The Millwheel and Flume teams took a tour of Google’s datacenter in The Dalles yesterday. I can’t say much about what I saw, but there’s rather a lot that I would say if I could. It was an eyeball-widening sort of place.

I still don’t like the fact that the computer industry has decided on massive centralized datacenters as the way we’re going to do things. It’s great that Google is committed to not being evil, but no organization maintains its original values forever, and we’d all be better off in the long run if we built evil-tolerant distributed systems.

Of the dozen projects I listed a month ago, I’ve completed #2 (ALT&S expansion), #3 (living room couch), #4 (mysterious music project), #6 (dimmer for Hunter’s geode sculpture), #8 (repackage Shame Project lights for use in my living room), and #9 (serger workbench for ALT&S).

I haven’t touched the electric skateboard; it’s too cold and rainy out to ride such a contraption anyway. The high-output full-spectrum light has had a couple of setbacks, but once that next Digikey package arrives I should be able to finish it up in a night or two. The City Light thing – well, they weren’t actually looking for a proposal, just some kind of artist resume. It was frustrating and nothing is going to come of it.

The rhythm synthesizer algorithm is still kicking around in the back of my brain, but I may divert that mental energy toward learning to use Ableton Live. It’s been a long time since I did any studio production work, and the Mysterious Music Project reminded me how much I enjoy composition. I haven’t lined up any live-PA gigs lately; I think maybe I will spend some of this winter “in the studio”, making dance music.

Last on last month’s list was my motorcycle: it’s been in the shop for the last two and a half weeks. I’m not sure what’s going on with the mechanic but I’m getting worried. He had to order in a new front tire and some special tool to replace the clutch, but still, it shouldn’t be taking this long. Meanwhile I have been driving the car to work, or having Ava drop me off. It’s not so much fun.

The new active project list:
0) Finish assembling the full-spectrum LED array
1) Radian: clean up after introducing a new allocator and a new X64 backend
2) Recruit new members for ALTSpace – lots of room now
3) Acquire and learn to use Ableton Live

That’s a really short list. No wonder those boxes of fabric at the shop have been catching my eye every time I walk by…

I do have a few things on the home improvement list too:
– install AirPort base station for better internet access in the office
– figure out why one of the Shame Project lights doesn’t light up and fix it
– weed old stuff out of wardrobe
– help Ava hang up her wall-sized mirror
– introduce a more rational organization to the file box

Our kitchen has one big light, on the ceiling in the center of the room. It is adequate but not bright; you want something a bit more intense when actually cooking. I added a strip of under-counter LEDs months ago, which helped a lot on the preparation side of things, but it’s still pretty dim over on the range itself.

While rummaging around looking for a camera cable this afternoon, I happened to find an Edison-based LED bulb I bought three or four years back. It was one of the very first generation of LED-based home lighting products, and I never used it for anything as its light beam was too narrowly focused: but aha, I thought, this would make an excellent spotlight for the range.

A cheap screw-on base and some not-at-all-up-to-code wiring later, it works perfectly: bright white light pointing straight down at the stove top.

Of course I found out why the main light is so dim: it has two sockets, but only one is populated. Ha. Still, this LED device solves the problem, and only burns 3 watts. It’d take at least 10 or 15 watts in the ceiling fixture to yield the same effect.

I’m sexy and I know it, yeah!

I did some more work on the light module for Ava’s desk last night. The goal is to construct a full-spectrum array comparable to a 500W halogen work light, to illuminate her work surface and help stave off the Seattle grey-sky winter blues. I estimate that it should be possible to produce a comparable level of light using only 150W. Of course LED-based lights are available at all brightness levels now, but I am not aware of any commercial full-spectrum units yet – and after designing this project it is pretty easy to see why. Give it another year or two and I think this sort of light will be available off-the-shelf, but right now it is still a challenging hobbyist project. Perfect for me to play with!

As per usual, I have gotten myself in a little deeper than I expected. Every LED project I’ve done previously starts with a fixed-voltage DC power supply, then I add appropriate current regulation for each LED circuit. This time I knew I was going to be drawing a great deal of current, so I thought it would make more sense to run all the LEDs off 120VAC. This is not as crazy as it sounds: it’s the same thing all those LED christmas light strings do, only I’m using much more powerful emitters. Instead of running all the lights in parallel, regulating each one independently, I decided to run all the LEDs in series with a single regulator: dividing a single power loss across all the lights, instead of multiplying it by the number of lights.

I started with a bridge rectifier and a large capacitor; the output, I expected, would be roughly 120VDC. Each of the Bridgelux emitters drops 8.9V, so I wired up a dozen of them in series. Then I threw in an LM317HVT linear regulator, rated for 40V / 1.5A, and configured it as a 1-amp current regulator.

This did not work. The lights came on briefly, then something went “pop”, and the lights went out. In the second or two before I managed to disconnect the power, two of the LEDs flared on and went “pop”, leaving a black smudge across the lens. Uh oh.

Further testing revealed that the output from the rectifier was nothing like 120V – instead I was getting something close to 170V! Now of course the whole point of alternating current is that the voltage alternates, swinging back and forth constantly. When we say that wall outlets supply “120 volts” or “110 volts”, that’s the RMS average – at any given instant, the outlet voltage may be anywhere between -170V and +170V. I expected that my little rectifier/capacitor setup would smooth out the peaks and valleys, giving me a nice steady 120V, but it appears that I’m drawing so little current that the voltage just stays high all the time. This is just a guess, really – it would all be so much easier if I had an oscilloscope.

I think the first “pop” was the LM317HVT, which is designed to handle a maximum of 40V difference between input and output. On encountering a 60V difference, it must have fried itself closed; with no remaining current regulation, the LEDs started overloading, and thus the bright flash and the pop as the magic smoke escaped.

I ordered a bunch of replacement emitters, replaced the two damaged ones, and added six more to the chain. Now I have eighteen of the Bridgelux units wired up in series, for a total drop of 160.2 volts. I also threw in a 10-watt, 68-ohm resistor to help out with current regulation. This seems to work, and it is almost hilariously bright. I should be able to replace the LM317HVT now and keep the current set where I want it.

If I can get this to work, the next step is to augment the “neutral white” spectrum with three other frequencies. “White” LEDs have a big spike in the blue range and a softer, broader lump in the yellow/green; this setup stimulates all three of our color receptors more or less equally, so the light looks white, but it doesn’t actually illuminate colored surfaces evenly. The reds are very weak, and there’s a noticeable gap in the cyan as well. My solution is to interleave colored LEDs with the white ones, adding 660nm (deep red), 627 nm (red), and 505 nm (cyan). I’m sure somebody, somewhere, has tried something like this before, but I haven’t been able to find any trace of it on the web, so I don’t really know how it’s going to come out. I expect that I will have to tweak the color balance somewhat, but in the end I hope to have a very bright light with all visible frequencies reasonably well represented.

I had this idea, while I was out hiking with my sister Jeanine, for a piece of music I wanted to compose as a gift for my mother on her birthday. I thought about it all afternoon, as Jeanine and I ground our way up the snowfield leading to Muir Pass, and by the time I got home I had pretty much worked out what I wanted to do.

One day at lunch, my coworker Josh H. mentioned that he sings in the Byrd Ensemble. A few emails back and forth with the choir’s director sufficed to arrange a recording session.

This is the result. It is a medley of my mother’s two favorite hymns: the Doxology, set to Old Hundredth, and “Crown him with many crowns”. I’ve reworked the harmonies, but the melodies came straight from the traditional tunes.

Microkernel Construction Lecture Notes: a detailed tour of the L4 microkernel, explaining the design decisions and performance constraints.

Jeanine and I wired up a power supply for three of the Shame Project lights this afternoon, while Ava mounted the light modules into three paper lanterns. We hung them from the ceiling in the corner over the couch. It’s a nice effect: a colorful, diffuse brightness, just enough to read by, with a slow, quiet color shift animation.

My sister Olivia got married this weekend. Her new husband Brian is a solid dude and I’m glad the two of them are going for the long haul.

Ava and I decided to drive down to Sacramento for the occasion, since flying basically just sucks anymore. I took Friday off and we cruised down I-5, arriving in Sacramento about ten minutes before the big post-rehearsal dinner at Spataro. We adjourned to the hotel bar, and stumbled upstairs at some very late hour.

Saturday we wandered down K Street, hung over, and did a little shopping. Then the wedding: a small church, full of guests, strewn with leaves. The tone was very serious, until the end: my mother hired a local high school marching band to do the ‘Love Actually’ musical surprise, with a big thumping snare drum and a tuba. It was fun, if a little chaotic. We all took a stretch Hummer back to the hotel for the reception.

Sunday we kidnapped my sister Jeanine, dropped the convertible top, and set off northward. It was sunny and pleasant until about ten miles from the Oregon border, when it got cold. The California / Oregon border may be a mapmaker’s straight-line fancy, but there is a genuine ecological boundary there too.

Jeanine is between jobs and rounds of schooling at the moment, so she’s going to hang out with us for a while and explore Seattle. It’s all rather ad hoc – we have no idea how long she’s going to stay or how she’ll be getting back to Sacramento when she goes. But, whatever, it’s fun to have her around!

All of Fremont lost power this afternoon. There’s a distinctive groan you hear when an office full of techies all find their computers dying at once: frustration, with an undertone of amusement – because it’s all backed up, really, and if the power doesn’t come back quickly enough, we’ll just all take the rest of the day off.

So here I am at home, thinking about what I can do with three unexpectedly free hours this afternoon…

I should mention the fact that I have knocked another item off my project list: I had to stay up late last night, and there was some 20 minutes of tweaking to do before I went to work, but the mysterious music project is finished.

I just finished signing the new ALTSpace lease. This is it, we’re actually expanding! Now we just need to work hard at recruiting more people to help us pay for it all.

I did some more work on the mysterious music project last night. 60 bars completed out of 88 planned, and the next 16 bars are half done. I have gotten through the hardest part now: a section of six-voice polyphony, in counterpoint. I’ve never composed anything quite that tricky before. I’m hoping to finish the rest tomorrow night.

How to program an ATtiny45 or ATtiny85 microcontroller using the Arduino software and hardware. Includes add-ins for treating these microcontrollers as a different kind of Arduino board. The ATtiny chips are tiny and cheap; if you can solve your problem using no more than 5 I/O pins, they cost about $2 in single units and closer to $1.25 in quantity.

Fluid Nexus is another distributed, peer-to-peer messaging technology. This one is implemented as a smartphone app, and uses multiple communication protocols as available:

Fluid Nexus works on an opportunistic, broadcast model whereby it searches for any other device in its vicinity via network modalities that must be explicitly enabled by the user: Bluetooth, and link-local connections over WiFi via zeroconf service discovery. No messages are sent if you are only connected to the Internet via 3G/EDGE.

I’ve just finished the last details on the light dimmer box I’ve been building for Hunter Cross. He’s constructing a large “geode” sculpture which is supposed to glow, and he wants the lights to pulse like a MacBook sleep light. The project has gone through a number of major design changes, so the device I’ve ended up building is rather less elegant than it might have been had I designed it to do this job from the start, but it certainly does the job it needs to do. That is, it supplies up to 30 amps at 12V DC, running a 500 Hz PWM duty cycle, and modulates the pulse ratio with a perceptually linearized sine wave.

It looks pretty.

The background light in this video doesn’t actually change; that’s just the camera compensating for the additional brightness as the light on the desk fades up.

Crashed my bike tonight. I am still confused about what exactly I did wrong, but one minute I was riding along 23rd Avenue, and the next my bike was slipping out from under me, and then I went rolling down the street. There was a paint stripe across the street at about the right place, so I think I must have lost traction going across it, but I really don’t know what happened.

I had all my leather on and I am really glad I did. My ankle is sore – I must have twisted it as I landed – but I got right up and moved my bike out of traffic. I have no scrapes or significant pain, basically just bounced off the pavement. My left hip is a bit sore but not in any serious way.

The bike suffered more damage than I did, but it came off pretty well too. The headlight is crooked, the handlebar is torqued funny, the mirrors went every which way, the turn signal broke, and there’s a dent in the gas tank, but the engine guards did their job and the road rash on the tip of the exhaust is not visibly any worse than it had been before. It’ll all clean up except the dent in the gas tank, which I’m pretty unhappy about.

Well damn – I was really happy about the way I had been not crashing this bike. I laid each of my previous three bikes down within two weeks of buying them, so I’ve actually been doing pretty well with this one.

That didn’t take long: one month after Burning Man, I’ve built up a long enough list of active projects that I’m starting to feel overcommitted. Currently occupying parts of my brain:

0) Electric skateboard (designing tilt-steering mechanism)
1) Full-spectrum, 13000-lumen LED array contra Seattle winter darkness (awaiting parts)
2) ALTSpace expansion, up to 2600 square feet (paperwork, cat-herding)
3) Living room couch back piece (awaiting material)
4) Mysterious music project (20 bars finished out of 88 planned)
5) Proposal for City Light public art project (idea imagined, need to write it up)
6) Electrical engineering work on Hunter Cross’ “Geode” project (an evening’s worth of assembly to do)
7) Radian (ongoing! just finished a speedy new X64 code generator backend)
8) Repackaging some of the Shame Project lights for use in my living room (awaiting parts)
9) Small new custom serger workbench at ALTSpace (acquired parts, need to do carpentry)
10) Rhythm music synthesizer algorithm (thinking about it, doing no actual development work)
11) Powdercoating most of the chrome parts on my bike (next up: luggage rack / back rest)

Recently finished:
– Repaired the door frame and installed a new door at ALTSpace
– Built a storage shelf under the big work table at ALTSpace: storage for 12 more bins
– Powdercoated my bike’s headlight bucket and replaced the dented headlight retainer ring

I don’t actually have any clothing projects under way right now; it’s all electrical stuff and software. I have ideas and material purchased for half a dozen new garments, but they are pretty far down the priority list right now so I am not actively thinking about them. Also, my Pfaff is still broken; I need to get the timing adjusted again.

Oh, yeah! I have a day job, too! I work at Google. Right.

Way back in June, Ava and I started building an L-shaped couch for our living room. We built the frame, glued on a layer of memory foam, wrapped the whole thing in cotton batting, started sewing the upholstery, and then – ran out of fabric. Since it was some fancy stuff we’d ordered on eBay, we couldn’t just run out and buy more… and by the time the new order arrived, the summer art project season had gotten under way and the couch project landed on the back burner.

Yesterday we both had a day free, so we decided it was time to get this piece of furniture done. We finished cutting out the upholstery pieces, then I got to work sewing them together while Ava turned a piece of plywood into an elliptical, notched backboard and covered it in foam. Once the upholstery was done we wrapped the bench and stapled the fabric down – hundreds of staples, very sore wrists.

We ran out of steam before finishing the back piece, but the chair is done enough to sit on now, and it looks as nice as we’d hoped it would. Ava picked out the fabric, and while I raised an eyebrow at the idea of buying $35/yard upholstery fabric sight-unseen over the Internet, I’m really glad she stuck with the idea because the result looks great.

Seattle City Light wants to install some art projects at two of their facilities:

The Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, in partnership with Seattle City Light, seeks two artists to create semi-permanent, site-specific installations for City Light’s North and South Service Centers, hubs for City Light’s work. Each selected artist will create up to two artworks that may be two- or three-dimensional to hang on walls. The artworks should capture the “electricity” of City Light’s activities.

Right, well, I’ve never been particularly interested in getting permission to make things, and interacting with a public agency seems really strange and awkward, but this also seems like exactly the right environment for the kind of algorithmic animated light sculpture project I like to build. I mean, it’s the power company, and their name is “City Light” – whether they know it or not, they really, really want something that incorporates a whole lot of LEDs. They have budget, too: $23,500 for each building. That’s enough to do something really very cool indeed.

The first thing that comes to mind echoes a piece I saw in the San Jose airport: thousands of panes of LCD shutter glass, switching between transparent and translucent states. It’s a subtle thing; it is animated and lively, but it doesn’t reach out and grab you with the force of its brightness. Instead you just get this constant motion and shimmering reflectivity.

It strikes me that a power company is fundamentally all about intervening in natural processes. It’s all driven by the Sun, of course; we capture energy directly from the sun using photovoltaic cells, but primarily we capture energy from the hydrological cycle using dams, and energy from temperature differentials using wind turbines. And fossil fuels are of course nothing but chemical storage for millions of years of ancient sunlight… The point of a power company is to extract a uniform, controllable source of energy from the wild, chaotic environment around us.

So I’m imagining an art piece which puts that wild, chaotic environment in a bottle. An array of glass jars, all shapes and sizes, all clear, frosted inside, hanging from the ceiling, in a hexagonal grid, at varying heights. Each one has a light – a high-power LED, of course – and together they render the output of an evolving wave algorithm. The algorithm would of course be the one I developed for the Cuttlefish project, oh so many years ago… but monochrome, I think. Just light. Or perhaps a very subtle, muted tint, even more muted than what I did with the Shame Project lights. It’d look like waves, like clouds, like the wind running across the grass; it would ripple and sway and move, and it would never, ever repeat itself.

ALTSpace has been operating at close to peak capacity all summer, hosting a lot of work for the Shame Project and the Groovik’s Cube as well as many smaller projects. We’ve decided to expand into the unit next door, doubling our floor space: the current tenants will be out at the end of the month, and there’s a door we can unlock on the common wall which will connect the two units, so we will have one big happy 2400-square-foot makerspace.

We will be able to set up more work tables and more storage lockers, which means we can bring in more members. We will also have room to expand our machine shop to triple or quadruple its current size – a partition wall and a new drop ceiling should give us enough soundproofing to run power tools. If all goes well we will be able to move in a mill, a lathe, and a 2D CNC router table! Very exciting – this will greatly expand the range of projects it will be possible to build there.

Sometimes a new project idea grips my brain with sudden, sticky determination. I came back from Burning Man thinking almost nonstop about a couple of small electric vehicles I’d like to build for next year. The first is a jumbo-size electric skateboard. I brought a normal electric skateboard to the playa in 2007, but the playa beat it hard, and after only a couple of rides the suspension was destroyed. It was also geared too high for the dusty, rutted condition of BRC roads after the first day or two. Of course you can buy larger, burlier “off road” skateboards, but they get expensive very quickly, and don’t have the kind of range I’d want at Burning Man. So I bought a four-wheeled electric mobility scooter at a garage sale ($150!) and took off all the bodywork. It has a 1-HP, 3400 RPM motor with differential, four pneumatic tires, a steering linkage, and two 12V batteries – perfect! Next I’ll replace the motor controller with something more appropriate for a skateboard, then add a deck and set it up for tilt steering. Add on some obnoxious LEDs and it’ll be done.

The next vehicle I have in mind is something like the Atomic Zombie Streetfox: a recumbent-style reverse trike, with two steering wheels in front and a drive wheel in the back. I plan to build it out of mountain bike components, so each wheel will be independently suspended, and an array of deep-cycle batteries under the driver’s knees should power it up to about 20-25 mph. That’s fast enough I could conceivably use it to ride to work and back – and Google already has electric-vehicle charging stations in the parking garage…

Oh well, who knows if I’ll actually finish it all, but it’s certainly interesting to think about. I’ve been learning about Ackermann angles and freewheels and high-current PWM driver MOSFETs…

This is a key reason I keep coming back to Burning Man:
Burning Man is for amateurs.

It’s Burning Man’s rank amateur status that keeps it alive and interesting and challenging to the culture at large in a way that raves never were and TV can only dream of. After all, the mechanism of appropriation is to bring professionals in and have them do things to spec. Amateurs are unpredictable. They’re in it for the passion, not the money, and they’ll follow their passion way past spec: amateurs can’t be co-opted as long as they stay amateurs. Burning Man can’t be co-opted as long as amateurs are the one’s really driving the culture.

And they are: Burning Man’s “no spectators” ethos turns everyone at the event into an amateur impresario. If you can’t sit back and watch then you have to do something, and if you’re not getting paid for it you might as well do something you’re passionate about.

I’m back. I’m alive. It was a great burn, probably the best one I’ve had. The project worked well, the group functioned smoothly and without drama, the weather was perfect (no whiteouts!). There were lots of interesting art pieces to look at, and I’ve come home with a couple of new projects rattling around in my head…

I’m wiped out today, after driving down to Bend and back yesterday to pick up the BMW. Its water pump seized on the way home, so we had it towed and then drove home in a rental Mustang. The trip was about 660 miles; I’ve driven more than that in a day before, but for some reason today I’m just exhausted.

Between work and Burning Man, I’ve been very busy lately.

This article from the Guardian is a remarkably sensible, thorough look at hackers, hacking, and most especially hackerspaces.

Today marks the end of week two at Google’s office in Seattle. So far so good: I’m still busy trying to figure out how things work, and haven’t actually written any code yet, but that seems to be normal and nobody expects otherwise. The project is reasonably interesting, and work practices require a reasonably low level of overhead.

Preparation for Burning Man now occupies all of my free time. I was hard at work on a custom tent, designed for better playa comfort than a standard camping tent, until I somehow managed to misalign the timing on my industrial sewing machine. I didn’t know that sewing machines had such a thing as timing, and I have no idea what I did to cause this problem, but the big green beast won’t make stitches anymore. I took it down to C. H. Holderby this morning for service, but they don’t expect to have it back to me til Tuesday, and that’s too late to get the project done before the trucks leave. Oh, well, I guess I’ll be enduring another crappy tent experience this year after all.

The Shame Project light hardware is done. We had a last work party this week and built all the wiring harnesses that will power the lights. After a 48-hour soak test, the lights are still burning bright and the power supplies are barely warm, so that counts as success. The software is not quite done, but the boards are designed for in-field reprogramming, so I can actually keep working on the code until the last minute if necessary. The big issue is that I haven’t gotten the network going yet. Each board has two serial ports, so I can connect all the lights in a daisy-chain; my plan was to use the hardware UART for one of the ports and a bitbanged software implementation for the other. I’m using the NewSoftSerial library for the software port, but I haven’t yet gotten it working correctly; it will receive data, but seems to lock up after transmitting. Oh, well, more debugging this weekend.

I should really get a bike, pick out a wardrobe, and pack up my gear pretty soon, but it’s been tough to feel motivated. I’m not actually excited about the playa experience this year; I’m going because of the Shame Project and not so much because I want to go hang out in the desert. It’s too easy to think of the heat and the dust and the general nuisance of it all. But I’m excited about the art project: this is the biggest canvas I’ve ever had to paint on. Yes, the groovik’s cube was bigger and more visible, but my contribution was purely technical. With the Shame Project, I get to present an evolving lightscape of my own imagination, projected across the skin of what counts as a very large building in playa terms. It’s a great opportunity and I am excited to see it all in action.

Google orientation week has gone well. There are three more lecture sessions on my calendar today, then I’ll go pretty much straight home. I had originally planned to stay Friday night and go back Saturday, but there’s not much to do in Mountain View, and I’m eager to get back home to Ava.

I suppose the real test will come when I show up at my Seattle desk and start figuring out what I’m actually going to be doing, but so far I feel like the orientation curriculum has done a good job of ramping everyone up at a steady, manageable pace. I’d probably enjoy myself more if things moved more quickly, but it’s better than being overwhelmed right up front. We’ve had overviews of the dev tools and the whole data-center architecture, an explanation of the search system, and practical exercises with the custom source-control and build tools. There is a lot of learning ahead, of course, but at least now I know what the general layout is and where to start looking for things.

Google really seems determined to take care of its engineers. It sounds almost too good to be true, but they’re walking the talk.

I have survived my first day at Google. I have a badge and a laptop and no idea how to actually do any coding. I expect that some training session during the remaining four days of orientation week will touch on that topic.

The Central District News published an article about ALTSpace, with pictures. Whee! We come off sounding pretty cool, even.

Sunday project: I built that evaporative cooler in a bucket I was talking about earlier. The original was intended to run on 12V power, but our camp is going to have a generator, so I substituted an AC fountain pump and a bathroom exhaust fan for the harder-to-find 12V units they picked out. The local home depot does not stock swamp cooler pads (“DuraCool”), so I made do with a cut-to-fit furnace filter.

Seems to work OK, though the air here is not dry enough for the cooling effect to show up that much. Still, it was about an hour’s labor and $70 worth of parts, so it’s at least a worthwhile experiment.

Friday project: I cut apart the cover for the Corbin seat that came with my Nighthawk, used the pieces as a pattern, and remade the whole thing out of leather. Then I stretched the new cover over the old foam and glued it down with contact cement. It was about six hours of work altogether, and the glue stank up the workshop something fierce, but the result looks pretty good. It feels good to ride on, too.

Hello there. It took a few days to really recover from that backpacking trip, and I’ve had a lot to do in the meantime.

The hike was about nine days, covering 85 miles and four mountain passes. It was the most intense hiking I’ve ever done: and yet it was only a third of the whole hike my younger sister Jeanine is doing. She’ll finish up on August 2nd by climbing Mt. Whitney, a 14,500 foot peak which is the tallest in California (and all of the lower 48).

We started at Red’s Meadow, a campground near Devil’s Postpile. First day was fairly nondescript; we basically just had to climb back out of the lowland and gain some elevation on the way to the first pass. It was harder for me than her, since I was not acclimated to the altitude or accustomed to the mileage, but I kept on chugging and we made it to our intended camp site.

The next few days were really nice. We camped near high alpine lakes, climbed snow-covered passes, tramped through meadows full of wildflowers, trekked along ridges, forded rivers, and generally had a great time. We got into a rhythm and generally arrived at our campsites an hour or two ahead of schedule, despite never making any particular haste to leave camp in the morning.

Eventually we reached Muir Trail Ranch, where our resupply bucket was located. Resupply went fine but things got a bit more difficult after that. We tried to find the prominently-advertised hot springs across the river, but it turned out to require a mile of bushwhacking and a highly dicey log scramble across a deep, narrow river gorge. When we eventually found the hot springs they were small, muddy, and full of algae… not exactly inspiring. Oh, well, we made do and had a good evening regardless.

The next three days were much more challenging. We got off to a slower start as we had to work our way back out of the bush to the trail, and then we had a long hot unshaded hike along the San Joaquin River valley and then up into the Evolution Valley turn-off. It was not a bad day but it was a very long one and we spent most of it climbing.

The next day was the real killer. We climbed up to Evolution Lake, which was gorgeous, but quickly became mired in a slushy, hazardous, seemingly endless snowfield. The sun was hot and there was no breeze; we toiled up the unstable slope for hour after hour, never able to settle into a steady, efficient hiking rhythm. We finally reached the top of the 12,000 foot pass at 4 pm, having originally intended to lunch there, and spent a while just laying around recovering.

Our schedule completely blown, we decided to have dinner, rally our strength, and go just far enough down the other side to camp at the first reasonable spot. This would make the following day harder but we were bushed and the thought of pushing on another five miles was unbearable.

Our spirits rose as we crunched down the equally squishy far side; at least we didn’t have to keep hauling ourselves up this mess. We eventually found a good spot at what we called “Frog Lake” due to all the frogs hopping in and out along the shoreline.

This happened to be my birthday, so I pulled out a flask of bourbon I’d packed for the occasion and Jeanine whipped up a special dessert she’d been carrying. We were so happy and relieved to have made it through the pass that we didn’t care about being tired and sore and wet and miles behind schedule.

Next day, then, was another long, hot climb. We made up our extra miles by 11 am, then started climbing up to the Dusy Basin area. It was another mostly shadeless climb back up to 12,000 feet, and we were plenty footsore by the time we arrived, but there were lots of gorgeous mountains and meadows and cascades to look at.

This was nearly the end of the line for me: in Dusy Basin the resupply crew met us. Mike and Joel continued on with Jeanine, and I hiked back out over the Bishop pass with Brian. I was eager to be done by this point so we trekked straight on til the parking lot, not even stopping for lunch. Of course we hit the first pizza place we saw in town.

It was great. I’m glad I did it. I’m impressed with Jeanine’s ambition and really glad I could help her achieve her dream. It’ll be a long time before I have another chance to take a backpacking trip this intense, and I’m sure I’ll remember this one fondly for years to come.