I’m going to try to get down for this. It looks like it’ll be interesting!

I’ve got a new camera, so there will be photos!

Smart geometry is an amazing experience, being locked up with 100 really smart people for 4 days can result in some incredible outcomes.

It is all in full swing, but here are some amazing pictures from SG this year!

the picassa albums

I’m sat in Oxford, in my house, Winnie-the-Pooh-ing about and putting things in the dishwasher.

This doesn’t seem like very responsible behaviour for a tutor, especially for one of such an exciting cluster as the “Rapid R&D to Rapid Assembly – snap fit, push on….” group. Surely I should be solving wicked problems and grinding out slick moves to make snap fit shuttering carpentry late into the night.

No. If you don’t have a passport – but you do want to travel – then, in a slightly twisted version the words of the great John Nash, “Fuck you buddy“.

This is a complicated problem, and one that rests on an interface problem. The nice people in the passport office struggle with the fax machine.

I think this is going to take a bit of explaining, “no fax machine got to mess up my passport application” you say, and I’m sure it didn’t. So I’ll start form the beginning. last year, when I lived a happier, but more environmentally profligate, life on the other side of the world, I flew a lot. Being an alien, I carried my passport more or less everywhere I went as this was the only way for me to get onto flights if I was flying with certain airlines. One particularly tired night at Canberra airport I must have dropped the passport as I was sitting in departures. This is a sad thing, that passport was looking pretty exciting, it had visas from all sorts of places in it.

So now I didn’t have a passport, and I needed to get back to the UK to do my best manly duties so I ended up getting a temporary passport from the British consulate in Melbourne. This was enough of a drama to warrant its own story, but I’ll leave that for now.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon my six months of temporary [passport] bliss was over, leaving me with a scruffy, thin notebook. That was OK though as I wasn’t going anywhere. Until I got a last minute draft for SG, and it was all go.

Still all OK though, I got the application in with plenty of time to spare, and I was booked on the high luxury of EasyJet U26025 from Brizzol, so what could go wrong.

well, it turns out that it doesn’t take much to bring the process of the mighty Identity and Passport Service to a grinding halt. To issue a passport, an agent needs to confirm that the passport was indeed issued,not forged, so they confirm that with whoever issued the passport. This seems sensible, they’d jump onto a database and check that the person in question exists, 20 seconds with a barcode scan, and away we go.

Hmm, no, this is done by sending a fax to the issuing agency. I don’t know much about faxes, they’d pretty much had their day before I was old enough to buy fags, (and when I was that age, that age was younger than it is now!). What I do know is that they are unpredictable, and there isn’t much you can do to check if they other end is seeing what you put in, or just a food fight in a coal mine.

So the Austrlian end was sent my paperwork on the 23^rd of February, and when I first called it had been in their hands for about 20 days. The quoted 3 week target for passport turnaround was already starting to crumble.

The problem with time zones is that everyone goes to work at different times, in the case of Australia and the UK, completely different times. this means that there is just one chance to throw a message over the wall. you send your fax, and then you wait…    ..until the next day.

When the next day comes if nothing has happened, then you just do the same thing again.

I’ve spent the last week calling both ends at both ends of the day, hoping that they’d managed to send that fax, but to no avail.

The breakthrough came t 5:30 am today, the fax was found (in the in-tray, filed in the bin, who knows where) and then the rest of the day was battle stations getting the trip organised.

I fly tomorrow afternoon, so fingers crossed that the extra effort of finding the Saturday delivery sticker is worth it.

While zooming out on the San Francisco map, I spotted Yosemite National Park 200 miles to the east, and knew in seconds what I’d be doing for those free days!

After a less than inspiring flight, and Lloyds thoughtfully putting a stop on my card in SF because I might be getting scammed, I eventually got on the train to Merced, where if I’d had less drama buying food I’d have caught the bus to Yosemite, but as it was, I ended up sleeping at the train station in a luggage cart!

Yosemite doesn’t mess about, there are incredible falls in the valley floor, and about a kilometer into the trail you come across Vernal Falls

the water falls so far that by the time it gets to the bottom it’s just a very fast mist that hits a rock and flys out horizontally!

Almost immediately after that is Nevada fall, by the top of this I was 1500 feet off the valley floor. (Americans still use imperial measures, cue imperial march music.)

I thought that Josie would like this, when an item falls on the snow, it’s a bit warmer than the snow, and it absorbs more solar radiation that the surrounding snow, so it burrows down into it and makes a little pocket the same shape as the object.

This was the moment that I realised that I was a bit under prepared for all of this, without show shoes, it mean that almost every step meant a deep plunge into snow, and then a big step out again.

once I was tucked up in my two sleeping bags and a bivi I was toasty warm and should have slept fine except that nobody at macpac told me that if all the zips were done up for warmth, then there was no air movement whatsoever, so I woke up hyper ventilating because I’d used up all the air inside. Oh, and that I was terrified that a bear would come! every tiny noise could well have been a bear’s footsteps, or a mountain lion sniffing about for a snack. I wonder how long you need to sleep out there before your mind stops playing tricks on you?

My ultra light stove was made from a red bull can and a piece of foil, and it worked pretty well, it only had one drawback though.

It seems that to make a stove from a can of red bull, you need an empty can to start with, and the good, healthy people that you find in Yosemite aren’t much into energy drinks. I bought a can of red bull, but just could not give it away. So at the beginning of day 2 I ended up drinking the repulsive stuff myself.

tasty honey-y porridge out in the wilderness is great!

you can only see this faintly, but the path ahead is actually bear tracks. There were quite a lot of bear, mountain lion and coyote tracks, and no human tracks other than my own!

this looks flattish, but it’s actually at about 40° and picking a route that has snow dense enough to actually walk on is about 90% luck.

I’m pretty sure that this would have been no deterrent to bears, but it was fun winding the cord around the bark on the tree. My food bag fitted nicely into the dry bag that I had my sleeping bags in during the day, so that would have had some effect in keeping the smells in.

The second night I spent quite a long time melting snow as the lake I’d been heading for had been frozen over. Never again will I say "just melt some snow to drink", it takes ages, and your water bottle ends up pretty full of tiny bits of tree!

I slept with my shoes inside the bivi, but outside the sleeping bags, which meant that there was quite a lot of shoe defrosting to be done the next day.

there were a lot of incredibly gnarled trees, natural bonsai almost

as the sun set on day three I could see the full complement of Yosemite mountains to the north of the ridge, and the lights of the bay area, 200 miles away to the south.

mmm, salami, fatty protein goodness!

by day 3 I was wearing the hood of my jacket with the rest of it over my pack, to keep the sun off my face. Mid day breaks are good times to melt snow are good because you can get out of the sun, and use its heat to do a bit of the melting.

This was the first serious look at mt Clarke.

I think that with proper gear, and a partner, it would be very doable, but as a solo, with no water and no gear (crampons, axe, rope) it was a bit on the risky side!

	I was so pleased to find a waterhole, but I had no idea how to actually get the water out, but after a bit of head scratching, I made a fishing kit out of the accessory cord and my platypus.
	descending is much faster, especially when glissading on my arse!

as if to highlight how cold the water I was about to cross really was, the Merced was fringed with frozen pools.

I ended up crawling over this log in a very inelegant way, and then discovering that I’d actually made it to an island, and that I had to crawl back. The people in the catalogues make water crossings look like so much fun, so I found a rocky bit, and whipped of my shoes.

when I woke up on the last morning, there was frost on the inside of my bivi bag.

So this is the route that I actually took in the end.

It’d be great to go back in August one year and try it without the snow, and with a partner. i think the ring of mountains would be an incredible trip, and if you really did take 8 days over it it could be epic!

** Carbon Footprint for the air portion of this itinerary is
2792 kg,
or 2.79 metric tons. **