we step down onto the very top patch of a thousand foot plus frozen snow couloir.

We have gained the final ridge of the mountain now, a narrow plateau composed of granite blocks rising to the summit. We are walking in the sky now, with awesome expansive views to the south, east, and north. Mt. Winchell''s magnificent summit spires now reside at our eye level, so close to the south. Scale is lost here, and Winchell''s summit appears as if it is only a couple hundred yards away, yet is more than half a mile distant.

The summit is near, I think. It is so hard to tell, because the summit is often obscured by nearer fake summits. And then it is upon us, almost a surprise, and continuing would send us plunging down the vertigonous east face of Mt. Agassiz. The summit boulder is perhaps the size of desk, and is perched precariously near the east face. We do our obligatory stand upon the perch, and settle in to have some lunch. Three hours from the base of the pass.

Mt. Agassiz is the northern most summit of the fantastic Palisade group, a spectacular and nearly continous wall of granite comprised of six peaks over fourteen thousand feet in elevation. Among them is North Palisade, one of the High Sierra''s most sought after summits.

Far below, the alpine tundra drops away in basins, cirques, and hanging valleys, dappled with numerous turquoise lakes and meadows. For a time we admire the grand spires and gendarmes of nearby Thunderbolt Peak and Starlight Peak. We identify Mt. Sill further away. We are tired, and must descend. We must be alert and cautious for exhaustion and carelessness is a killer up here.

As far as High Sierra ascents go, Mt. Agassiz is rewarding, yet considered relatively easy. Such are the humbling ways of the mountains.

Kivas

About thirty miles east of Santa Fe, New Mexico, lies the small town of Pecos. And a few miles south of this quaint little town, set amid the evergreens, is Pecos National Monument.

Hoping to get some good photography of the mission ruins, I enter the monument. To my surprise and delight, I discovered there are two kivas here. Kivas are below ground chambers, often used for ceremonial purposes. Kivas were frequently built by the Anasazi, a mysterious culture that lived a thousand years ago. I am unfamiliar with the origins of the kivas here.

I enter the kiva. It is perfect. Light cascades in from above, creating a diffuse orange glow on the sandstone walls. I setup my Nikon 8008s on a tripod to shoot. Becasue I am using Fuji Velvia ISO 50 film and I set the aperture to f22, the exposure requires 30 seconds. I do the shot.

I was not dissapointed.


Edited by - bishop_pass on June 26, 2000 9:04:49 PM

Man, I really wish I had the chance to go out and do that stuff. That''d be the greatest thing in the world! Alas, I''m only 17 right now with a $5.15 per hour job and school & marching band coming up in about a month...I hate my life.

P h a n t a s m
"I'd feel safer if the helicopter had an ejection seat."

Well, I''m glad to hear somebody is reading my posts. And I''m glad to hear there are others who have that adventure itch...

quote:

---

Original post by Phantasm

Man, I really wish I had the chance to go out and do that stuff. That''d be the greatest thing in the world! Alas, I''m only 17 right now with a $5.15 per hour job and school & marching band coming up in about a month...I hate my life.

---

Although I do admit to having thousands and thousands of dollars of ''gear'', it''s not always money which is the barrier. Gear can be borrowed, made, or creatively done without, but it seems to be time which is the hardest resource of all to come by. One of my favorite ways to cheat time is the ''one day assault'': get up at 3:30 AM, drive 250 miles, hike, climb, or explore for ten or eleven hours, and drive home, back by midnight. Crazy? Perhaps. But it makes things happen that otherwise wouldn''t.

Buckskin Gulch - Part 1

About forty miles east of Kanab, Utah, an extraordinary canyon snakes its way through twelve miles of sandstone before its confluence with the Paria. This canyon, known as Buckskin Gulch, has the grand honor of being the longest slot canyon in the world. For nearly twelve miles, Buckskin Gulch maintains its 'slot' character: hundreds of feet deep and only five or ten feet wide from top to bottom.

Parked at the Wirepass trailhead, my pack is loaded with my 4x5 monorail camera (a large format camera with an accordian bellows) and I am prepared for my first foray into the 'Gulch'. About a mile of walking down a dry wash sees me at the entrance to Wirepass, a slot canyon in its own right. Entry is gained through a narrow cleft in the sandstone cliff. And there I am, amidst sandstone walls only a few feet apart and perhaps fifty high. A prelude of things to come? The slot narrows further, and I have to turn sideways to continue. I descend some chockstones, and eventually arrive at the confluence with Buckskin.

It is here where I locate some petroglyphs, perhaps drawn by the Anasazi a thousand years ago. Numerous 'glyphs depicting deer are here. Higher up I see handprint 'glyphs, often present in what were considered sacred areas. Ahead the true entrance to Buckskin lies, in the form of a gigantic opening in the cliff, perhaps a hundred feet high and ten feet wide. I enter.


Edited by - bishop_pass on June 28, 2000 12:14:55 AM

OK, in the interest of sustaining my ongoing monologue, I have decided to disseminate some more tidbits from my vast collection of wisdom upon my silent audience.

A Terrain Rating System

The difficulty of traversing across and climbing terrain has been quantified into a system that is now known as the Yosemite decimal system. Originally it comprised of 5 classes, ranging from easy to difficult, but climbers and mountaineers soon found it to be inadequate to accurately describe the difficulty of harder climbs.

And so, in the ''50s, Chuck Wilts, along with Royal Robbins and Don Wilson, while developing a new guide for Tahquitz (a splendid 1000 foot tall monolith of granite near Idylwild, California) came up with the Tahquitz Decimal System, This system further subdivided class 5 terrain into (at that time) 10 separate levels ranging from 5.0 to 5.9.

Class 1
Terrain rated class 1 is easy terrain. You''re simply walking along, likely on a trail. Maybe the trail is steep, or even has sections like stairs, but, all in all, it is easy.

Class 2
Things start to get a little interesting here. It is certainly cross-country travel, with no trail. You''re very definitely finding it necessary to use your hands for balance at times, and you find a heavy pack has a tendency to throw you off balance. Examples include talus hopping and scree scrambling.

Class 3
Naturally, class 3 is more exposed than class 2. This is definitely climbing. The terrain is steep, and a fall could result in serious injury at the very least. However, the climbing isn''t necessarily difficult. Though steep, anyone in reasonable physical condition can handle class 3 terrain. Question is, do they have the nerves? A rope and belay would likely be welcome here. You could liken class 3 terrain to climbing a steep narrow fire escape with no railing on the outside of a tall building.

Class 4
OK, we''re getting serious here. Class 4 is steep. In fact, its just plain vertical!

My friend Wayne is on the ''Fresh Air Traverse" of the East Face route on Mt. Whitney. Many parts of this climb are only class 4

Though class 4 terrain is steep, it is still relatively easy. However, a fall will prove fatal, and a rope and belay is highly recommended. Imagine climbing a ladder for hundreds, even thousands of feet.

Man, I really need to get away from my computer once in a while . Nah, I don''t spend too long at my computer, but I would love to get out there and do something like that! I usually just go camping or partying, whichever has the most alcohol .

Nah, paintball seems to be the sport of the year, and other than that skydiving is definitely a go-er.

But this just reminds me that I should go for a hike sometime



-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)

Check our site:
http://www.crosswinds.net/~dwarfsoft/
and our eGroup:
http://www.egroups.com/group/dwarfsoft

dwarfsoft, a hike every now and then is good for the soul. However, I actually don''t hike locally often, (Southern California) as I am usually in pursuit of something a little more fantastical, a more exotic or powerful experience, if you will.

Adventure is mostly hunger, exhaustion, pain, illness, injury, temperature extremes, and just plain unpleasantness! Ah, but the memories shine like a beacon among the ordinariness of everyday life!

Im really inspired to go find an real adventure now...

Unfortunally, theres not too much exotic nature in the realms of Atlanta...
Perhaps in the future I will be able to find the adventure I need.

Exotic hiking would definitely be a good thing... Pity I am on a student budget and I live in the Boring Capital of Australia... It is the smallest city in Autralia (not quite, but about the 6th largest I think).

I usually go Camping riverside, get out skiing (water skiing that is) and I try to cycle up whatever steep inclines I can



-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)

Check our site:
http://www.crosswinds.net/~dwarfsoft/
and our eGroup:
http://www.egroups.com/group/dwarfsoft

Class 5
This is where technical climbing begins. In general, a class 5 route requires specialized knowledge of climbing moves and technique. This is where you find it necessary to focus your mind and body on the task at hand. You will likely be making use of various hand and foot combinations, and different body positions to maintain balance and position on the rock. Some typical techniques include stemming, liebacking, smearing, hand, fist and finger jams, and toe jams. A rope and belay is generally a necessity for protection from a fall, but is not used for direct climbing aid.

Class 5 is further subdivided into a number of levels. Originally, there were ten levels (5.0 - 5.9) but today this has been extended to fifteen levels (5.0 - 5.14). Unlike a true decimal number, 5.12 is greater than 5.9.

Class 5.0 through 5.3 is generally easy, even for novices, but is still considerably harder than climbing any ladder. A typical hand or foot hold on a slightly less than pure vertical face might be the size or shape of a deck of cards.

Class 5.4 through 5.6 is a little more difficult. You will find yourself employing stemming and smearing more often. The holds will be a little smaller, and you will have to think a little harder to make these holds work for you.

Class 5.7 seems to be a defining level for novices. It is here where the novice will comprehend what is necessary to make the next move, but their mind will insist that it is not possible. However, upon making the move, the novice realizes it was indeed possible, and is often delighted in their ability to pull it off.

Class 5.8 is just plain hard. It requires planning and sequencing of moves. Rarely will each hold provide a resting place, thus the climber must know in advance a sequence of moves to gain the next resting stance. You must stay focused, and constantly evaluate your options to succeed. Hand and foot holds may typically be the size of sugar cubes.

Class 5.9 really challenges! A novice will look at a 5.9 route and find they can''t even get both feet off the ground. It just takes the difficulties of 5.8 to a new level.

Class 5.10 is typically the limit of climbers who literally don''t keep their skills honed on almost a daily basis.

And so it goes, 5.11, 5.12, 5.13, and 5.14. Each is progressively harder and virtually beyond the point of comprehension for climbers who can only climb at lower levels.

The ''East Face'' route on Mt. Whitney, actually one of many routes on the east face of Mt. Whitney, is rated 5.4. This is because there are portions of the climb which rate this difficulty. The ''Harding Route'' on the esat face of Keeler Needle is rated 5.10.

Buckskin Gulch - Part 2

Note: Part 1 resides a few postings above...

I have timed my gulch exploration in April, one of the drier seasons of southern Utah. This is because the wetter monsoon season around August and September can prove fatal in a slot canyon. As a thunderstorm's water is funnelled into a slot canyon, the speed and forces become so great that anyone caught within the canyon will surely be drowned or pummelled to death against the walls.

The first part of the canyon is not so deep or narrow that shafts of sunlight can't reach the bottom. But this condition doesn't last long. Soon, it is only the diffuse glow of light off the walls which provide illumination.

I arrive at the first of many stagnant pools of water. Wall to wall they span the floor. Continuing on means stepping into the muddy water. I bite the bullet and wade into the pool. The water is cold, but bearable for a short spell. My feet squish in the slimey mud sucking at my boots as I wade deeper. Fortunately, the pool never gets deeper than just above my knee. For the next mile, I encounter perhaps ten of these pools, some nearly waist deep.

Every now and then, as testimony to the dangers of floods, I see a tree trunk wedged between the walls perhaps twenty feet above me. All in all, this place is kind of creepy.

Edited by - bishop_pass on July 1, 2000 2:36:08 PM