Author Archives: Kate

After the meeting at UCLA, Bruce drove up from San Diego and picked me up on the campus Thursday evening. We did grocery shopping for the long weekend, which was a bit of an experience for Bruce as we were going to be camping without a cooler. Bruce had not looked so hard at food in cans in a long time! After a nice dinner in Westwood Village, we headed out to the airport to pick up Mark, and then hit the highway and drove out to Joshua Tree. We made it to the campsite at about 1am, put up our tents and hit the sack, all excited about what our first day of climbing would hold.

I’ve got photos from the weekend up in the gallery.

We camped in the Indian Cove campground for the weekend, which is one of the lower altitude campgrounds in the national park, and we hoped a little warmer for it. To keep everything simple the first day, we took our time getting up, making our breakfast and packing up for climbing. We then wandered past about 5 campsites or 100ft east to Short Wall and started our climbing day.

Double Crack (5.3) – Mark started out the day with a great lead of this nice little route. Bruce and I followed and had a lot of fun. The anchor at the top used our three biggest pieces we brought, two #3s, and the #3.5.

Tight Shoes (5.7R) – I moved the TR to the left after my climb up the previous route, and then we all took a ride on this little slab climb. It was tricky, and I lost my footing a couple of times, but once we all got used to the friction on the slab, the route was pretty straight forward.

Linda’s Crack (5.2/4) – Mark moved the TR to the left once again so we could take a ride on the fat crack on the wall. Linda’s Crack turned out to be a bit wide for an OW, with some nice face features that kept it from getting too hard. I wouldn’t want to lead it, but we all had a great time climbing it.

SOB (5.6) – As the sun hovered just above the horizon, we decided to head up one more crack. Mark lead up this one with no problem at all, and Bruce and I followed him happily. It was nice way to finish the day, by standing on top of rock and watching the sunset.

We cleaned the climb and hurried down because the temperature dropped rapidly after we lost our sun. We packed up and headed back to camp, where we had a great dinner of canned food, played with some long camera exposures and then tucked in to bed at about 7p. Well, what else are you going to do at night, in the cold, cold desert?

Pictures from the fantastic campus are up in the gallery.

I have to admit, my last trip to LA was a lot of fun, but also involved a lot of traffic and a lot of freeways. I can’t say I fell in love with the city. And I won’t say that it happened on this trip either. Though, the city did improve itself in my eyes when I got to spend a few days working at the UCLA campus. I always imagined UCLA being a huge city school, in the heart of downtown Los Angeles – which was never pretty in my mind. And the school is huge, and it’s just north of downtown LA, but it is amazingly … lovely.

Of course it helped that the days were sunny and warm, with highs near 70F and never a cloud in the sky. I was surprised at how much I subconsciously missed things like green grass and feeling the sun on my neck. There were flowers everywhere, and trees with green leaves or even avocados still hanging on them. And the buildings on the campus were amazing. Just covered in detail carvings, tilework, arches, porticoes, balconies and towers. You really got to check out the gallery.

My college was functional. I learned a lot, I had some fun, and I always felt safe during my four years of living in the middle of a corn field in Indiana. But if I had known UCLA was so nice, I might have reconsidered my options at the time!!

So, you know how you get new camera equipment and suddenly your whole artistic vision of photography changes? Ok, maybe you don’t, but it’s happened to me before, and I think it’s happening again. Suddenly I’m seeing subtleties in light that my old camera would never have been able to reproduce. I’m looking at my world around me and framing it in a completely different way, because my equipment allows, no, it actually encourages me to. There will be plenty of time for adventure photography and pictures of beautiful, remote and exotic locals. But for right now, I find myself fascinated with the long winter light coming through the windows and shades of our house.

Thus, I hope nobody minds a few shots here and there that aren’t my usual style. But the D80 and this little 50mm lens can do so many lovely things. Like make my laundry look so clean.

I always thought that 15 years of ballet and over 5 years of yoga and rockclimbing would give me ankles of steel. And so far it has.

But yesterday morning I was worried about my new camera not working correctly, and running around getting ready for work, and I stepped off the top of my stairs a little too far. I landed four feet down right on the side of my ankle with my foot turned under. It made a horribly loud “CRACK!” noise and I rolled around on the floor making an “OW!” face for about five minutes. Eventually I sat up and saw the swelling, so I got my anklet off as fast as I could. I then found my cell phone and called Mark.

I could hop around on it a little, but it hurt like mad. Mark said the prudent thing to do was go to the Dr’s and get it X-rayed, which we did. First lesson learned: When in pain, take pain killers before going to the hospital. Because you’re not going to get them while you’re there, well, maybe if you’re bleeding or something, but I wasn’t in that much pain, I guess.

The second lesson learned was that driving a wheelchair is a lot harder than it looks. Mark got to wheel me around in a wheelchair, which he kind of sucks at. He kept accidentally bashing my feet into furniture or backing himself into signs and equipment. Not that I’m complaining mind you, he was wonderfully sweet the whole time, and continues to do everything I need to keep me stationary.

It was a big day for “ortho” injuries as the nurses were calling us. There was another guy there who slipped on ice and had quite a swollen wrist. The worst one was the poor dude next to me who had fallen down stairs the day before and dislocated his shoulder. He hadn’t been able to get in to see his doctor until 24 hours later, so had spent that entire time with an un-located shoulder. They re-located it at his doctor’s and then sent him to the hospital for x-rays, just like the rest of us.

We were all in a big room, separated by curtains. The dr came in and told dis-located shoulder dude that he had no fractures, but should probably have a follow up with an orthopedic specialist in a couple of weeks. Then she poked her head into my curtain and said “There’s something weird about your X-rays Katherine, I’ll be back in a minute.”

Crap.

She came back 20 minutes later and said I had no fractures or broken bones. Yey!! When we asked what was weird about the X-ray, she said that she and the radiologist think it was probably just something about the angle of the picture. Mark mentioned the 15 years of ballet when I was a kid, and she nodded and said “Well, that might explain it too.” Then she said something about how dancers often develop arthritis in their feet and ankles later in life, and that I should go see a doctor if I start experiencing pain or stiffness in my hips, knees, feet, or ankles. Awesome. I bet all of the crack jamming in Vedauwoo isn’t helping either.

I suppose she meant “if you experience pain in a few years”, because right now I am experiencing a lot of pain and stiffness in this ankle. But the swelling has decreased dramatically and I’m hoping I’ll be back to normal in a week for our trip to Joshua Tree. Hopefully.

My good friend Dougie B gave me a call while I was sniffling on the couch this afternoon and told me to run my sick butt outside into the cold and check out the cool clouds in the southwestern sky.

This was something I’ve never seen – wave clouds breaking in a clear blue sky. Usually there must be a whole lot of moisture around for something like this cloud to appear. There was some discussion as to whether these were originally triggered by a jet contrail or naturally occurring due to a layer of moisture in the air. Here is the sounding info from Denver this morning:

As you can see, there was a strong inversion over Denver this morning, way up at 400mb and some strong directional wind sheer associated with it, but that doesn’t make wave clouds break. What makes these clouds is the more subtle change lower down. Right around 600mb, there is an increase in relative humidity and a decrease in windspeed, but no change in wind direction. This little change can produce thin clouds. They break because the lower layer is moving slower than the upper layer, just like waves break on a beach as the lowest part of the water moves slower than the tops of the wave.

Ok, so this is a commercial, but it’s so funny I got smoothy up my nose this morning. I think I need Lance Armstrong running behind me all of the time, I’d do so much more cool stuff!

“Pain is temporary, and quitting lasts forever!”

Mark and I finished our short work week excited about getting out into the mountains for a day. When we read reports of a wolf sighting in the Rocky Mountain National Park, we knew where we had to go. Dylan also excitedly joined our hunt. The photos from the day are up in the gallery!

We didn’t know exactly where the wolf had been seen, but in order to maximize our chances, we decided to hike in the less popular northern part of the park. Due to the snow from the most recent storm, avalanche hazards were pretty high, so we opted to hike Fall River Road, which stays below treeline and away from avalanche prone areas. There is a map and elevation profile on Dylan’s blog post.

The lower third of our hike was well protected, and even though the snow was coming down heavily, we didn’t feel much wind until about 45 minutes into the walk. We rounded a corner and just got hit with a blast of wind and spindrift. Temperatures hovered just under 30F, so the hike was actually relatively warm compared to many that we’ve done. We walked through the whirling wind and snow, enjoying the quiet afternoon and listening intently for wolf-like noises.

We even had the trail mostly to ourselves. On our way up, we saw only one other group of hikers. We decided to turn around at the 3.5 mile mark, which gave Mark and I a good indication of the distance we’ll have to cover to climb Mt. Audobon or Quandry Peak this spring. On the way down, we were treated to several interesting sights. At one point, the wind had blown all of the snow off the road, leaving only our footprints of packed snow sticking up off the frozen gravel. We also passed a huge group of highschool or college aged kids just starting out as we were nearly finished. They all looked extremely cold in their hooded sweatshirts and tennis shoes.

But, in the end, we did not see any wolves, hear any wolf noises or see any paw prints in the snow. But we’ve got lots of time to keep looking!

We’re looking at a snowy weekend coming up, and Mark and I are excited about digging out the winter gear again! Here’s a shot from Christmas of my mother’s nice warm kitchen and fettuccine drying on the rack in the afternoon.