{"id":1651,"date":"2014-09-28T21:13:08","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T05:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/?p=1651"},"modified":"2014-09-28T21:13:08","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T05:13:08","slug":"the-drop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/the-drop\/","title":{"rendered":"The drop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some quick\u00a0notes from the trip last week before life spins up again.<\/p>\n<p>The suck:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the climb up to Gem Pass was a sufferfest. Note: Wilderness means no one really maintains the trails, so with livestock everywhere &#8211; the trails are trashed. Uphill for miles in what was horse-trodden sand. **Notably different from the John Muir Trail inside Yosemite proper. It&#8217;s a like little elven stonemasons have built a granite roadway over the mountains &#8211; truly spectacular.<\/li>\n<li>The wind. OMFG the wind. It&#8217;s not so much sleeping as just waiting for the sun to come up. I didn&#8217;t bring any ear plugs, so the wind whipping the tent was constant and kept me awake at night. I learned that no matter the conditions, between 3am and 6am my body shuts down &#8211; I slept through the wind at that time. Remainder of the night I was playing a game to try to guess what time it was before I checked my watch&#8230; 2am!&#8230;NOPE&#8230; 9:30pm. OMG. Below Donahue Pass the wind blew sand into my tent all night &#8211; I was using a 3 season tent with a rain fly, but a netting roof and sides. I had to keep my mouth closed to avoid the blowing sand. In the morning I had grit in my teeth and sand covered my sleeping back and everything inside the tent. After crossing Koip Pass at 12,500ft, the wind was so strong that I worried I was going to be blown off the mountain&#8230; I kept thinking about the weight of the rocks around me and if the wind can&#8217;t pick them up, there was no way the wind could pick me up inside my tent. But it was a constant worry.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The highs<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Very tense and considered go\/no-go calculations when crossing Koip Pass. I needed to be at Mono Pass by Friday morning and wasn&#8217;t exact on the mileage remaining. I was about 12 miles into the day, it was about 3:30pm. Full risk assessment analysis in about 10 minutes. I concluded that I could manage the wind \u00a0(gusts nearly knocking me over around 12,000ft. What I couldn&#8217;t manage was wind + a whiteout if it started snowing, or rain for that matter. I decided to go. It was extremely stressful. I was solo and hadn&#8217;t seen another human since I left the John Muir Trail and passed into Ansel Adams wilderness. I could feel the wind grow stronger and stronger &#8211; when I felt a strong gust coming, I stopped and leaned into my poles with my head down and stopped moving until it was over. Then pushed on. Coming down from the pass I expected the wind to relent &#8211; it didn&#8217;t. I was traversing high on the ridge over some small glaciers &#8211; at one point I saw the trail was eroded, washed away and dropped \u00a0over a vertical cliff. I noticed it as I was moving fast and stopped, then jumped it. At another point, the switchback took me to the top of a cliff with maybe 3k drop, with the wind blowing me forward, I jumped down and cut the switchback to avoid getting too close to the edge.<\/li>\n<li>To illustrate the mental state I was in late in the day crossing the biggest pass of the trip, \u00a0I saw something down in the valley below and thought it was a tent&#8230; and thought it was another climber I met back at Donahue Pass&#8230; and I thought he was watching me and was going to have some hot food prepared when I got down to the saddle. It comforted me to know that there was someone else there as I was moving through this very technical terrain, exhausted and hungry. When I got to the bottom the tent turned out to be a glacial erratic (a boulder). There was no one there and I wouldn&#8217;t see anyone until I got to the Mono Pass trailhead the next day. In retrospect, it&#8217;s fascinating to me that I contrived another human to get me through that very stressful moment.<\/li>\n<li>The 2 most humbling experiences of the trip however were just being alive in such a beautiful place. The stars at Donahue Pass. I&#8217;ll try to describe, but words fail. I could see the Milky Way stretched across the sky, I watched falling stars spark and fade\u00a0across the sky. I watched planes leaving San Francisco follow a highway in the sky East. I saw satellites orbit the earth. I saw these things with my eyes.<\/li>\n<li>After the very stressful climb and descent on Thursday, wind like a gorilla shaking my tent all night near Koip Pass, I awoke before sunrise and boiled water for oatmeal and coffee and saw the sun break the horizon &#8211; behind me the sky was black and alight with stars, before me, an orange stripe was illuminating the horizon. In the distance I could see the light reflecting off Mono Lake. The wind stopped and all was still. I sat up in my tent with my sleeping bag draped over my legs, drank my coffee and witnessed the birth of a new\u00a0day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Dirtbag climber accomplishments (in no way do I condone or support such\u00a0behavior :\/ )<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>entered the park from Fresno at 2am and never paid the entrance fee<\/li>\n<li>poached a shower at Curry Village on my way out (with my .99c Wal-Mart towel&#8230;that I left behind)<\/li>\n<li>hitchhiked from Mono Pass back to Tuolumne (Sergey the Russian petroleum engineer picked me up &#8212; he had flown into LA, rented a convertible and hit Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and was on his way to San Francisco, then back to LA. First time in the United States. &#8220;Le grande tour&#8221; [wtf is gasoline to a Russian petroleum engineer?? pfft])<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even Norte\u00f1a music has the drop.<\/p>\n<p>[youtube https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DsXxVI9nvQk?rel=0]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some quick\u00a0notes from the trip last week before life spins up again. The suck: the climb up to Gem Pass was a sufferfest. Note: Wilderness means no one really maintains the trails, so with livestock everywhere &#8211; the trails are trashed. Uphill for miles in what was horse-trodden sand. **Notably different from the John Muir [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sartor-resartus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chrisrivard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}