Day 5

Still working on the whole healing thing. I've just been sitting around my house reading, eating, and sleeping 13 hours a day. I think I'll be out of the house soon, though. I'm getting bored.

Here's a cool picture of Hurricane Ivan from the ISS.

Update

Went to the dentist today and got my teeth fixed up. I feel much better now that I can eat. The swelling is way down, too. I'm supposed to stay out of the sun, and I can't swim, though. Here's the picture.

Oooooowwww

A bit of a setback for me today. Fell about 7 feet onto my face at the school by my house today. Tore the crap out of chin and cheekbone, but nothing's broken. I might have a big scar, though. The worst part is, I broke two of my teeth (commence groans), so I'm toughing it out right now, waiting to head to the dentist tommorow. More news soon, and maybe pictures.

Castle Hill, NZ

This is one of the places I'm going to visit in New Zealand, probably for a week or two. Some of the Lord of the Rings was shot here, and the battle scene in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was filmed here as well. In 2002, the Dalai Lama declared it a "Spiritual Center of the Universe." Pretty good recommendation.

A few PK shots

Me and my best mate Otis went out for a bit of Parkour and photography today. Light was short, and the camera is old, so these are the best shots that came out of it. This was only our first attempt at photographing PK, so it's a little rough. I'll have some better ones up soon.

Freedom School

My sister is deeply involved in organinzing and running the Tyree Scott Freedom School, a reincarnation of the Freedom Schools that sprung up all over the south during the Civil Rights Movement. It is a weeklong retreat focusing on Institutional Racism. Another friend of mine, Dustin Washington, who I coached a basketball team with last winter, is also one of the key leaders. There was an article about the conference in the Seattle P-I today featuring interviews with Megan (my sis) and Dustin. Check it out.

Our Triumph route

>>>>>>Our route on Triumph (NE Ridge, III 5.7) followed the red. I climbed it with Marshall Balick, Tom Unger, and Theodore Barnhart. We camped on the saddle at the mark point. The approach to there was a heinous six and half hour hike. The next morning, we got up and crossed the glacier to the climb. The route itself was great; easy ridge climbing with lots of simul-climbing and a knife-edge ridge that dropped off six or eight hundred feet down to the glaciers on either side. We summited at about 2pm, and were back at our camp on the col at six or seven. What a classic route!

Really cool picture I took

I took this photo while waiting in line for the Ferry on the way out to David Martin's cabin. I picked this rose next to the public bathroom and got this nice shot. You really have to view it big to fully appreciate it. Try clicking on it once, then when that image loads, click on it again (in most browsers).

Old things I wrote

Here's some old thing I wrote.Its about the month that I spent in Yosemite over the summer of 2004. I go through stints where I write furiously for a while, then totally drop off. Anyway, here is one of my products.

Its dark as we pull into Camp 4. Our Toyota pickup, spared the scathing glances of opulent tourists by the grace of the night, breathes a sigh of relief as we turn off its abused engine. Nine-hundred thirty miles from Seattle, from my bed, from free food. It felt wonderful. As we started moving our food into one of the bear boxes, I looked around the camp. It was cluttered with tents of every size and shape, and people to match them. Dozens of people sat around fires, laughing over jokes in languages I didn’t recognize and strumming guitars. The sickly-sweet smell of menthol cigarettes floated in the air, as did the smell of dirt, sweat, and marijuana. Shouts erupted from the night occasionally, as a particularly funny joke was told. We found an unused bearbox in a campground near the bathroom and stocked our larder. Beans, rice, cereal, a bit of soymilk, and a bounty of homegrown vegetables, fruit of the Californian sun. We had no money to pay for a campsite (five dollars a night seems absurd to any climber from the US under the age of forty), so we stuffed our sleeping bags into our packs and set off across the road into the meadow. We walked for a few minutes through moonlit fields of knee-high grass, and found a small stand of trees that seemed as it would suit our purposes perfectly. Finding shelter between a few fallen logs (the devious rangers have been known to root out climbers with night vision scopes), we laid out our pads and looked up through the trees at the stars shining through the trees.

Chappelle Graph

This is about people who quote Dave Chappelle all the time, thinking they are funny.

Cape Alava and Mt. Triumph

These are a couple photos from my last two trips; the first a climb of Mt. Triumph in the Cascades, and the second to Cape Alava, on the Washington Coast, for 8 days.
The first here is my friend Theodore, exhaused as we make our way down the climb. The other one is Marshall on the ridge, and the third is Triumph. The climb goes up the right hand skyline.

The bottom picture is me with my cousin Zola.