A fine cup of coffee....

I don't do well without my morning cup of coffee, and usually it is a latte. It has been my custom for many years. But for the last year or so I have been going to the Old Soul bakery and coffee shop here in Sacramento. These guys are way above the usual Starbucks, they are even a level higher than Peet's, and making a latte is a work of art for them.

This was my latte this morning.

Don't you agree it is a work of art - its all in the pouring of the foam. It's a shame to even think about drinking it.

The Largest Living Things

After visiting the oldest living things last weekend, the Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains, this weekend it was time to visit the largest living things, the Giant Redwoods (Sequoia Giganteum) in the Calveras Big Trees State Park.

This park is just a couple of hours away from Sacramento and is one of the most northerly groves of these monster trees here in the Sierra Nevadas. They are truly amazing things - bigger and taller than anything else in the forest with huge branches way up top that are larger than the trunks of most other trees. Alas no pictures that I can take can do justice to these fine specimens.

Next week I will have to visit the tallest living things the Coastal Redwoods (Sequoia Sempervirens). We have them all here in little old California.

Here are some more photos.

Attending Synagogue....

Friday evening I went to a Jewish Synagogue for the first time. It was to celebrate my friend Greg's conversion to Judaism, the religion of his wife Julia.

I remember when he announced his intention to "convert" to Judaism a couple of years ago how surprised I was that it was so much work. You don't just show up at synagogue and you are in, you have to work for it. It is a long period of study, essay writing, interviews, and of course the dreaded cicumcision. There's even a ritual drawing of blood for the already circumcised - so even they don't get away that easy. All in all, a very significant effort, enough to put anyone off.

Anyway, Friday night, was the culmination of Greg's labours and his acceptance into the Jewish community and it was my first time attending a Jewish ceremony. Thankfully there were a few other gentiles there so I didn't feel too much of an outsider. And really they were all quite welcoming even though I had no idea what was going on. The ceremony was, I believe, a normal Friday night Shabat, and was quite informal really (it was a reform jewish community), lots of singing, lots of clapping of hands, standing up, sitting down, and then these cute little half bows - half curtsies at certain points of the ceremony. However the majority of the service was conducted in Hebrew, and so was meaningless to me.

It's easy for an atheist like me to get all cynical about this stuff, but I did like the really strong sense of community and family among the congregation and I did like and was pleasantly surprised by the informality of it all. So, all in all, it was very interesting to observe. I don't think I will be signing up for the conversion myself but I have respect for Greg and what he undertook.

The oldest living things....

The White Mountain area, where we hiked and camped this last weekend, is also the home of the oldest living organisms on the planet – the Bristlecone Pines. These gnarly old trees grow just below the tree line where they don’t have much competition from other species and where, over their 3,000, 4,000 year plus lives, they have developed some very interesting shapes.


The oldest one, known as Methuselah, is around 4,800 years old. It used to be identified as the oldest tree but now the Forest Service have removed all identification since people were apt to want to take home a bit of Methuselah as a trophy.

After our ordeal on White Mountain on Saturday, we hiked around the forest on Sunday. A nice gentle stroll to stretch out our tired legs. At the end of the hike, that Park Ranger showed us a National Geographic Magazine from the 1950's with a picture of the oldest tree, Methuselah. It might be the one shown here with my friend Dave preparing to carve his name in it.



More photos here.

The White Mountains

This past weekend I took a couple of days off and had a long weekend hiking and camping down in the White Mountains on the Eastern edge of California, near to the town of Bishop. I rode the motorbike - the first ride of any distance this year. It was good to blow the cobwebs off the bike and off me.

The Easter Sierras are my favorite part of California, particularly down by Bishop where the Sierras get really high and really impressive. This is where Mt. Whitney is, at 14505 ft, the highest point in the lower 48, and a group of peaks called the Palisades that look so beautifully rugged and dramatic.

We camped on the eastern side of the valley at around 8,000 ft. and we had beautiful views across the valley to the Sierras. It was also a full moon so it was just perfect. Admittedly the photo below of White Mountain itself is not very inspiring - it isn't a pretty mountain - but trust me the views in the other direction were awesome - I just don't have any good photos.

On the Saturday we climbed White Mountain - at 14252 feet - quite a high altitude slog for us lowlanders. I must admit, I was not feeling very comfortable at all when I got to the top, and although our summit photograph shows us all smiling, I think it doesn't quite reflect our actual condition. I had quite the headache from the altitude and the thought of the 7 or 8 miles back to the trailhead did not make me feel any better at all.


White Mountain is the third highest peak in California, and it is known as the easiest of the Fourteeners (peaks over 14,000 ft). I think when I heard it was the easiest fourteener, I somehow translated that to it being easy. Well it was nothing of the sort and we all were pretty exhausted at the end of the day. There was not much light conversation going on on the way down, just a lot of gritting of teeth and putting one foot in front of the other. Why do we do this?

Of course later that night at the campsite, with food and wine inside us, we were all a bit more positive about the whole affair. Strange how you forget the bad bits and only remember the good bits. While I am not ready to tackle something like that for a while, give me a couple of months and I will be ready to do it all over again.

More photos here.

Balloon Ride

I took a ride in a balloon this past weekend - a commercial trip down in the Sonoma Valley. It was quite a nice experience - nothing wild or scary, just a very calm and peaceful ascent, a float along with the wind for a few miles and an equally calm and peaceful descent.

I am not at my most comfortable when exposed to great heights and it was kind of weird being in a basket so far above the ground (I think we went up to around 1500ft). I do recall thinking I should have checked out the floor of the basket more carefully before take off, because that is all there is between you and a very nasty surprise. But I suppose that doesn't happen very often and the real risk is power lines or high winds and the like, not basket floor failures.


The only controls you have in a balloon are up (more heat) and down (allowing the balloon to cool, or in more extreme cases, opening a flap on the top of the balloon) and rotation (by opening flaps on the side of the balloon). Of course there is a lot of lag built into all these controls so it is a case of making small adjustments, and waiting to see the result before making the next adjustment. The pilot of the balloon (yes, that's what they call them) likened the process to 3-dimensional sailing. You are always looking for subtle changes in wind at different heights in order to guide you where you want to go.


All in all it was a lot of fun. It was great to help out in the rigging up of the balloon and the repackaging when we were done. It is actually quite a lot of work - almost an hour to rig up and an hour to rig down, and the flight was only about 1 1/2 hours. So that's a lot of work for a relatively short trip, and with a support vehicle following you along on the ground you need a lot of help to make it all work. Anyway, I highly recommend it, at least once anyway.

12 Hours at Cool

For want of a better thing to do on a Saturday night, I ran in something called the "12 Hours at Cool" this weekend. It is a 12 hour race in Cool California that starts at 7:00 pm Saturday and finishes at 7:00 am on Sunday with the idea being that you run as many laps as you can of the 9.5 mile Olmstead Loop Trail - in the dark.


I had been sort of interested in running the trails at night just to see what it is like. Normally you don't get to do that unless you are in some extreme 100 mile race and I know I am not that crazy so this seemed to be a good idea.

The race was pretty small - less than a 100 folks - so there was plenty of solitude - for my last 2 (of 3) laps I was entirely by myself so there was plenty of time to ponder the weirdness and the wonder of it all. It was a dark and moonless night and I found you really had to pay attention to where you are going. You couldn't relax and appreciate the stars or the silhouttes of the trees, you had to keep focused on that little patch of light from your headlamp or else you were in trouble. And then there was every little rustle in the undergrowth that was probably only a field mouse or something but you couldn't prevent your mind straying to mountain lions and whether they were out hunting that night. I nearly jumped out of my skin when a couple of dear bounded across the trail in front of me.

Anyway, I did manage 3 laps, albeit with a long nap in the back of my car between laps 2 and 3, so that was almost 29 miles. Not bad for someone who hasn't run more than 5 miles in the last couple of months.

Just to put it my measly performance in perspective - the winner did 8 laps - that's 76 miles - pretty amazing.