15 Dec 1967 - ordeal enough for me

kw: personal experiences, ordeals, hiking, climbing

The date 12/15/1967 is significant to me for several reasons. One is that, from late afternoon until late evening, I found myself fighting for my life on a mountainside.

I enjoy walking, and hiking even more, and when I was living in Pasadena in the late 1960s I often hiked partway up the old Mount Wilson road. I never went all the way to Mount Wilson, which is eleven miles, but usually stopped at Henninger Flats after four miles before returning. The 8-mile round trip made for a pleasant afternoon's walk. I nearly always went alone.

On this occasion I was early, and decided to try a shortcut down the mountain. In this overview of part of the area, the Henninger Flats Ranger Station is at upper right. Top center you can see a turnout in the fire road. It is at the head of a small canyon down which I decided to hike. At extreme lower left is a cliff that interrupts the canyon, and brought about my difficulties. Actually, my ignorance and arrogance brought about my difficulties. That, and the lack of a topographic map, which might have led me to a safer route.

I took my time going down the little canyon, and it was easy walking for the half hour or so it took me to go about half a mile. Along the way I hopped down a couple of little dry waterfalls that were five or six feet high. Then I came to a twenty-footer. I managed to clamber down that one, which shows in this relief image as a chute to left of center.

I was walking along, thinking, "I'm glad I don't have to go back up that one". Then I came to the cliff/waterfall at bottom left. What shows in this image is a fifty-foot sheer drop. The drop is followed by very steep going for another hundred feet. Measuring with Google Earth while compiling these images, I figured the total drop is 154 feet.

I had no climbing equipment. I am not a very good free-climber. I was stuck! Nobody knew where I was. Although I knew I was within a mile of the ranger station, I didn't think they would hear me if I yelled, because of the ridge intervening. I was a couple weeks past my twentieth birthday, and wondering if it might be my last.

I decided to climb the canyon wall to my southeast (the right side of this image). I walked back up to the 20-foot dropoff and began climbing there. To my dismay, this was a north-facing canyon wall, so it had more vegetation than the opposite side. Most of the vegetation was thorny. Zigging and zagging to miss the roughest patches, and just plowing through where I had to, I climbed from sundown until after 9:00 PM, almost four hours.

When I attained the ridge top, I was just about center-right in this image, where a fire trail goes along the ridge line. From there I hiked half a mile to the Ranger Station. The ranger on night duty kindly gave me some water and called my parents to let them know I was OK and would be home in a couple of hours. I looked in a mirror, and was surprised that I wasn't the bloody mess I expected from all the thorns. My shirt was a total loss, but had protected me.

I hiked back down the four miles to where my car was parked and went home. It is the last time I have hiked alone, or without mapping the route beforehand! Those principles stood me in good stead in graduate school; I hiked a few hundred miles of the trails in the Black Hills getting my studies there done. I always made sure there was a safe route to the places I needed to go, and didn't deviate. I also usually carried a topo map.

I am thankful I didn't actually have very far to go, when I got stuck, and even more thankful I was in good physical shape for a 4-hour climb. I'd have been really embarrassed if Search and Rescue had to come out to get me. It is said, "You have to know your limitations." Sometimes it takes a bit of foolishness to find that out. Glad I lived through it.

Something to say

kw: personal experiences, marketing

Today I was in marketing mode, a rarity for me because it isn't my favorite activity. I attended a company conference, a combination of technical learning and "intramural" marketing, where I put up a poster. Its subject is not cleared for the "outside world"; suffice it to say it has to do with helping researchers find articles and reports they need among the company repository of technical documents. Curiously, it is not well known, so my poster is an early foray into improving our visibility.

I've had posters up before, a few times in the past couple of decades. This one seems to strike a chord. During the open poster session, I had a pretty constant stream of people taking the handout, asking questions, or taking my card. It wasn't the drudgery that many "marketing exercises" typically become. I am actually looking forward to tomorrow.

I recalled a story about someone who was stranded among people whose language he didn't know. What he did know was some technical stuff that happened to be helpful to the people. When rescuers came for him, he was doing pretty well for himself, in spite of the fact that he hadn't learned the language. He'd been passing on his knowledge by showing, not telling. As the story ends, he explains his good fortune by saying, "I had something to say." It is good to have something to say that is worth saying!

Dental drama

kw: observations, personal experiences

I spent a week eating on one side of my mouth after my root canal. Two days ago I had the next steps: a deep cleaning, the crown preparation of the bad tooth, and extraction of the wisdom tooth behind it, which was getting rather loose.

I don't really want to go into the 3½ hours at the dentist. The crown prep, in particular, was like hearing a jackhammer inside my head. Fortunately, the dentist did a stellar job of numbing everything. The extraction went very quickly, because the tooth was pretty ready to go.

All this happened Thursday. I wrote a book review that morning, then went to the dentist. I came home just before 1PM, and sat around reading until the Novocaine wore off. I was surprised that the empty socket wasn't painful. I'd heard such horror stories about post-extraction pain. Anyway, once I felt it safe to do so, I took a nap. I didn't eat until dinnertime Friday, though I worked about 2/3 of Friday.

Now it is Saturday. Things seem to be healing quickly. I got up late, and have eaten just soft stuff, until our pizza dinner. Still, I am eating primarily on the "good" side of my mouth. Wrap-up of the dental work will require two more visits, and be all done in mid-May. I'll be so used to eating one-sided by then, I wonder if it will be hard to switch back? Ha.

On another note, I mowed for the first time today. Then I fertilized. Lovely day for it, a little cooler than the weather people had predicted. It was nice to be outside. I figure an hour of pushing the mower around is equal to anything I do when I work out at the YMCA, so I suppose I caught up for not going yesterday. Some of my neighbors have azaleas blooming already, but none of mine are. Spring has fully sprung.

Tornado Stories

kw: tornadoes, personal experiences

I've been reading a book about tornadoes and tornado chasing. I'll review it soon. It reminded me of experiences going way, way back.

I first heard a tornado story from my grandmother. Her family lived in Wichita, Kansas when she was young. One sunny day, a storm blew up rather suddenly. The young girl, exploring in a hidden corner of the yard, didn't respond to being called right away. A hard wind prompted her to go around to the front of the house, trying to find people—everyone had vanished. She sat on the porch, looked across the street, and saw a neighbor's house shatter apart. The tornado lifted at that moment, and roared right above her. She looked up inside the funnel. She told me it was blue inside, rather bright against the dark sky.

I've heard from others that tornadoes that arrive in dry weather have a lot of lightning with them, including inside the funnel. Some tornadoes are visible after dark for that reason. I have only seen tornadoes in moist or rainy conditions.

As a child, growing up in the arid Southwest, I often saw dust devils. We kids would pretend they were mighty funnel clouds, and imagine being carried away like Dorothy, to Oz. On a few occasions I ran right into one of them. Once it was strong enough to give me a spin and sit me down. I never tried running into one that was carrying a few tumbleweeds, though!

I first saw (nearly) the real thing when I was in High School. I was working at a resort on Lake Erie. One afternoon a big storm protruded a wall cloud, then, one after another, seven waterspouts formed over the lake, spun ashore, and broke up. They were about half a mile away, no more than fifty feet across just above the water line.

I went to graduate school in Rapid City, South Dakota. We lived East of town. People boasted that the city had never had a tornado within city limits. You could see, though, on aerial photos (I was a Geology student) several scars of tornadoes that had knocked over swathes of trees in the Black Hills. One day, the boast became outdated. A huge storm system blew up, with wind of all kinds, but little rain. I looked out my back door and saw a funnel cloud forming, several miles away. I ran outside to photograph it. About then, a blast of wind blew me right back through the open door, into the house. It was the inflow from a nearby tornado. From the front door, we watched a tornado tear its way across a sorghum field, hoovering up about a third of my neighbor's crop. It was later determined that four tornadoes passed through the city that day.

Many years later, living in Oklahoma, I nearly drove into one. Oklahoma twisters tend to be rain-wrapped. Anywhere within a half mile of them, you can't see them. I was at a friend's house, about 5 pm. My wife called to say the tornado siren had gone off (I could hear it over the phone), and would I come home Right Now! Foolishly, I agreed...there was no siren howling near where I was. The traffic lights were all out, so I figured it had already passed on. I found out later, the town power came from the West, and the wires went down ten minutes before the storm arrived. I remember turning North onto Perkins, the main street toward home. It began raining buckets, and blowing hard. Within seconds there was surf in the middle of the street. When it began to hail, I whipped into a parking lot and drove to the lee side of a warehouse market. I'd been trying to find a radio station that was working. Just as gravel from the building's roof began falling on my car, I got a Tulsa station. I heard, "...we have it on radar. It is at the intersection of Perkins and McElroy." I though, "That's where I am!" A minute or two later, the wind began to drop. Within ten minutes the sky was blue, except in the East, where the storm was receding. I had to go around the rest of Perkins Avenue, because there were wires lying in the street. The power poles had all been broken off about 15 feet above the ground, and the upper floor of a 2-storey apartment building, right across the street from my shelter, had been removed. It seems the tornado wasn't quite on the ground when it went by me, about 100 yards away.

Five years later, we took a driving vacation through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota. On the road going West toward Goodland, Kansas, we saw an isolated storm get organized about twenty miles further on. Goodland was another twenty miles beyond that. It was similar to the Ohio experience, but not waterspouts. There were five tornadoes in all, and for several minutes at a time there would be three on the ground, apparently following the same track. About the time the one in front broke up, another would form at the rear. They looked like small tornadoes, perhaps F0; I don't think they were as big as F1. See The Fujita Scale of Tornado Intensity. Regardless, I slowed down, not wanting to get there too soon! After about fifteen minutes, the show was over and the storm broke up. Another fifteen minutes, and we drove by, seeing only a few "drag marks" on the ground showing where the funnels had crossed the highway.
The following year, we moved to the East Coast, where tornadoes are not impossible, but very scarce. Funny, though, we liked Oklahoma a lot, and talk about returning when I retire.