3. North Bound

From at least second grade, when I would sit in the back seat behind my dad driving us somewhere, I was keeping records of what was going on and doing related math problems. One thing that kept me busy for hours on end on long trips was to interrupt dad every fifteen minutes to get the odometer reading, multiply by four, and write down our average speed for that quarter hour. I remember the excitement once when it was 72.0 mph, over a whole fifteen minutes. (The speed limit was 70.)

This was long before the Gameboy.

As I grew up this “record keeping” got worse and by the time my first child was born, I was writing down in a log everything that happened all day every day. What a chore this was to write and transcribe into a computerized record! Nowadays, I only keep such records when on a big driving trip like vacation and feel a big sense of freedom (coupled sometimes with a lack of accountability) as a result. It has to do with miles per hour and miles per gallon and trip costs per day and such but it really has to do with my obsession that nothing has happened until it has been written down. And, of course, you’d want your vacation to have happened. Right?

The day John and I rode our bikes down the San Jacinto River to Long Beach and back up on the Blue Line, I’d had a breakthrough in record keeping and narrative. I’d taken notes on a piece of paper in my pocket, then transcribed them in italics into a file, then filled in my thoughts and memories into a complete story. For the actual trip, I took along my nominal ham radio notebook, the one in which I write down contacts and test results and any other notes relevant to the station, and ended up using it to make a complete set of notes on this entire trip, similar to the Long Beach trip.

This chapter is the transcription and clean-up of those notes with my reflections and memories inserted as appropriate between the entries. The Record here is the mile-by-mile account of where we went, how far it was, what we spent, and what we talked about.

Packing

On all three trips, I had carried calendar items that would allow for an orderly period of packing so the departure would be (or at least could be) smooth. In all three cases these plans culminated in a “test campout” in which we would shake out our camping preparations. In all three cases the plans had failed. In all three cases the “test campout” was cancelled.

This trip was planned to be simple in this respect. We would take the seats out of the van, leaving only the two in front, and put everything else in the back: camping gear, bicycles, tools, luggage and clothes, food, igloo, radios, and diversions like games and CDs. The van was large. Careful packing would only be needed to save the frustration that comes from disorganization, but not to fit everything in.

Thursday I took the car for smog check and, while I was out, went by AAA to get plastic keys for the car and van so I’d have less chance of locking myself out. They were out of blanks for GMC like the van keys so for backup I arranged for John to borrow and carry Viann’s key, the other one that had a remote.

John’s bike had a flat. We took an evening and fixed it. As we got down to the last few days, I wanted to leave work early Friday July 28^th but couldn’t. I got home around seven. What was left to do was to take the seats out of the van and clean it, put the ham radios in including antenna mounts and tests, break out the camping gear and decide what to take and what to leave home, pack our bags, collect all the toiletry stuff, find things we wanted to take along for entertainment, … in other words, everything.

In addition, I had spent the last three weeks writing a paper, due August 1, for the AMSAT Symposium which would be in October and needed to pay all the bills that had come during that time. That chore could itself take all day. Also, I needed to upload that AMSAT paper, something that could take five minutes or several hours. I gave it a try. There were upload problems. I e-mailed the coordinator and waited nervously.

And, we had to have Family Night this weekend. A tradition since the fall of 2000, it had been disrupted by Joanne’s illness some this summer since we had used weekend time for visits and to move her out of her apartment and do other such support chores. Sometimes these had counted as Family Night; sometimes they had just crowded it out but we were determined this week to have one before we were separated for as much as three weeks.

What’s more, John wanted to play Settler’s of Catan for this Family Night that meant a trip to the store to buy it … before the store closed on Saturday evening. Family night was held Saturday evening in part due to schedule conflicts with Katy and other matters. We were in the middle of the camping packing Saturday night when it got too dark to continue. I was nearly certain that we wouldn’t be able to leave until late Monday or even Tuesday morning. Since the trip was largely unscheduled and the end largely undefined, this would be OK, but it was always bad form to burn a spare day before even starting.

Sunday after church Viann and I went to see Joanne. She didn’t think she would live three more weeks, but I thought she might. The exchange was awkward. Back home, John and I finished packing. I had put him in charge of the food and he had some help shopping, packing, and loading from his mother. Around 9:00 p.m. I started into the bills, violating the “Sunday is for other things” principle. I plowed through, delegating the difficult college tuition payment paperwork (except for writing the checks themselves) to Viann. Around midnight I was done. A stack of bills a foot high was ready to mail. The van was loaded, about two feet deep.

It might be possible to leave roughly on schedule after all.

The Record

2006 July 31

I had quipped that without direction, John would just get up, pull on pants, and get in the van. Meanwhile, I thought I had the whole world to wrestle into quiescence before we could drive away. I got up about 7:30, started my normal routine, modified for preparations, and got John up about 8:30.

0923 = 1623 Loading

That’s Pacific Daylight Time and coordinated universal time, UTC (sometimes signified by the letter “Z”). I had thought we were ready to drive away but we weren’t.

0936 = 1636Z 70 = 21C

Nine thirty six, the start time of record.

That’s the temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius. John asked why I wrote this down too. … Because it was available from the car displays. Other than that, I don’t know, but notice throughout the trip how consistent the temperature was.

087761 = 58.1 = 0.0 drive away

That’s resetting the trip odometer to zero to measure the actual trip. The current tank of gas had 58.1 miles on it, we didn’t fill up until mid-day, and didn’t reset the van trip statistics until then either. (Oops.)

0944 Montrose Post Office, 23 pieces of mail. 71F = 22C

Mailed off all those bills I had been up late paying.

Now we started driving up the 210 Freeway towards the I-5, through the Grapevine and thence north. John saw a Hawaii license plate while we were still in La Crescenta. He started the license plate collection in his notebook. Soon we had most of the locally easy ones. … California. This collection would grow out of hand.

1055 76.0 Bottom of the Grapevine 85F.

In general, I would just keep times in PDT, miles in trip miles, and temperatures in Fahrenheit.

1059 I-5, not 99, 88F.

Sometimes I record major intersections. The last several times we went this way we went up Highway 99, as to Yosemite where Katy had been in college. Not today.

Topics:

States License Plates

287 and me and dad

Vi and Nate

6 + hours of straight

Tomatoes, trucks and piles

Mrs. Lucy Jones things – Rogues

Ham vs. real: Yay! Darn!

These are today’s discussion topics.

287

I had a long history with Highway 287, the piece between Ft. Worth and Amarillo (actually, Claude). This was because both of my parents had grown up in the panhandle, mother in Panhandle and Borger, and dad in Canyon, all outlying towns from Amarillo. Dad had gone to seminary at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and had received his first appointments in the North Texas Conference of the Methodist (and later United Methodist) Church. Even from further south in the Central Texas Conference, a trip to the Amarillo area meant a lot of driving on 287. When I was in second grade sitting behind dad doing math on trips, we lived in Henrietta which was on 287.

Some of my earliest memories had been of trips to see the grandparents. All four were living up until I was four. We would arise early and drive all day. This would have been from Frisco where we lived while I was one to six years old (the place we lived before Henrietta, back when both were only about 3000 people!). There was a favorite restaurant where we would stop for breakfast. If dad remembered to call ahead, they would let me tear the number off the calendar.

In the very earliest years we would occasionally fly to Amarillo, flying up 287, in essence, but we had not done that since I was four or five years old. One of those trips was the occasion of my legendary question to my mother. As we were getting settled in our seats, I said, allegedly in a shrill voice, “Mother, is this the kind of plane that blows up in the air?” No, it was not a Constellation. (It might have been an Electra.)

Moving to Henrietta had been an improvement, being two hours up 287 to start with, nearly to Wichita Falls. These were the trips where I learned how the odometer worked. We would watch weather patterns form in the clouds as we drove across the plains. I remember once watching a thunderhead become an anvil head as we drove up to Canyon. That night, the storm came into town with its booming fury. It was fun for a little kid to hide behind the furniture inside a dry house. Less fun for the folks who owned the house and the cars outside that might get hailed on.

At Henrietta, dads mother and aunt would sometimes just come down for a visit on the spur of the moment. It was only, what, five hours or so? One day they came down and went back the same evening. On another occasion they came down, spent the weekend, and went into Wichita Falls to buy a new car, for cash. It always scared dad that grandma carried a lot of cash around in her purse. Legend had it that she didn’t trust banks, they had lost everything in the Great Depression, so she carried … cash. One day they came down, went into Wichita Falls, and bought the Story & Clark piano on which I would learn to play. Long after I was out of college and gone, that piano moved on to another Baylor music student.

Another time, Grandad Pennington was due in Henrietta for a visit. I was playing out in front of the church when he drove up. I remember this as being the first time I was aware how old he was. He had been 56 when I was born. On that day, mid-60s. I can still see him sitting in the car putting things away, collecting his thoughts before getting out, never in a hurry. I grew to be that way.

There were routine sites and stops along the way. There was a little park on the Red River near Estelline where we would sometimes stop to stretch our legs. There was Dutch’s in Quanah. Sometimes we ate there but not always. Dad would tell the story of the time when he had locked his keys in the car and Dutch himself had come out to help dad get into his own car through the trunk. In later years, there was a donut shop in Childress where dad would always stop and act as if everyone in there knew him.

Highway 287 hadn’t always been a four or six lane divided freeway. For a long time (see “gruesome accidents around Henrietta”) it was two lanes for much of the route. This meant hours and hours of driving in the two-lane paradigm. Dad told a story of once, coming up over a hill, there was somebody coming the other way in his lane. He went right off on the shoulder, closely followed by another guy right behind him. They got out, shook their heads, waved, got in, and went on. On the very next hill, the very same thing happened again.

Not everyone lived through these incidents.

From Henrietta, we moved to Dallas. The trip up 287 was two and a half or three hours longer from that area. From Dallas, we moved to Taylor, near Austin. That was three hours further still but was closer to Corpus Christi and South Padre Island, the bi-annual vacation sites on the beach.

I always remembered these places by the grade I had been in.

Frisco: pre-school, but they didn’t have kindergarten.

Henrietta: 1-4

Dallas (Pleasant Grove): 5-6

Taylor: 7-9

Hubbard: 10-12 (and the first three years off at Baylor)

So, from Taylor, we had moved to Hubbard, in the Waco area. It was there where I learned to drive and started making my own trips up and down 287. Early in my driving career, I was sent to Claude by bus where I was picked up by mom’s dad (F. H. Pennington) and taken to Borger. The next day I was to help him drive back to Hubbard for a visit. The next morning we got up and got ready to go. I didn’t have much luggage; it was just an overnight for me. He sat in the chair under the cuckoo clock and prayed for fifteen minutes before we went out to the car to get underway. I remember little about the rest of the trip except that the section of 171 coming into Hillsboro from the northwest was then just under construction, slowing us down right at the end of the trip.

One time, I was either in high school or college, I was scheduled to drive up to Borger by myself for a family visit. I got up early and drove away at 4:30 a.m., not stopping at all except for one stoplight in Wichita Falls. Everyone was shocked when I walked into grandad’s house at 10:30 that morning. They weren’t expecting me until mid afternoon!

From Hubbard I had gone to college at Baylor in nearby Waco. When I was a senior there, granddad Pennington died and I was chosen to inherit his 1965 Ford Fairlane, which was my first real car. This was the car in which I had helped drive to Hubbard that time back in high school.

(Grandma Duncan had given me her 1957 Chevy not long before, but after driving it for a while I had decided that it was too old and I didn’t want to be in the antique restoration business. I sold it to a guy in Wortham who did want to do the restoration project with his son to teach him about cars.)

At least once during those years, for reasons I could no longer remember, dad and I had driven up 287 in tandem. I don’t remember if we were moving a car or had different destinations or schedules or what. It was at the well known speed trap in Chillicothe where a young patrol officer pulled me over. It was a standard technique. The speed limit out on the highway would be 65 or 70 but in town it would go down to 55 then 45 then 35 and sometimes even 30 through the business district. After several hours of this, the average driver wouldn’t be paying good attention anymore and wouldn’t slow down soon enough entering a town, or would speed up too soon leaving it. And there would be the patrol officer, using this laxity to raise money for his city.

Hubbard was also such a speed trap. Buck Hill had a reputation in those years.

Well, that day it was my turn to be stopped, but I was no sooner out of the car than dad pulled up behind us, came storming up asking what was going on here. If he’d been a swearing man, it would have been “what the hell was going on here”, but he wasn’t. Anymore. The officer looked surprised, I could see him stiffen for a confrontation that was surely a familiar routine for him. But dad didn’t press it and in the end the young patrolman let me off with a warning.

I had no idea what dad’s point would have been had this had turned into a serious argument.

It was on that same trip that I had dozed off somewhere north of Electra and woke up throwing dirt half way off on the gravel shoulder. Dad was ahead but didn’t seem to have noticed. We kept on going without any more sleeping.

I had done some of my first amateur radio mobiling along these routes. There was a repeater in Altus, Oklahoma that had fringe coverage along at least fifty miles of 287 centered around Vernon. What was it, 145.79 minus 600? I couldn’t recall now. There was also a repeater in Childress run by the local Old Man, W5XO. He had an electronics repair shop out on the edge of town. I was driving through one day about noon talking to him on his repeater when he warned me to watch the speeds closely, the traffic patrols might be patrolling in close to their headquarters in town so near to lunch time…. But there were no stops that day.

Further up into the Red River Valley, there was a turn in the road out in the middle of nowhere as the rolling hills were becoming plains where a guy had a house with a big tree stump out front painted red white and blue. The road probably turned right there because the prior owner of that house had won the battle with the highway right-of-way people.

Shortly after college I got married. The following spring we went on a trip to Pensacola, Florida for Kathleen Kelchner’s wedding. Kathleen had been one of Viann’s friends in nursing school. We went by way of Canyon. Study the map and you’ll see that this was nowhere near “on the way” and put us something like two to three days longer getting to Florida. We visited my grandmother, who had a bad case of shingles, and aunt, who had lived with her for fifty years. This was the only time that Viann would ever meet grandmother. She died later that year.

It was after that last death in 1984 that, perceiving our mortality, we started thinking seriously about having our own children….

That trip up 287 had offered the first and only opportunity for me to see Dalhart, the Fairbanks of Texas, and then to drive across the Oklahoma panhandle. My romantic mental image of that part of the country will always be a horse loose on the road and a couple of teenage girls chasing it on foot. We slowed to let them get the horse back under control before coasting on by.

The next year, we got to see a previously unexplored piece of 287 in Midlothian. In our one and only preparatory ride for riding our bikes to Alaska (see Alaska), we had gone from Dallas through Cedar Hill through Midlothian, crossing 287, and on to Venus where we had camped near the road. Highway 287 went on southeast from there ending up down in Beaumont, but I didn’t know much about that part of it. The other way it went to Yellowstone National Park and beyond. Mother had been to Yellowstone, on a vacation with another family once, but I had never been out that far. My 287 was the stretch between Ft. Worth and Amarillo.

Normally we would go to Canyon by going to Amarillo then south down what was now I-27 but on a trip to visit Aunt Da when she was ill, we had gotten off of 287 at Turkey or Estelline and driven across the broad downstream depression of the Palo Duro Canyon. We undoubtedly went a new way that day due to pressure from me. I was always wanting to go different ways.

The Palo Duro had been dad’s boyhood haunt (but not this far out). There were many stories from there, all lost now, but driving across that day, I felt homesick for the vastness of it all. Once in a while you’d see a house with a TV antenna up on a 60-foot pole. That’s how far out they were.

When going to Borger, we’d get off at Claude and go north on 207, straight as an arrow. You could see Highway 66 (I-40) coming for miles, then cross it, then up to Panhandle and on north. In the last fifteen or twenty miles before Borger you’d get into what mom called the Canadian River Breaks. The land would start to roll and the road to turn. It was all ranch country, but mostly scrub. Out here you didn’t talk “head per acre,” you talked “acres per head!”

This was the region of the famous 6666 (“four-six”) ranch, so named because it had allegedly been won in a poker game by a hand of four sixes.

It was in these parts where granddad used to turn off hias engine and coast down hills to save gas. Sometimes he would stop at a pipeline junction and get some “casing head”, a little gasoline condensed out of the transmission pipes. This wasn’t good for the engine, it made it ping, but during the war with gas rationing sometimes it was all there was. These were only stories to me; granddad never did anything like that with me in the car. He was much more conservative and careful by the time I was a teenager.

Mother’s mother had died in 1960, of complications from multiple sclerosis, dad’s dad had died in 1962, of a massive heart attack accelerated by a life of smoking, drinking, and overeating fried chicken. After the remaining grandparents were gone, granddad in 1978, grandma in 1979, and Da in 1984, there hadn’t been many trips up to the Amarillo area anymore. Mother and Wilda had closed out her dad’s estate within a year. Dad went up by himself occasionally for a few more years dealing with various things, no one really knew what. By now, Viann and I were living in the Houston area, four or five hours from even joining the 287 part of the route.

Then we had moved to California, and that stretch of 287 became just a small part, half day really, of a very long two or three day drive, when the “north” or “I-40” route was used. Vacations nearly always had some sort of Texas theme, even on the rare occasions when it wasn’t the sole destination. Typically we would go one direction on I-10 through El Paso, Van Horn and Ft. Stockton, and the other direction on I-40 from Barstow to Albuquerque to Gallup and Amarillo, then down 287 to the relatives.

As life goes on, things happen that are sad, irrevocably changing everything. When dad died I flew home. He and mom were to be buried in Panhandle Cemetery next to the Penningtons, her parents. Having flown home for the services, we made the trip from Hillsboro to Panhandle up 287 in two rental cars, mother and Wilda and I in one, Viann and the kids in the other. The hearse, traveling independently, charged by the mile. We stayed in Panhandle that night and had the burial the next day. Afterwards mother’s cousin Vivian took us all to a late lunch in Amarillo, and we parted ways from there. Viann went home on I-40, making it to Gallup, New Mexico that night. We went back down 287. It was the same as it had always been but it was not the same. We talked about everything we could think of. Wilda slept in the back seat. We stopped only in Henrietta for snacks then drove straight through to Hillsboro, arriving just ten minutes before the other party got to Gallup.

Ten days later, I flew home. My flight had a stop in Denver. We flew from DFW straight up 287, over Panhandle.

After I knew we were out of Texas, I got out the L.A. Times that I had inexplicably brought along, the December 9 issue (the day dad had died) and started reading it, trying to get back to life as usual. This would take years, and “usual” was never the same.

The next year I came out to be with mother for chemotherapy and clean some of dad’s stuff out of the house. I loaded up his truck, put my radios in it, and drove up 287 to take it all home. There was a big thunderstorm on the route that night. Everything in the back got wet. I hit every light in Wichita Falls green, the only time ever. “Thanks dad,” I thought.

We were going out for Thanksgiving in 2004 when Katy wrecked the car in Victorville, just an hour or so after leaving Los Angeles. We limped back, got the van, and made the trip in it instead. We stopped in Amarillo and bought gravestones for the plots in Panhandle on that trip. Katy did some of the driving down 287. I told some of the stories tough. It was a tough trip, and the week off we had for Thanksgiving was too tight for all that driving.

Another trip that was necessary, but also too tight, was to go to the Slagle Reunion in summer of 2005. We spent two days driving to Hillsboro from California, one day going up 287 to Amarillo, one day at the reunion, one day driving back, and two days driving back to California. This was the first time that I thought it might be the last big drive like that with the five of us.

The road had changed over all these decades. There’s more traffic on it now. The little towns are either bypassed or have widened roads through them. The gas stops are all chains run by Hispanics and other “immigrants.” (Or are they? Who was here first? Who was here next?) In any case it is a new era in northwest Texas. The big tree stump painted red white and blue is long gone. The half of a doublewide that blew off the road and sat there with “no trespassing” signs on it for a couple of years is also gone, finally. The little park out of Estelline appears to be fenced off, perhaps no longer public. The Altus, Childress, and Vernon repeaters are all on some linked system so that mobiling there is like just one big phone call through the whole region.

The flatness and the old grain elevators you can see for dozens of miles are still the same. The dry llano estacado and the caprock are still the same. The sunsets and thunderstorms are still the same, if you know how to look at them.

It’s uncertain what my future is on 287. I’m getting to where I might just fly out to Texas when I need to go, time and gasoline being so precious. But there will be a few more trips. Mother will be buried up there one of these days, and maybe one of the others of us. The Pennington plot in Panhandle Cemetery has five graves….

Vi and Nate.

Two years ago I had driven to Pennsylvania to bring Viannah home from her freshman year in school. She and her freshman boyfriend Nate had broken up the day that I arrived, but not knowing this I took them and Daylin, Viannah’s roommate out for ice cream before we started talking serious packing – of the small car – and serious shipping of the rest. Following this, Viannah and I had spent four days together driving across the country in the small car. I had done most of the talking but had asked about Nate at one point. Even so, I hadn’t listened much. I didn’t learn about the breakup until the following year. This was just to say that John should not let me do all the talking on this trip. I’m supposed to get acquainted with him and his stories too.

As we drove along we passed and were passed by trucks and trucks filled to the brim with tomatoes. Alongside the road were little piles of tomatoes in various stages of rotting. Bumps?

I told John that I was expecting, starting about here, that I-5 would be about six hours of straight road. We drove all the way to Weed this day, however, and that wasn’t the case.

Mrs. Lucy Jones things – Rogues

Along Highway 2 three or four miles south of our house, on the east side of the freeway, there is a tripod with a small gray dome on top. What was this? Part of SCIGN, the Southern California Integrated GPS Network. Its purpose was to densely monitor local fault motions in order to determine the zones more hazardous for earthquake exposure.

For a dozen years I had worked on the JPL-developed Rogue Receiver, at the time the best science-grade GPS receiver in the world. Many of these sites, including perhaps the one there on Highway 2, were based on Rogues. They would collect data around the clock and around the calendar and all of that data was collected back to JPL for routine processing and analysis.

It wasn’t just southern California, however. Stations like this were all over the country and all over the world.

John already knew about all this. Those sites were Neil’s mother’s things. Neil’s mother, the eminent geologist Lucy Jones, was in fact among the end users of the SCIGN data, and other data like it from around the world.

We had even worked on putting some at sea. This was “seafloor geodesy,” in which my boss, Larry Young had collaborated. The idea was to have sonar transponders on the sea floor and a GPS-equipped buoy at the surface pinging them. With long-term measurements, perhaps crustal motions exhibited on the sea floor could be monitored too.

The first seagoing test of this was the legendary week south of Catalina. We had joined our colleagues from Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego and had gone to sea on Robert Gordon Sproul, a vessel originally intended for hauling pipe up the flat Mississippi. As soon as we were out of the harbor, I had become seasick and remained so until several days after our return, over a week in all. We were supposed to set up three sonar sites in the basin where the water was about a mile deep and sit in the middle of the triangle they formed with the boat, buoy, and GPS. Two of the transponders had failed, however, so we made a one-mile radius circle around the one that was working, at two knots, at sea state four. This had been awful.

In another test that I didn’t go on, they instrumented the Juan de Fuca plate off of Washington State. We would be visiting that area and learning about this on our present trip. The idea in that test had been to put a monument on the sea floor, take some data, then come back a year later and take more data from the same monument. Juan de Fuca, a subduction plate, was chosen because it was relatively close (as things in the world go) and it might move as much as 10 cm in that one year, a measurable amount. In fact, they set out more than one sea-bottom marker, to hedge their bets.

I wasn’t sure how this work had come out, but there had been trouble with the markers being drug down by fishing nets, or failing for other reasons. Of course, any move of even an inch or so would spoil the measurement. Later, funding for seafloor geodesy was cut.

Hams vs. Real: Yay! Darn!

This is a simple story, but it is key to understanding what amateur (ham) radio is all about and not being confused about what it is not.

Formally, it goes like this. Amateur radio consists of hobbyists doing things that are to some degree experimental, educational, or service oriented. Because it is a diverse, distributed, and voluntary activity where each participant provides all of their own equipment at their own expense, it can also be useful, on an ad hoc basis, in emergencies and disasters. Not dependable but potentially useful when things that were supposed to have been dependable have failed.

Real communications services, like the telephone (landline and cellular), broadcast services, cable, and so forth, are supposed to be dependable. When they don’t work, it is a breach of contract of sorts.

Steve Roberts of Winnebiko fame had summarized it like this. On ham radio you struggle and fuss and when your intended “communication” works once, it’s a great victory, “yay!” If, on the other hand, you pick up your telephone even once and don’t get dialtone or don’t have service, “This darned worthless thing! Useless!”

This was the experience we were having with the shortwave-based N5BF-10 APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) we were trying to run. I’d turn up the receiver and we’d listen. When we saw a packet go out and heard what sounded like it being repeated (and therefore relayed into the internet based reporting system), it was a great victory, we cheered. Alternatively, if we’d paid for this service and it missed a single report, we’d be trashing it.

By now John was ready for a nap.

CDJ Paderewski

Each of us had brought CDs along. John also had his player though we didn’t use it much, being in the van that had its own player most of the time. My CD bag had forty disks in it, John’s somewhat less. I thought I would enforce a “take turns” policy and let John go first. When my CDs came up, I’d have him pick one at random, then tell him the story of why I have it (maybe something I had once played myself but was here played better by a professional, or maybe just one of my favorites from somewhere, or whatever) and then we’d listen and maybe comment further.

But, John went first and pulled out a CD of piano rolls recorded by Paderewski, a great pianist of the 19^th and 20^th century. And, there were pieces on here, like the entire Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, that I had played, when I was younger than John was now. John’s favorite cut on the CD was the third movement of that Sonata. It had been background on a video game he had played at one time and so he had familiar with it.

1350 called VOD @ Joanne’s – dropped ~ 60 secs. Called back, left message.

Viann was visiting Joanne at the hospital this afternoon. I called but the connection dropped after about a minute. Called back, got no answer, and left a message. It turned out that this had been during a crises conversation with Joanne. Viann, knowing that I would leave a message, had agreed not to answer and further disrupt the conversation.

1403 = 2103 Sperry 76

296.3 = (354.4) = 088057 92F = 33C

20.083 X $3.199 = $64.25 oil clean, new

Zero trip calculator here.

This was the first fill up on the trip and the point at which I noted that we hadn’t reset the vehicle trip computer, the one that keeps average mileage, speed, and so forth. I zeroed it now.

This was a 76 station in Sperry, a rather pretty, agricultural portion of the I-5, no “straight and boring” here. This would be the first entry in the fuel statistics spreadsheet, the one from which we determined the cost in gallons of the whole trip, the fuel cost in dollars, and related statistics. I had said that I was going to take this trip regardless of the cost of gasoline, if it was available at all.

Plastic Spoons $2.37

For some reason we thought we needed utensils to eat something although one of the camping boxes had service for about ten.

1422 resume

… Keep on driving north.

1438 Split 5 -> SC – 580 -> SF

In La Canada there is a sign on the freeway that says “Sacramento 369.” All along this route there are signs that give mileage to Sacramento and San Francisco that is one mile different, that is, the sign in La Canada could also (but does not) say “San Francisco 370.” This is where you make the choice. To go west to San Francisco, take I-580, to go north through Sacramento, stay on I-5.

1858 612.2 Comfort Inn Weed, 73F Room 315

Shasta RR

Tourist Sacramento

A Bombs

Apollo

We kept on driving through Sacramento and on northward. Viann had called back to explain about the phone call and to encourage us to stop and see the capitol (and the “governator”) in Sacramento, and to do several other such things. John and I discussed this and decided that the trip, as outlined, started when we got out of California. Touring Sacramento could be done more easily at another time. So we kept driving, amongst plowed fields, vineyards, tomato trucks, and other tourists, discussing various things as we went. We got into the mountains that would lead up into the Mt. Shasta area and crossed the Lake Shasta region, noting that they had a tourist railroad there, something else that we would not do on this trip. The headwaters of the Sacramento River were up here somewhere; Viann had visited them when we came to Weed for an AMSAT meeting in 1989. But, again, not on this trip.

A-Bombs

I told John everything I knew about A-Bombs, which wasn’t much, just the schematic overview.

There were two types of bombs, Uranium and Plutonium. Uranium was more stable and the bomb was harder to detonate. The trick was to get a near-critical-mass sphere, then fit it with a shape charge (of regular high-explosives) that would implode it evenly into a smaller sphere, but at slightly more than critical density. This bomb had been tested at Trinity in New Mexico, in the middle of the night. Dad had been stationed out there at the time but had not seen it; he had only heard rumors. They don’t tell people in the military anything they don’t need to know and precious little of what they do.

These A-bombs were in the few tens of kiloton yield range. Before the A-Bomb test there had been a project to find out what would happen in a large explosion and start to learn how to deal with it. They had stacked up boxes and boxes of high explosives on the site, maybe a hundred tons, and detonated it all at once. It had similar results.

The other Uranium bomb had been used on Japan. A key goal of the war effort in the Pacific had been to get within B-29 range of the Japanese mainland so that this weapon could be used there

There was only one Plutonium bomb. They were easier to detonate. Just fire a slug of material into the sphere. Plutonium was capable of self-detonating, in fact. A Plutonium bomb had been used on Hiroshima without prior testing. The other bomb was Uranium and was used on Nagasaki. These were the only three bombs in existence at the time, though this was unknown to the enemy at the time. So, the world waited….

This “without testing” was hard for some people to believe. In looking over early atomic history material on the recent anniversaries, I had discovered a conspiracy theory web site. Someone was essentially claiming that the U.S. Navy nuked a bunch of its black sailors at Port Chicago before Trinity. The explosion and mushroom cloud was observed by unsuspecting pilots flying over the area at the time. Some 300 had been killed but there was no radiation. It sounded like a conventional armaments accident to me. The lack of radiation seemed problematic to the conspiracist’s cause. The incident had a name, but I didn’t remember any other details.

Apollo

I had brought along the new book First Man, the biography of Neil Armstrong to read, in case it turned out that there was any time for solitude and reading. There was not, so I didn’t crack the book on this trip.

My memory of Apollo was mostly programmatic, what the various missions did. I knew several of the astronaut names and other stories, but it really boiled down to this:

Mercury: proving that we could put people in orbit and bring them back, one at a time.

Gemini: putting up astronauts two at a time and doing necessary development testing for moon missions. In particular this meant rendezvous and docking, space walking, science experiments, and mission durations of up to two weeks.

By the time of Gemini I was old enough to be getting really involved. I built models and understood what was going on. Those guys sat for two weeks in a capsule that was much smaller than this van, their living area much smaller than even the front two seats here. No windows to open….

I specifically remembered Gemini 7 and 6A. Gemini 6 had been scrubbed when it’s docking target didn’t get into orbit, so they decided to turn it around and instead do a rendezvous between it and the upcoming Gemini 7. This was the first time NASA would attempt to have two manned spacecraft up at once.

So Gemini 7 was in orbit, this was the two-week endurance test. Simultaneously they were counting down Gemini 6A on the pad.

Now, Gemini was the only one of the first three types of vehicles that had ejection seats. Mercury and Apollo had escape towers. If something went wrong, an escape tower would carry the whole manned capsule away from the rocket (if it worked). The Russians had actually had occasion to use this capability. Luckily, we had not.

Anyway, that meant that the two astronauts in Gemini had to get into ejection posture for the liftoff. Nominally they were lying on their backs in launch position, but ejection posture meant pulling up like a sit up with head between knees and hands on the ejection activator. All of the indicators used for liftoff would be down there at their feet too.

So it was Wally Schirra in command with Thomas Stafford in the right seat. Wally, by the way, was the only astronaut to fly all of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

There they were in ejection posture counting down. … two, one, zero. The Titan II lit up, the pad separation indicator came on, then, unexpectedly, the Titan shut down after about one second. I had inside information that, at this instant, commander Schirra had uttered, “Oh Shit.”

Should they eject while they still could before the rocket fell over into an inferno, or did they bet the other way and sit tight? Ejecting, though standard procedure in this case, wasn’t that safe either. High G-loads, close to the ground, possible injuries even if they survived.

They sat tight.

NASA turned around the charred pad in two days, and they tried again, this time successfully flying into orbit. Gemini 7, watching from space overhead, saw both ignitions. After a day or two the rendezvous was successful. They flew the two craft to within six feet of each other and did various sorts of inspections. They could see each other’s beards through the windows.

Gemini 6 then came right home, leaving Gemini 7 to finish up their two-week sentence.

Then there was Gemini 8 in which a thruster stuck on and Neil Armstrong, acting quickly, saved the mission by prematurely activating the re-entry systems. At first they thought the problem was on the Agena target they had just docked with, but when they got loose, the tumbling got worse. They were spinning about 90 rpm before Neil got it under control. Those guys were real “Right Stuff” pilots.

Gus Grissom, veteran of the second Mercury and first Gemini manned flight (on which John Young, still an astronaut today, was the rookie); Ed White, the first American space walker, and Roger Chaffee, rookie, were training for the first manned Apollo flight. It was 1967 and we had about two years left to get to the moon, by Kennedy’s mandate. One evening during a routine pad test, a fire had broken out in the sea-level-pressure, pure oxygen atmosphere. They were dead in seconds. The hatch could not be opened quickly; attendants outside suffered injuries trying. The capsule ruptured. It was an enormous setback.

It was late the following year when the first flight did take place. Apollo 7, commanded by Schirra, was earth-orbit with the command module only. It was to verify the systems. Several unmanned Apollo flights had been conducted beforehand to show that the capsule would survive and operate properly in and beyond earth orbit.

Then, the program had a problem. The next flight was supposed to be a test with the Lunar Module, but still in earth orbit only. But, the Lunar Module wasn’t ready yet. They decided to do the trans-lunar test next instead. The LM wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t ready. The facilities for navigating to the moon and back had never been tested either. They were rushed into service for the earlier-than-expected flight. There were many risky things about the Apollo 8 mission. It was the first time that anyone had left the vicinity of the earth. It was at least three days home, maybe more, if anything went wrong. No simple retro-fire and splash down in the Pacific as with the Gemini 8 emergency. Commander Boreman felt that he and his crew had a 50/50 chance of surviving this challenging mission.

Frank Borman, with Jim Lovell and Bill Anders for crew, went to the moon, orbited Apollo 8 ten times, and returned successfully. Borman, Westpoint, was notoriously sea-sick. For logistical reasons, they had landed in the Pacific ninety minutes before local dawn. The Command Module was so rank when the frogmen opened it up (Borman vomiting, and a week of camping out without windows) that they had dropped back from the hatch involuntarily.

This flight was just before Christmas, in fact, the return-to-earth burn had been executed early on Christmas morning. “There is a Santa Clause,” Lovell had reported on their first communication after the burn. On Christmas Eve, they had read from Genesis to the people back on the earth. There was a famous story about Japanese journalists in Houston covering the flight. When the reading started they called up NASA and asked what it was that was being read. The official asked where they were. “In our hotel,” they had replied. The NASA official said, “Open up the drawer on the stand next to your bed there….”

The Japanese were duly impressed by the ultra-organized Americans!

Apollo 9 was the test with the Lunar Module in earth orbit.

Apollo 10 was the test with the Lunar Module in lunar orbit. They did everything except the actual landing. They went into earth orbit, fired to transfer to the moon, pulled the LM out of storage atop the Saturn IV-B third stage, braked into lunar orbit, boarded the LM, and fired to change the orbit from sixty mile circular to sixty by ten, meaning that they would be descending to within ten miles of the surface. At the bottom of the descent was where the terminal burn would start on a landing attempt. At that point, they just staged, fired the ascent motor, and came back to rendezvous and return to earth. The staging had been scary, there had been unexpected tumbling, but the pilots had recovered.

John Young was the astronaut who waited in the command module. Commander of Apollo 16, he was one of three astronauts who went to the moon twice. (No one walked twice. Lovell went twice and didn’t walk once.)

Then came Apollo 11. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins did everything Apollo 10 had and when they got to the 10 mile apilune had begun a terminal, landing burn. The automatic systems had done it for a while, then the computer overloaded. Commander Armstrong saw the system bringing them down into a boulder field anyway, so he switched to manual and flew to a clearer spot for the touch down. This had caused some consternation back in mission control where Charlie Duke was capsule communicator. They had touched down with somewhere between zero and seventeen seconds of fuel remaining.

Rocks were collected; the return was uneventful. The only real blunder is that no picture of Neil Armstrong had been taken on the moon, not with the good Hasselblad camera anyway.

Then there were the rest of the Apollo flights. Apollo 12 had been struck by lightening shortly after liftoff, dumping all the systems in the Command Module, but the Saturn V booster didn’t burp. They went all the way to the moon, landed, and come back. Apollo 13, commanded by Lovell, was a near disaster, as has been well documented. In Apollo 14, first American in space Al Shepherd commanded, and hit golf balls around. In Apollo 15 they had used the lunar buggy for the first time. John Young commanded 16 where he drove the lunar buggy as fast as it would go. Apollo 17, commanded by Gene Cernan, was the last flight. Budget cuts axed 18, 19, and 20, leaving their boosters as exhibits at various NASA centers (including one at Johnson Space Center that was aimed right at my office when I worked as a coop there). Apollo 17 was the flight carrying the first geologist, Harrison Schmidt, now a senator from New Mexico, into space. He was also a bit far sighted, the first astronaut with less than pristine 20-20 vision.

We got to Weed and checked into a Comfort Inn.

Dinner at Silvey’s Family Restaurant $22.31 + $4.00

Cell technology and hamming

The cost of meals must also be recorded, of course. There were several chain restaurants nearby but we had no appetite for these. There was a steakhouse, but I’ve never been much of a steak eater. There was Silvey’s. After considerable consideration, we wandered around and found the entrance. The place was full; the staff was frenetic. It looked like they might be short handed. One waitress scooped us from another. Sometimes I would write down the charges and the tip, sometimes the sum. John, who was supposed to be keeping a ledger that we would balance from time to time for educational purposes, would always write down the sum, calculated in his head, and keep the running total in his head too. This, I thought, was not going to work.

John had chicken fried steak and I had breakfast. On a scale of one to ten these were about four. John asked questions about how cellphones worked.

888 earthlink from 530 938 1982 use 471 0177

Earthlink (internet service provider) has a service where you can call a toll free number to get a toll free number to dial in from “any” location. Enter the room phone number when prompted and they give you a local access number. This worked the first time. I did my e-mail, checked the APRS (see the Ham Radio appendix) and uploaded some pictures of Mt. Shasta out the window of our room.

Toothpaste lost – found – brush

John couldn’t find the toothpaste. While he was on the phone to Viann about it, it was found. He brushed his teeth. There was confusion about which brush was whose.

Settlers of Cattan – Long Island – blocked timbers with Robber – won.

We played Settlers of Cattan in what John called a “long island” format. The format had its problems. I rolled sevens relentlessly, blocked his timbers with the Robber, and won.

Turned on Cartoon Network for a minute -> off (John)

Much of what is on Cartoon Network is so silly that even kids are bored with it, after a mere minute.

2006 August 1

Up about 8. Shasta too bright to see in sun.

I’m glad I took the pictures out the window last night when there was something to see.

Decompression feels like dread.

Being in command of the expedition, being the one to get everything started and make everything happen is not my favorite role. It is even harder when there is no set, hour-to-hour plan of things to do and schedules to make to fall back on. The plan for today was to swing by the college here in Weed then head on north into Oregon. I hadn’t even chosen a highway yet, though I was thinking “more rural.”

This happened nearly every day of the trip. I would wake up, realize where I was, and have a sense of dread that I had to make something happen today and I didn’t even really know what. And, we really wanted it to happen safely. No fast detours to emergency rooms potentially dozens of miles away, for example.

Or was it just coffee withdrawal? I had been on two cups of coffee per day for years and was feeling too wired for my current age, fifty. For the last week at work I’d only had the early morning cup, not the after lunch one and that had helped. I’d been moving a little slower but was less stressed to go with it. Now I was thinking of getting off altogether but hadn’t done it yet.

At continental breakfast waffle iron – “how old is he?”

Spilled stuff – “coffee”

John was making a waffle at the waffle iron. While I spilled cold cereal all over the counter, the attendant asked me how old he was. I rounded up, “16.” She said it was OK but you have to be “old enough” to operate those hot things. She then instructed him on how to coat the iron with butter first so the waffle wouldn’t stick.

This would come back to bite us in Seattle….

I then spilled my juice. “I need my coffee,” I said in lame excuse.

John takes the soap like Viannah (but doesn’t mind using it).

Viannah always collected hotel soaps, shampoos, and other such condiments. It was a problem because she would collect them before you could even use them, then there was nothing to use! John did this too, but he didn’t mind opening up the ones we needed.

During the trip I pawned a few soaps to put in the next box to Viannah.

After having struggled with a 2400 bps dial-up connection last night, I discovered a high speed drop in the room while packing. Duh.

Check out $98.99

“Those are trained birds.” Bird catcher and son Josh.

While we checked out, the hotel employee’s attention was mostly a man and his son Josh, bird catchers. Apparently they’d hired them to get some bothersome birds away from the hotel. Meanwhile, however, the manager had learned that these birds were actually owned by someone, a man who lived nearby in a bus. I thought of the adds I’d seen for high speed internet via satellite to your remote RV. As we drove away I said to John, “We could be living in a bus. Wonder what that’s like?”

“Like that movie where the kid goes to the Indian reservation to live with his uncle and they live in a small trailer.”

“Kind of like that. They had dignity.” Maybe the bird owner does too.

1028 612.2 = 88373 63 = 17C

Those are the drive-away time and mileage.

There is an S-8 station on 30 m. Nearby?

See the Ham Radio appendix.

1034 612.4 88373 Chevron $54.50 = $3.319 X 16.422

Our second fill-up. The routine would be to fill up in the morning when getting under way. That was always good enough, though I did run it down to the “low fuel” light a few times and, in the process, set a record for “most expensive fill up in the van” ($67).

At one point I remarked to John, “I should be teaching you to fill up the van on this trip.”

“I already know how to fill up the van,” he replied

1045

Old lava flows

Calculus – limits and time integrals

2 way slow trucks 2 lane

~5000 ft. summits on road

Amarillo / Hubbard - but with hills

Continuing, we followed the signs to the college and drove into the parking lot. There was some sports activity in progress this morning. There was a public swimming pool nearby that reminded me of Henrietta where, at age six, I had been a failing student in swimming classes. But the small town public pools were fun, nostalgic. Weed had one. So did Panhandle, Texas where we’d been exactly a year ago at the Slagle Reunion.

I had given a talk here at a local AMSAT conference in fall of 1989. We had come up with two baby girls, John not imagined yet. I’d met Steve Roberts, N4RVE, and his Winebiko, based on a Ryan Recumbent bicycle. He had talked too. Viann had taken the girls to see the headwaters of the Sacramento, a fish hatchery, and other local sites. We’d gotten in trouble with the hotel in Mt. Shasta because one or both of them had screamed most of the evening. We would never stay there again.

Today’s destination was Crater Lake, Oregon. We could either continue up the freeway then go west, or we could go up US 97 to Klamath Falls and approach from the east. More rural, we did the latter.

We drove along through the old lava flows of Shasta and Klamath National Forests seeing different views of Mt. Shasta and the other mountains and valleys nearby, the forests, the lakes, the marshes, the road maintenance buildings, the trucks and cars. We discussed the basics of calculus, limits and line integrals. A line integral might be used to find the length of a windy road such as this one. Say you wanted to find the distance from La Canada to Weed. You could just mark the points on the map at each end and use Pythagoras to calculate the straight-line distance. That would be a first estimate. You could, on the other hand, put some points in the middle of the path and add up all the straight-line distances between adjacent points. You could put down points every two minutes, as we were doing with APRS, N5BF-2. The odometer feature of aprsworld.net would probably be pretty close to what our odometer said, if we had the right amount of air in our tires so that our tire rotations, counted by the van odometer, were accurate.

These would work to a few percent which were as good as we were going to get or need on this trip, but in calculus, you could take the limit of the sum of the distances as the points on the map approached infinity and the distances between them approached zero, and that would be the exact answer. There were different ways to calculate this. Sometimes you had an analytical answer. Pi was calculated in this way. Sometimes it had to be a numerical approximation, facilitated but not perfected by modern digital computers. We didn’t get into that.

I noted several mild “summits” along the road, usually around 5000 feet. We talked about acrophobia, the fear of heights, really, the fear of edges. Nobody is afraid of Denver, though it is about as “high” as we are now. They are afraid of a high place very near a less high place.

1155 667.8 Dorris – find Reeses under seat

This was the last town in California. The two-lane road came into town and made sharp turns before exiting. As is normal with rural two lane roads, we had been following heavy equipment and farm vehicles for some miles. We pulled over near the railroad to find something. I found a peanut butter cup melting under my seat. We discussed stowage etiquette, especially for foodstuffs.

The town, the area, the railroad, the agriculture, the young people walking in town, the traffic, all reminded me of Hubbard in central Texas. Everything was the same except that here there were hills and mountains, which gave it a charming contrast. John would say, “Everyplace reminds you of Hubbard.” This wasn’t true. Some places reminded me of Taylor, or Frisco, or someplace else I had lived growing up.

1159 671.2 Oregon – no stop

At noon we crossed into the state of Oregon. I didn’t see the sign in time to stop for a picture. The DeLorme North California Atlas & Gazetteer went to the bottom of the stack for a couple of weeks. John opened up the Oregon Atlas and started trying to interpret what we were seeing.

Lake Miller, really? Mud? Canals?

The first feature at the bottom of page 22 was a Lake Miller. This was a hatched out lake on the map so it might not have water in it. Looks like we were supposed to drive right across it but there were only ditches, mud, and planted fields. Maybe it was a dry lake.

Klamath River Log Capture Sawmill

The first of many pictures that I would have liked but missed was of the sawmill on the river at the entrance to Klamath Falls. This was one of those views where you top a hill and there it is and you have it for five seconds. Not enough time to find the camera, much less get it turned on, booted up, mode selected, auto-focused, and all the other little startup delays that it has, at least not without pulling over. Although we learned to keep the camera in a standard place and to minimize the impact of all this start up stuff (like, by leaving it on when pictures were likely to be frequent, coming out of sleep being somewhat quicker than booting), this modern digital camera overhead was a hassle throughout the trip.

The view itself was of a major sawmill along the west riverbank and hundreds, maybe thousands of logs captured, floating in the river. It looked like they just put the logs in the river upstream and caught them here just before the highway bridge, for later processing. It would be fascinating to tour this plant and learn how all this works. If only we had a week for every place we went. … or a month, or a lifetime.

John would eventually say, “Dad, you always say that.”

Spider in car

1225 692.3 Klamath Falls Safeway $23.29

Cheese, hot dogs, nice bald checker

Our first shopping trip: supplies for tonight’s camp dinner. They had no crushed ice, someone yesterday had messed up the ice order so we bought a solid seven-pound block of ice and added it to the ice water in the Igloo. I also got some instant coffee and powdered creamer.

My Von’s card worked at this out-of-state Safeway, we saved three dollars! “Thank you Mr. Duncan.” Wow….

1325 716.9 62

After driving along the edge of Upper Klamath Lake for a while, we turned off on highway 62.

Dotted by the occasional historical site or out-back low-end resort, this road wound through more Hubbard-like agricultural countryside. Another Hubbard-Dawson-like feature was a sudden 35 mile-per-hour turn in the road at one local junction. I missed the warning sign and started into the turn at 65. Tires began to screech, camping gear began rattling to the right side of the car. John took note. “Dad, this is a 35 mile per hour turn.” We exited at about 40, resolved to be more vigilant going forward. And this would turn out to be a good thing.

1345 737.4 S. Entrance

We arrived at the south entrance to Crater Lake National Park. Soon, to our left, was an obviously deep creek or river. There were occasional turnouts to view this wonder. Thinking we were near the park where we would be staying, we pressed on, thinking we might come back later for a closer look. It was Annie Creek.

1359 Crater Lake 747.4 entrance $10

But, it was ten more miles up to the formal entrance to the park.

1406 Visitor Center 751.3

We paid the entrance fee then drove four miles up narrow winding roads to the park headquarters. There, we inquired about camping only to be directed back down to the facility about a hundred yards from the entrance station.

My imagination coming in, fueled only by light skimming over the park’s website, was that there was a major campground somewhere away from the crater but that there would be smaller ones up along the rim road that would be more popular because, if you could camp up there you could just walk to the water to fish or swim or whatever.

In retrospect, I don’t know what I was thinking.

1418 Mazama Village

Crater Lake has two campgrounds. Mazama (the prehistoric name of the mountain) was a major one with a couple hundred sites. They didn’t take reservations but usually had sites available. A smaller campground, Lost Creek, in the back country on the way down to the Pinnacles nearly always required reservations. Neither was anywhere near the lake itself. We drove back down the winding road, pulled up in the little village, and got in line to talk to the camping chief about a spot in Mazama. He gave us a reservation tag to take with us, drive through the campground, and leave at a site we picked so that no one else would get it while we came back up and paid our fees.

We drove around and John liked site E49. It was surrounded by trees and close to a water faucet. It was also close to the restrooms, but not too close. It was early in the afternoon, there weren’t many other campers here right now. We placed our tag and went back up to pay the fees.

1438 Registered $36 756.4 88517

1459 Site E49 757.0

camp store

$12.00 wood X 2

$5.00 in quarters

The campsite was half a mile from the store, by the required driving path at least. We walked up and bought wood and changed some money for quarters, required by the showers.

1715 lunch – make your own sandwich

set up site

fill fuel things – lamp and stove

steal wood

talk about plans

We had missed lunch and it was now kind of late. There was a new restaurant in the Mazama complex and we walked in, but it was around three, looked like a steam tables buffet, and a long line was slow. We walked back out.

John in charge of the food, we got the Igloo out and used sandwich meat to make our own sandwiches.

I filled up the camp stove and Coleman lantern with fuel, while it was light enough to see what I was doing. Walking through other unoccupied campsites, we picked up some partially burnt wood out of their firepits.

After setting up our tent and moving things in, we decided to drive up to the rim and look at the lake.

drive rim

1735-1810 walk around lodge – pictures 764.7

After nearly eight miles of winding road, the rim is reached at the lodge. You really need reservations (and wealth) to stay at the lodge. Another restaurant there was under renovation this summer. It was too late to visit the store. We walked around on the paths near the rim at the lodge.

There was a one or two foot rock wall along the crater side of the paths. The fall from the path would be several hundred feet down a rocky, wooded, 45 degree slope to the cold water. John started doing the standard teenage things that make parents (all parents, not just the parent of the kid) nervous: walking on the wall, going over and up to the edge to look down. I wondered if I would be photographing his grave injury or death. Other grownups did too, about John and their own children, if any.

Should I say something? Was this too big of a lesson to allow to be learned by accident?

We walked on down to the east, to the point on the trail with the instruction and warning signs. Part of the trail was closed.

It was August 1 and there were snow patches everywhere. I explained that this had to do with partial shadowing, not getting as much sunlight as other places, cool temperatures at an elevation like this. One big snow patch was in full sun and obviously was for most of every day. So much for my made-up science.

People were out on the lakeside edge of the lodge being served dinner while overlooking the lake. More wealth.

Back at the car we started around the rim clockwise. We quickly realized that we were not going to go all the way around today, so decided to do that tomorrow. And, tomorrow when we did this we would stop at some places and do some hiking. Also, I’d read the park newspaper and see what the other possibilities were.

We stopped at one viewing area and parked to look around. There was a fire watch tower up above us. Some people were hiking up and down to it. We added that to the list.

1839 leave pullover 769.0 60-65 up here

From that area, we returned to camp.

Dinner with hot dogs boiled, hot chocolate, stove flares

We fired up the camp stove, so to speak, and started dealing with the standard air bubbles problem. When it was working John boiled water with hot dogs in it. We ate dinner.

Fire no problem – Marshmallows

It was no problem getting the fire started. Roasted marshmallows.

2035 Ranger talk about lake, volcano, water, fish, moss, soundings.

At an amphitheater near our site, a ranger talk was scheduled for 8:30 p.m. We walked over and arrived a few minutes late. The talk was accompanied by a slide show.

We were on Mt. Mazama, an active but sleeping volcano that had blown most of its top off in a major eruption around 7000 years ago. (The exact date was quoted with slight differences everywhere it was presented but, still, this was nearly up into recorded history.) This eruption would have caused devastation over hundreds of square miles and ash worldwide. We wondered if this had been the plague of darkness from the Exodus, about the right time, but a long way away.

Some smaller volcanoes, such as Wizard Island, had formed in the new crater and eventually it had all calmed down and filled with water, mostly snowmelt. There was a unique breed of moss around Wizard Island. Scientists were here this very day to study it. There were no natural fish in the lake but it had been stocked by one of the early park rangers in order to attract fishermen. The lake had been sounded; the deepest part was about 2000 feet below its surface. The water was very clean, the temperature higher than expected as there were vents at the bottom. Volcanic activity….

“So, as you go to sleep tonight,” the ranger concluded, “realize you are on a magma chamber that will one day … ERUPT!”

I asked John what would happen if Mt. Mazama erupted tonight. He said we’d go straight to heaven. True enough, I said, but his mother would be mad, at me.

Pay phone to call home then back to camp

Went back to camp via the store where there were a couple of payphones. I called our home 877 number and found Viann talking to Viannah (in Pennsylvania) on her cellphone.

There were places around the rim and campsite where there was a hint at cell coverage but nowhere where the phones worked, thus the satellite pay phones. One kid up at the lodge was standing at what he thought was a hot spot trying to dial out. Withdrawal. Not wanting to be here, wanting to be somewhere else. The main use of the cellphone, indeed, to be somewhere else. Now we can not only not live in the moment, we can also not live in the place!

I empathized with the kid; this was one of the reasons I had gotten into ham radio when I was his age, to be in touch with … elsewhere. I reminded myself that this, here, now, was elsewhere.

Other places around the rim you’d see people doing the same futile exercise with their phones. I decided not to join them.

John cold in shorts.

John was still in shorts.

Lantern no problem.

No problem lighting the lantern.

Forgot to take towel to BR – ok

Dual suitcase OK – great

I had packed my clothes kind of equally in two suitcases so that it wouldn’t matter which one I took into the room or tent. This was still working fine. Not much in the way of dirty clothes yet.

And I had forgotten to take a towel to the bathroom but had managed anyway. I don’t know why I write down things like that. No one else does.

Reminisced about Grand Canyon – heat – cicadas 5 a.m. breakfast

Santa Rosa – heavy packs, volunteer ranger drove

As we sat by the fire, I talked about the hike across the Grand Canyon. It had been hot that first night and we were under a tree full of cicadas that screamed until after eleven, at which time they all shut off at once. I had finally gotten to sleep around three or four only to get up at five to go to the early breakfast seating, an unfortunate misunderstanding. We were scheduled for the 6:30 seating. “Dad, we could have been sleeping.” Indeed we should have been.

And, there had been unloading the boat on the pier at Santa Rosa with Katy. I was down on the boat in the bucket brigade and Katy was up on the pier. People lifting the packs out of the hold stopped and groaned at mine, probably 55 pounds. Certainly, we had not won the race hiking the mile and a half from there to the campground.

John on the cot and I on the two eggshell pads, we were tucked in waiting to go to sleep. I only had one long sleeve shirt with me, a t-shirt from the 2000 Dallas Turkey Trot, and some sweats that I used for cold weather pajamas. Wearing all of this and wrapped in the sleeping bag just so, I was barely warm.

August 2, 2006 Weds

0828 48F was cold overnight

As on nearly every day of the trip, I woke up at 6:30 but didn’t get up until around eight. It was still cold after eight and my blankets and jacket that I had piled on the sleeping bag had become misadjusted so I was getting cold too. John was sleeping soundly, seemed fine. Pushing past the despair I got up, put on clothes, and wore my jacket.

It looked like there was time to make it to the DSP-10 net. After many years of trying, I had finally built a DSP-10 radio last year. The core group of developers for this radio all lived in the Oregon - Washington area led by Bob Larkin, W7PUA, and held a 75-meter net every morning at 8:30. I had switched the shortwave antenna to the 75-meter resonator the night before and went to the driver’s seat now, tuning the radio to 3.818 MHz to listen.

Sure enough, right on schedule, there they were. With W7PUA as net control there was a group consisting of W7FC, KD7TS (Mike), W7LHL (Ernie), W7SE (Larry), W7SLB (Beb (pronounced ‘beeb’), Bob’s brother), and W7CQ (Jimmy). These were all calls and names I’d seen on the DSP-10 reflector on qth.net where developers worldwide shared ideas, frustrations, and results. To hear them all talking on a frequency was remarkable.

They were engaged in a discussion of DSP-10 memory operation, the implementation of which confused everyone except the implementer, Bob, himself. It also confused me, but I didn’t join in the discussion. It was already pretty heated between Bob and Mike, who had just finished writing the documentation for the feature and didn’t think he understood it well enough to have done so.

At 0854 (local, 1554Z) I checked in to much welcome and gave and received signal reports from many of the other stations. I was then given the floor to give a general report in which I briefly described our trip so far with plans, the local cold temperature, introduced my son KG6HCO (John), and gave a brief synopsis of my experiments with the DSP-10 mode EME2 with which I had claimed a five watt, single antenna lunar echo detection and about which I’d written a paper for the upcoming AMSAT Symposium this fall.

Bob personally invited me to lunch if we happened to pass through the Corvallis, Oregon area sometime next week. He was about ten minutes from the freeway, more if we came in from the coast. He even gave a local 2-meter simplex talk-in frequency, 147.53, showing that the invitation was serious. If I showed up on that frequency some morning, someone on Corvallis would nearly certainly follow through.

Jimmy and Bob were both very familiar with Crater Lake, having been up here to see the sites and to operate radios at various events. Bob suggested the Pinnacles as a “must see” in the park, and Jimmy recommended the music museum just opened by Paul Allen when we got to Seattle. I signed at 0921 (1621Z) and went to get my coffee. John had water boiling.

This inclusion was an exciting honor for me, but I knew John was indifferent. I discussed the lunch invitation, pointing out that I might or might not feel like doing it next week when we got down there but that in any case it wouldn’t be more than about a half a day disruptive to our other plans, such as they were. He said, “Sure.”

We were entertained about the way in which the park service was spinning the possibility of being close to forest fires while we were up here. It went something like this.

“Naturally occurring fires in the area are a good thing and keep the forests in balance. If they don’t threaten lives or property, we monitor them but leave them alone. While you are in the area you may have the opportunity to see fire fighters in action, helicopters or aircraft flying overhead, and fire equipment being dispatched. Always follow directions and heed warnings.”

The opportunity to see helicopters indeed….

This same notice could have been posted in the part of southern California where we lived.

Guy in bathroom advised Mt. St. Helens – from freeway go to 1^st info then last – best view, then back.

While brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I encountered a talkative tourist. Asking where we were going and having received “Mt St. Helens” as an answer, he advised going to the main visitor center right off the freeway first, seeing that, then driving all the way to the end of the road, skipping all the other viewing sites except the very last.

Duly noted.

1019 780.1 51F drive

to go around rim CCW

So once again we set off to circle the crater rim. I thought we’d go the other direction so that the places we’d already seen and said we would come back to in more detail today would be last rather than first.

12.0 V vs. 13.8 V in rigs

Why was I running the engine this morning when I was talking on the net? It’s because modern solid-state rigs don’t run on 12 volts, the level that a discharging car battery will maintain when the engine is not running. They expect 13.8 volts, the regulated level of the alternator in the car and the voltage for which “12 volt” power supplies are built. On 100 watt peaks, my rig would distort or even drop out of operation unless the engine was running. The 2 meter rig on N5BF-2 had the same property. I could only run it at the “high” 65 watt power level when the engine was on. Otherwise key up and it would go blank and reset itself.

Some wanted the ARRL and others to include performance metrics for various input voltages in their product reviews but they refused, possibly due to pressure from their advertisers, none of whose radios would work right at “low” voltage.

road blocked

After three quarters of a mile, we came upon construction. They were patching the road and had just laid down the asphalt. It would be half an hour before we could proceed.

We turned back and went to park headquarters again. I had forgotten to write my mother this morning anyway. There was a post office right there.

1036 HQ Write mom 56F 785.4 + 2 postcards, .48 stamps .50 post cards

After writing the letter and buying postcards that wouldn’t fit in the envelope, then buying postage for them and mailing them separately, we started out again.

1054 CW

Perhaps the road to the east would have been ready by now, but we continued clockwise, yesterday’s direction anyway.

1104 789.3 58 hike stop

This was the first place that looked interesting for a short walk on yesterday’s reconnaissance. A path right off the road made a couple of switchbacks up to a higher part of the cliff. We got out and hiked up to a little meadow. John tried out several places too close to the edge. We saw deer.

1121 drive, John versus freqs.

Back in the car John started twiddling the frequencies on the radio again. The APRS equipment was still trying to send positions assuming we were tuned to the correct 30 meters frequency. This twiddling meant that there was some small chance we would attempt a transmission on some out-of-band frequency, like 59.999 MHz, the highest the radio would go, or 50 KHz, the lowest. On either of these frequencies, the antenna was worthless. In fact, it wasn’t clear from our lack of success on N5BF-10 that the antenna wasn’t worthless on its intended frequency around 10 MHz. No, I’d made contacts and gotten a few packets in from it before. It was the low power and other circumstances that I thought was the problem.

1128 Pinnacle Hike 732.0

“not an accident” plus 3^rd hiker

We had decided to hike up to the fire watchtower. The signs at the trailhead said to allow 45 minutes each way, it was a little over a mile and several hundred feet climb. John changed from his usual sandals into tennis shoes, the closest thing he had to hiking shoes. I was wearing my hiking boots, as always.

There were several snow packs along the trail and along the road below it. Some of them had melted underneath leaving overhangs and caves nearly large enough to climb into. John climbed around, made snowballs, got cold hands.

We started up the broad switchbacks. To our south and west it was only forests for miles and miles up to the mountains in the background. We thought we could see Mt. Shasta in the distance to the south. Only a few miles in that direction, one of the advertised wild fires was burning in what looked like two segments.

John brought up the subject. Something about looking over all this made people think about God and the creation. He didn’t think this could all be an accident. I started into my standard discussion about my two metaphysical questions: 1. Why does anything bother to exist at all? 2. Why does anything bother to live? Underlying these are many more questions of course, such as, what is life and why does it strive upstream against entropy, things like that.

My own belief was that these things had to do with God, not that I could explain God or where he came from or anything, but both of these questions were in perfect agreement with our faith that God created everything out of nothing and caused beings apart from himself to come to life. The debates about the nature of God or what he wants from us were beneath these fundamental questions. These debates form much of the diversity we see in religions.

Another hiker appeared around the corner coming down. We stopped at the point of a switchback and talked. Before long he worked the conversation around to the non-accidental nature of our existence. “You know,” he said, “if I saw a Pepsi can sitting right here,” he pointed to a flat rock with nothing on it, “I would be insane to conclude that it just happened by chance. Do you realize that if all the bees were taken out of the world life as we know it would come to an end. What would pollinate?”

Was this a remarkable coincidence?

Without encouraging or engaging him too much, I brought the conversation to a polite close. He continued down, we continued up. We might have been talking to Jesus there, but I suspected that it was just one of his servants.

John says, “See?”

I said that I agreed with our friend in general but that I thought he was repeating a sermon he had heard. The Pepsi can was the giveaway. “Why don’t they ever use Dr. Pepper?” He had said other things that were borrowed from familiar sermons, which were in turn borrowed from less well-known philosophers of recent centuries, some of them Christian in bent.

One reason John wanted to be in ministry was to tell inspirational stories like that. I could see my life flashing before my eyes in front of crowds of thousands, John the great storyteller. Today he was still in the material collecting stage.

We climbed on up towards the fire watch tower.

1304 active fire watch

no hamming

read book…

About two switchbacks from the top, we encountered a man decked out with radio and other gear. This had to be either an employee or a ham. The hand held radio strapped to the front of his overalls chest was talking; I didn’t quite catch about what.

At the top we found a few other tourists, making photos, eating snacks they had brought up. The fire station was open and in use, visitors prohibited. The man with the radios came back up and climbed up to his station inside. He had gone down possibly to get a look at a fire somewhere that couldn’t quite be seen from the installation itself due to blockage of a nearby hill.

Some German tourists arrived at the top. One of them, pregnant was joking, half in German half in English, about pregnancies and other disabilities. We had been there.

I went around taking pictures. John threw rocks for a while then took his book out of his backpack and read it for a while. When I was ready to go down, I had to wait for him to finish a chapter, it was so engrossing.

We could see the tour boats on the lake below, circling the great crater counter clockwise, graceful wakes following them.

I had my hand held radio with me, but didn’t try to use it. It would be more fun if I knew some people on the repeater in Portland or Salem or somewhere to surprise with the big DX, but I knew nothing about such systems in Oregon, in fact, this was the first time I’d ever been in the state, except in airports.

1321 The boat 799.1

Taking for 1600 – no Wizard Drop offs

Will come back tomorrow

1329

We hiked back down to the car, stopping at the snow again near the bottom and continued clockwise around the lake, now going north on the west side. Soon we came to a split in the road where a turn left would mean exiting the park to the north and a turn right meant continuing around the rim. We continued around the rim and soon came to the parking lot for the boat tours. They sold tickets out of a booth in the lot. We parked and went up to the booth.

Boat trips started at 10 a.m. and ran through 5 p.m., sometimes hourly. Looking at the lists, it looks like they had been bi-hourly today. At this point they were selling tickets for the 4 p.m. boat and Wizard drop-offs were not available.

“What?” I asked.

“If you don’t know what that is, never mind.”

I figured out that this referred to the higher priced ticket that left you on Wizard Island for hiking to be picked up by a later boat. Since we were thinking of doing the boat tour anyway, I was also thinking of doing the hike. Of course we should, actually. Well, it was over two hours until 4 p.m. I said we’d come back tomorrow. They said that people were usually there for 10 a.m. tickets when the opened the booth at 8 or 8:30 in the morning.

We were planning to leave Crater Lake and head up to Mt. St. Helens the next day, so I suggested that we get up early tomorrow (bending our rule of not rushing for anything), break camp and drive straight here. Buy tickets for the earliest possible boat and probably try to get the Wizard Island hike in too. Then when that was over, we’d come back to the fork in the road and continue north. John was agreeable to this. I thought it might mean getting up about seven.

1348 807.0 Phantom Ship Overlook

1359

There are two islands on the lake, Wizard, which was substantial, perhaps a square mile or more and rising 700 feet out of the water, and Phantom Ship which was comparatively tiny, maybe three or four acres, but mostly vertical, one or two hundred feet high. The first looked to the man who named them like a Wizard’s hat, being a volcanic cone. The other looked like an old sailing ship.

We stopped in a vista circle to view this island, a little dot on around the lake, while other tourists, on motorcycles, RVs, and even bicycles came and went. There was also a display here about why the trees were grown so crooked and many were dead, because the wind was blowing hard most of the time.

Next we came to a trailhead for climbing Mt. Scott where there was another fire lookout. The park newspaper said this was five miles and to allow three hours. We passed on this one.

1410 Phantom Overlook 811.7

Our neighbors are bicycling around the lake.

Further around the caldera, now on the east side, was another view of the Phantom Ship, this one much closer.

Yesterday, when we were already established in our campsite, a white RV pulled by a large white pickup truck carefully pulled into the pull-through site opposite from us. Two ladies got out and spread the gear out even further. This was about three times the operation that we were conducting.

While we were at this stop, these two ladies rode up on bicycles. They were circling the rim on their road bikes, same direction as us. We recognized them, they recognized us, but didn’t say much. Road bikers are often in a hurry to keep their average up.

Riding bikes around the rim. That was certainly possible, we could have done it. Well, not without repairing John’s flat again. It had gone flat in the van.

As we drove on around the rim I thought about this. That could have been today’s goal, to do the 30-35 mile ride around the rim. Lots of tough climbs, hair raising descents and tourist traffic. I didn’t feel up to it, physically or mentally. A couple of hardened road cyclists, accustomed to all these things, could contemplate it readily. This might have been the goal, but wasn’t.

1428 Pinnacle Overlook 817.8

Guys from Arkansas with Truck Tent

Bob Larkin had specifically recommended The Pinnacles. Down slope from the crater itself, this area was reached by a side road of about five miles that ran southeast from the rim.

Turning down the road, we soon passed that backcountry campground, one of those places where you bring your own water

I had envisioned some grand overlook of great precipices, but that was not what this was. The Pinnacles were hardened lava shafts that had come up through the strata during the eruption then, over the following thousands of years, had stood while everything around them was eroded away by an adjacent creek. From the picnic area turnaround in the road where we stopped, the creek was only a few tens of yards away, the bottom hundreds of feet below but it was full of pinnacles, the tops of some of them reaching within a few feet of our level. The precipice was protected by a short wooden fence giving John more opportunities to go over and get too close to the edge for viewing or pictures.

Also sharing the road with us today was a new pickup truck with a tent in the back. They were parked here too and, on close inspection, the tent was intended to be used in a truck bed and left in place. That must mean it was capable of withstanding 100 mile per hour winds. The plates were Arkansas and the occupants of the truck were two men who looked like they could have been fishing buddies.

Badger in road

It was always a comfort to get back in the van and have our both our lives in my shaking hands as we went up the narrow roads, cliffs on both sides, one way straight up and the other straight down.

We were proceeding along the main rim road when a large animal ran across in front of us. It loped along strangely, not like a coyote and too fat, more like a beaver but too large. We judged it to be a badger.

1457 Videa Falls 829.2

Somewhere behind Kerr Notch or Dutton Cliffs, the road passes cataracts on the crater side. Our fishing buddies from Arkansas were already there; one of them was swimming in the ice water just so he could say he’d done it.

We walked around the base of the falls. I went back for the camera and John went for a climb. He climbed nearly to the cliff edge where they started. I got stills and movies of all this. He had some trouble slipping but was being careful and knew how to take care of himself. I climbed half way up to meet him on the way down.

Drove over the patch – smelled it, John said three times – then I realized it.

Finishing up the loop we were driving through a forest. When we came back to park headquarters, I realized that I’d smelled new asphalt a few miles back. John said he had mentioned that this is where the patch was. Three times he said. Somehow I hadn’t heard this.

1529 campsite 836.7

Finally gave up trying to put the hatchet anywhere except in the tree log.

John liked leaving the hatchet sticking out of a tree trunk or stump. Finally I gave up trying to put it away in a safe place and just let him keep it where he wanted.

Put pix on computer in campsite but power is off in RR so could not charge camera.

Booted up the PowerBook G4 and moved the pictures from the camera to it. Reflected that all the worry about powering this computer out of an accessory plug was misplaced. The things that takes so much time are internet related. We didn’t even have cell network out here, much less internet.

16-17 hot dogs again – church membership – baptism

brave chipmunks

birds irritate John

tuning and matches irritate me

For another late lunch we had the rest of the hot dogs while discussing the anomaly of modern church membership. There was a time when membership in an organization was a sought after privilege. These days, as in our own church, membership was nearly optional. There were some people who would never be members, each for their own individual reasons. I shared with John some of the reasons that I knew for particular people. Every January when we elected officers to the church, we inducted new members first so that some of them would meet the membership requirement for the holding of office. Membership in itself, then, wasn’t inducing or preventing action, it was mostly a formality now.

Then there was baptism. Some Protestant denominations require immersion baptism for membership but are accepting of other groups that don’t agree. Others go further and claim that salvation is otherwise impossible. One of the former, one that acknowledged that it was not necessary but still required it for local membership, had once been on our short list of churches to join. On this understanding I had considered being “re-baptized” to meet their rules, but this would have been a break with my own tradition. By joining elsewhere, the problem was solved by avoidance.

Viann had been immersed as a teenager, a condition for becoming a Southern Baptist. My sister and I had been baptized as infants as had our three children, by their grandfather. At confirmation age, Viannah had seriously talked about being immersed along with her peers. I hadn’t known what to do with this and had talked to her about her grandfather and the belief system she had been baptized into. For a time I thought her rejection of church was due in part to this, and perhaps it was, but by now, this issue didn’t seem like it had been pivotal, just contributing.

Our meal was periodically interrupted by a brave chipmunk who had little fear of nearby humans. If we left our food out unattended, he would certainly be into it. All of our food was locked into campground-provided food lockers while we weren’t using it.

Throughout the evening, night, and early morning, loud birds would serenade us, but this irritated John and he would sometimes even go after them, at least shouting if not by throwing small rocks or sticks.

In addition to tuning the radio, another thing that bugged me was John’s approach to the fire. Trying to light it, he could easily use up thirty or more matches, studying each one carefully before making ineffective use of it. Even after the fire was roaring he’d strike new matches and throw them in, or spray the Off (insect repellant) in it to get a flame burst. We had no bugs in the fire, but we did run out of Off, both cans, prematurely, and the camp store was out of stock.

1710 leave on Annie Creek Canyon hike

After our very late lunch we secured the food and went on the local Annie Creek Canyon hike. This was supposed to be something like an hour and a half loop across the back of the campground area, down into the canyon, up stream, and back to another part of the campground. We started to the southeast and followed the trail backwards, at least as indicated by the numbered site markers. They started with #16 and descended to the trailhead.

Short on Off, we spent as much energy on this hike swatting mosquitoes as hiking down and back up the trail. The descent into the canyon was marked by several warning signs that we might find the trail impassible below. Resolved to just return the way we came if this were the case we walked past and eventually around these as we went deeper. Finally at the bottom we found a footbridge washed out and a new one under construction. Nearby was an eight by eight plank serving as a temporary bridge. This was easier to walk across than a log.

The mosquitoes were now thick as fog.

The stream was surrounded by tall grasses and small fields of flowers. I tried some flower pictures.

Of course, by going the wrong direction we had come up behind the “do not continue beyond this point” sign.

After hiking upstream for about a mile and making several more crossings, pictures, and videos, the trail started switchbacks back up to the campground level. At John’s direction, we rested for a while at a bench at the last switchback before reaching the top. This overlooked a denuded patch of slope down to the stream, perhaps a recent landslide.

Coming out at the top we came to a place where we could buy a trail guide for 75 cents explaining all of the sixteen sites we had passed. Although we weren’t going back in, I bought one anyway, for the record.

We stopped back at the store to buy ice and learn that they were out of Off. Called home on the pay phone again.

West Side Story

Fiddler on Roof

Navigation

Town Drunk

Fire > 1.5 hours

Shower > 4 minutes

Could not charge camera

Back at the campfire that night we talked about John’s recent experience performing in West Side Story. It had been one of his favorite things in high school so far. I loved the music myself; it was genius in many ways. Rumor had it that next year they would be doing Fiddler on the Roof. John was not familiar with this. I gave him the synopsis and a few of the more prominent songs. Three poor Jewish girls get married under more and more difficult circumstances for their father. Sunrise, Sunset. If I Were A Rich Man.

We talked a little about my dad’s dad, the town drunk. Dad had never said this but I suspected that it had something to do with granddad’s sister in law moving in with them shortly after dad was born, and staying for the rest of their lives. One knows their grandparents as contended people, happy with their grandchildren. The immense struggles that preceded were never discussed.

A bundle of firewood was advertised as being worth about an hour and a half, but we’d gotten much more than that out of each of ours. Seventy five cents in the shower had been advertised as four minutes worth and I had planned accordingly when I went over for my shower, taking eight minutes worth of money and bathing – in order of priority, but I had finished well before the water shut off and had time to stand there and just get warm in the running warm water. Some camping experience is useful in managing to stay clean and sanitary in such a shower. John didn’t use it himself.

When I went to the restrooms to try to charge the camera earlier in the day I’d found an outlet that was dead. I thought it might be because the lights were off, so I went over after dark when the lights were on to check again. Still dead. I figured that the outlet had been there for people to use electric razors and the like but that it was deactivated now because they didn’t want people charging cameras and cellphones in the one outlet there.

Or maybe it was just broken and not yet repaired.

2006 Aug 3 0643 45F

seemed warmer – one more shirt?

I made the same bedding arrangements as the night before but with one extra short-sleeve undershirt. The temperature noted by the van was colder when I got up than it had been the day before, but I had been warmer all night. Was it the shirt, had the blankets stayed wrapped better, or was I just acclimating?

Broke camp, cold coffee, start

In order to save time, I mixed my instant coffee and Irish Creamer into cold water. This wasn’t very good, but was not much worse than the same thing in hot water.

As usual it took about an hour to break camp, pack everything away and load it up. I didn’t try to get into the 75 meter DSP-10 net today.

0819 836.7 drive 48

By the time we drove away it was 48, the same as yesterday at this time.

0826 837.2 recycle station 51F

The camp store also had a recycling place. We deposited our cans there, no charge.

0902 Boat Place 854.6 $59.00

Pack food 57F

Tickets for the boat tour including the drop off and pick up on Wizard Island were $29.50 each. When we got to the parking lot, a large family was also pulling up. I walked briskly to the ticket building trying not to look like it was a race, or make it into one. There had been a cancellation on the 10:00 a.m. boat; we got those two seats. There were about five more seats on that one for the large family to worry about.

I hadn’t finished my Lucky Charms breakfast. Put them in an empty peanut can and brought some water and Gatorade. The ticket people recommended that we start down the trail to the boat dock immediately, it being more than a mile and 700 feet down.

Notes on boat

The notebook didn’t go with us on the trip around the lake so I made notes on the guide brochure.

0912 – 0945 hike down

Umpqua

Klamath

Rogue

The hike down to the boat ramp took about half an hour; we were there in plenty of time. The three tour boats were Umpqua (getting ready to take the first load out), Klamath, and Rogue. Having worked for years on the Rogue (GPS) Receiver, I took pictures.

1003 underway

36/19

Chris Captain

Christina Park Ranger Volunteer

We got going just a few minutes late. There was a crew of two, the captain and a volunteer ranger who talked about what we were seeing. There were 36 passengers on this run of whom 19 intended to get off and hike Wizard Island. I was the last one onboard.

The first half hour is just scene after scene from the west side of the caldera. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet of slide, trees, and sometimes patches of snow at a forty five degree angle of repose. The scale of the beaches, outcroppings, and ridges was deceptive. The trees did in fact look tiny on the slopes. In one case a hole in the rocks some ways up was pointed out. It looked like something you might walk through, but the guide told us that it was large enough to put our boat through (possibly 30-40 feet long), standing on end.

Old Man jump on

Most tree logs float horizontally when they end up in the water, but ten percent float vertically, with an end sticking out. One such log called the “Old Man” had been floating around in Crater Lake since at least 1929 when it was first seen. The Old Man was in the narrow gap between Wizard Island and the main caldera today. We slowed to drive around it.

The story was told that in the early days the park ranger docent would jump out of the boat and stand on the Old Man to show that it could support the weight of a person without sinking. Christina, our interpreter, said that we would be seeing no such stunt today.

“Take our fish away”

We pulled around to the landing on the south side of the island. Those of us hiking had special tickets that would allow us to board a later boat. We received instructions from the ranger. There were two trails, one up to the top of the cone and the other around to the southwest side where people fished and swam. The brochure said to leave 45 minutes each way for either one, and that the one along the shore was poorly marked further out and didn’t terminate anyplace exactly. There was only time for one hike and we all chose to go to the top.

Before we got off there were other directions. Don’t leave anything; pack it all out. Don’t take anything, any plants, animals, rocks, dirt, whatever. Leave everything as you found it, except for the fish. You could fish all you wanted and keep as much as you could catch. “Please take all our fish away.”

Crater Lake does not have naturally occurring fish. What was there had been stocked by early park rangers in order to make the site more attractive to tourists. There was a heroic story about bringing the fish up by foot from a hatchery dozens of miles away. But, this was not today’s sensibility.

Today we want everything exactly as if man had never existed. Fish in the lake is a sacrilege. If they can be removed; all the better. This is today’s sensibility.

1050

We started up the hill, as always near the end of the group. There were some older hikers who we leapfrogged a time or two.

1135 Top

I was first down in and last off the top.

not full of water

Although nearly all of the other hikers reached the top before we did, none appeared to have gone into the crater itself. Most were hiking around the mini-rim, maybe a thousand foot circumference. Well, there were trails down in there. I started down. Someone else followed. John and I took turns with the camera and going to the photogenic spots.

There was a patch of snow in the bottom of the crater. Someone had made a peace sign pattern out of rocks that melted the pattern out of the snow.

Here was a question. Why wasn’t this smaller crater full of water? The larger one was and they had about the same aspect ratio. The official answer was seepage. In fact the larger lake was held at a near constant level by processes that were not well understood but it was thought that seepage on the north side, either into ground water or rivers, kept the level within a foot or so of nominal. On Wizard Island, the seepage kept the crater empty.

1205 down

John was worried about missing the boat. Miss the boat and it could cost you $100 extra to be picked up special. Our pickup was supposed to be at 12:30 and it had taken us 45 minutes to get up here. We had seen the 11:00 boat down below, circling around the Old Man.

Bet: by 12:40 and would be OK. Won both.

I made a bet with John that we would be on the boat dock by 12:40 and that we would not miss our pick up. He thought maybe so but started down nervously anyway. I was the last one off the summit, somewhat behind him.

1210 16 total going up

Soon I met a young woman climbing. We passed. I wondered if it was one of the scientists who wanted to be up there alone. Then I met some more. It occurred to me that these were probably the hikers coming up from the 11:00 boat, of course. I met 16 people going up as I was coming down.

The scientists would doubtless go up early in the morning or later in the evening when the tourists weren’t around.

While packing last Sunday John and Viann had agreed that I would not be a good person to surprise with a trip as a gift. Hiking down with John in view, it occurred to me what this was all about. One of those trips where you get in the car to go out and eat or something and end up in Tahiti. “Just pack a bag….” I’d had a colleague do this for his wife. She didn’t know where they were going until they had gotten off the plane, in Tahiti.

“Oh, I get it,” I said, explaining all this to John, and agreeing with the assessment.

“How long did that take you dad,” he made the motion of clicking a stopwatch. We thought something like 93 hours. John had several timers running like this. Some took me a few dozen minutes. Some had been running since before he was born. Long before.

We want to go again!

I told John that after we hiked back up to the van we should run over to the ticket booth, like a roller coaster line, and say, breathlessly, that we wanted to go again. He wasn’t impressed. We tried this later at the ticket booth. They weren’t impressed either. “… ok…,” they said.

1254 Rogue

20 got off, we got on. Net 1.

Elize Gonzales, talker

Captain Jack

I was at the dock before 12:40 and though I was the last one there, the boat wasn’t in yet. Both bets won.

One of the hikers had been swimming right there off the dock. I inspected the situation and realized that it would have been easy for us to have just worn swimsuits instead of pants and done the same thing. I’ll remember that next time. I even considered jumping in dressed as I was, but the hassle was more than I wanted to deal with.

John lay on the dock on his stomach and splashed the water. Cold, but surprisingly warm.

I ate some of the rest of my few Lucky Charms, the only actual food I’d brought. John wanted some too.

The Rogue arrived at 12:54 and let off 20 hikers. That was a net plus one. They all started up the hill. The crew on this boat was Jack, captain, and Elize Gonzales, ranger. She was very talkative.

Froze over in 1949, Walked on lake, stuck on Wizard

One story the ranger told, in answer to the question, “does the lake ever freeze over?” to which the answer, generally, is “no,” was of the freeze in 1949. Two rangers had decided to see if they could walk on the ice out to Wizard Island. This had worked, but when they looked behind them, their snowshoe prints were filling with water. They made it to the island and were stuck there until they could be rescued a few days later.

Highlights from the rest of the trip included more landslides, some waterfalls, more beaches, high points and low points, and more snow. When we got around to Phantom Ship Island, we cruised around it too. The outcrop reminded me of the billion year old sediment at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but much larger and newer. The story was that this vertical escarpment was the top of a cliff over a thousand feet high, mostly under water. This was one of the deepest places in the lake.

At Crater Lake they are proud of their clear water. Sometimes and some places they can see a reflective marker up to 140 feet deep. There were few places where you could actually see the bottom, however. Being so clear, it looks blue in bulk, like the planet.

The ranger got into a discussion with some of the other passengers about a scientist, eminent in this area, that they knew personally and was familiar to her. This led to more detailed descriptions of the landmarks and formations that we were seeing for this more savvy audience.

1410 shore

The boat pulled in at ten past two and we started immediately up the hill, a grueling mile long climb at ten to fifteen percent most of the way.

1448 van

Back at the van, we were finished at Crater Lake.