Bascomb's Regrets

Highlights

Anna, Brad, Carol and Paul’s 2-hour journey across 10 miles of San Francisco by car.

Dean’s magic bottomless air mattress

Dave C’s magic ice-less margaritas

Geoff’s magic long-lasting flashlight batteries

Brad’s face-to-face with the permanent residents of the Cove

Philosopher Bob

Visit from James and Shari

Anna and Carol’s communion with frigid bioluminescence

Mark’s first weight-bearing test of the rope swing

Deirdre’s record fastest-ever Bay swim

Eli, Taj and Kira’s contest to see whose marshmallow could stay on fire longest

Complete photo set here.

This trip I tried to go light on the food prep side, and heavier on the food itself. I found a little alcohol stove (about two ounces), and made a windscreen for it out of aluminum cans I found at the trailhead. For the food, I carried more fresh stuff than I typically would: it was an excellent trade-off.
Starting with the best, here are the fresh foods I would pack again and again:

garlic
pecorino
ginger
bell pepper
carrot
apple
onion
lime

I always bring along naan for cleaning pots with (it’s much more fun to eat than to scrub). And of course, there’s lots of dry stuff that makes sense. My favorite dry items:

dried refried beans (Rainbow Grocery)
couscous (which I didn’t take this time: tried bulgur wheat instead but bulgur is too finicky for an alcohol stove)
roasted, salted pumpkin seeds (roasted sunflower seeds work well too)
raisins (or, even better, currants)
rolled oats (which can be added to anything–not just breakfast)

For general cooking I always bring vegetable oil, salt, pepper. (Olive oil is too ’specific’ a flavor–but oil-cured olives are good to bring to add to the vegetable oil.) This time I added honey, which was nice for breakfast and I even added it to the salty stuff to put a little dimension into the one-pan dishes (as if Mountain House dinners didn’t have tons of corn syrup in them). And of course you have multi-purpose taste-it/drain-it whiskey. Next time I’ll bring vinegar too, and a poblano pepper in place of one of the sweet bell peppers, and maybe peanut butter. Clif bars is cheating.

Three stuffsacks I’ve used on nearly every camping trip I’ve ever done. The big burgundy sack was my mom’s sleeping bag stuffsack: I swiped it for Alaska, and it has been my food bag ever since. Many a squirrel has clung to the bottom of this bag, trying to nibble a seam while suspended upside down 15 feet above the ground. The olive bag was a gift from my sister’s first(?) boyfriend Tracey, who came into a big stash of outdoor gear and shared liberally. It contains ‘important things’, like duct tape, a knife, lighter, sewing kit, etc. Then the bag in the middle: Mom gave this to me as part of the Alaska package (tent, backpack, stove, etc)–it has my last name on it, but I recall she labeled it when we had the same last name. The stuffsack is my shaving/medicine kit–and I guess I use it all the time (not just for camping). It is riddled with holes from sharp objects inside, but for that reason it’s well-ventilated and the contents dry rapidly. I love this bag.

These three things came with me through time and brought a message to me on banks of the Rubicon River recently. They said what they’ve been saying all along: “Come home safe.”

(I can never remember: did I tutor Discreet Math in college? Is it for not being discrete that I always get into trouble?)

I’m not a map-and-compass guy. Here’s me, hiking: I get to a place where you have to take the trail to the right or the trail to the left. I open up the map. I rotate the map until it lines up with the trail on the ground under the map. I put the map on the ground. I walk around the map and bend down to look and see which trail goes to what I have circled on my map as my destination. And that’s the trail I take. Painful. And what do I use a compass for? I use it to make sure I don’t walk in circles when I stop paying attention and walk off the trail.

For me, hiking would be easier if standard topo maps didn’t exist. What I need is a list of edges and vertices. The vertices are the points of interest: ‘Bitchin lake for swimmin’, ‘High peak with no skeeters’, ‘Water fer drinkin’, ‘Where you left the car’ (, ‘The other parking lot where you did not leave the car’)–stuff like that. The edges connect the vertices: ‘Steep hike in the sun: 1.7 mi ‘, ‘Rocky trail but nice views: 3 mi’–that sort of thing. Let’s call this a ‘discrete’ hiking map, because it just lists the vertices and shows the edges that connect them. Vertices are represented by pictures. And the trail markers (those posts in the ground on the actual trail) should just indicate which way to the next vertex (which is depicted on your map).

Why doesn’t the Park Service provide us with ‘discrete’ trail maps?

Desolation Wilderness pics

It happened more frequently to me as a kid, but still sometimes now: I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, wondering what woke me up. Then some part of my auditory memory comes online and plays back the sound that woke me up, and I process the sound consciously: something large fell on the floor in the kitchen. I get up to see and Dipsea has knocked something off the counter onto the floor. Again, this is pretty common for me. But something different happened to me this last backpacking trip, a bit of a twist: I went to sleep on the bank of the Rubicon River in Desolation Wilderness (near Lake Tahoe, CA), near the rapids, so it was loud. I went to sleep quickly but awoke with a start in the middle of the night:  the sound of the rapids had disappared. And for maybe 3 seconds or so after waking up, I still couldn’t hear them. Then I *listened* for them, to see if maybe they were just quieter, and I could hear them again. What happened? Had one part of my brain filtered out the sound (in order to listen for other, more irregular sounds)–and then another part of my brain noticed that the sound of the river was missing?

While hiking I noticed that, if I hum or sing or tap a rhythm, I can pretty much shut out the entire landscape as I pass through it (which is something you want to do for some stretches of Desolation Wilderness). When I walk long distances I don’t fight the earworms: they come and–if they’re walkable–they stay. The bass line / bass solo for ‘Le Freak’ (c’est chic) is a great example of an earworm I can hike on for hours. ‘76 Trombones’ works for me, too–as a solo hiker. ‘Road Runner’ cartoon theme song not good. But this trip: wow, I never thought I would get ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ stuck in my head. I was first exposed to Queen Night at the Opera as a nine-year-old: I liked the song ‘Killer Queen’ so well that I memorized it. But ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’–that was too complex and strange and, well, really, too dark a subject for a nine-year-old. So as a kid I would skip the track, and as a result only heard the song occasionally. As an adult, I remember snippets of it (and of course Wayne’s World) but had never tried to assemble the whole production from memory. For some reason, on this hike, I missed Camper Flat, China Flat, and was all the way over Mosquito Pass before I realized what happened: 6 miles and two hours later, I could sing the whole thing all the way through (complete with guitar solos). The biggest challenge for me was: what comes after ‘Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening’: was it ‘Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Figaro’? Or was it ‘Mamma mia, Mamma mia, Mamma mia, let me go’?

How do you explain Freddie Mercury’s writing this song? Some say he was working on four songs simultaneously and got writer’s block when he started trying to write the choruses: so he just rounded up all the disparate verses into a single song. Others say that he was drunk and accepted a bet from a friend: that no song with the structure A-B-C-D-A could ever make it to the top of the UK pop chart.

And yes, I checked: Bohemian Rhapsody only costs $.99 on iTunes (although it should really be $3.97).

Pics from the hike.

In Hungary, I had limited vocabulary. Two words I learned to identify early are the words for ‘no’ and ‘nada’. I became pretty sensitive to the fact that people responding to my questions or requests often used these words in their responses. And I secretly–cynically–suspected that listeners were narrowly interpreting my questions so that they wouldn’t have to help me. I can imagine one typical conversation (translated from the Hungarian):

Me (holding up my water bottle): I would like a wagon very much.

He: No, I’m sorry–I don’t have a wagon. A wagon?

Me (gesturing again with the water bottle): Wagon. Please?

He: I’m sorry; I don’t understand.

I found that, in cases where a listener didn’t understand my broken Hungarian, if I just stood there then eventually they would figure out what I needed and help me. It helped if it was clear that I didn’t have any other place to go.

Later Henning and I were again looking for water and we just tried using one of the non-functioning pumps (we knew that they didn’t work, since they were pretty uniformly disabled along the Kektura). When I did this, a guy jumped up from where he was waiting for the bus, walked over to me and gestured for me to come with him. He leaned through a neighbor’s gate, called for the woman who lived there, and got her to fill our water bottles for us from her kitchen tap.

Henning and I had bought a really accurate map of the area around Eger, and were using it to hike to a nearby town. We were walking a short stretch of road, and a car pulled up beside us. A woman on the passenger side rolled down the window, and the driver and passenger both looked at us hopefully as the passenger asked us a question, pointing forward and behind the car. I instinctively responded in the best Hungarian I could–”I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Do you speak English?” She said no, and thanked me anyhow, and they drove on. Only then did I think about the detailed map we were carrying and how, even though I couldn’t understand her question, the map was what she needed and what we should have offered.

I started to think about how we’re stimulated to helpful action. When confronted with an unknown individual asking for something, is it more difficult to assess what the need is and whether we might help? I think that’s true for me–

Pictures from Hungary and Germany.