lobster harmonica

Windy Hill

Yesterday I went on a trail run best filed under 'humbling.' Possibly also 'insane.'

I'd been thinking about joining a trail running group, and a quick Google search had served me up this one: Bay Trail Runners. Innocuous name, but joining it comes with a catch. Before you can officially become a member of the group, you have to go on a run with the guy who founded it. Prove yourself something other than a sporadic weekend warrior, I suppose. Most of the group's website is behind a wall, and much of its trail information (including precise mileage, calculated by the group on foot with GPS) is accessible only to members (who are collectively known as 'the Battery').

Getting tested on my trail running by some sort of stealth and covert running group was much more intriguing than showing up for a group run with a club not cloaked in mystery. So I registered. Within seconds, I got back an email that disclosed the exact location of our meeting place. I found my own directions, and on Saturday morning headed to Portola Valley, to a trail called Windy Hill.

The head of the group is the only one at the trailhead. His name is Rob. His trail running shoes are caked in dried mud. He's intense but friendly. He doesn't run on roads, he tells me, just trails. Last year he placed sixth in the Big Sur Trail Marathon, a punishing race with a cumulative elevation gain of 6600 feet. Suddenly I'm thinking that I should have asked about our route and our distance before I came. So I ask now, and Rob tells me nine miles. He mentions there are some big uphills. And that I should be on the lookout for rattlesnakes. And for poison oak. He'd somehow gotten some on the bottom of his foot the other week, during a run, and said it was hellish. I was just starting to wonder how hard a person has to run for poison oak to somehow cram its way down to the arch of your foot when Rob takes off.

Gulp.

The good thing about trails is that you can't run them as fast as you can on the road, and Rob's pace was actually reasonable. Problem was, he had no trouble maintaining that pace on the uphills, which on the trail he'd chosen included a 2300-foot elevation gain up a switchbacked trail in the space of just two miles. If you've ever wondered what it feels like to have the lactic acid lock up your quadriceps to the point of 'bonk,' I can pass on that information. Once we got to the top, things got easier, thankfully. Rolling flats and then a downhill. The scenery up there was beyond beautiful, and so was the view. I could see Mt. Diablo and Mt. Tam, plus a vague outline of San Francisco. I understand why Rob has given up roads, given that the entire midpeninsula open space is his backyard.

So I'm in! Turns out you pretty much just have to show up to be in, but it felt good to 'pass' just the same. My quadriceps think differently, but they'll get over it.

Modesto

Last Sunday I drove out to Modesto to watch a minor league baseball game between the Modesto Nuts and the Stockton Ports. The idea of spending a sunny California day plunked down in farm country watching baseball somehow appealed to me. Plus, I know one of the Nuts’ mascots. There are two mascots, actually. A walnut and an almond. I know the walnut.

The drive to Modesto surprised me. It was beautiful. Bald green hills, the valleys between them stuffed with trees. Lines of silver and white windmills stretched across hilltops, blades slowly churning (clean energy!). Endless fields of strawberries and asparagus and walnut and almond trees, all perfectly aligned in their rows, flickering by as I drove. Also flickering were thousands of butterflies - 'painted ladies' making their yearly migration north in big numbers (I looked it up). Unfortunately a good two dozen of them were unaware of what flying in front of my car would mean for their travel plans. Windshield smack. Yellow splatter. Wince.

The sensory overload didn’t end there. The game was about as 'all American Sunday afternoon in farm country' as it gets. Crisp, simple baseball – the crack of the bat, the yell of the ump, the smell of burgers grilling, people licking ice cream cones and yelling 'Way to go, Nuts!' I was a little taken aback by how peaceful it all made me feel. It was as if someone had just stuck a giant American pacifier in my mouth, and I wasn’t resisting. Wait, shouldn’t I put down the soft pretzel and do something really urban, really blue state, like bash Bush to that guy in the 'GO NUTS' shirt, or talk to the little girl sitting next to me about the dark power of evangelicals? Right, well, actually, this is a really good pretzel. And the Nuts are playing so well here in the fifth. And I should probably check my program to see how I'm doing in Nuts Bingo....

Turns out I didn’t get to see the walnut, though. An independent troop of big furry mascots (Krazy Kreatures, they called themselves; giant primary-colored Elmo types) had descended on Modesto for the weekend - a special stadium promotion that precluded the need for the walnut but did, I think, cause some measure of brand confusion. The almond did make a brief appearance in the first inning, while I was still parking my car. Next time.

avalanche training

This past weekend I took a three-day avalanche training course up in Tahoe with a couple of friends. The course should be required prep for those contemplating some time in the backcountry, but unfortunately a lot of people skiing and boarding "out of bounds" and beyond do so without any safety instruction, which, having gone through this course, now strikes me as pretty much insane.

The classroom part of the class was a bit tedious; it's hard to learn how to dig avalanche test pits and spot suspect terrain when you're sitting in a room that's normally a daycare center (the beanbags, cubbyholes, and construction-paper art projects stuck to the walls made it hard to get serious) and when your instructor favors blurry overheads and only answers questions obliquely ("When would you use that snow test?" "Well, I don't use it." "Ok, when would one use that snow test?" Ack.). But we learned a ton in the field: how to use avalanche beacons, how to spot sketchy snow, how to pick good touring routes versus the kind that'll get you into some seriously bad but avoidable trouble. The toughest part was on Sunday, when we climbed a bald mountain in 35 mile an hour winds to investigate a slab avalanche that'd triggered a few hours earlier and then dug test pits really close by, which seemed a bit counter to the whole "safety first" directive. The best part: Monday's terrain tour, which gave me my first big taste of the flat-out splendor of the backcountry. No human tracks but ours. No crowded resort madness. Great views. Plenty of peace. Also plenty of "whoa-whoa-whoa!!" one-ski action due to my newness to telemark skis, which was a bit embarrassing. Converting from downhill to telly has its challenges, turning in powder apparently being one of them.

Here are some photos from our second test pit exercise. And here's a link to NASTC, the organization that put on our training.