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I was watching the end of the movie, “Snatch” with Brad Pitt today and remembered something. In Morgan Hill we had a little informal boxing club, my friends and I. We would meet up in Scott’s backyard, get on the gloves and go to town. There was Big John, Heavy hitting Rhett, Mackey the non dairy creamer, not sure if Scott had a nickname and I know I didn’t. We fought each other and I remembered why I liked boxing, besides the basics - good workout, fun, challenging, competition.

I liked boxing because when I got hit hard, in the head I’d hear voices. They seemed like they were just out of reach, just beyond behing able to hear what they were saying. I could just hear murmering in the background as I was coming to. I would see little pinpoints of light as well, sometimes referred to as seeing stars but hearing the voices was neat. It was like waking up in the middle of a dream and trying to remember what the conversation you were having with the man in the moon was about. You have a feeling that the talk was important, but you just can’t recall what it was about.

That’s what I liked about getting hit in the head. I’ll be honest, Rhett was a fucking freight train when it came to hitting. I can see why Scott just ran around the ring instead of going toe to toe with that beast.

Thirty degrees and windy.

There were five people invited to White Mountain, October of ‘07. This was a short lived tradition I had to hit WM every October to celebrate my birthday. It has always been cold up in the highlands in October, but I do personally enjoy the cold so it has always been fine by me. Of the four invitees, two showed up. Of the two who couldn’t make it, one actually let me know ahead of time. The other one just ignored the entire situation, and as a matter of fact on our summit day was fawning over himself, as usual. Of the three of us who were there, none made the peak.

We knew it would be cold, we knew there would be snow on the ground and we knew that Scott had never been higher than Telescope peak at 11,049 feet. This hike would be starting higher than that. Scott’s been training hard for this trip for a while now, while Jared and I are still up at a pretty good level after getting ready for the triathlon last week.

Jared drove us all to Grandview, it was dark and freezing by the time we got there. I started the fire, Jared setup his rarely used 6 man tent and realized that zipper on the door wouldn’t zip closed. Scott, meanwhile was trying to put on more layers than a polar bear. After the three of us were done with our respective tasks we started cooking. Scott had rigged up a nice little contraption made of tape and sticks to roast his food on. At 10pm it was 34 degrees and dropping. The tent door wouldn’t close and we had a long, cold way to go until the sun was up again.

Dawn eventually came, with Scott not sleeping much, but Jared and I putting down some good Z’s with the new cots. After warming up by the fire and a light breakfast we made our way to the trailhead and prepared for the hike.

There are essentially four uphills on the way to the peak. The first one is short and steep, and starts as soon as you get out of the truck and continues for about a mile. The second one is shorter and steeper, the third one is long and slow and the fourth and final one is very steep and sort of short. We ran across our first substantial patches of snow on the second uphill and took a nice long break at the telescope. The temps were in the forties so it didn’t feel too bad when we were hiking, but during breaks we would get cold very quick.

As we continued on the air got thinner and the snow got thicker. Still nothing that would really impede our progress, but it was there. We were above 12,000 feet and Scott’s first time up high was getting tough. Jared was cruising right along and passed us up. Along came another herd of Bighorn sheep and Scott made a very mature decision to turn around. Scott sat down while we waited for Jared to come back.

So, we hiked back; tired, hungry and cold. Scott’s new high point is about 13,100 feet or so. When we got back to the truck, we decided to bypass Scott’s promise of cooking up some steak fajitas in order to get down to town and get some food, as fast as possible. After the food, we also decided to stay in a hotel with a working door.

Good trip, good fun.

Album of pictures from trip

Today I was hoping to see my sister up in San Jose, so I called her in the morning from Morgan Hill where I was doing a load of laundry. We made plans for later in the day and I called Scott to see if he wanted to waste any time with me until then. Turns out him and his wife had no big plans this weekend, which is shocking in and of itself as those two are always out doing something or other, so I went up to his place after going and seeing Ryan and Tyler’s gravesites at Mount Hope.

So, the three of us went to a newly redesigned and reopened Oakridge (mall) and had a look around. After this was done, Scott and I went out and played 6 games of 21, of which he won 4. Despite the fact that he hasn’t played in over a decade, that fool has some solid D. I’ll have to work on not being thrown around by his superior bulk. Hopefully as we play more, he’ll get into better shape (read as: lose some weight) so he won’t be able to use that fatass of his to move me around so much.

Then I got back to the academy grounds, since my sister wouldn’t be able to meet me up until later in the night that I was able to stay out. When I got back, I took care of some errands/crap that I needed to and went over to the piano to practice the little bit I know. It just soothes me, while I play that stupid little set of keys I smile, my heart calms, my mind relaxes and I’m just in a different mood/mode. As I was fumbling around, one of the other people in the hall came over and helped me out a little bit, showed me a couple other things to do and played the piano very well, I didn’t catch his name, though I appreciate his help.

Coe was outstanding, as always. I saw the western flank of the Sierra, which I only see from Coe. I was growled at by some of the wild pigs, for getting too close with my camera. Scott wants to do a bit of backpacking out there, which is great news for me because it gives me more reasons to head up there during the winter, while the Sierra is largely off limits for me and my limited winter mountaineering skills.

Of course the drive up there sucks, and even worse than that is the drive back especially if it’s only a 2 day trip, 1 day up and one day back. I spent almost as much time driving this weekend as I did hiking, I need my pilot’s license, STAT.

Morgan Hill sort of changes, while staying the same. The hill in front of the old police station where we would slide down when there was ice on the ground is now all dirt and stone. There are more and more houses and fewer open fields every time I go back, those open fields where we would catch pollywogs, or walk through to get to school when it wasn’t muddy and of course where we would build our tree houses. Those open, empty, fields really do hold quite a few memories for me, now they are just condo farms.

On the good side, the village and the crest (previously the bad areas of town) have cleaned themselves up somewhat, or my standards have dropped after living near L.A. for so long that they look better than they used to. The Granada theatre looks like it is being remodeled and cleaned up finally. That’s where I saw Revenge of the Jedi, when the theatre only had one screen, then they went and remodeled it so there are now TWO WHOLE screens (they basically just split the room in half with a wall that you can usually hear the movie on the other side through). I wonder if it’ll have 4 screens now with the remodeling!?! Gotta love small town life.

In the dead of November, Scott and I rolled up to Henry Coe for a little car camping trip.

Saturday

I left Socal around 5am, for my 5 hour drive, Scott of course was still sleeping.  5 uninteresting hours later I pulled into the parking lot for the largest Safeway in Santa Clara county (WOOOT!!).  Despite the fact that Scott lives about 390 miles closer to Morgan Hill than I do, I was on time and he wasn’t.  We got some last minute supplies from Safeway and drove up to Coe.

I used to bike from my house, to the entrance of Coe, 16 miles or so up (severely up) hill, then bike down. To this day this is one of the most difficult physical exertions I have ever completed and I used to do it daily.  It was this schedule that got me into such good shape that when I got to and through boot camp I actually came out in worse shape than I went in.

So when we got up to camp, we hiked up to Eric’s bench, Sierra view, Monument, Sada’s pine, Manzanita point and then back to camp.  Basically it was just a little 8 mile day or so, with perfect weather; overcast, a bit chilly, very slight breeze and no one else out there because of the occasional drizzle.  We did alot of catching up during the hike, so the time went by pretty quickly and the scenery, as usual was classic Coe.

After the hikes, we got back to camp, Scott started cooking and I setup the tent.  After a few hours of burning wood and melting bottles in the firepit we went to the tent where Scott demonstrated some shady card dealing techniques by beating me at 21 and Texas hold ‘em as well as some other dumb game.  I did however wipe the tent with him at Uno, take that chump.

Sunday

I woke with the sun and hiked up to Sierra view to get some sunrise shots while Scott gets more sleep.  I had a run in with some of the wild pigs of the park, got a bit too close and they growled me back.  I gladly stepped back to make them happy (by gladly I mean I basically ran backwards until I was out of breath).

After I got back to camp, we cleaned up, had some breakfast and tried to contact his parents, no luck with that.  So, we drove down the hill back to town.

After we packed up camp, we headed down the hill and to town where we tried to find a Street Fighter game to play so I could demonstrate to Scott the fact that he still has no skill.  However, we were out of luck as Morgan Hill seems to be out of arcades nowadays, I have no idea what kids do after school now, but it must suck.

Since we found nothing to do in town, I took another five uninteresting hours to drive back to Socal and so ends the story.

All pics from trip (not many & not good)

Well my truck has new tires today, I have a new cellphone (god how have I fallen so low?) and my snowboard has a fresh coat of wax on it. All ready and waiting for the new season to begin in earnest. Enough about boarding though, in just a week and a half I’m going to Henry Coe for a little reunion with Scott.

I’m looking forward to Coe, that place has always had a soothing effect on my soul, like an entire bag of Hall’s when you have a sore throat. Sierra view, Monument point, Kevin’s bench, Sada’s pine, it’s been… years since I’ve really spent time there. This is the park that inspired in me my love of the outdoors, the ranger there, Barry Breckling was the one that inspired in me a desire to become a ranger (eventually… slow process) and the park has always been a place where I could go to calm my nerves, recover, gain perspective and a bit of distance on any problems I’ve got.
I guess the fact that I haven’t spent any real time there in the last few years means everything has been going pretty well.

Other news, my to do list continues to grow as fast as my SSX3 scores. I can’t get away from that damn game. Between that game, reading the mini novel that is the instruction booklet for the new phone and waiting on the tires to be installed on my truck I got absolutely nothing accomplished today.

Back to the game now, if I were to bring the PS2 downstairs so I could sit on the couch and play SSX3… I likely wouldn’t leave the house for a few days. Hmmmm.

At work today I remembered something that struck me about my upbringing as opposed to Scott’s.  As we were growing up, he was always talking about opening up a business; gym, dojo, gym/dojo combo, Mustang shop, motorcycle riding course and others that I don’t remember.  I would always listen and wonder what kind of balls it takes to dream about opening a business.  Something about my upbringing led me to strive for just a good dependable job, something about his led him to strive to create his own job.

Is this due to nature, or nurture?  Is there something inherently hardwired within Scott that predisposes him to accept more risk than I do, or is it something that we each picked up from our seperate sets of parents that set me on a path of accepting, or even needing to just have a solid job (why I’m at my current job is beyond me in that case)?

I’m voting for nurture.  I didn’t grow up poor, but it was a traditional blue collar family life.  Scott didn’t grow up rich, but he does have a little more white collar flavor in his life, with a very Entrepreneur-ish dad.  I think those different environments taught us entirely different lessons about life.  I can’t speak for Scott, but I know that I see a regular paycheck as being good enough to make me happy, I know deep down that I’ll never get rich working for someone else, but I don’t see the gain as being worth the risk, at least not now.  I have a feeling that Scott won’t truly be content until he is running a business of his own, doing exactly what he wants and working for no one but himself.

I wonder if he’ll hire me?

Friday April 25th, 2003

Scott and I are planning on meeting at the really good beef jerky stand in Olancha, on the 395 at one thirty or so. Neither of us have cell phones, and Scott had never been to the area before so the plan was a bit sketchy to begin with. Despite this, both of us got to the jerky stand just fine, a bit late, but we got there safely. This was the first time we’d seen each other in over a year or so, Scott doesn’t change though, he just seems to be jovial, no matter what. We stood around and BS’d for a while in the parking lot we decided it was too windy there and we needed to get a move on to the campsite. More on the wind later.

We were planning to leave Scott’s car in the backpacker’s parking lot in Lone Pine for the weekend. We turned on our radios to talk shit to each other on the drive to LP, which took about half an hour. Once we drop off his car we start heading to Death Valley. Along the way we stopped off at the Death Valley visitor center, where this “big-boned” girl tried picking up on Scott, unsuccessfully, it was fun to watch though.We tried asking them about directions and conditions but really didn’t get too much useful information, so we got back in the truck and kept moving.

When we arrived in Death Valley and got our first sure view of Telescope Peak, it looked quite packed with snow near the top. We had been hoping that by late April most if not all the snow would have been gone, but we had no such luck. We also noticed the VERY WINDY conditions had followed us up to this point, but we hoped that this was just because we were in the valley itself and it would clear up the higher we got, we’d find out otherwise later in the day. We continued driving on through Death Valley, there’s quite a bit of dead beauty out there and it’s very quiet; well except for the wind that is. It is really howling too.

We got to the dirt road that leads up to Mahogany Flats campground and passed these really odd looking cones on the left side of the road. We stop to check them out and find out that they are old charcoal kilns that the miners in the area would use. After a hundred or more years of non-use you can still smell the burning wood in there, very cool place, well maintained and interesting to check out. After checking these out for awhile we figure that we’ve screwed around enough, it’s getting on to about 4 pm and we still need to get up the road a bit further to the campsite. That wind is still going, very loud and very chilling.

Setting up camp at Mahogany Flats was easy enough, it’s an OK campground – pretty small, I think there were less than ten spots, first come first served and the sites are a bit too close together, but overall it’s all right. The wind has not letup yet though, and we are bundled up like mad, even though the sun is still up and this is DEATH VALLEY for god’s sake, why are we wearing sweatshirts, jackets and gloves?? At this point we just hunker down, eat some dinner and try to hide from the wind. Around nine we got in the tent and broke out the Uno cards. We don’t really need to go into who won and who lost, I’ll just leave it with this, Scott needs practice.

Saturday

We really didn’t sleep too well, what with the hurricane force winds outside and all, but Saturday morning came around regardless. I cooked up some damn fine oatmeal for breakfast; we packed our shit up and stepped off for Telescope Peak. From our campsite we have about 7 miles to go and around three or four thousand feet of elevation gain to go. The wind had thankfully died down, but it was still chilly so we are both wearing our jackets for the first hour or so. During that first hour we only covered about a mile, so yeah, we aren’t setting any land speed records at the moment. Around the one mile point we turn a corner and can see the peak for the first time today. From this close we see it’s definitely snow packed, but at least the wind is gone.

Another mile or so into the hike we find ourselves at a crossroads. The path to the left looks like it goes in a straight line to the peak, while the path to the right looks like it takes a more roundabout way to get there. The problem with the path on the left is that there is a moderately sized hill named Bennett Peak in between us and Telescope peak itself, but it doesn’t look too bad from this side so we decide to go up and over it and get to TP all that much sooner. At this point Scott is doing ok, he’s moving slowly but he’s doing all right overall. I just don’t think he had a lot of gas in his tank that day because he started to run out soon after we hit the top of Bennett.

Near the top we had a good long break, ate some GORP and relaxed in the sun. At this point we had already gone over a few hundred feet of snow crossings, and as we got closer to the peak we saw more and more snow, so we knew we had a LONG way to go. So we start heading down Bennett and were moving along quite well until we hit the actual final uphill section of the peak. Here is where the going got tough and each step made it even tougher because the further we got, the higher we got, the higher we got, the more snow there was, the more snow there was, the harder it was to take steps. We struggled and fought against the snow but it always won. Every step took about 4 times as much effort as a normal step at sea level on a sidewalk.

As we got higher and higher the snow got to about knee deep, and almost every step we took our feet would plunge down all the way through to the ground because the snow was softening up in the afternoon. This meant that with each step we would have to extricate ourselves from this foot or two of snow and replant that foot in more snow that we would have to step out of in a second, each step getting our socks, feet and shoes a bit wetter and heavier as well, all in all it was very slow going. Along the way we threw more than a small number of snowballs, mainly at each other though most of them with terrible aim because we were getting tired.

Nearing two in the afternoon, we see the peak… or at least what we are pretty sure is the peak. Scott’s a bit behind me so I am the first to realize the heartbreaking news. This isn’t the real peak, yet. Telescope is shaped slightly like a table top and we were at the northern end of it, the real peak is on the southern end. It’s only a quarter mile or so between the two points on the peak and it’s pretty clean of snow since there’s usually quite a bit of sun and wind at the top. It was just hearbraking that you have your heart set on seeing the peak and relaxing for awhile at the top but then realizing you’re not there yet. Either way, we get to the real peak, finally, andwhat an amazing view. We read some of the old summit logs, looked out at nearly all of California, from Shasta in the north to the San Bernardino Mountains in the south. It is pretty spectacular to say the least. After a while on the peak and some more GORP we turn around and start what we think will be the easy part, going back to camp for some steaks.

Scott starts off strong; we are heading downhill, it’s a pretty steep downhill and still very heavily packed with snow so we have to watch our steps, but we make good time. After this downhill section we start walking on relatively flat land, and Scott starts to slow down dramatically. We decide to go around Bennett peak on the way back, it was draining to go up and over it on the way out there and I figured that Scott would do better on the flatlands. Unfortunately, what neither of us knew was that the path going around the peak was solidly packed with snow, which is much tougher to deal with than an uphill, this day will just not end. Scott’s condition is starting to scare me the further we get; he’s sort of listless, a little non-responsive and generally looking pretty fucked up. I am afraid he’s going into a low level of shock from the exhaustion he’s experienced today. So I slow down my pace even more, and hope for the best. We have less than two miles to go at this point, and plenty of sun left so we don’t have to hurry.

Those last two downhill miles almost took two hours though. Scott’s not doing all that well, I don’t feel all that super either, that snow was exhausting. But we get back at camp, thank God. We take off our soaking wet boots and socks, start up a fire and sit down. Neither of us brought charcoal so we let the fire die down to embers and Scott grills up the steaks, we eat, have some Smirnoff and relax some more. Scott’s looking a lot better; he just needed to get off his feet and rest up a bit. As it gets dark we hit the tent and fall asleep. I know I slept well that night.

Sunday

We wake up; slowly pack camp after breakfast and head into Lone Pine. We had breakfast at the Sierra Café, it was quite good. At that point we said goodbye, and headed home. He has a seven hour drive ahead of him; I’ve only got four hours of driving. I’ll be asleep before he gets home, that’s a good feeling.

I hope this experience hasn’t scared him off of some good camping trips or any backpacking, because this trip was insanely tough. Overall though it was a very good trip; it was good to see Scott, awesome to see almost all of California from a single point and fun to hit him with snowballs along the way.

Photos from trip, and a couple from an older shooting trip

Movie from trip