Every year the Caltech Y, a Caltech associated community involvement organization, runs a week-long hike in the Sierras for incoming students just before orientation and rotation. Normally at this time of the year, I am involved in International Student Orientation, but this year I decided to lead the hike instead!
About 25 people total were involved, split into three groups according to degree of ambition to achieve altitude sickness. I was assigned the 'beginner' level group, which was pleasantly cruisy, walking 3-5 miles (5-8km) per day. Normally arriving at camp by midday, we had plenty of time to explore, climb, look for bears, filter water, and shiver.
For a change I used a GoPro instead of my regular camera. It is much more wide-angle and more versatile, though nearly useless for night-time photography.
After a week all three groups met at Lodgepole campground and compared notes and blisters. Noone died! Success all around. I had only previously hiked on the eastern escarpment, so it was nice to explore the interior of the range.
What started in the mid 80s as a small group of friends gathering on a beach to burn stuff and party has now grown, in its ~28th year, to one of the most extraordinary and bizarre events in history. During the last week of August, approximately 80,000 people leave their drab, wretched lives and travel to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to build a city, do art, music, dance, and have a terrific time.
Having lived in the American south west for nearly 4 years, it was high time for me to go. Planning had been underway for more than a year, but at the last moment my designated transport, a tiny Cessna 152 plane, became unavailable. Plans awry, improvisation began.
S, O, and I met and crammed our stuff in S's Ford Taurus one exquisite Sunday afternoon in the recent past. By 6pm we had set out and laden with all the food, water, costumes, sparkles, and fairies we could possibly need, we sped up the 5, through Sacramento, Reno, and out into the deserts of Nevada. By 4am we had joined the queue of vehicles waiting to get in through the gate into Black Rock City. The place I had heard so much about yet never seen, never been, never lived, never experienced.
My curiousity turned to frustration and ambivalence as shortly after our arrival a series of unusual thunderstorms dumped 6 inches of water onto the playa, or dried up lake bed, on which we were parked. Instantly the surface turned to adhesive devil's cake and all vehicles were halted until the surface dried. When it became apparent that watching playa dry was like watching paint dry, and about as fast, the 15,000 or so of us stuck in line did what we do best - brought the party with us. By noon the surface was dry enough to walk on, and around us (the line was about 15 lanes wide and a few miles long) people cracked open their RVs, assembled bikes, changed into playa clothes (often not much of anything), fired up their barbecues, and even held spontaneous improvisational concerts on their roof of their RV, or got their DJ equipment out. A series of dark clouds spun overhead but the heavens held, and by 7pm we were on the move again.
At the wheel yet limited to 5mph, we met our greeter who provided a kit of information and most valuable advice: "Pee clear!". We dropped O at her camp; Basshenge, occasionally of the silent 'B', sporting a 100,000W sound system, then headed in to 5 o'clock and Esplanade. S's camp and my artistic nexus was Phage, a camp of mostly scientists and their sympathizers positioned in prime location on the front row. Black rock city is arranged as a series of concentric circles from A through L, and radial streets named after times on the clock from 2 through 10, with a gap between 10 and 2 for art and dancing.
Coming upon Phage, S unpacked her gear and I headed for the Tesla Coil. A project I'd been involved with since the beginning, my main (though minor overall) contributions were a less lethal capacitor bank and the external design of some of the structure. I was thrilled to see the structure standing (as opposed to in tiny pieces when last I saw it) and the coil in the middle. A ladder underneath supported the main builders, D and M. Oh no, the coil is here but doesn't work properly! My fears were unfounded. We dropped the ladder and fired up the midi controller. Soon gigantic bolts of lightning were sending 120dB shivers down my arms and spine. With some trepidation I approached the janky midi keyboard and proceeded to play what little piano music I could remember. The sound, light, and smell was overwhelming. Hordes of brightly lit burners milled around like moths to a candle flame - the sound was audible from the eponymous Man, a 105 foot wooden structure in the center of the city, not yet burning.
S and I drove out to the airport, where I was camping, and set up my camp. Despite the lack of a convenient wing I was able to raise my shade and hammock, driving rather disposable stakes into the living playa with a series of mallets of steadily increasing size and lethality.
I crawled into my trusty hammock and passed out.
The following morning I volunteered to be an oar-less galley slave and helped produce enough hash browns, veggies, sausage, and so on for a hundred people who were camping at the airport. When I had eaten enough to last until dinner I hiked into the city where, for the first time, I took a look under the light of day. Phage was located on a street corner with containers, several trucks, parked cars, shade tubes containing tents, a galley, dining area, steam yurt, generator with trenched 3-phase power, fresh water hose, grey water disposal, art installations, flags, a dome, and two art cars, Dr Malthus and Dr Brainlove.
Art cars, or mutant vehicles, are the only powered vehicles allowed in the city. Limited to a maximum speed of 5mph, they must disguise their vehicular origins and look like something else. The photo album has a few photos of various art cars, but in total there are over a thousand, ranging from tiny single person vehicles up to large articulated multi-story party complexes sporting millions of computer controlled LEDs and flame throwers. One art car, called Robot Heart, features a sound system with a mere 85,000 watts of undistorted subwoofer and traditionally the best DJs in the world, though the lineup is never announced. This is a video someone else made about Robot Heart.
Dr Malthus belongs to one of the sister camps of Phage, and is styled as a military half track with outdoor and indoor sitting areas as well as a roof lounge/DJ table. The indoor space features squashy leather arm chairs, a fireplace, and a mounted moose head. The driving area is surrounded by a cage to comply with liquor open-carry laws, and believe it or not, the vehicle is road legal.
Dr Brainlove is Phage's new art car. Started only 6 months ago, she is a converted school bus. A large geodesic brain is mounted on top of the bus, modeled on an MRI scan of one of the designers. Each geodesic node features a lighting node with dozens of computer controlled LEDs that, combined, fire like neurons, and are controlled by an EEG cap worn by a willing volunteer. As you may have gathered, Phagelings are somewhat geeky.
Brainlove was the very opposite of road legal, being GIGANTIC in size. It had to be assembled on playa, and at this point the lighting system was being put together. Composed of 3D printed parts, they needed to be aligned, the wiring checked, then ziptied into submission and position. Only 178 nodes were required for completion.
Slightly more complete than before, Brainlove was loaded with a kaleidoscope of people and taken for a drive out on the playa to rehearse safety procedures during the day. What do you do if, while driving, a horde of hippies jumps on the structure and begins climbing? I sat on the pre-frontal cortex and kept an eye out for people trying to get run over.
Back at camp preparations were underway for the Tuesday night party, requiring the running of optical fiber to run the coil under the esplanade. A trenching machine cut a hole, we threaded 100 feet of conduit, and laid fiber. Only took a few hours! After a quick break for dinner, I returned to phage in time for the party, then walked out to 10 o'clock. At night, the playa is completely dark save for art, cars, and people festooned with LEDs, EL wire, flame throwers, and lasers. One camp had a trio of very powerful lasers shining over the city onto a nearby mountain to display the time. At the far end of the city I was seriously tired and returned to phage and the airport. On the way back I fell asleep on my feet several times, waking up to find I was still walking but in the wrong direction, or with flaming art cars zooming by.
The following day I spent mostly walking around taking it easy, meeting new people, checking out the big art installations on the playa (most of them at least 3 stories high), and resting. That morning the Black Rock City ultramarathon is run, and a few of them were passing the camp. Here's a video from 2013:
I had brought a pair of welding goggles dark enough to look at the sun, and found that after about 10 minutes, your eyes adjust and you can see other things through them. Walking around where people are silhouettes against the sky and everything is a funny tinge of green did not seem out of place at all. In the afternoon I made my way back to the airport and gave the ACME Bomb Company cocktail hour talk on Cosmology, an hour or so long speech describing this history of the universe in reverse chronological order. A large and appreciative audience asked useful questions and were highly amused by my descriptions of metallic element nuclear synthesis, oxygen isotope variance, interplanetary meteorite exchange, the cosmic microwave, neutrino, and gravitational wave backgrounds, and so on. In the background, a couple of powered paragliders were looping and rolling close enough to the ground that they regularly touched it with a wing tip. After grabbing some dinner, I hitched a ride on a perilously dangerous ice bike back to Phage and gave a second talk, this time on black hole collisions. The kicker there is that at the moment of greatest gravitational wave emission the signal actually vanishes because the common black hole event horizon grows and swallows all its own screams.
We got the Tesla coil working and managed to attract some talented pianists, whose memorable performance still rings in my ears. I walked around the inner playa with S and discussed business, space launch, and a few other interesting ideas before stumbling back to the airport and passing out.
The following day I strategised and got a ride on the skydiving plane. Burning Sky Camp runs a skydiving plane all week and allows divers and riders to get a free trip up and around Black Rock City. That morning, a record had been set for the largest simultaneous nude jump (15), so all were in high spirits. At the zenith, 10,000 feet off the deck, the last of the divers leapt out and the pilot cut the power and put the plane into a steep, zero G dive. We were back on the ground in just over a minute.
In the heat I walked slowly around to 7 o'clock and K where I met some Caltech types, chilled in the shade, and had a chat. By this point I had realised that Burning Man is not really an alternate reality. The culture is not so different to the culture in any university or musical society, or at least parts of it. I had experienced substantially more culture shock in many foreign countries. Burning Man is overwhelmingly affluent white people from San Francisco. Cultural dislocation is not really the point.
Accidents do occur. Legend has it that very few people die at Black Rock City because most people live long enough to get on the medevac plane, after which they are declared dead in Reno. The previous night, someone fell from and was crushed by an art car, the first such death since 2003. From conversations with various rangers, there were many more near-misses, in which injured people came back to life in the nick of time.
Back at Phage, the talk was of a new art installation. A post-hole digging auger had become stuck out in the deep playa, so a decision was made to convert it to an artwork entitled 'The Lobster Trap'. A set of handcuffs was ziptied to it, a large sign saying 'do not touch', and a set of unrelated keys. A day later, someone rode out to check there weren't any skeletons attached and found the ziptie broken and the handcuffs gone - incredibly, someone had locked themselves to it! Later, the identity of the trapped individual was discovered - we had caught a fellow Phageling - who had had to get the handcuffs taken off by the police.
M and I spent a pleasant hour climbing all over the Phage dome attempting to install a new lighting system, then back at the airport a cocktail hour talk on deep brain electrical stimulation, followed by an excelsior dinner of chicken, salad, and curry. That evening I helped do the dishes, but made it back to phage in time for the tail end of a talk on the IBMI, a group dedicated to the improvement of Burning Man by turning it into a two day networking event for 300 people. The coil was once again on fire until an unidentified fault (strategic power cable disconnection by grumpy person) gave me the evening off and I went to explore center camp, which had a sweet Jazz bar and an even better Tango dome with funky LED triangles and nice music.
The following day, my fourth on the playa, was windy and dusty. Around noon, K and I went on an extensive bike adventure. At this point I realised not bringing a bike to BM was a serious oversight. On the playa, visibility was down to 10 feet, so we rode aimlessly, discovering art, lost people, and burned stuff at random. We made our way to 9 o'clock, picked up some mail, and spent a while finding its recipients and delivering it. On the way, of course, meeting lots of interesting people. At 3 o'clock, we visited another post office, called the BRC3PO (Black Rock City 3 o'clock Post Office), with a Star Wars Theme, obtained 3 more letters, and delivered them after a detour to the deep playa wherein we found yet more cool widely separated art and nice people.
Back at Phage around 6pm, it was time for 'Ask a Drunk Scientist', in which hordes of unfulfilled PhDs swarmed the Esplanade armed with megaphones, labcoats, signs, and attitude, haranguing passers by to ask us anything. "Is a PhD worth it?" "How much debt do we have?" "Can science help you find love?" "Why are sunsets red?" and so on. A great opportunity to apply knowledge and patiently explain stuff in an understandable way!
That evening, M gave a talk on the Tesla coil, answering the three most commonly asked questions: "How does it make sparks?" "How does it make music?" "Why doesn't it kill hippies?". After that we were infested with people who couldn't play very well, which is a problem when everyone within half a mile has to shout over the noise of yet another terrible rendition of Fuer Elise...
By this point the Institute LED sculpture was up and running - a pair of LED encrusted spheres with a bewildering display of patterns, together with some pretty good dance music. I alternated grooving with cerebral chats on the Moveable Feast, gave a few massages, and then passed out.
It is Saturday! The day of The Burn! All week we have been working for The Man, and soon he must be burned. With Burning Man closing only 3 days later, it is time to strike! First the Phage Dome was unbolted, parted, and packed. Then a gigantic crane lifted the coil, we detached the legs, then the rest of the structure, power electronics, and so on. Rugs were rolled, bikes corralled - I managed to salvage an abandoned Huffy Cranbrook (new and already falling apart) that became my ride for the next few days. Shade tubes were collapsed. Piles of stuff 10 feet high formed around various trucks, trailers, and containers. Hexayurts were disassembled.
Come 5pm K and I rode to the airport for the cocktail party beneath the Star Port, enjoyed a terrific band, climbed the observation tower, watched the planes, made an incredible salad, and then ate absurd quantities of paella, pork, beans, bacon, and salad. Several of my airport friends worried that I still had not been awarded a playa name. Some people said it can take a decade to get one. One pilot told a story about a ride he had gifted to a couple in which the man proposed, and then the woman revealed she was pregnant! Much excitement!
We rode back to Phage, parked, then walked out into the playa. The Man was surrounded by a Colosseum of art cars all pumping music into a crowd of 70,000 people mostly seated between them and an inner fire containment circle. A few thousand fire twirlers performed, followed by fireworks and gigantic fireballs as the Man was lit. The facade burned away quickly, the inner structure of very large lumps of timber took longer. Tornadoes of smoke, flame, and embers rose downwind of the sculpture and at times we were showered with glowing cinders. After about 90 minutes the ankles burned through and the structure leaned, collapsed, and fell. Back at phage D had finished packing the Moveable Feast so we said goodbye. At the airport, I was still buzzed so I rode around the perimeter fence, a distance of about 11km, seeing all sorts of odd things in the dark. Already, a line of vehicles had started to leave the event. Back at camp, I had my daily wet-wipe bath, was re-covered in dust from the shade structure, and prepared for bed.
Before coming to Burning Man, I had been warned that my habit of wearing sandals everywhere would be my undoing, due to a mysterious and scary condition known as playa foot. Allegedly, playa dust is super alkaline and, like laundry powder, will burn your exposed skin, leading to dryness, cracks, infections, and probable amputation. Now, I was relatively certain that small amounts of dust in foot wrinkles would have their pH neutralised by sweat and then form a protective layer, but ever the servant of science I decided to clean my left foot thoroughly (thus destroying any protective layer while also removing the offending material) and leaving my right foot as the control. I also brought a supply of vinegar in case of emergency pH adjustment. After 5 days of steeping in playa, neither foot showed more than a mild sunburn, which annoyed my inner scientist no end. My left foot had a couple of scrapes from being trodden on, but that was it.
Sunday. The man, which had previously towered over the whole event, was gone. Packing up continued. I rode out to the deep playa and found the art I'd previously missed, including the zollotrope and the last outpost. The zollotrope is a gigantic suspended wheel with sculptures attached. At night, it spins in time with a strobe and the objects appear to be moving. The last outpost was a very interesting, dark artwork. An interactive building set in the near future during a time of societal breakdown due to aliens or zombies or whatever, it conveyed a sense of paranoia and black humour. Detailed journals and various signs were quite immersive, and made a nice contrast to the usual love/harmony-centered artistic zeitgeist.
Back at Phage, Brainlove was being dismantled. I clambered all over the structure for hours pulling zipties, nodes, wires, optical fibers, thread protectors, and throwing them all into labelled bags. Finally, the bare structure was ready for disassembly. Two teams of two climbed to the peak and began impact drilling the nodes apart. To ensure safety we had safety gloves, safety helmets (optional) and safety whiskey (compulsory). Obviously you had to check what you were standing on, since large parts of the structure became fluid once certain bolts were removed. After only a few hours most of the structure was disassembled, and by the following day, packed. In one casualty, a freed strut swung around and smacked my foot - a small amount of blood was readily clotted by some playa dust I found in my pocket and work proceeded. Needless to say I strongly advocated major design changes for any future brain.
Drank a lot of water, then grabbed a rake with L and proceeded to moop. Moop, or Matter Out Of Place, is bad news on the playa. The camp has to be thoroughly mooped, or de-mooped, before going home. Any foreign object must be picked up and packed out. After an hour or so, L and I had demooped the area formerly under the Tesla coil and the Phage dome, collecting more than a liter of hair, feathers, sequins, metal shards, bolts, sawdust, wood chips, contaminated dirt, thread, fiber, string, paper, plastic, and so on.
Back at the airport I disassembled my own shade. Getting said disposable stakes out of the ground required vice grips and long bits of metal for levers. Dinner was pasta, salad, meatballs, and mushrooms, followed by a ride back to the playa for the temple burn.
The temple is a structure designed and built each year along the same axis as the Man, roughly at 12 o'clock. Within it people write or leave tributes to deceased friends or relatives. When I visited earlier during the week, there were numerous tributes to Robin Williams, as well as thousands of others of the dearly departed. The day after the Man is burned, the temple is burned. The structure is incredibly beautiful and ornate, but ultimately serves to celebrate the finite nature of life. In contrast to the previous night, tonight the circle of art cars was silent, the people sat silently and watched. The structure was lit on the down-wind side and the flames quickly spread. With its high surface area, the temple was soon a skeleton which fell with a half-twist. People approached the flames and watched as its last parts turned to hot gas and rose into the sky. Here's a video of the burn, the collapse happens just after 9 minutes:
Back at Phage everything was packed, so P and I sat on 3-phase power adapters and discussed Burning Man romance in terms of semi-conductor theory before returning to the airport and sleeping.
Monday I struck my own camp, then returned to Phage for the last time and mooped for hours, finding all sorts of good stuff. We did our best to return the surface to its original state, including crushing and filling trenches, tire tracks, and so on. K was my ride home, and after finding R, we loaded my stuff, said goodbye at the airport, and left at about 1pm. Traffic was slow out of BRC as far as Gerlach, then picked up. We fueled at Carson City, and drove south on the 395. The sun set as we pulled into the Mobil at Lee Vining, where I conspired to eat a reasonable yet light dinner and marveled at the bathroom with running water. K, R, and I were in no hurry to get home, so we took a detour to Mono Lake and explored the tufa towers by moonlight, then continued on to Mammoth.
After a few false starts, we found a Mammoth hot spring around midnight and soaked under the stars and meteors for nearly 2 hours. At last, a place to get clean! The following morning I found the one place I had neglected to scrub - the back of my hands - still carried a patina of playa dust. I climbed into my carefully packed clean clothes and K drove us south through the Owen's valley until just before dawn, we explored the Fossil Falls by flashlight. I drove some more, passing through Red Rock Canyon at dawn, with Venus and Jupiter clearly visible in the east. R came to life near Mojave, so we ducked into a Denny's, I ate a decent meal, and then R drove us the rest of the way to Pasadena, arriving around 10am.
I had heard of, read about, and imagined Burning Man for years. It surpassed all my positive expectations and failed to meet my negative ones. The climate, culture, and conditions were less extreme and much more friendly than I had anticipated. The diversity of artistic expression exceeded my expectations by about a factor of 20. That is, if you try and imagine all the things you think are possible at Burning Man, you will be lucky to get to 5% of what is there. I can and will recommend at least one visit to anyone who thinks they might like to go. I don't think it's the universal panacea or the only place I can ever be myself, but I am privileged to live an existence which ordinarily suits me quite well!
Here are two slightly NSFW videos which capture at least a fraction of what Burning Man is about.
Some of my loyal readers may not know that I just got back from a 10 day trip to Spain! Summer in LA is a time of heat and getting research done, but I was toying with a trip to Europe some time during the next year to catch up with some friends when two events occurred to bring the schedule forward. First, my old housemate/chem lab partner B finished his other PhD, and second another old friend T narrowly escaped death and dismemberment, and was recovering on the sunny northern coast of Spain. Meanwhile B decided the best way to celebrate finishing a few years of pain and drudgery in grad school at Oxford would be to spend a month walking across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, or French Way, an ancient pilgrimage route leading to the alleged remains of St James.
Cut to last Friday, 2am. I can barely sleep, which is lucky, because an airport van picks me up and whisks me through the LA streets to LAX, where I wander about desperately trying to remember how to walk long distances. The previous week's training sessions were cancelled when I came down with a nasty cold, but dedicated sleeping and doing nothing seems to have taken care of the worst.
The first leg, to JFK, enjoyed a 100kt tailwind courtesy of the jet stream. The second leg, from JFK to Brussels, involved talking programming with a retired COBOL programmer/grandmother and watching Wrath of the Titans - excellent aeroplane TV. In Brussels, I had a 6 hour layover, so caught the excessively swift and smooth train to downtown, and walked around looking for bread, water, and an ATM. At 8am on Saturday, Brussels isn't exactly the most alive place, but I eventually found my way to another train station and returned to the airport in time to negotiate 18 flights of escalators and 400 chocolate shops for my final flight to Bilbao, in Spain.
This flight featured a nearby child with the most piercing scream I have ever heard, and I've heard a lot of children scream, for unrelated reasons! I slept soundly. Bilbao delivered me to a sequence of buses and before long I was in Pamplona, meeting B and finding the Xarma Hostel, a mere 31 hours after leaving my home in Pasadena, and only 47 hours since I'd last been horizontal. So I was wide awake. B and I went shopping and managed to find enough ingredients for a vegetarian, gluten free dinner, which I consumed with all the enthusiasm of someone who had lived on airline food for a few days.
The following morning we rose before dawn, packed, and got started. Walking through downtown Pamplona (site of the famous 'running of the bulls') we located the Camino, marked with shell symbols and yellow arrows, and began our journey westward. I should note that B had already walked for 4 days from the edge of France, and had waited in Pamplona for me to arrive. Most days the Camino ends in a rather small village which can be hard to get to - as I discovered a few days later.
About half way through the first day I'd finished my first loaf of bread just as we climbed a ridge bedotted with gigantic wind turbines. We arrived in Puenta la Reina at around 1pm. B's feet were rather blistered though mine in my terrible sandals were as yet holding up fine. Puenta la Reina was an ancient walled town built to support pilgrims in the 11th century, with wide arched doors to ground floor stables, walls, and an ancient arched bridge. Every shop was closed until the evening so we relaxed. B was carving a walking stick with an emblem for each day of the trip. That evening we found a bunch of Irish pilgrims (and thus the best food in town), got yelled at by a drunk homeless pilgrim, and took an early night.
The following day we got up around 5:30, obtained mass quantities of carbs, and walked out of the city. B realised he'd forgotten his stick (not the first or last time, I might add), but after retrieving it we continued on through the Spanish countryside. I had brought my video drone, but sadly the transmitter had range issues, so flying it too far away tended to result in abrupt catastrophe. Fortunately I had many spare propellers! Video from the drone can be found here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvwG6Z0cO8A), though watchable footage is only really possible if there is no wind at all.
I ate my own weight in Spanish tortilla for lunch, and by 1:30 we reached the next town, Estella. B and I found a piano shop in Estella, where we played music for a while. Both of us have not practised much in the last year, and it shows. In most hostels people are up most of the night drinking and being noisy. In the pilgrim albergues, many people were fast asleep by 4pm! Nearly everyone sported gratuitous blisters and quite a few were strapping up various joints. Most people were carrying a lot more weight than they needed! Including me! I could have done without the first aid kit, the cooking pot, the drone, the raincoat, and the solar panel. I helped modify B's flip flops to make them more useful, with a pocket knife and string. They were works of art.
The following morning came with the sad news of the death of Robin Williams, one of my favourite comedians. We struggled on, passing a fountain of free wine, then remarking on the relative lack of pilgrims on the road. Later that evening, we met a few of them who had filled their water bottles with wine and thus achieved a slower but less painful pace! An incredible sunrise illuminated a distant cliff and golden haystacks. Toward midday, our pace slowed and we were passed by numerous pilgrims, including two Russian students in their late teens. I haven't spoken that much Russian in quite some time! Soon after we arrived in Los Arcos and checked into the Austrian albergue, which had a nice kitchen and a small pond in which to soak feet. During the night a strong wind blew up and in my attempt to retrieve some washing before it blew away, I found we'd been locked in - a sobering reinforcement to my usual ritual of identifying two fire/emergency escape routes before bed in any unfamiliar place. What B lacked in mobility he made up for with excessive gregariousness and we made about 20 new friends that afternoon.
The following day was my last day on the Camino. We walked through the stone old-town, many buildings abandoned and derelict, and then popped out into the countryside. The route typically goes through three or four towns a day, with ample opportunities to water and feed oneself. The last town before our destination was Viana, which seemed to suffer from being slowly consumed by the adjacent and much larger Logrono. It had a cool church which had partially collapsed. In Logrono we saw a good example of predatory hostel locating, in which a new hostel positions itself just down the road from an older one, so that sore footed pilgrims drop their pack at the first possible moment. I left B to carve his stick and walked across town to the bus station, where I bought a ticket to Gijon the following day, then back via a supermarket and a few other neat places. That evening B and I went out on the town and found a good place where we ate awesome food and, later, bought some sandals for B so he could join the sandal-wearers cult. Back at the hostel, got involved in a lively discussion about best practises for blister treatment. A lot of people drained them, cut them, or even sewed threads through them overnight! No-one seemed on board with my suggestion of draining and fixing the gap with a small amount of superglue. As a member in long standing of the sandal wearing cult myself, I have often had cause to patch up the odd hole and superglue works perfectly, if you don't overdo it. Sometimes you can even stick your fingers together.
The next morning B left early and I stuck around, walking around the old town of Logrono, buying some breakfast, and eventually finding my bus to Gijon. It took about 6 hours to get to Gijon - quite a long drive, through impossibly rugged mountains dotted with half-abandoned villages, cows, and sometimes huge flocks of eagles. I walked around the beaches of Gijon, stalked by pigeons who recognised my by now high bread content. After a magnificent dinner, I located my couchsurfer. A rather nice dentist who rode a speedy motorcycle, we immediately got on well, and that evening walked into town for a giant fireworks display in celebration of the city's festival.
The following morning I woke, packed, and walked across town to meet up with T, my other mystery friend! I last saw her in late September 2010, so it was great to catch up and see for myself how not-dead she was, despite recent injuries. After a magnificent lunch involving cider poured from a great height, we said goodbye and I walked back into town.
My original plan had been to catch a bus to Santander and enjoy the beach and stay with couchsurfers. My couchsurfers had all fallen through, however, and the coastal weather was windy, cloudy, and cool, so I instead decided to return inland. All the direct buses were booked out, so at 4pm I took a bus to Leon, then a train to Palencia, then another train to Miranda de Ebro, arriving at about midnight. I was relatively certain that B's feet would prevent him making it to the nearby Santo Domingo de la Calzada until the following day, so I found a local hotel and prepared to, you know, roost. But wifi was my friend and after 3 days of radio silence, B got a message through confirming he was, at that minute, already IN Santo Domingo. If I had arrived the following day at 10am or so and walked the wrong way to intercept him, we might never have met. Instead I jumped in a taxi and by 1:30am was in Santo Domingo.
At about 10pm the last hotel closes its doors, so I hunkered down in a doorway where, despite wearing ALL my clothes, by 3am a cold breeze made not moving difficult. I walked around town with my phone out and eventually managed to locate the holy grail - unsecured wifi! I took advantage of several hours of unscheduled time to check all the internet stuff I needed to do, and then walked to the four corners of the town to stare at the stars and talk to sleeping ruminants and count road tiles. At around 6am I found B's albergue and walked straight in, which he found pleasantly surprising. Sandals it turned out had worked for the better and he was now making excellent time. I took a quick nap on the kitchen table while they all packed, then we set out for the next town. It felt good to be back on the Camino, and I was rather wired rather than tired.
By that afternoon, however, 28km of walking plus failing to sleep/lie down had taken its toll and my feet were a little sore. We picked the best of Belorado's five albergues (quattro cantones) and spent the afternoon hanging out in their back yard, which featured a greenhoused pool, a lot with chickens, peacocks, geese, and rabbits, and several adjacent derelict houses. I caught up on laundry, and together with a german vegetarian Z cooked a gigantic dinner. We met a Basque fellow A who was an expert on conflict resolution and had a long and interesting chat about the nature and history of the rebels in northern Spain. Apparently a cease-fire was signed only 2 years ago.
The following day I fried the left-over dinner and we left early, quickly leaving the towns behind and walking the longest stint on a rather terrible trail, perhaps 4 hours between towns. B, Z, and I sang a lot of Disney and other songs on the trail, and eventually we arrived in San Juan de Bottega, another town with one non-abandoned building, a gigantic church containing the remains of several saints and some cool architecture, and a dusty combine harvester. 3km further on we found our destination, Ages. Unlike the medieval architecture of Los Arcos and Puenta La Reina, Ages and Belorado featured rows of larger places in an un-walled setting, perhaps benefiting from nearby larger towns and almost certainly much later construction. Like the other towns, especially ones away from the Camino, Ages was also mostly abandoned, with about a dozen modern renovated homes between many more derelict and abandoned older places. At this point I realised that despite the relaxing nature of life on the Camino, it was, today, a highly privileged existence to spend a month involved in unnecessary physical labour! The majority of pilgrims were not religiously motivated. After a terrific dinner I walked to the outskirts of the town and set up a timelapse with my camera, which can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JOPbhqoU6s
The next morning I retrieved my camera, where the dawn's light revealed a field full of thistles, explaining my previous discomfort! We set out but failed to find a town with a bakery, leaving me rather hungry, for a change. Eventually, on the outskirts of Burgos, I ate a semi-microwaved tortilla and we pressed on. The last 2 hours of the walk was through the outer sprawl of Burgos, one of the most depressingly awful things I've seen in quite a while! Fortunately the old town was lovely. I located the bus station, bought a ticket, and took a shower. Not long after, I said goodbye to B and Z, and 2 hours later was in Bilbao, footsore and exhausted.
So I walked for an hour across the city, taking in the Guggenheim museum and various Calatrava edifices, meeting a couchsurfer at the city hall. With him I walked through a giant fair ground to his place at the top of the tallest hill in Bilbao. Not long after, we returned to the city, climbing down about a thousand steps into the old town, where more than half a million people had gathered to celebrate the city's festival. It was out of control!
I had an early flight the following day so narrowly caught the last bus to the airport. At the airport (another Calatrava design) we were herded into a rather cool room to stay overnight next to the car rental place. At 2am they sent a floor polishing unit around to help us sleep. I guess they could start the buses a bit earlier in the morning! A moderate amount of yoga and armrest limb threading and I could sleep flat, although by 4am I was shivering too much to sleep well.
Later that morning I was in Brussels once more, this time with a 9 hour layover. I boarded a train to Ghent, where I met an old colleague E, who I had not seen since accidentally running into them in early 2011 in San Jose! We spent two hours catching up on our respective news, discussing how best to navigate the academia/industry divide, and being shown the awesomeness of downtown Ghent. All too soon it was time to return to the station and the airport, and take a flight to Washington DC. On the flight I watched the Dark Knight Rises, listened to the Beatles, thought about the Stokeslet Green function, and watched a few other silly films. My neighbours were veteran electrical engineers, specialising in low-voltage switching. That is, less than 11kV! At DC passed through about 15 layers of immigration and security, then boarded the last flight to LA, on which I mostly slept. I got back to my place at around midnight, 38 hours after leaving Burgos, and immediately stayed up for 5 hours collating photos and otherwise having a terrific time.
It is nice to have the freedom to occasionally zoom around the world and indulge in pointless physical exercise for days at a time. Something to consider with career development!
Some time before 28 March, 2011, my dear great aunt R asked me to do a blog post on what my actual research is. What is it that I actually do on a day-to-day basis?
The reasons for the absurd delay in writing this are many, but I think it's time to get on with it, since I finally published something. It can be found at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.7029v1.pdf .
In this post, I'll talk generally about what my day-to-day existence is like when I'm not doing exciting stuff I write blog posts about, and then I'll give an executive summary in plain English of what the paper is about.
Here's a photo of me in my office.
I spend a LOT of time here. On the window providing some shade is a gigantic chart of all the isotopic nuclides. It's like a periodic table, but with isotopes too. The story behind the mask is too detailed to relate here.
I'm wearing a shirt I had printed with the Maxwell equation written in exterior differential form - it's a very compact way to write the equations which completely describe electromagnetism. To my right on the desk can be seen some toy magnets, a titanium spork, a spec sheet for an orbital telescope I worked on, some 3D printing stuff, a rocket design manual, and a giant spanner. To my left on the desk is a pile of papers on true polar wander (the process by which the earth tips over), multiple Rubiks cubes, a jar of vegemite, a toothbrush, a pile of books on Chinese, Russian, Indian history, and geophysics. Hanging from my laptop is one of my small drones charging on a USB cable.
Concealed behind me is a gigantic pile of papers dealing with my actual research, which is on gravitational wave propagation algorithms. Plural, because all but one don't work. Proof by exhaustion states that there is a large space of possible algorithms, and the correct one is in there somewhere, and all you have to do is optimize on every possible dimension until you find it. Unfortunately the number of dimensions, and thus potential causes of errors, is practically infinite.
Don't think for a second, though, that simply getting a nerdy shirt and a cluttered desk will result in (possibly correct) algorithm generation. Many, many long hours I've frittered away my youth experimenting with various schemes that not even I think might work. When I started this post, more than three years ago, I'd just started out, and the problem had not even formed. A year later, I hard started on the problem plus a bunch of preliminary work. Two years after starting, I discovered that the general consensus was that the problem was impossible to solve, at about the same time that I had a scheme that seemed like it was thinking about working - enough to present a poster at APS. Since then, every last part of the algorithm has been chopped and changed, like a car that, over its lifetime, becomes an entirely different car through part substitution. Part of the fun of using an object oriented code is that this is even possible with some degree of confidence.
The code is written in C++, one of the most powerful and most widely used high-performance programming languages, and one of the hardest to master. After about 3 years of using it, I can say with confidence I still have not plumbed the depths of my ignorance on the topic. Common knowledge suggests a decade of incidental use will result in reasonably good understanding. I must emphasize, however, that even the most bizarre, difficult to use programming language is still orders of magnitude more simple than the simplest natural languages, even made-up ones like Esperanto.
All that said, what does the paper actually talk about? It's not the sort of scientific paper that announces a new result, or some great discovery. It's more representative of the bulk of scientific papers, representing incremental progress. It's also a methods paper, in that it establishes a new method for solving a known problem. It's also a general paper, in that future papers (probably from me, maybe from other people) will refer back to it as establishing the basic method, and laying out the formalism in modern notation.
The paper contains a lot of equations. None of the equations are particularly new, in the sense that I did not have to discover 'the equation of gravity' in order to do this work. That equation (The Einstein Field Equation) has been known for nearly 100 years. Any new equation would not be correct, because that is the correct equation. But it's actually a horrendously complicated equation, and we have to slice it up into (about 50 different) manageable parts to solve on the computer. People have been trying since the 1960s to solve this equation on the computer, but only succeeded starting in 2005. Many things can make computers go wrong when solving equations, and this equation can and does produce all those problems, plus some new ones. For example, when simulating black holes, the simplest choice of coordinate system is called inertial, which means the coordinate system you'd get if each grid point was in freefall. It's simple because there are no accelerations, and it's the coordinate system you get in space when there's no apparent gravity. But a blackhole quickly swallows that coordinate system, which is very sad.
Fortunately, I work with an existing code base of more than 100,000 lines, written by many collaborators in my group over the last decade or so. This provides a LOT of functionality which just doesn't exist in many other codes or programming languages. This allows me to focus on the algorithms themselves, instead of getting bogged down with a lot of low level functions.
The paper starts with a general discussion of the problem that my work directly addresses. The existing code is tremendously powerful and successful, and simulates black holes that inspiral, merge, and ring down, emitting gravitational waves in the process. We hope to detect those waves on earth, which will provide us with new insight into these peculiar and high-energy regimes. The simulation volume is typically similar in size to earth's moon. Even at its outer edge, the grid points are very close to the action, and the coordinate system is shaken by the gravitational waves. This makes unique determination of the gravitational waves difficult, because it's difficult to see what's going on when everything is shaking around.
Unfortunately, even a little bit of error is unacceptable if we want to have a hope of getting useful physics out of gravitational wave astronomy. So there's an equation which allows extraction of gravitational radiation from the simulations, by simulating the space between the simulation and infinity. Unfortunately, the equation is so complicated that there is only one other code that does it. Written in the 90s, it is now too slow. Moreover, it does not exploit the advances that have been made with the code we use in our group.
Often in science progress is made when a fresh face (i.e. me) approaches a problem they don't know everyone else thinks is impossible. Or at least extremely technically annoying. And the first 10 or so attempts at solving the problem didn't work. At first, I tried to understand the process on paper, and later by prototyping using a simpler computer code and a simplified problem. Eventually I built up my understanding of the tools and system behaviour, which allowed better guesses at avenues for exploration. At the same time I was learning how the code worked and how to write new parts of it.
There were two central technical tricks I developed and exploited for this research. To the best of my knowledge, they've never been employed together in this fashion, and for the well being of grad students everywhere, I hope they never are again!
The first trick is one that just shouldn't work on computers, but somehow it does. The problem arises because the equations explicitly diverge on both sides of the equals sign. Eg, we want to solve for Q, where F(Q) = RHS(other stuff). Q is finite in the domain, but F(Q) goes to infinity as radius goes to infinity. Using some moderately complicated maths it's possible to invert F and write Q = F^(-1)(RHS(other stuff)), but getting it to work on a computer, where numbers can't be infinite and so on, took some finagling. I explain this in the paper in great detail, but suffice to say, without the code's ability to perform extremely accurate and quick radial integrals, this method would not work at all. All hail the Fast Fourier Transform!
The second trick is both better established in the literature and less well known among my advisers, and it's called the Magnus expansion. As it happened I worked out the basics for how the method would work, tried to devise a name for it, googled the name, and found someone else (Magnus, as it turns out) had already discovered this rather obvious technique and, what's more, had written a paper doing all the hard sums for me. In this case, the Magnus expansion was applied to a matrix which represented some complex numbers. The equation had an annoying part which could be thought of as a phase. The Magnus expansion allowed this phase to be set to zero, and ignored until it could be dealt with in a consistent fashion. Again, incredibly seat-of-the-pants numerical methods, and I'm just lucky that when all was said and done I'd only wasted about 14 bits of precision, leaving me with perhaps 6 orders of magnitude to play with. For people who know the difference between single and double precision floating point numbers, the difference makes ALL the difference.
Okay, I had the basics of this method finalized a year ago, and permitted myself a shy smile. There were a bunch of other technicalities covered in the appendices related to translating information from the simulations into the form where my algorithm could deal with it. I crushed that problem on only the third try. At this point I could have published yet another theory paper, but if you want the method to be used, or for anyone to take notice, you need to actually prove that it works. Especially when the underlying methodology is so left-field and the apparent efficiency increase (hundreds or thousands of times faster) so unlikely seeming.
To prove that it works you need to show that its stable by feeding it garbage and watching it resolutely refusing to explode. You also need to show that it converges. That is, as you increase the resolution, it gets closer and closer to a particular value in a predictable and most importantly, extremely rapid way. The prescription for these sorts of graphs is well known, and its in this phase that cryptic bugs are eventually discovered. Sometimes they even have a comment nearby saying "\\this will cause problems I bet...".
When the code behaves itself, you finally need to compare it to results produced with another similar code. Afterall, it could converge to garbage, which would be useful to noone. In this case, it was compared to the code it was designed to replace. First I had to convince this no-nonsense older code to do what I wanted it to do, and then get the parameters right to prevent its own menagerie of stability and convergence issues. Principle problems include it never being designed to do what we had in mind. Similarly, my code was never designed to operate with parameters that could compare to the older code. After a few decades of wasted CPU time and more than a few false starts, we generated comparable data sets. By this time, enough of the problems had been worked out that they were close enough to publish, as you can see in Figure 8 of the paper. This figure shows that over the absurdly long time scale we ran this code, both codes were pretty accurate to begin with. Moreover, when the resolution was increased, the error dropped by a certain, predictable amount. Lastly, the difference between the two codes is also really tiny. Of course, there are always a few problems. For instance, the older code begins to lose convergence toward the end. Also, the codes resolve the junk radiation to differing extents.
Junk radiation is nonsense signal at the beginning caused by the fact that the simulations have to start somewhere. This insult to well behaved computers causes unphysical fake waves to bounce around inside the simulation and sometimes even stop it working properly. We think my code might be able to stop or reduce junk radiation in the future. Stay tuned!
It bears mentioning that this work was a team effort! I don't name names on this blog, but the most overt contributors are listed on the paper. For a more complete list, you'll have to wait for my thesis! But you know who you are, and without you, there is a good chance we would have never known this problem was, indeed, possible to solve.
The high point of the trip was the hike I did on Thursday, a 20 mile loop with 7000ft of elevation gain to North dome via Yosemite falls and Mirror lake. Other cool things include waterfall rainbows and a raven falling into a stream right next to me.
(This is the long-lost post on the conference material of The Amazing Meeting, 2013.)
If you were to wander into the South Point Hotel in Las Vegas some time between July 10 and 13 this year you would have the very good fortune to find yourself in the middle of The Amazing Meeting (otherwise known as TAM), the largest annual meeting devoted to skeptical thought. Three days of talks, sessions, discussions, gambling, drinking, and late night spa sessions, all in some way related to the fundamental question: how do we know what we know? Run by the James Randi Educational Foundation, the extraordinary spectacle was witnessed last year by none other than your humble servant. Collating my notes, I shall now attempt to give an impression of the experience.
What is skepticism? Skepticism is not just about making fun of young earth creationists, believers in ghosts, aliens, paranormal stuff, and so on. It's not about having a set of beliefs that those things are silly. It's not even about reductively doubting everything and refusing to have a good time. Rather, it's a cautiously positive statement; I will believe anything if the evidence shows it to be true. The usual response of a skeptic to an outrageous claim is 'show me the evidence'. As we know, outrageous things do occasionally actually exist (like being related to peanuts), and the evidence to support that can certainly be produced.
Stereotypically the obsession of predominantly older, white, bearded, balding and overweight men, skepticism has sent out shoots in all directions, particularly with the internet, and I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity on display. There was even a delegation from Australia!
One of the risks of a gathering of this nature is the echo chamber. Put a thousand people in a room to talk about the silliness of magical thinking and you'll have a thousand heads nodding in agreement and, in my case, sleep. Fortunately, many of the presentations inverted this principle by illustrating just how prone skeptical people were to making exactly the same mistakes. Barbara Drescher gave an account of how, upon infiltrating mensa, she found a group of self-congratulatory 'high IQ' types hosting talks on everything from angels to ESP. Similarly, studies showed that retirees who had been warned about telephone fraud were actually more prone to being conned. Why? No-one likes to think they're stupid!
Some of the presenters gave perspective on first-hand engagement with proponents of 'woo'. As always, most of the victims are sincerely deluded. Only a small minority are opportunistic con artists! Bryan and Baxter bill themselves as a paranormal phenomena investigations team, and gave a rousing talk about their discoveries of haunted houses, UFOs, rejuvenating gazing, demon rape, and everything else you can imagine. Of course, the primary challenge is provide the tools for critical thinking as well as a diagnosis or judgement, and above all, to avoid being a dick about it! Several skeptical societies have offered large cash prizes for scientific proof of paranormal phenomena. Surprisingly, there are regular attempts to win them, usually by deluded people with cash flow problems. Needless to say, none have ever been won! Less surprisingly, the contestants always have an excuse for failure, ranging from mobile phone interference to orbital precession.
Not all attempts at engagement are quite as successful. Susan Blackmore attempted to set up a large scale double blind study of bio-electric armband shields. What exactly they do or how they work is somewhat unspecific, but the manufacturer was happy to produce a number of placebos. Unsurprisingly, there was no statistical difference between the placebos and the 'real thing'. During a data audit, however, it was eventually discovered that the manufacturer had screwed up their supply data and it was impossible to draw conclusions.
Why are people, skeptics included, so dogmatic in their beliefs? So unable to change their minds? And above all, so prone to believing in stuff that makes no sense? You might be tempted to think that you at least are mostly rational, but that in itself is a prime example of the sort of delusion that is almost impossible to break through. Fundamentally, humans make decisions instantaneously and emotionally. Rational thought swiftly comes along and almost universally justifies the decision. The more rational we are, the more easily we are able to convince ourselves that our decision was correct. But the decision making process was about as sophisticated as a squirrel deciding to flee my oncoming bicycle.
Some of the talks concerned the intersection of skepticism and policy. While readers are no doubt aware of some congressional members wacky and harmful insistence that pregnancy rarely results from sexual assault, Susan Jacoby pointed out that from a factual consistency point of view, aged care policy was just as silly. Why? If you live to 55, you have a 50% chance of senile dementia well before you die, and that's a fact. Whether or not you eat your vegetables and exercise. Yet the mass delusion seems to be that if you do the right thing, you'll be alright. Obviously this has and will continue to have a dire and officially unanticipated effect on aged care.
James Randi himself, wizened yet feisty gave several talks recounting his exploits as a magician and escape artist, and later in debunking Uri Geller (the spoon bender), Peter Popoff (the radio assisted mind-reading preacher), and Project Alpha. He also announced his recent marriage to his long-time partner, to broad cheers.
Skeptics' enthusiasm for rational thought has an interesting corollary; a rabid appreciation of magic and mind reading! Of course, we all know these involve no violations of the laws of physics, but if anything, a heightened awareness for the feebleness of the senses makes for a heightened appreciation of being fooled in a spectacular way. Penn Jillette, a permanent Las Vegas resident, has long been associated with TAM and threw a bacon and doughnut party featuring his very own No God Band. Apollo Robbins, one of the world's best pickpockets, also made an appearance. I did not agree with everything I saw! Far from it, there is a healthy quantity of dissent throughout the conference. My particular gripe was with usually older distinguished presenters making a negative example of the effects of rapid IT progression. Ranging from the dangers of computer games (show me the evidence!) to denouncements of the profusion of supposedly useless diagnostic information, like whole genome sequencing (we'll work out what to do with it), TAM nevertheless crammed a huge amount into three short days. Hands down the most interesting conference I attended all year!
Of course, skepticism has been around for a very long time, but I was surprised just how detailed and developed the movement is. TAM helped provide perspective on just how many people are doing all sorts of interesting things.
Memorial Day weekend saw another instantiation of the legendary Ge136 field trip. This trip has taken me out and about all over the south west US, and is always a blast. My recent trip to Zion was no exception!
Friday morning I collected some food supplies, snuck (one of) my secret payload(s) into the truck, assembled a compelling team of passengers and copilot, and headed for the expressway. Even at midday on Friday before memorial day, the traffic was slow going at times, though we managed to avoid a terrible snarl on the 15 by diverting up the 215. Before long we cruised through Apple Valley, Barstow, Baker, Primm, and Vegas, continuing past a crash on the 15 to Valley of Fire state park, where, rather unusually, we arrived at the camp site well before sunset.
Caltech's master of all things culinary Tom Mannion and a few friends had come to cook us an incredible dinner that took two days to finish. Surrounded by eroded rocks eroded from the fossilised Navajo formation dune fields, crossbedded, incredibly red, and eminently climbable, we discussed the upcoming meteor shower, the possibility of monopole detection, and the slightly overcast skies. I sat on a ledge overlooking the fire and tried to imagine what Zion canyon might be like.
That evening, sleeping on a camp stretcher beneath the stars the clouds cleared for long enough to see a few meteors including a very bright fireball, but not the thousands we had anticipated! At some point an EMT van showed up convinced one of us had managed to fall off the rocks, but everyone was okay.
Next morning we woke and while stuffing ourselves with leftovers talked about rocks while I flew my video drone around and between them. Soon enough we loaded up the cars and drove north. The 15 north of Las Vegas cuts through an incredible canyon as it climbs up the Colorado plateau. A relatively stable chunk of crust, the Colorado plateau has some of the most interesting sedimentary sequences in the world, all revealed in devastating clarity within the grand canyon and others as the plateau was lifted and incised about 60mya.
Beyond this canyon, the town of Hurricane lies next to the Hurricane fault, a normal fault that in the last few million years has resulted in relative lifting across the Virgin river of up to 800m, which caused the formation of Zion Canyon. We stopped in Hurricane for a presentation on the Pah Tempe hot springs there, sadly defunct since an earthquake and drilling project led to their abatement.
The 15 diverts through Utah before cutting east across northern Arizona above the grand canyon north rim. We turned off on the Turroweap road and followed a friendly geologist down to a breccia pipe. Some of the grand canyon sequence contains limestone, and its selective dissolution has lead to the formation of vertical pipes, somewhat like a filled sinkhole. These pipes, filled with sediment, have inward dipping bedding layers and often act like chemical reactors as different pore fluids from different levels flow up and down and mix. In particular, these breccia pipes contain a reductant that leads to the precipitation and concentration of uranium oxide, a mineral essential to the nuclear power industry. On the surface, the breccia pipe appears as a gently sloping bowl shaped area about the size of a football field, but beneath the surface disrupted rock extends for thousands of vertical feet. Over the next decade, the ore will be extracted, leaving the surface largely undistrubed.
Sadly we didn't have time to drive the 60 miles to the grand canyon rim and back, so we continued east and then north back into Utah and into Zion canyon. We arrived near the top, which are the youngest rocks dating from the early Jurassic, around 180mya. As we continued through the park, we went back in time. The campsite was near Moenkopi formation, dating from the beginning of the Triassic, right after the greatest mass extinction of all time, roughly 250mya.
Our first stop was checkerboard butte, a large conical slab of Navajo sandstone crosscrossed with stress fractures. Unlike the rocks in Valley of Fire from the same formation, these had been bleached white by a reducing pore fluid which dissolved the iron oxide right down to the level of the water table. As it moved through the rock, the minerals occasionally formed hematite concretions, small spheres of rock stained and hardened by a hematite matrix, and thus protruding from the sandstone face. Similar features have also been found on Mars.
We continued on through the canyon to the group campground, when S, TA emeritus, showed up. We knew we were in for a treat. Later that evening, the professor Joe told us the story of how he named his eldest son 'magnetite' in Japanese (a very auspicious name - the Kanji character means literally 'power stone'), and I set up my telescope to look at moons of Jupiter, the disk of Mars, and the rings of Saturn. Despite my best efforts I couldn't find comet Panstarrs, which was supposedly underneath the flat part of Ursa Major.
Next day, we had a full day of activity in the park planned, and even better, no driving! I produced a small jar of Vegemite at breakfast, which I shared with a few brave souls, though none asked for seconds! We caught the shuttle up to the grotto, where most of us zoomed up the well maintained trail to Angel's landing. Angel's landing is a tall promontory of rock sticking out of the middle of the canyon floor, more than a thousand feet high, and accessible only via a narrow, exposed trail with a chain to hold on to. After waiting in line while some rather silly people gradually realised that their ambition outclassed their ability in the same way that my flashlight is outshone by the sun, we made it to the summit and drank in the amazing view up and down the canyon.
On our return to the canyon floor, we had located a swimming hole. Fortunately my boxer shorts that day were brand new - the elastic more than competent, so I was able to swim without fear. The water was cool and refreshing and the bath highly recommended. S found a pair of glasses on the bottom. K lost her sunglasses. While sticking my toes into the freezing mud on the bottom, I found K's sunglasses and returned them to the light.
Soon enough it was time to return to the shuttle, where we climbed up into a cave covered with dripping water and hanging gardens. Flowers sprouted from the roof and a humming bird sipped the nectar.
Our last stop for the day was the narrows, the pointy end of the canyon, where the walls gradually close in, necessitating wet feet. We had a talk about desert varnish, a mysterious amorphous black coating on rocks, made of manganese oxide, occasionally found on Mars, and of unknown origin. I helped some canyoneers fix a rope on a waterfall for their descent. After a while we reached a good turning around point and walked back to the road, and, in due course, returned to the camp ground. I set up a timelapse, rehabilitated my drone after a recent crash, and made an alcohol fuel stove from an empty aluminium can, without covering myself blood! When dinner arrived, incredible quantities of pasta, I found to my dismay and confusion I had room for only one plate. That evening the stars shone overhead, a cool breeze blew down the canyon, and I snuggled in my sleeping bag as the events of the day played over in my mind.
The next morning, we packed our things and drove out the bottom of the canyon. Pausing near the rocket test track, we examined the lowest layers of the Zion canyon formation, including some rocks deposited during the poorly understood PT extinction. Later, near Quail Creek reservoir, we drove up an eroded anticline and had a good look at cryptobiotic soils, a common surface covering in non-sandy deserts. Built by bacteria over up to 50 years, it helps to retain surface moisture.
We drove back to Vegas. Traffic monitoring suggested the 15 and 210 from Vegas to LA would be stop and go for hours, so we diverted to the north, circling around the nuclear weapon test facility and stopping at a road-side shop that celebrated both Area 51 and one of the few legal brothels in Nevada. At Beatty, we turned west and crossed into Death valley, running around some dunes in 45C heat, then climbed a vertical mile before dropping into the desolate Panamint valley. A year ago, I saw it from the Hunter mountain saddle stretching below, and now we drove south along it. At the southern end we passed a pretty desperate looking borax mining town, reminiscent of some of the abandoned cities I saw in Russia.
From here the sun set and the story is all freeways and bad drivers. What an amazing weekend! Geologists have all the fun!
