Fixed??

OK, for any and all of you what wanted to visit my flickr account but couldn't I hope that the problem is now fixed. I'm also hoping that you will NOT have to create an account just to view the photos.

I would like to take this opportunity to state that the flickr staff are fascist dogs and incompetent. I wrote to them to find out why my account seemed to be malfunctioning. Instead of telling me that my account had been censored because of some of partial nudity, they told me that they'd get right on finding out what was the matter. I didn't hear from them for a week. In the mean time I spent hours tracking down the problem myself.

My account is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nomadphotos/ . Once my subscription runs out they'll only see my back as I'm leaving.

Photos From This Summer

It's been a large task, but I finally got some photos on the interweb from this summer.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nomadphotos/

Or you can follow the flickr link in the column to the right. I hope you enjoy them. They make me homesick for the trail.

Perimeter Haiku

I got a chance to look at the Perimeter haikus I wrote. Most all of them include some inside reference that wouldn't make sense to others except this one. But this one is one of my favorites anyhow:

drop below radar
lay in the dirt and cower
night vision finds you

The Ride Home to New Hampshire

At some point on my ride west in the spring one of my tail lights has stopped working. I assumed it was just a loose connection and I'd just have to jiggle a wire. It didn't work. It wasn't the bulb either. I did all I was able to track the problem but I never got it fixed and resolved that I'd travel mostly during the day to avoid the faulty light from being spotted by the cops.

So when it came time to leave Burning Man I traveled mostly during the day and avoided driving til the wee hours of the night/morning as I usually do. It was nice to actually get decent sleep for once on this cross country trip. I was astonished when once in a while a cop would pass me by at night and NOT pull me over. I figured that an old VW bus would be high profile for carrying some weed and any thin excuse would be used as a pretext for getting a look inside the bus. They would be disappointed if they wanted to find any drugs inside the hippie bus, but I certainly didn't want a defective equipment ticket for the trouble.

It wasn't until I was at the PA/NY line that I realized that as of Sept 1, my bus was no longer registered. I didn't leave Nevada til Sept 10. Back in April I had sought to register my bus in advance but I was told that it was too far in advance. My plan was to have my father register it for me in August, but motorized transportation was not a big theme in the past 5 months of my life and so registration seemed like a distant abstract by the time I was driving home in Sept.

After I realized that I was unregistered I became so paranoid I might as well have been smoking big bags of weed. Unfortunately it was already past dark when I came to the realization that my bus could be impounded several hundred miles from home. For the next 50 miles, until I could find a place to park for the night, every pair of headlights that came up behind me was a potential cop that was going to pull me over.

It was a miracle that I somehow managed to drive from coast to coast in an unregistered '71 VW bus with a tail light out and not get pulled over. But in the end I arrived safe and sound mid day in Sanbornville, NH.

Burning Man - Post Event

I stayed for nine days after the event to help clean up the desert. Cleaning up the desert involves removing all traces of the event. First the participants go. The responsible ones do a fine job of leaving no trace. The irresponsible ones leave behind their garbage knowing that 'someone will take care of it'. What gets left behind is sometimes more than just a bag of garbage. Bicycles by the hundreds are left. There was even an abandoned vehicle - the engine was blown - and a camper was left as well at another location. All this stuff has to be removed somehow.

After all the participants have gone it's up to the remaining staff to remove all structures - trailers, small wooden buildings, all vehicles, container units, and massive generators. In addition all the cable that's been buried needs to be hauled back to the surface. Posts that were once a part of larger structures need to be pulled up. And of course there's the 17 miles of fence that needs to go.

While all that is going on there's another part of the clean up going on as well. Every little piece of MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) needs to be lifted from the dirt and removed. This is a meticulous job and has to be done over several square miles. I participated in doing this combing for debris over the area where we camped and I picked up even individual strands of hair at times. Nothing is felt if it is seen. The trouble often arises with all the shifting wind and dust we had that can bury things under a light layer. So we even raked the ground to help us find things that may have been missed the first time over.

After nine days, I decided it was time for me to hit the road. There was a staff that would stay til the beginning of October. But I'd been there for 5 weeks already. I'd been traveling since early April. I hit my wall and needed a change of scenery.

Burning Man - Photography

I got the opportunity to talk directly with two of the best known photographers on the playa. I asked each one of them for the one bit of advice they had for someone who is a beginner at working with people. It was great to see their different style and approach and listen to their advice. One of them snapped my photo while we were chatting and you can find it at: http://webbery.com/galleries/burningman/bm08/faces/index15.html .

I also got the opportunity to work with some friends of mine who volunteered to model. I learned a great deal from the experience. I hope to be able to post some of the photos on-line soon. I have those to upload as well as thousands from the hiking trip.

I found it hard to go out and take as many photos as I wanted because of a combination of work schedule, dust condition, low energy, etc. It was a challenge this year.

Speaking of dusty conditions - one incident of note was a particularly bad dust storm we had this year. It started with a cyclone of dust that went right by my camp - just one hundred feet away. It was a opaque tower of swirling dust. About seventy feet up was a four-person tent. It's door was open and it had been plucked from the ground. The wind continued to keep it inflated so that it had little chance of coming down any time soon. I watched as it passed by and headed for the open desert. When I last saw it, it was about a thousand feet in the air and a quarter mile out still dancing around the shifting column of dust. It was at that point that a wall of dust overtook me from behind and blotted out everything that was more than twenty feet away. It didn't let up all afternoon after that.

Burning Man - The Work

It's been so long since I last wrote that I'm assuming my only reader left is my mother. That being said, here's an update.

Burning Man this year was a mixture of good and bad. From the working side it all went remarkably smoothly. There were a few key individual co-workers who's lack of work ethic hampered things greatly and were a constant frustration. But despite them the operation has been fine tuned over the years and is starting to run quite well.

I have worked on the radar for a number of years. In a nutshell I watch a radar screen and can spot people trying to enter the city from any direction other than the gate; thereby avoiding the cost of the ticket. I can spot vehicles, but also bicycles, and even pedestrians as far as two miles out walking across the open desert in the dead of night. The night shift is the one I enjoy most.

This year prior to the event the shifts were extremely uneventful and boring. One night for example the biggest excitement we had was one car load of stoned people who simply missed the turn and had to be redirected to the main entrance. They all had their tickets and so were definitely not trying to break in.

I expected the excitement to pick up once the event was actually going and people were arriving in far greater numbers. It never happened. Each shift passed by as slowly as the last. I work alone but I'm in radio contact with the folks outside the fence that do the actual chasing of the would-be fence crashers. To keep ourselves awake and amused we turned to writing haikus about working Perimeter. I didn't copy any down to share, but hopefully I will have some to print later.

Going Out To The Desert

I'm leaving the pulsing metropolis of Gerlach tonight and heading for the dusty desert of Black Rock. This means I'll be harder to contact.

Off The PCT

I'm officially off the PCT. I had originally planned on going all the way to Canada. Back in '04 when I did this trail last I was able to get far enough north that I could make it to Burning Man, return to the trail, and complete the remaining amount before the weather closed in on me. This year however, I was traveling with a group that wasn't putting in the miles necessary to make it possible this year. I was faced with going on without them to complete the trail, or staying with them, enjoying their company and giving up completing the trail. I opted to stay with them. I left the trail at Castella, CA, at mile 1505. I actually hiked 1400 miles of trail because there was 100 miles of trail that was closed because of the wildfires out here this year. It's been a fun and eventful 1400 miles and I got to meet some great people.

I put out my thumb to catch a ride down to Yuba City were my VW bus has been with a friend. By wild coincidence the driver that stopped was someone I'd met 10 years earlier while hiking the Appalachian Trail. He drove me quite a ways and dropped me off. My next ride was with a young guy fresh out of the Army who was interesting to talk with. Now I'm at a friend's house in Yuba City and reunited with my beloved VW bus. I've been trying to wade through an over-stuffed e-mail inbox, eating junk food, and staying up WAY too late watching pulp TV.

In the next day or so I'll head out to the empty dusty location of Black Rock Desert, NV where I'll spend the next six weeks helping to build the city, protect it from would-be gate crashers, and then tear it all down again and restore the location to it's former emptiness. So while one adventure is at an end another is about to begin. I've taken thousands of photos of the PCT and look forward to sharing them once I get home and can process them. I'm also looking forward to taking many more photos at Burning Man.

My Obscure Fame

I just found out on the trail that to a small group of people I'm "that guy" who was outstanding enough in a way as to make a lasting impression. Though my name wasn't remembered, my deed was. Here's the background...

In 2000 I worked a summer job for an outdoor adventure group that led wilderness trips for teens. I was on a 3-4 day trip on the Lost Coast with 2 other adults and 8 teens. The Lost Coast is one of the last (THE last?) parts of the California coast to be undeveloped. It's a narrow band of beach between the ocean and steep rising cliffs. At high tide the water will come right up to the base of the cliffs in places. It's also known for having an active bear population so food must be properly stored.

I was out with two other adults and eight teens. One of the girls was reprimanded by another adult for breaking a cardinal rule. She took it upon herself to sneak out that night and run away. We didn't discover that she ran until the very next morning. She had all night to get ahead of us. We had two factors working in our favor - there was really only two directions she could go because of the water and the cliff, and she was most likely to go in the direction we came from because she wasn't trying to run for good so much as just pull the rip chord on her own time in the group. She wanted to go home, not evade us forever.

It was decided that one group leader would stay with the kids, while another would scout in the opposite direction just to rule it out, then return to help watch the remaining kids. I was chosen to go in the direction the girl had most likely gone. I had hiked the Appalachian Trail the year before and I was still in pretty good traveling shape. I took some of the gear from my pack for so I could travel lighter and off I went.

I found the girl once I got back to where civilization touched the beach again. She had gotten to a phone, made her calls and was simply waiting for one of us to catch up. My boss (back on the east coast) had already received a number of calls on the matter from the girls parents and understood what was going on. So when I called him to tell him that the girl was back under supervision he said "I didn't expect you to catch up for at least another half an hour". At that point I transported her to the airport and she was flown home.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago. I was chatting with another hiker and mentioned that I had once worked for a small outfit that did outdoor adventure. She asked what it's name was and I told her. (Here's the small world moment.) She began working for that very same company the following year. It was quite a coincidence given how very small the company is. I mentioned the incident above and she got excited. She told me that the girl remained the one and only runaway the company has ever had. She also said that that incident has been used as a training scenario every year since. Lastly she went on to say that she never knew who it was that went after the girl, but it was always emphasized that "that guy could really run!" That guy was me.