I also had the chance on this trip to try out a new slope meter my brother gave me for Christmas. It was interesting to see how poorly I estimate slope—the very steepest terrain I skied barely hit 40°. It definitely doesn’t seem like that when you’re looking down from the top.

Here are some pictures I took on this trip.

A nice view looking out over Alta from near the Snowbird access gate.

Hiking along the Greeley ridge at Alta.

Looking down over the West Rustler area at Alta.

A box with avalanche control explosives near an access gate on top of East Greeley.

The path up to the high traverse on East Greeley at Alta.

Ready for the plunge.

This is in Glory Gulch at Alta.

Near the beginning of a long traverse to Devil's Castle at Alta.

At the end of the Devil's Castle traverse, near the Apron.

A snowy day at Snowbird near the beginning of the High Baldy traverse. There was an impressive cornice on the right side of the ridge, and all the Baldy chutes were closed.

Here's me, coming down off of Baldy with several inches of new snow.

Snow and fog hiding the top of Twin Peaks riding up Little Cloud at Snowbird.

The sun trying to break through the snow on our last day.

After messing around with it for a couple of days, I am very happy with it. At 1.8, the depth of field is ridiculous—for example, it is very easy to get the wrong part of a face in focus. The lens has a bit of trouble focusing, particularly in low light, and the motor is fairly noisy. Going for the $350 f/1.4 USM lens would probably fix these problems. I also definitely noticed the lack of IS as compared with the kit lens, but as this thing is so fast I really can’t complain about that. In fact, any criticism of this lens can be more or less rebutted by recalling the absurdly low price.

So, here are a few pictures I took with this thing. Several of them were outside at night, and they were all taken without a tripod(!).

My brother Josh.

The street outside my house. Driving was a challenge today.

A branch on our apple tree.

Our mailbox.

My footprints on our front wall.

#!/bin/bash
 
EVAL_STRING="notify-send -u normal -t 5000 -i info \"Task completed\" \"$@\""
eval $@; eval $EVAL_STRING

I put it in a folder which is in my path, and now I just do

$ notify ./takes_forever

and I know as soon as it’s done. OK, back to work.

This is the second-to-last last entry for the summer. The week before school started, I went on an ambitious hike to some fourteeners known as the Wilson group. We had initially intended to hike all three in a day, but as it turned out we only managed to do one: Wilson Peak. You may have seen a picture of this mountain before:

Not depicted: me at the top.

Coors uses the mountain in its logo because from some angles it is a very majestic and picturesque peak. I went with my Dad, my brother, and my friend Chris (from the first installment of my summer photoblog). We hiked into the camp at about 11,000 feet in the evening, set up tents, and set our alarms. At about 2:30am we woke up to beautiful, perfectly clear, moonless skies and frost covering our packs. We started up the trail to the first mountain. After some initial confusion we found the path properly, but my brother had an upset stomach and turned back with my Dad early on. I continued with Chris, and we slowly worked our way upward. It was very dark, and we only had our headlamps to light the path. It was also colder than I expected, but I was prepared and ended up wearing all the clothes I brought (but stayed fairly warm).

5am found us high on the side of Wilson Peak, trying to find our way from a saddle up to the main ridge line. We missed a few crucial cairns in the dark, and so we ended up doing some very interesting class 4 climbing across a band of cliffs by headlamp. We later realized that we were supposed to drop down below them and then hike up. This slowed us down somewhat, and we gained the peak much later than intended, just after sunrise. The hike down was fast, and the weather was absolutely perfect without a single cloud in the sky. Unfortunately Chris wasn’t feeling particularly energetic, having recently given blood, and so he didn’t feel up to doing the other two peaks. We also had a hard time finding the split from our route to the next mountain, Mount Wilson, and because of this and the fact that I hadn’t studied the map particularly well beforehand I didn’t feel up to soloing the remainder of the hike. So, we turned back to camp early and took our time heading down. I brought my new camera with me up to the camp, so I took some pictures of the lake and surroundings before we left.

A VW Bus that fell off the road years ago.

The trail to Navajo Lake goes through beautiful meadows.

Scoping out the terrain.

A month ago the wildflowers would have been gorgeous.

The late afternoon sun on El Diente.

The sun was setting as we got near the campsite.

The view out of the valley across Navajo Lake, before turning in for the night.

The first time it was light enough to take a picture. The trail is pretty rough here :)

The final summit approach. The route we chose is on the very right edge of this picture.

Me at the summit. In the background are Gladstone Peak (left) and Mount Wilson (right).

Mount Wilson (left) and El Diente (right). The traverse along the ridge between them is classic. It's definitely on my todo list for next summer.

A very chubby marmot.

There were pikas everywhere.

Gladstone peak is in the distance.

Navajo Lake, by daylight this time.

Looking back up the valley.

Some rapids below the lake.

My last day of work this summer was August 14th, and I planned to drive home the following day. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t hiked the last Saint, San Gorgonio Mountain. This is the highest mountain in Southern California and I certainly couldn’t leave without bagging it. So, I packed everything from my summer accommodations the night of the 14th and woke up at 3am on the 15th to do my hike. I had been unable to get a permit for my desired trail, Vivian Creek, so I instead had one for the longer South Fork trail. This trail is about 11 miles long (each way) but has the nice feature that the top section can be done as a loop so I didn’t have to retrace my steps the whole way. I got on the trail at about 6:00 and, hiking quickly, gained the summit at about by 11:00 traveling up the Dollar Lake fork of the trail.

Shortly into my trip I discovered that both the batteries in my camera and the spare set I brought were almost dead, so I didn’t take any pictures until the top. I snapped a few there and a few more on the way down. The hike was fairly uninteresting. At the start I could smell wildfire smoke and it made it a bit difficult to breathe. Higher up, everything below was obscured by smoke and smog except for the surrounding mountains. I did the downhill trip very quickly in running shoes via the Dry Lake side. This gave me a chance to see the aircraft wreckage from the 50s that is still on the mountain (see pictures below). There were a lot of tourists from Dry Lake to the trailhead, and I actually had my permit checked by a ranger (which I hadn’t expected). I made it down in a little over 8 hours from the start, including a half-hour break at the top.

Me at the summit.

The Inland Empire underneath the smog.

The summit flag with San Jacinto Peak in the background. The whitish smog is partly from wildfire smoke.

Aircraft wreckage between Dry Lake and the summit. Notice the prop just to the right of center.

Here I have included a picture from a late July sunset on the beach. A few days later, I went up to Lower Trestles with my friend Kevin to check out the big waves that were the result of a nice southern swell.

Sunset at South Carlsbad State Beach

It was a popular day to be at Trestles

10+ foot waves

It was very crowded out there

Kevin wants to ride waves like this someday

Climbing at Big Rock

I went climbing with some friends outdoors near Riverside. It was the first time I had climbed outdoors, and it was a fun experience. The wall was all granite slab, and in some places tended to be worn pretty smooth.

It got hot when the sun came over the cliff

This guy is a good climber

What if this were bold?

There was a fairly recent change to Gmail, where infrequently used labels could be hidden. It lets you keep your important labels in the left sidebar, and if you have 10 more hidden labels you click a little button that says “10 more” to show a menu with all of these labels. Chats, Sent Mail, Drafts, Starred, All Mail, Spam, and Trash also behave like normal labels for this purpose. This is a nice feature, in my opinion. I usually don’t care about how many spam messages I have, so I can tuck it away from my normal view. More importantly, I use a lot of filters (50 or 60) to organize incoming mail under labels (I have 32 at the moment), but  most of these only occasionally receive mail and it’s nice to have them hidden too.

When a label has unread messages in, it turns bold. For me, this used to mean that to see if I had any new mail, I looked both at the top of the inbox and scanned the labels for a bold one. Now, to see if any of my hidden labels have new messages, I have to click the button to show these labels. The fix, in my opinion, is to turn the “25 more” text bold when hidden labels have unread messages (see picture). I know it’s small, but this would save compulsive email checkers like myself a fair amount of annoyance. (Yes, I’m aware that I can just move all my labels out of this menu, but I like this feature too much to stop using it because of this.)

A small caveat here is that if you move the Spam label into this menu, you will always have unread messages (unless you don’t get spam, or mark it as read). Spam could be ignored for the purposes of bolding the button, but this might be considered unexpected behavior. Regardless, I’m sure the smart people on the Gmail team could figure something out.

I couldn’t find anyone else talking about this. This may be due to poor Googling on my part, or perhaps nobody else really cares. Hopefully other people have thought about it and we can get the attention of somebody at Google.

Edit: I found another person’s idea for a solution to this problem here.

I was in San Diego to watch Harry Potter last night (terrible, by the way) and I took the opportunity to check out downtown and Coronado. I’ve included a couple of pictures I took from Harbor Island.

Then today I spent more time taking pictures on the beach. I’ve been trying out some HDR techniques; you can see the results below.

The downtown skyline with the Coronado bridge on the right.

A ship docked at the Naval Air Station on the north side of Coronado Island.

An HDR image from the beach.

A sandstone wall covered in hundreds of names.

For the past couple days I’ve been heading down to the beach to take pictures of the sunset with my new Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I’ve really been having fun with this camera, and I’m learning a lot (especially how to estimate settings—I’ve been trying to force myself to use full manual controls for most of my pictures, and my eyeballing skills have much improved). I also got the chance to try surfing this evening, but I didn’t get any pictures of that.

The seagulls really seem to come out in force in the evenings.

Those two kids were having a lot of fun.

These guys are done after several hours of surfing.

Almost abstract.

The power plant north of the beach.

Right before I headed home.

I intended to climb San Gorgonio this past weekend, but couldn’t because my intended trail was closed due to “bear issues” (direct quote from the ranger). I ended up hiking Baldy again, this time with my friend Kevin from work. We went up the same way as I went last time, but we were both pretty tired and ended up going down via the ski area (and one helpful lift ride) to hitch a ride back to our car. The weather was unpleasantly hot, and is making me rethink my plans to do more hiking this summer. It was also crowded; Baldy’s proximity to millions of people makes it a very popular mountain. I’ve only included a few pictures because they were kind of uninspiring after Mount Rainier.

LA is just down over the hill...

Kevin on the ridge line.

The first good view of Baldy.

On West Baldy (a small subpeak).

Looking to the main peak.

On the way down, I spotted this character. Yes, that's a popped collar. That's when I knew that this was, indeed, the easy way down.

I'd love to try to ski some of those Baldy chutes sometime.

This was above Mt. Baldy ski area.

On the lift ride down.

I also took a few panoramic shots:

A good view of Baldy (right) and West Baldy (left) a couple of miles from the summit.

A very wide view of the San Gabriels, with LA below. If you look at the big version, you can see the channel islands near the horizon.