Mt. Baldy, California – February 28, 2010 – Fresh pow pow glide!

Remainder of the freshies, Baldy, 2/28/10

One of the hardest things about living in Southern California, for me at least, is dealing with the lack of quality skiing, snowboarding, or freeheeling (telemarking), and to a lesser extent, cross country skiing. Now, I know what people will say – 1) Southern Californians will complain about anything; and 2) that Big Bear is great skiing. To the second point, my response is simply this: “no”. Big Bear is not great skiing. I’ve skied Chile, New Zealand, the Alps, Utah, Oregon, and the better parts of California. Big Bear, quite simply, is not great skiing. Big Bear is skiing, I’ll give you that. If you want – or need to learn – any of the resorts up there – Bear Mountain, or Snow Summit, are probably great places to learn. The terrain is not that steep, and there’s a lot of novice runs. Also, if you want to hang out with your friends, or not drive the six to eight hours to the Sierras, it’s decent for a day.

However, if you are above intermediate skill level, and like to get out there, Big Bear is not the place for you. Unfortunately, there are few other options in the area – you can go full on backcountry on a number of ridges and mountains, assuming there is enough snow, and also assuming one likes a hike to get up for your run. I would know, since I try to backcountry ski San Jacinto at least once a year. Great open runs – but lots of work to do. The other solution: Baldy. Baldy is a semi-little known resort here in Southern California. I say, “semi-little” because while it was a locals only type resort for many years, the word is now out. It is hard to keep such a secret from all of LA and San Diego, though, to be honest. The resort bills itself as the “steepest terrain” in all of Southern California. This is one case where the billing is correct. The runs are steep, challenging, and best of all, provide great access to several great backcountry areas. Last year, my friend and I bombed down a narrow chute from near the summit ridge to almost the bottom – a truly great experience. This year, even though we got out after a recent storm (the best time to go, for sure), the coverage was not quite as good, so we stuck to some more traditional routes. If you do decide to check it out, note that it’s a true old school resort with no high speed quads and fancy trappings. But, no matter what, there’s always an adventure to be had there – whether it’s finding questionable bags, meeting interesting people for a pint, or getting in some quality runs. For information on how to find your way there, check out their site here: http://www.mtbaldy.com/,and be sure to enjoy the best part of Baldy: riding/skiing in t-shirts by the end of the day as the sun cooks you and the snow

Sunrise, January 1, 2010 – Garnet Peak, California

 Sunrise 2010, Garnet Peak

The moon was cold. The road shone with pale crystals. I winced inwardly and flung the door open, breaking the dark silence of the early morning. I placed one booted foot out, then the other and shut the door behind me. I waited. It didn’t seem that bad for the first day of January 2010, even though I was at five thousand feet. Then, I breathed. Pure, cold air poured into my lungs. I shivered, shook myself and grinned. It was cold. In the quiet, my boots clomped noisily across the empty road onto the hard, frozen trail. Within a matter of minutes, I had turned off my headlamp, as the moon was overpowering the sky. My pupils slowly relaxed as I quickened my pace to stay warm. Every bush, rock, and feature on the trail was lit in ghostly light, making it look spectral and ephemeral.

Briefly, I wondered if I was dreaming, and had merely fallen asleep at the New Year’s party I had just left. After pinching myself – just to be sure – my thoughts turned to when I had last slept. It had almost been a full twenty-four hours, a day prior, a year prior, and a decade prior. No wonder I was tired. Yet, as I rolled down the trail, I felt good, relaxed, and excited to see the first sunrise of the new decade. Then I saw them – twin shadows flitting ahead on the trail. By the time I had fully determined that they were also people, I was upon them. Quietly, they shifted over to the side of the trail, startled, as I blew by with a jaunty wave. At first, I thought it was rude that they hadn’t said anything, and then I considered that it was the early hours of the morning, and we were all hiking without lights in the middle of nowhere. I had probably just scared the crap out of them. I grinned, and tried not to laugh out loud. The sky turned from pale black to purple, to pink, as I powered my way to the rocky summit. Off in the east, the sky rumbled with colors, while in the West, the moon stayed stubbornly fixed in its full radiance. For a brief moment, I wondered if the sun would rise, and what would happen when the first rays of the new year caressed my face. Before I had time to come to a definitive conclusion, burning yellow and orange seared the sky, as the sun poked its body over the rim of the planet, leaving me to stare in wonder and amazement in the serendipity of the moment. 

Moonset, 2010, Garnet Peak

Interregnum – Where to go from here? The map is blank, Part II.

After I had told a number of stories, I began to realize that there were a couple problems. First, there was the time problem – I picked a spot in the past as a place to start, because it was logical, and a great introduction – but it also left me with a huge amount of material to cover, when sometimes all I wanted to do was talk about the present. As a result, I branched out and added another blog with fresher material. Then there was the content problem – when I began blogging, everyone’s posts were loooooong. Average posts at the time were easily 2000 words plus. Today, with the advent of Twitter, and other such devices, posts are 162 characters; and only the best can expect someone to read a post over a thousand words. I’m not going to bemoan the evolution of content – in some respects it’s easier to write a 500 word piece than a 2000 word piece. I also shouldn’t complain about something I can’t fight, just like gravity. (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-fieldnotes/2010/2/22/interregnum-the-problems-behind-the-great-content-absence-of.html). Also, I can't honestly say that things were horrible or worse when I posted less content.

The third problem was almost the blog killer. Writing this blog was taking away from my dream. You know, that dream to be a writer. Sure, blogging is writing, and writing can be used to blog, but when I say that I wanted – and want to be a writer, I mean that I want to write about the worlds in my head that exist in no known dimension. My dream is to tell those stories – and this blog was taking away from that, if not preventing it. It was preventing it because, surprisingly, there is not enough time in the day to do everything, what with having a real job, and doing real mundane things. This problem was the back-breaker, along with the fear, and the complacency, and while I pondered it, time wasted too fast.

Fortunately, seven hundred and seventy seven days is a lot of time to ponder a solution. It would have been easy to walk away from this, and just focus solely on writing about those imaginary worlds. That solution was unsatisfying to me. Sure, it was practical, but in my experience as a writer, nothing is ever that simple. There may be days where it is unerringly easy to write about mythical mountains and lost lands, but there may also be days where one simply wants to talk about how that last Thursday was completely ridiculous. Also, there’s that nagging desire to be known, and that pesky feeling of having something to contribute to the information overload of the world.

My solution was that I’m going to keep the blog for now as an outlet, but things are going to change. By now, you already know enough about me, so I’m going to move away from the backstory. (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-firering/). Having said that, there’s probably going to be a point where I want to finish telling some stories of back in the day, and I will – so, if you’re that interested, check in occasionally to see if there’s anything new. The main area, here, is going to be a lot different. It’s going to be non-linear, for starters – and it’s going to talk about things other than just adventuring around. Shocking, I know.

Never fever, however, there still will be plenty of talk about adventuring. It’s just going to be different talk, in that there will be more of a focus on photographs. While photographs aren’t memories, they’re great for capturing the unique – and for inspiring and aiding people to do many things, including get out and see these things in what time they have, and in what time the things have. Photographs are great timeslices. In conjunction with more visual images, there’s going to be less text – because less text equals less time, and frankly, because that’s what people want in a blog these days. I know there are probably at least one or two doubters out there, wondering if I can keep my posts under five hundred words, but frankly, I think I’m up for the challenge. This is not to say there won’t be longer stories, because eventually, I’d like to incorporate snippets of those far off places of the mind here, but overall, things will be short and sweet. My analogy at this point is that for the first five years, this blog has been in two dimensions – words, and more words – and has followed the line of time. In its new iteration, it’s moving to three dimensions – words, memories, and photos, and is going to navigate the stream of time between the present and the past as it chooses. So, strap yourself in, mythical reader, because the ride is going to be interesting, and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have and will.

-the LA

Interregnum – Where to go from here? The map is blank, Part I.

Everything is unique. Not everything is relevant. One of the interesting things about “relevant” is that it’s subjective. Another interesting thing about “relevant” is that it’s something that we, as people don’t always care about. But, in addition to being unique, we as people have an innate desire to be known. I could speculate endlessly here about why we want to be known in rambling philosophical ways, but the short answer is that I don’t know. We may want to be known, based on an absurd compunction to try and share the unknown; it could be a reaction to our mortality; or it could be a selfish desire to aid our genes; or maybe it’s where I started, that it’s something unquantifiable; like the number forty-two; or something extra simple, like a desire to be famous and have a different life from our mundane yet special existence; whichever it is, I still don’t know. What I do know is that now, thanks to the interwebs, more people have the opportunity to share what they do know with a larger audience. I also know that I have no idea what the state of the “blogosphere” is now, or how many people there are out there blogging – and frankly, after doing a small amount of research, I’m not sure anyone does – there’s a lot of people out there, each acting in their own distinct way (for purposes of simplicity, I’ve lumped all social media here – tweeting, blogging, and other things into this category, even though it’s not technically correct). (Also, Technorati.com provides information on the blogosphere each year, but after reviewing their 2009 recap, I could not find any “hard” data on how many people were out there blogging, despite all the graphs they provided: http://technorati.com/blogging/feature/state-of-the-blogosphere-2009/).

The irony of wanting to be known, and trying to be known is the information overload – by all of us trying to impress on each other that we are unique, we are all somewhat similar, if not the same. Yeah, I’ll be honest - that last sentence is a trite point, and it is a fair amount of the pot calling the kettle black, and yes, I am part of the blogosphere that I just was attacking. I don’t see it as an attack though. I see it as a positive thing. In a city; country; continent; world; galaxy and universe where everything is completely unique, it’s nice to have some continuity at times. Continuity isn’t all bad – it prevents us from going insane, because if we were to constantly focus on how things are always different and unique, make no mistake about it, we would go insane – and fast. These concepts are just too complex to constantly fixate on.

It’s easy for me to admit that when I started this blog, I wanted some continuity. I wanted to be known. Mainly, though, I wanted to write this blog to preserve my memories and my stories. If you’ve read any of these posts, you, the reader know that I’ve been lucky by cheating death in many ways. There isn’t a day that goes by where I take any of that luck, skill, and other things for granted. After feeling grateful for being alive, I feel fortunate that I still have the capacity to remember everything that happened. Life is fickle. When I began, I wanted to put down my life’s stories so that I would always have them, despite what would – or could happen to the imperfect storage device of my brain. After all, logic – and the laws of probability indicate that sooner or later, either that age will catch up and eat large holes in the files, or that my infinite luck will run out.  

A cynical person would say at this point would say, “Yeah, right. You, like everyone else wanted to be famous. (Insert sneer here).” Sure, being famous would be great. I’m not going to lie. At the end of the day, though, what I always wanted to do was tell stories; it’s just something you’re going to have to take on faith. That’s what I always wanted to do – hear and tell stories. Whether it’s with a drink in hand at a noisy club, where every third word is obscured, or around a fire where the silence catches every letter’s inflection, I like to tell and listen to stories. In that respect, it was always my intent that you – the reader, pictured this blog as a conversation, with me as that oddball quirky friend that you shook your head at for being utterly ridiculous. For a second, I’ll allow myself a self-congratulatory moment, and say that in many ways I’ve accomplished that. There are some posts I’d like back to re-write and edit more (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-firering/2005/8/13/episode-ii-the-ill-fated-beginning.html) and some posts that I’d probably like to redact period (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-firering/2006/3/3/episode-xxxviii-in-terms-of-trickiness-i-get-an-extra-d12-roll-for-guile.html), and some that I like (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-firering/2006/1/30/episode-xxxi-this-wondrous-invention-does-everything-it-slices-it-dices.html). The problem with self-congratulatory bullcrap, however, is that it hides the problems. 

Interregnum – the past is the past, the future the future, and the now now.

Everyone is unique. Think about that for a second. Even if you were sitting right next to me right now, seeing what I see when I stare out blankly at different intervals, you’d see something completely different. Perhaps you’re color blind which would render the view into something out of a black and white movie. Perhaps you perceive reds as a darker shade than I, or perhaps you’re younger than me, and hear a high pitched whine that I, with my crotchety old ears am not phased by. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/technology/12ring.html). Maybe there’s a smell that reminds you of a place in time that is merely a mundane scent to my nose. All of this says nothing about taste, or the imperfect nature of any human language’s attempt to describe any of these things. Sure, language does a great job at approximating certain things – a table, is a table, is a table, whether it’s poorly crafted or the ideal form. While there are no universal standards – after all, what toasty wheat tastes like to me may taste like something else to you, the truth is that we are singular separate beings recording a lifetime of distinct points of time in our lives. (For a graphical representation of this concept, with awesome talking dinosaurs, check this link out here: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1450 ).

If nothing else impresses you about life, think about this point for one moment and one moment alone: not only are we unique but everything we experience in life is unique. The planet is always orbiting around the sun while it spins on its axis. To top that off, the solar system is rotating within our Milky Way galaxy, which is spiraling around as it moves through the universe. Think about this: you have never occupied the same space twice. This is to say nothing of the day to day interaction of particles on a micro level here on Earth, or of the myriad factors that change our lives as time moves over us. Nothing we ever experience can ever be exactly the same. In this respect, calling ourselves “unique” seems like a colossal understatement. After all, if everything is always new, constantly changing, and varies from person to person, there should be a better word that captures such a state. But there isn’t. Or rather, there isn’t one in my opinion that can capture all of those things and more that I listed about. It is one of the absurdities of life that we can and do experience all of these irreplaceable things in the time we have but yet fail to pass along this knowledge to others.

Even though I am in an empty room, I can still hear the disgruntled rumblings of whatever readers I have left with my above logic. Let me admit two things here; first, that there is a transmission of experience and knowledge throughout the generations, otherwise I wouldn’t be here right now, writing this. In fact, this transmission of experience and knowledge has even been constantly improving from “fire hot” to sophisticated oral histories, to writing and drawing, to books, and to photography and computers, among a plethora of other things. Now there is a parallel problem to go along with information loss, that of information overload. Simply put, there are certain things that are unique to each person that others don’t need to know about. They involve unique parts of space and time, but provide no additional essential survival or philosophical or educational benefits to anyone. After all, if I tell you that I slept for eight hours last night in fuzzy pajamas and dreamed of worlds that only existed in my subconscious and disappeared from my memory upon waking, you would probably stop listening, or soon forget what I had said at a later time, because it would not be practical to you. Even though things are always unique, with respect to dealing with other people, they are not always relevant.

Interregnum – The problems behind the great content absence of the early twenty-first century.

Time wastes too fast. Life passes too quickly, and does not follow any rules. I could fill this blog with innumerable words about what happened to me in the last seven hundred odd days, and how the person I am today changed from the person I was yesterday. At times, I didn’t want to change in the slightest degree, and at other times, I wanted to change more than anything, to have my mind rewritten and reprogrammed so that I could forget all that I was. The main thing I learned during all of these phases was simple: change is like gravity. Even if you want to fly, and focus all of your mental energy on levitation and subsequent zooming around, and chant to yourself, “there is no gravity” day in and day out, nothing will happen. You could choose to walk off a tall cliff chanting this, and for a second, you would certainly feel like you were flying. What you would really be feeling is the relentless tug of gravity, pulling you down at 9.8 meters per second, no matter how loud you were chanting or screaming your mantra. Gravity is there whether you want it or not. (It is my recommendation that no one should try the above idea, unless they are from Krypton).

Gravity isn’t all bad though. It prevents us from being thrown bodily into space at any moment, which would be bad. So even when internal inconsequential events are going on, and it feels like we have been disconnected from the world, gravity holds us fast. Change is like gravity. It is neither good nor bad, it merely is. Therefore, what I have really learned is that in life, one has to roll with change, just like one rolls with gravity. Sure, we’d all like to fly, but the sacrifice of not flying is outweighed by not being cast off into the sun or other parts of the universe at some random moment. With the exception of eventually telling some stories that happened to me during this period at some point, there is really nothing for me to say about what happened during those seven hundred odd days. I was learning to deal with change like I deal with gravity. No big deal.

For those of you screaming obscenities and staring angrily at the screen thinking, “that was the biggest bunch of bullcrap I have ever read”, let me tell you two things that are important about the great content absence of these last weeks and months and years. In order for me to tell you that, first, I must tell you a small thing about myself. It has always been my dream to be a writer. When I was a sassy teenager, I would tell anyone who would listen about how I was going to be a great author. (In my defense, I never told people what I was going to write about; in my opinion, you never surrender your ideas for nothing). No, I’m not going to apologize for saying that. I think everyone needs that bit of teenage moxie to get them started.

Let me tell you why it is good to have that moxie at an early age. No matter how good you are at something; how good you think you are; how good you could hypothetically be; or how good you actually are on an absolute scale, at some point, fear creeps into your brain and rumbles through all of your plans and ideas, paralyzing you in innumerable ways. Frank Herbert said it best in Dune, “fear is the mind killer”. (http://www.dunenovels.com/ ). To that perfect definition, I would only add that fear is the time waster, the life taker. I know this because for many of those weeks, I was afraid. At this point you may rightly scoff – “You? Afraid?”, but it is true. At times, I have been afraid of my own dreams. At those moments, it was easier to do anything, take any type of risk, and accept any challenge except those that involved following my dreams. It was easier to focus on the million problems that existed in chasing those dreams, the billion hypotheticals that prevented me from moving forward. Since I was afraid of failing in one way or another, I simply stopped trying. In this way, I found the fastest way to hit the ground and fail – I simply didn’t try. It was deplorable.

For a while, I wouldn’t admit that I was afraid. I was out doing things that were incredibly risky, tiring and time consuming. I told myself that I would merely write the next day. It was simply to murmur to myself that I would do it the next day, and watch Monday turn into Thursday turn into another week turn into another three months. In this fashion, with quiet complacency, it was easy to partially kill myself and my dreams. That’s what I really want to apologize for – the loss of time. Not to you, the reader – but if you want, partially to you, but to me – because while it’s easy to live with no regrets in many ways, lost time, and lost friends are things you can never get back. There’s a story about how I stopped being complacent, and stopped being afraid – but I’m not going to tell it, because it’s an everyday story, one of small victories and constant battles. I’m happy to say that it’s a story of how I broke free of my own inertia, remembered my panache, remembered who I was and placed myself back on the path to my dreams with simple words. For me, those words were simple. Time wastes too fast. Life your dreams now. Life’s better with dreams; because the world needs dreams and imagination now – because it’s too full of fear and complacency. With that, I’ll be here on Friday, to tell you about how I see the mystic dreams of this site in the future.

Interregnum – Welcome Back. My name is the Last Adventurer, and I write this blog.

My handwritten copy of this post has a series of long, trite series of sentences about not writing. I don’t like it, so I’m not going to type it. That’s how it works. Those words are going to sit in the black hole of my journal, wondering if they, like other lost thoughts will make it past the event horizon of the pages and into real life. The thing is, there’s not really anything I can say about not posting for seven hundred and seventy seven days. There are no words. Alright, realistically, there are words. There are plenty of words that come to mind, apologetic words, words of resignation, and words of excuses. Speaking for myself, I don’t want to hear those words in my head, let alone read them on the screen, since real life is full of such small disappointments, and I don’t want to contribute to those in any way whatsoever. So yes, even though there are words, there are no words. There are no words because I’m not going to say them.

What I can say is that if I had any readers originally, and for a time, I definitely had at least one or two, I drove them off with easy aplomb by not posting. I know what people are thinking, and what the indexing bots are wondering: “Why didn’t you at least re-post articles you found interesting, or better yet, post two line posts next to the same articles that provide no additional insight or content?”. The answer to this question is simple. If I’m going to drive away my readers, I’m going to take the shortest point from a to b. I’m going to flat out do nothing, so that no one is under any illusions about what is going on: for those seven hundred and seventy seven days, absolutely nothing was going on. If, two weeks ago, I had chosen to stop, take my site down, and walk away, I could at least have told people that I had a little-known-but-semi-popular-blog for a period of time, which sounds quasi-respectable until I told them that the content was adventure stories based on my life. However, since I decided to return to my blog, I now have to tell people that I have a blog that used to have readers, but no longer does, even though occasionally my friends’ dogs take pity on me and at least log onto the website to make it look like I’m getting traffic. What can I say. I’m stubborn, and I like a challenge.

When I stopped posting seven hundred and seventy seven days ago, I was recounting the story of the first Pizza Port expedition in one section. I had just got to the place where we were halfway up the mountain, when I stopped. (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-fieldnotes/2008/1/2/the-first-and-last-pizza-port-mountaineering-expedition-day.html ). In the other section, I was midway through describing a blow-by-blow account of a long lost fight. (http://www.lastadventurer.com/last-adventurers-firering/episode-lxxxxiv-failures-to-communicate-usually-lead-to-fist.html ). Good news: in real life, I haven’t been leading that expedition, or fighting that fight all of this time. Spoiler alert: I, and everyone else made it up and off the mountain, and I won the fight. All of this begs the question of what I have been doing all of this time. It’s clear that I didn’t suffer some terrible fate and pass on, as one concerned e-mailer inquired a long long time back. Or did I? After all, wouldn’t it be a harsh fate to pass on, and then be returned to blog about events that had happened back in your actual life to an audience that may not exist? I think I have just hit upon a new, modern twenty-first century version of purgatory. Someone get me the Pope on the pope-phone. Rest assured potential readers: if I am the undead now, I am not nearly as sparkly in real life as vampires have oddly been made out to be.

 As to where I have been and what I have been doing, all will be revealed in due time. In fact, at times, it feels like I stepped out of one, comfortable dimension in which everything was moving like a well-maintained clock, to one where the world had no gears, and things moved in a chaotic mess, to one where things moved in surreal backwards steps to wherever I find myself now. Also, I’d ask that you note that the prior sentences are a figurative depiction of my life during the last seven hundred odd days or so, not a literal depiction. I do not actually think that I have traveled between different planes of the multiverse. At least I don’t think that for real yet. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when I do think that, so someone can send for the men in the white coats to find me a nice jacket and a comfy padded cell. The good news is that I’m back, and while I’m not necessarily going to pick up where I left off, there is going to be progress that’s not completely disorderly. Don’t worry – what’s going to come is good – I promise. And if it’s not good, since this is a free service, you get a refund of nothing. So strap yourselves in, and get ready to get a glimpse of things past and present, and if we’re lucky, the future.