Mt Whitney, again

Once again, it has been time to climb!

The Caltech Alpine Club has run a few winter trips! First, there was the training trip to Mt San Gorgonio a few weeks ago. There has been very little snow this season, but I still managed to dig a deep enough hole in which to pitch my bivvy bag. When I woke up, there were ice crystals on the tent fabric all around! Brrr! The next day we climbed to the top, which was hard work in mushy snow and very little air. Photos are here: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/MtSanGorgonio. A long hike out at the other end ensured that I was pretty ambivalent about the main climb of the season, Mt Whitney. I climbed Whitney last year earlier in the season. At 14,495ft (4,500m) it's seriously high, and takes three days to climb while acclimating properly.

However, after only a few weeks I'd forgotten my previous misery and resolved to climb it, if only to make sure that I really, really hated mountaineering! Without going into mind-numbing detail, it was actually nowhere near as bad as I thought it might be. On the drive up we were treated to an incredible sunset just after the almost full moon rose over the opposite horizon. The lack of snow meant we could drive up the to trail head. We slept that night at 8000ft, although it was well below freezing. The next day we weighed in (I had a 50lb pack, up from 32lbs last year, for reasons that will shortly become clear!) and walked steadily up the North Fork trail. Lack of snow in the valley meant we had to do some rather exposed climbing and scrambling along the ledges to get to Lower Boy Scout lake, where my tent-mate D and I found a nice flat patch of exposed ground in which to make camp. Sitting on a warm, dry stone ledge with our fellow climbers while playing ukulele and passing around bottles with various liqueurs, we watched the sun set over the visible peak of Whitney far, far above us. That evening I took a few neat photos, and even got the laser into action!

Next day we continued our walk, this time with crampons up the icy snow into the Upper Boy Scout lake cirque and valley. I stopped where the ice climbers were for a bit to take photos, but opted out of climbing this time, to conserve strength for the following day's efforts. Upwards, ever upwards, into the next hanging glacial valley, and the last gully before Iceberg lake. The lack of snow made the route in particularly sketchy, and having tried it the year before I tried another chute a little further up the valley. To my pleasant surprise it was snowy most of the way, and soon I found myself on the Iceberg lake saddle, only slightly puffed. Before long D made it up from ice climbing, we set up the tent, I took a bunch of photos, and we heard the stories from H, who had climbed the entire mountain (up the east buttress!) in only one day. His climbing partner got a bit altitude sick, and returned to the trail head that day. A nearby tent had an excess of pasta, which I vacuumed up in seconds, and not long after sunset D and I beat the cold to climb into bed. For me, at least, bed consisted of a sleeping bag, a car windshield reflector, and a folded polar fleece blanket. I put my shoes in my inside-out sleeping bag bag under my feet, water bottles near by, and hoped the whole lot wouldn't freeze. When sleeping on gravel with not much padding, it's important to keep everything pretty relaxed! That night I managed to take a few photos, but unfortunately it was too cold to get the timelapse effect I was looking for - the camera battery froze.

Next morning we were up at 3am, ready to get going! Remembering how cold I'd got in the past waiting for someone to get going, I quickly got dressed, collected my gear, and headed for the chute that would take us to the top. Sloped at roughly 45 degrees, this partially snow-filled gully would take us up nearly 1500 feet to near the summit. On the way up I had an opportunity to use my new headlamp in anger for the first time. Putting it on high power, it was more or less impossible to determine if anyone else was using their headlamp or not. There, the leaders set some ropes for us to tie our harnesses to with a prussik, in case of a fall during the last steep scramble. After overtaking a few people on the way up, I was first in line to ascend the ropes, reaching the top of the first pitch before the second one was set, then the top of the second one before the third was set. I scrambled up to a higher ledge to make room for people waiting in line. Buoyed by the rising sun and frustrated by the difficulties of keeping a prussik in a useful place while climbing, I free soloed the last 200 feet to the summit, arriving just as H finished setting the anchor. We trotted across the summit plateau to the hut, where H began a quality hot chocolate production line. The only source of water on the snow-free summit was INSIDE the hut. Last december, when M visited, there was a huge wind storm. With winds maxing out the anemometer at 150mph for 6 hours at the summit, the door was long gone, and the inside mostly filled with accumulated snow. I summitted just as the sun rose. Soon after, full moon having passed, the almost full moon set. I immediately began my scheme of silly photos, first with soft toys, then with a tuxedo I'd brought to the summit for funsies, and finally with a kite. A few other people also brought some cool stuff up, including a hula hoop, a ukulele, a watermelon, a large quantity of beer, and so on. Even L, who had succumbed last year to altitude, made it up. I brought out my finger pulse oximeter and found my blood oxygen saturation to be 93%, considerably higher than the mid 80s where it had been hovering the whole time since leaving the car park. Good sleep and hydration, combined with free pasta/pesto must have made all the difference. Next a bunch of people wanted me to take their photo, so by the time we got back over to the ropes to rappel down to the notch, a large queue had formed. In the 90 minutes it took to get to the front, I had got seriously cold! Also the ropes got pretty shredded by the sharp rocks, which was a bit scary. 

To the notch, stand in the sun and out of the wind for a bit, then work our way back down the rubble avoiding falling rocks to the snowy section. Crampons on and walk back down to camp. Pack up, drink some water (made from melted dirty snow, it wasn't exactly clear. Back down the gully, down to Upper Boy Scout lake, down the valley to Lower Boy Scout lake. I retrieved the wag bag I had stowed there on the way up, chatted to people for a few minutes, then continued down the hill. By now it was mostly no snow, warm, and I was very low on water. We wanted to avoid down-climbing the exposed (ie HUGE fall) ledges, so tried to find another way down the gully. Unfortunately the lack of snow made this easier said than done, and some time was spent struggling through over-grown thickets of willow. By this stage my feet were pretty sore from going down hill, but luckily a couple of fast hikers passed me at a break, and I fell in, matching their pace down to the bottom. Once down I returned D's stove and tent bits, retrieved my corn chips from the bear locker, borrowed someone's water, packed my stuff into various people's cars, and headed down the mountain. Down the road, past all the fallen rock, into Lone Pine, where we stopped at the Mt Whitney Restaurant for our tradition post-climb eat. The same waitress as last year was there, and somehow managed to feed us all. H had a Whitney burger with two chicken patties, something I thought was very appropriate given that he summitted twice in two days.

Before long we were in the car on the way back, a short 4 hour drive back to Los Angeles, with my ears popping at odd intervals while listening to radiohead and passing out.

Photos are here: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/Whitney2012

When Lucent Met Herakut and Latry at the LA Phil

The return of the verbose concert snob.

Last weekend it was my sublime pleasure to partake not one but two
extraordinary shows in Downtown LA.

The first was the latest show by the underground circus group Lucent
Dossier, entitled "When Lucent Met Herakut". Although it lacked an
overarching storyline as such, the entire thing was an eye-popping
spectacle from the moment one stepped from the dusty sidewalk until
the moment the show viscerally spat one back out into the drab, muted
real world beyond its doors.

Consisting of a mix of steampunk and derelict aesthetics,
inspirational facepaint, dynamic set design and construction, live
electronic music on classical instruments, setting things on fire, and
insanely energetic dancing, it was a seductive induction to a land of
alternate logic and the celebration of the grotesque and peculiar.

Highlights included costume gloves with very long fingers reminiscent
of Harajuku in mid-2007, and a sequence of ever evolving and expanding
aerial performances in which an integer number of people hung from the
ceiling on nothing more than a ribbon wrapped around their waist,
often spinning another performer dangling by their finger nails. At
the beginning of the second act one set of costume overalls containing
a man was spray painted with a star shaped stencil in the middle of an
act.

Following the show the theatre was transformed into an electronic
dance party in which the audience, mostly dressed for the occasion,
pulsated to the distorted rhythms well into the night.

The next day I still hadn't adequately sabotaged my academic program,
so decided to spend Sunday evening at the LA Phil watching an organ
recital. Passing Pasadena's resident Tourette's suffering crazy old
lady, I managed to leave the mothership and return once more Downtown.

Despite the sad infrequency of recitals on the magnificent instrument
at the Disney Hall, the ones I have attended thus far have all left a
strong impression. This one certainly promised that. The most recent
recital was by Laszlo Fassang (which I also reviewed), a student at
Notre Dame of none other than one of the finest organists of our age,
Olivier Latry. Latry, born in 1962, is one of the four organistes
titulaire at Notre Dame in Paris, an expert at improvisation, and none
other than the artist of this evening's recital!

In contrast to Fassang's knowing wink at the standard repertoire,
Latry did not even treat us to some improvisational fireworks. Instead
he presented three pieces of the modern genre, each more ambitious
than the last.

Beginning with Heiller's Tanz Toccata, a short and spritely piece that
exploited the exquisite tuning and mechanical health of the Disney
Hall organ, the audience was casually warned that they were in for the
complete opposite of hymns and other standard organ fare.

Next he delivered Alain's Three Dances, a piece of about 25 minute's
duration in which a very interesting theme was developed and repeated
many times, each with a different tonal palette drawn from the ranks
and inexorably moving towards a series of musical climaxes.

Following intermission, the real show began. While it will celebrate
its 100th birthday next year, Stravinski's "Le Sacre du Printemps" or
"Rite of Spring" is a watershed work for ballet depicting in music and
rhythm the ecstatic sacrifice through dance of a young woman in a
prehistoric tribal society. The final panel of Stravinski's
revolutionary triptych beginning with Firebird (1910) and Petrushka
(1911), 99 years of ensuing controversy combined with its enduring
stylistic uniqueness have made it one of the most famous pieces of
music ever written.

Originally written for a large symphony orchestra, and making full use
of the tonal resources therein, reduction to a keyboard instrument
presents a unique challenge. For this, Latry was joined on stage by
fellow organist Shin-Young Lee. Together they played a four-hand,
four-foot transcription of the work. To manipulate the stops of the
organ, the page turner was pressed into service activating presets via
a button on the side of the console. Slightly overtaxed in this
capacity, Latry himself ended up turning the good half of the pages
and stop changes where his cue had been missed! Such side distractions
only added to the dramatic tension as the innovatively lit organ
produced sound after sound, mimicking the orchestral sounds with all
the precision and cohesion of an expert orchestral performance.

In Rite of Spring, Stravinski broke down many fundamental elements of
western music, including tempo, pitch relations, rhythm conventions,
and movement structure. This left the composer free to recreate from
scratch the music he needed to paint his sacrificial vision. 99 years
after its premiere we heard all that afresh in a concert that combined
the breadth of orchestral tone and colour and the focus and vision of
a single performer (or two, in this case).

Following a brief encore consisting of the last movement of the piece,
the audience, mostly recognizable regulars of the organ recital
series, filed from the hall into the balmy indigo evening, once again
filled with a sort of collective personal satisfaction practically
impossible to share with people for whom music after Mozart went
inexorably down hill. Such is life.

Avalanche safety course

Last weekend some members of the Caltech Alpine Club drove to Mammoth Mountain, a dormant volcano and super duper skiing resort only 5 hours drive from Pasadena. On arrival we set up sleeping arrangements in a somewhat stacked condo, then settled back in the jacuzzi to watch the stars overhead, blow steam, throw snowballs, and attempt conversation in Czech.

Next day the course began, which involved a lot of talking and a fair amount of moving snow from place to play to try and identify layers, weaknesses, and potential instabilities. In the afternoon we shifted to search and rescue training, which involved using beacons to find other buried beacons, probing, a fair amount of innuendo, and occasionally getting stabbed. Probes are a lot less sharp than they look!

That evening we chilled back at the chalet, ate some dinner, watched the x-games at Aspen on TV (not enough crashes), and eventually went to sleep. Next morning it was back to the mountain. I'd traded in my sandals for snow boots and shoes, and finally gave my new jacket the run it had been looking for. I spent a fair amount of time experimenting with different ways to configure gear to try and take the edge of my n00biness next time we go alpine climbing!

Sunday too consisted in large part of digging holes in the snow and trying to break it into large chunks in a semi-regular way. The afternoon involved a more realistic beacon and probe search over a hectare or so. Finding a buried beacon is somewhat harder than a person, as they're not very big! None the less we managed to consistently extract the burials within 15 minutes.

That afternoon I set up my camera on the rear view mirror of M's car and did an epic time lapse of the drive home - a public version is coming home. I also did some time lapses of sunsets and stars, one spin-off of which (ha!) is in the album. Which album? Read on!

Only 5 hours after leaving Mammoth we returned to the mothership, where I was just in time to catch the last half of FD rehearsal and memorise a few new songs. In other news an undergrad attempted to emulate my photo of semi-transparency in front of the city of LA, and wound up getting winched off the mountain by helicopter early Saturday morning, though without injury!

Photos from Mammoth: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/AvalancheSafetyCourse

Sister comes to the US of A

This is a rather late and thus rather short account of a visit to the USA of my sister A.

I collected A early one morning from LAX, and she and I spent five days exploring Pasadena, hanging with my friends, climbing the mountain and shopping.

In due course we flew to New York, where we were joined by our brother M to see The Book of Mormon on Broadway, which was well received! We also explored much of the island, hung out with friends, and got a dose of culture.

First, museums. We started with medieval chess pieces at the Cloisters and finished at the Met, with everything else in between. We admired the pipe organs of St Ignatius Loyola and St John the Divine. We saw an improvised musical comedy, two operas (Faust and La Fille du Regiment), and took a train out to Coney Island.

We spent Christmas eve with my friend J's family, and New Years Eve with M in New Haven, chilling in the hospital and on the historic Yale campus.

All too soon it was time to pack our bags and head for our respective homes. One more flight across the geological wonderland of the western US, and A continued to Australia.

Next day I was back in class, to start the winter term.

More recently my friend S was in town and we tackled Echo Mountain in under 4 hours. Not bad for 23km in the dark.

Photos of A. Photos from Echo Mountain.

Surprise trip to Australia

In possibly the most expensive prank I pulled in 2011, I snuck back to Australia last week. Without telling my mother, sister, or grandparents I flew into Sydney the day of my sister's speech day (high school graduation). I found everyone drinking coffee nearby about 45 minutes before proceedings got underway, and relished the look of surprise on their faces.

The ceremony itself was, as usual, 99.9% other peoples' relatives walking across the stage, but in the end A nabbed four major prizes, so we were all very proud of her! Lunch under the Sydney harbour bridge followed.

That minor subterfuge aside, the rest of the week in the antipodes was spent catching up with friends, mainly at Sydney university, and mainly in pouring rain. Naming names in the usual initial fashion would be boring even by the standards of my blog, so I'll leave it to the photo album! Suffice to say it was terrific to catch up with gazillions of people - only a small handful had the excessive forethought to be out of the country or city at the time. Next time, peoples! You are warned.

I also took a moment to get my father shod in cutting edge vibram toe shoes, which I hope will help him walk under load more efficiently, in preparation for an impending Everest attempt about which he does not yet know... I also visited my ancestral stamping grounds on the coast, and more recently in Newtown - in both cases the situation was soggy with nostalgia, as well as the afore mentioned inclement weather.

All too soon it was time to throw my nerdy teeshirts back into my bag and head for (new) home, back in Pasadena. I was fortunate (my work less so) to have a functioning entertainment system on both legs of the flight - a first!

Photos can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/Australia2011

M visits Pasadena

Early last Sunday morning I dragged myself out of bed to stand by the road in the chilly morning air. After a short wait, who should step out of a shiny blue van but M, my brother who I had not seen in more than a year. He was on his way to do a two month endocrinology surgery placement at Yale, and kindly agreed to stop on the way. 

Photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/105494084231616659850/MInCalifornia

After a short rest to unpack, relax, and begin the process of desecrating my room, T took us to the Huntington gardens and library for lunch. M seemed to appreciate the understated opulence of the place, which looked terrific on this crisp sunny day. We visited most of the gardens and headed for home, taking in the fall colours and neighbourhood. A quick siesta was followed by dinner and rehearsal.

Monday called for some serious cold weather clothes shopping, culminating in methodical raids of every department store between Lake St and Arcadia! I myself picked up a fine dark green skiing/mountaineering jacket. We sampled the caltech cafeteria for lunch, and that evening M cooked dinner and we duly conquered Echo Mountain. 26km was dispatched with barely a whimper; I also took the opportunity to test my new camera in dark conditions. I'm tempted to try a yellow filter to reduce light pollution, but it was otherwise excellent.

Tuesday brought mainly work, followed by an FD rehearsal that M attended, through frantic prep for a concert on Friday. On Wednesday we walked into old town Pasadena, saw the cheese cake factory and the museum of east asian art, as well as the rather impressive town hall visible in CBS' hit show The Big Bang Theory. That evening there was a huge windstorm that resulted in damage to nearly every tree in Pasadena.

An early morning walk revealed the extent of the carnage, with power out and roads blocked in every direction. I hired a car and we drove up highway 2, the Angeles Crest Highway. M remarked on the steepness of the geologically young mountain range, and before long we were in Palmdale, found the local track of the San Andreas fault, performed the usual rituals, and located a place for lunch. Lunch? In-n-Out burgers. While a far cry from my badly missed burgerfuel, it gave M a taste of American cuisine.

From there the Aerospace highway took us north through the Mojave desert, to California City. A city designed to rival Los Angeles had roads and land surveyed for at least 100,000 people, but noone ever moved there. Today 14,000 inhabitants are lightly scattered about an enormous and barely used central park, complete with a large, duck-inhabited artificial lake.

In the day's dying light we zoomed north to the Red Rock Canyon national park, at the beginning of the Owens Valley. The setting sun blended with the natural rock formations, and after a quick jaunt through the day's frigid winds we turned around for home.

On Friday we picked up some amazing sandwiches from Roma Deli, then headed to Eaton Canyon with T and S. Many trees had fallen victim to Wednesday's winds, making for some interesting balancing problems. At the waterfall we climbed on the rocks a bit, tested my new geology hammer, then headed for home. I got dressed up, picked up some friends from Fluid Dynamics, then drove to Cal State, where we performed a few songs (Look Around, Don't Know Why, Break Even), then drove home. I started packing, then crashed on the floor, M having already grabbed the bed.

On Saturday we dusted the car, went fail-shopping for a warm hat, ate some left over food, then caught a bus to the airport. Why would I go to the airport? Stay tuned.

Overall a crazy busy week to catch up with my brother I hadn't seen in 15 months. We saw most of what Pasadena had to offer, with the exception of the insides of one's eyelids.

Dispatches from the cultural front: Laszlo Fassang plays organ at Walt Disney Hall

Dispatches from the cultural front: Laszlo Fassang plays organ at Walt Disney Hall

Last Sunday noted Hungarian organist Laszlo Fassang gave a recital at Walt Disney Hall in downtown LA, and I was fortunate enough to be in attendance. A former student of Olivier Latry at Notre-Dame de Paris (himself due to give a recital here on February the 19th) Fassang has distinguished himself over the last decade in both recital and improvisation. Organ improvisation is an art going back centuries, even millennia to the origins of the precursor instrument, the hydraulis, in Ancient Greece. In particular, several Parisien churches and organs have dynastic compositional and improvisational traditions stretching back to perhaps the greatest organ builder of all time, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who revolutionised the capabilities of the instrument contemporaneously with the French romantic period. At Église Saint-Sulpice, there were Widor and Dupré; at Notre-Dame de Paris, Vierne was followed by Cochereau, Lefebvre, and Latry; at Église_de_la_Madeleine tenured organists included Lefébure-Wély, Saint-Saëns, Dubois, and Fauré; at Basilique Ste-Clotilde there were Franck, Pierné, Tournemire, and Langlais. More familiar artists from this period include Chopin and Liszt, both of whom also wrote for the pipe organ.

As I had recently attended the recital of Cameron Carpenter, I was already familiar with the rather formidable capabilities of the instrument we have here in Los Angeles, and anticipated the program with excitement bordering on pathological. Fassang opted to play a series of pieces based on the B-A-C-H theme (B-flat, A, C, B in modern notation), used as a musical signature in hundreds of J.S. Bach's own compositions, and providing a narrative for a journal through a few hundred years of subsequent musical thought and invention. Serendipitously, Fassang began his recital with the same piece as Carpenter, the Bach Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540. Unlike Carpenter, Fassang played it in its original key, and did a reasonable though not spectacular job of warming up both the instrument, the crowd and himself.

Following the requisite sacrifice to the unimpeachable master of organ repertoire and probably music in general, Fassang left Bach and wisely skipped the renaissance period entirely. Next up was Schumann; Four Fugues on B-A-C-H, from Op. 60. With a shift in texture from polyphonic to symphonic, Fassang's Hungarian- and French-trained musical sensibilities could come to the fore. He began by explaining that he was playing the pieces out of their numerical order for the sake of musical cohesion, a choice which also helped place them in the context of the entire recital. 

Rounding out the first half was Reger's Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H, Op. 46. Although he died young, Reger was a profilic composer and musical experimenter. Though music had moved more than two centuries since Bach, his musical signature continued to inspire musical geniuses everywhere, and in tandem with the extraordinary versatility of more modern pipe organs, this piece was a quarter-hour of grinding counterpoint, symphonic texture and musical flow plucked by Fassang from the roaring instrument with dexterity and taste.

Following an intermission in which to catch our breath, we were treated to a rather rare performance of Liszt's gargantuan work Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale "Ad nos, as salutarem undam", adapted from Meyerbeer's opera Le prophète. Composed as a private meditation by Liszt during his pilgrimage in Weimar in 1850, it was eventually published despite almost nil demand for such a challenging work, and received its premiere performance five years later. Composed of three sections and lasting almost half an hour, it abounds with musical contrasts and is epic in scope. While perhaps not as coherent or consistent as the archetype recording done at the Sydney Town Hall Grand Organ (Hill & Son 1886-89, 5m., 127 sp. st., tubular-pneumatic/Barker lever) by David Drury in 1993, Fassang nevertheless contended stoically with the herculean difficulties presented by the piece and in the end triumphed to rapturous and well-deserved applause.

While Fassang took a short break to mop his brows, he was approached by a member of the crew carrying a basket of papers. During intermission, audience members had written suggestions for themes on which to base the final item of the program, a hotly anticipated organ improvisation. Several members of the audience drew the raffle, Fassang read the results and placed the slips of paper on the console music stand. Organ improvisation is an anachronous art, surviving despite its death in the classical performance of nearly every other musical instrument. Creativity and coordination combine to mix musical ideas old and new, construct a coherent piece of music, and perform it in real time. For those who love to watch figure skaters crash, there is a certain nail-biting element here also, since one misplaced finger or toe can be all it takes to destroy a musical line developed over seconds or minutes. Fortunately Fassang combined a generous dose of natural talent and study with the best in the business to deliver a quarter hour every bit as interesting as a meticulously and laboriously constructed piece of music. It is no secret in organ circles either that many of the most famous pieces of music were initially improvised, then later recorded or transcribed.

Fassang gave one encore, on the theme of the Walt Disney Concert Organ, in which he got an opportunity to show off some of the more unique aspects of the instrument, including bells and other percussive stops, weaving the whole lot together into the musical equivalent of a braided sausage: consistently textured, meaty, rich, and topologically non-trivial.

Denizens of LA are fortunate to have both such a spectacular instrument and a well organised celebrity recital schedule to make use of it. I look forward to future recitals with the sort of interest I ordinarily reserve for free food and pass/fail grading.