Our week-long break is wrapping up and, surprisingly, I’ve accomplished some things. Unfortunately, not much of what I have gotten done is school related. Saturday, my friend, Brody, and I drove to San Diego in my car. We left at 5am and made fairly good time, arriving around 11:30 with some traffic around Riverside. The rest of the day was spent hanging out with friends and accomplishing absolutely nothing. Sunday we had a brunch for my dad’s birthday, which included an amazing black forest cake and later that day I met a couple of people at Starbucks.

Monday morning is when the pace started picking up. It started with me getting up very early (7:30am) to take my dad to drop his z3 off for repair. Then we took my macbook to the Apple store next so it could get repaired; I just got it back and they ended up replacing the display and magsafe board (battery charging thing). It all works great and I had dented the display before so I’m not complaining that I have a new one  After dropping off my computer, I went to visit General Atomics. I have a friend who works there and he wanted to give me a tour/have me meet his bosses since I applied for an internship there. It was really cool because although cubicles are always nice, I got to see the predator drones being built one building over. They have several versions and the small one is smaller than I expected. The biggest predator, Reaper, is used in the Air Force, NASA, and several other nations. The things run off of a modified snowmobile engine and you can tell that there’s a lot of engineering in each one, including the material used for the landing gear so it can flex without breaking.

Tuesday, I visited a few teachers and my old work group at Northrop Grumman. It was good to see some of them that I hadn’t seen in years. Later in the day, I decided to go for a bike ride. I ended up at the beach and decided to go swimming. The water was pretty cold but still not as cold as it’s been in Prescott. Luckily it was sunny, but I wasn’t completely dry until I was almost home, so it was a little chilly for the ride back. Besides that and visiting some other people, my week has been relaxed.

Things have been very slow, yet fast-paced recently. What I mean by that is a lot is going on, however, not much to mention. Probably the most interesting thing since my last post was a hike my friend, Brody, and I went on two weeks ago. We left the school at 11:00 am for Granite Mountain, a 10 minute drive. Once we got there, it was about a mile or so hike from the parking lot to the base of the mountain. What we didn’t realize was that we went over a ridge that would confuse us a lot on our way back. We started out strong, hiking up at a quick pace since there was no brush obstructing our path.

Granite Mountain is about 2500 feet vertical and depending on how you go, the horizontal distance can range from a mile to a mile and a half. There is also a trail on the backside.

Brody and I wanted to get up and down the mountain as quickly as possible, so we went up the side that’s most vertical. We decided that it would be easiest to get to the top if we followed streams up. Now, at the time, I didn’t even give thought to the fact that I couldn’t see any snow and yet, there were flowing streams on the mountain. The school is almost directly south of Granite Mountain, and when it snows or rains, the wind is generally going south. We got to a point where we had to cross between toes on the mountain when we were about half way up. We rounded a corner – until that point, we had seen only two four foot patches of snow – and suddenly we were staring at two feet of snow solid along the mountain. We figured it wasn’t too bad further along so we crawled across the snow (so we wouldn’t sink) and crossed the stream to the other toe. We made much less progress now that we were hiking in snow, but continued on. We got to what we thought was going to be the top and realized we had reached one of three summits. Unfortunately, ours was about 500 ft short of the others and require hiking down quite a ways before being able to reach the others.

It was four o’clock at this point and I told Brody that we really needed to go to make it down before dark (I’d been bugging him for a while and he insisted that we had kept going). To make matters worse, it began to snow and then we were in a blizzard. We began our descent, through the snow, and I realized that we were taking a completely different path down than we had up. Due to our lack of time, we had to do this to make sure we were off the mountain in time. Our largest problem was that since Brody and I had not seen the snow from the school’s vantage point, we only had light gloves and jackets. My hands and feet quickly became cold as we walked down along a stream. The temperature had dropped significantly both because we were so high up and since the sun was slowly going down. There’s not too much more to say about the walk through the bushes…ah, actually, almost the whole way up and the entire way down was through very dense brush to make our trek harder.

We finally reached the base of the mountain just as the daylight faded and that’s when we saw the ridge I mentioned earlier. We were both very confused since we didn’t remember it. Hiking toward it, we jumped on a trail that we thought would take us to the car. It was pitch dark at this point and after hiking on the trail for a while, I told Brody we should just turn off the trail and go over the ridge to try to find the car. It turns out this was a good idea since that trail just went along the base of the mountain forever (or a really long time). Once we got to the top of the ridge we saw the main road and we were home free. Walking through very dense mud, each of our shoes accumulated 5-6 pounds as we continued. After crossing through two barbed wire fences (not illegal at all) we finally reached the road.

Now it was almost 7:30 pm and pouring. Brody had a heavier jacket so he gave me a poncho he had in his bag. We walked across the street to figure out where we were and called my roommate, Trevor, to pick us up. After standing there for fifteen minutes, we figured out he had already passed us and so we made our way toward the parking lot. It turns out that the trail we hiked on the ridge made us over-shoot the car. We were almost at the lot by the time Trevor came back, but he took us the rest of the way.

Brody and I finally made it back to the school around 8 or 8:30…it’s all a blur now. We were both fine except some scratches and I had very mild frostbite on my fingers that’s almost completely healed by now since it wasn’t much below freezing (30 F) on the mountain. The lesson in that story was to either wait until the snow is completely gone or take the trail up the back side instead next time. Here are some photos/video of the mountain from our trip:

Video 1: Climbing Up the Mountain Video 2: Snowing at the top

Let’s pretend I had this post written 2 weeks ago

It’s been a super long time since I last wrote a blog post. That isn’t to say that I haven’t had time to…it just never feels like the right time. In my last post, I wrote about most of my Christmas Break. One of the few things I left out was seeing Avatar, twice (which still wasn’t enough), once in regular 3D and then the next day in IMAX 3D. Needless to say, I’m obsessed with the movie. I even found a 30 page book on the Navi language, including Phonology and grammar rules. It’s amazing to me that someone spent years of research and development to create a language for a movie! I guess it makes sense once you’ve seen the credits roll by twice; I’m pretty sure there’s several thousand names. I later found out that Avatar is literally the movie Pocahontas with different names and some insanely good graphics. Here’s a link to the plot duplication, ahem…coincidence: http://bit.ly/7Yb7TS.

I also went to the San Diego International Auto Show over the break. I think I’ve gone every year for the past four or so years, and there’s always a surprising amount of change every year. Some cool feature cars were ones with solar panel roofs, the same Lamborghini’s that never need to change because they’re just that awesome, and the indoor jeep track was neat. It’s entertaining to watch people freak out when the car they’re driving is balancing on 3 wheels on a 45 degree left-right slope. They also had a section with about 20 Camaros covering over a 40 year span. One of my favorite “vehicles” was an off-road wheelchair with…tank tread! I’ll try to write another post in the next couple days to cover our amazing snow days.

Here are a couple of pictures:

Is an explanation needed?

Off-Road Tread Wheelchair