(The image is of the sky one afternoon on the Coal Oil Point walk.)
Greetings from Anisq'Oyo Park in IV. I've spent two weeks deleting photos. Then half a week figuring out how best to share the photos. Naturally there's no best way. And then another week writing and revising this.
After Kernville, the last update on May 19, Andrea and I walked over to Kennedy Meadows South (which is on the PCT) and then back to Kernville, but over Sherman's Pass, with three hitches. Each hitch is a different world. I don't really like it. But they are memorable. Hitching is easier with Andrea than as a solo guy, generally.
Number one was with an ex-construction now tex-mex restauranteur & school administrator couple on the way to their cabin, where they harvest mesquite for their barbeque. Number two was a short one in the back of a USFS truck, and the driver told us how to find a yurt with a wood stove to stay in that chilly night. Number three was with a Bordelais bicycle enterpreneur who drives mountain bikers from LA up to Cannell Meadows and other trail heads, Xavier of Crazy Bear Bikes.
Then we went up to Alta Sierra from Wofford Heights, with two hitches. The first with some perhaps drug-damaged but friendly women in a convertible, via the lair of the buff and shirtless drug lord with a friendly pitbull who was interrupted by our arrival while having sex and wasn't happy about that. Our driver said he owed her rent. The second with a Hispanic family who squeezed in even tighter to pick us up and fed us too when we got to the top.
Then we walked to Camp Nelson through a forest partially closed because of fires and logging. On the way we met two German doctor cyclists: Laura and Christina. And a European guy cyclist, Dutch maybe, also on some stage of a world tour, but we only saw him once.
At the time I was reading Kevin Kelly's _Cool Tools_ ($5 at Amazon, free at libgen.io) and found out about and read Tom Neale's _An island to oneself_ from that. Neale's book was among a list of stories of other wilderness dwellers which included Silvan Hart and Dick Proenneke. Sarah Marquis, Nicole Apelian are some survivalist women just for some balance.
Camp Nelson has a spring of bubbly water that is very good to drink. Then we hitched down into Porterville with a Sierra Club hiker we'd passed earlier that day. Then we hitched back up into the mountains to Balch Park first with a line technician from LA who funds a small ranch his wife runs and second with a supervisor of a Cal Fire prison crew. The line technician took pity on us and stopped to ask what we were doing, we weren't actually hitching at the time. We're lucky he stopped.
I realize I've forgotten two rides: one in the minivan of an ex-military woman on the way to Wofford Heights from Kernville, and another with a Hispanic forest service fire crew member and a co-worker from Clovis to Springville. It's always a small miracle when anyone stops. Not to disregard the dangers of hitching.
Then we walked into the south end of Sequoia NP. And down into Three Rivers. Then we walked back up into the park along a very overgrown trail where Andrea got a tick bite, I a bee sting, and both of us waded, nay bushwhacked, through miles of poison oak and other brush until 11 at night. I was trying to get to a high enough elevation to be out of the poison oak before camping, which we just about managed. Oddly, neither of us got poison oak. She never has, I believe. I often do. Correction: she says she got some inside her nose from that escapade. And I had mild whole-body puffiness the following day maybe from being coated in pollen from all the brush.
Andrea also reminded me we got a ride in the back of an old Jeep from a young (19 or 21?) almond, orange, and pear farmer and his girlfriend or date on the last stretch of dirt road before the Old Colony Mill bushwhack started. This guy had previously run a dairy farm with his father and brother but they had switched to tree crops a few years back. It sounded like he owned his own orchards and had bought out his father.
He was surprised I knew about the upside-down-umbrella-style almond tree shakers, which I'd seen in Spain--he was one of the first in the area to use those. These are tractors that approach a tree, grab the trunk, unfurl around the grabber something that looks like an upside-down umbrella, and then vigorously shake the tree trunk while the almonds fall into the umbrella which then funnels the almonds into a channel near the grabber leading to a hopper in the back of the tractor. The umbrella appendage then retracts and refurls, and the tractor goes to the next tree. I'm not sure actually whether the almonds go into the chute before or after the umbrella refurls. Check YouTube. The process takes less than three minutes per tree, maybe less than 60 seconds. Most other US almond growers somehow do it with two separate vehicles, a shaker and a collector somehow it sounded like.
We kicked back at Hume Lake for a bit after getting a ride a lot of the way from Wuksachi Village from Calissa—an ecstatic-to-be-out-of-the-city-for-the-weekend neuroscientist—who was paying off years of college debt doing something for some sort of birth control pharmaceutical or appliance company or nonprofit and Gabe, who maybe was a lawyer and had already paid off his. Andrea insisted we do laundry before hitching to wash off any poison oak before sitting in someone's car. That and showering we had done at Lodgepole. We enjoyed a golf cart tour of the Hume Lake Christian camp and free ice cream. I swam while listening to an audiobook for the first time since Goleta. This book was about about timing and effects of circadian rhythms (When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. I don't really recommend it, but I find it interesting I remember what I was listening to when and where). We then walked to Grant Grove Village and left the park via the YMCA at Sequoia Lake.
We got a ride down to Clovis with a CHP officer who was once a wandering hippie-ish type and was now reading Race and Economics by Thomas Sowell. He pointed out where a death-by-cop stakeout had occurred a while back, drawing officers like flies. The ride up to Shaver Lake and some breakfast at a small cafe was with with Bruce, a founder of the Aryan Brotherhood, and Chula, his small rescue dog whose former abusive owner was the only one he still had it in for. I don't disbelieve the guy. What he had to say checked out with Wikipedia at any rate.
We eventually went north from Shaver Lake to Redinger Lake, and up Italian Bar Road to the exact center of California, near South Fork. Andrea's feet hurt so we hitched to North Fork, got a bus down to Madera, then Amtrak to Sacramento and stayed at her parents' for a bit. Then I walked up to South Lake Tahoe, and she rode up later with her family for the Fourth of July.
On the way back south, we visited her great-aunt in Concord and we visited Monterey. After a month and a half back in Goleta we went to Tennessee to visit my parents and sisters.
Aside from all that? I've figured out a good way of staying warm and dry during a SoCal winter in a hammock. I got to surf and windsurf for my first time on the west coast thanks to the local Excursion Club. Having made it to the southern hemisphere last winter I'm happy to be here with lots of darkness for a change. Darkness in which to be snug in my hammock and read. And so far there hasn't been any rain of oppressive duration. I'm a bit tired of wandering to be honest, though I did see $330 tickets one-way to Santiago for a while earlier in the year when I was looking.
I continue to be focused on cryptocurrency, primarily ether, maker, and dai. Today I'm currently in the green on my first test decentralized short using expotrading.com (closed it the next morning and made $1). Yes I finally learned just holding isn't the brightest. Prices do not go up forever. One has to have good entries and exits. At any rate, my goal is peace of mind. A virtual loss of 90% of one's capital motivates even me to try to learn some new tricks for better or worse. At least until I have no more to play with.
Andrea went with me to cryptoinvest in LA, to which we had free tickets, thanks to me being on peepeth at the right time. I also spent $350 (1.1 eth at the time) to go see Vitalik Buterin and Zooko Wilcox among others at the crypto conference at UCSB.
What's in store for 2019? I may stay here until the coastal fog sets in, then go to the mountains again. Here I've found that as long as I do a six-mile beach walk most every day—out to The Spot (a cliff-side hide-away that becomes difficult to access at high tide) and back—I don't feel a need to escape here. I do wish I could get to the mountains without crossing car-land though. The front country trails would be more exercise than the beach.
So, stay here and read. Play tennis. Let me know if you want to at the UCSB courts—I have racquets. I'm not that good, maybe ten-year-old level. I like swimming while listening to audiobooks, currently _The Signature of All Things_ by Elizabeth Gilbert. David Foster Wallace has been good. _The Code of the Extraordinary Mind_ was good. It’s a great way to stop worrying about whatever it was I was worrying about for a while and spend part of the day in a different world. I listened to King Kong too, but have yet to see the film.
Long term goals: read more, be at peace about investments. “The markets are a way to transfer money from the impatient to the patient” is one quote that sticks in my mind. As does this one:
Patience… followed by pretty aggressive conduct. It is given to human beings who work hard at it—who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet—that they can occasionally find one. And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s just that simple.
- Charlie Munger
Ok, on that note, if you join Robinhood (link a bank account, maybe transferring money too is necessary) with this link, we both get stock:
If you join this new exchange with this link:
https://e.investvoyager.com/4TLA-326U-2KT0MQ-2WZGY-1/c.aspx (only on December 31!)
We may both get $25 worth of Bitcoin eventually. But, personally, I'm more excited about Robinhood. Charlie Shrem, a guy behind Voyager, has given me the impression of being from the Ponzi part of the crypto world. I hold no Bitcoin anyways I'd convert it to usd, ether, dai, or mkr probably.
Here are links to the PDFs of the photos. You can view the few comments in the Adobe PDF viewer and a few other PDF readers.
Mega, for the fastest downloads:
Box if you want to view it in your browser, but it didn't seem to allow downloads when I tried:
Google drive may also work:
Andrea doesn't like some of the duplicate photos, but I left them in partly for the sense of movement they can give.
Videos from the time are at
By the way, I like cryptoamd and Ricky Gutierrez. And I have lists of people on Twitter who provide helpful ideas regarding trading mainly, or holding or not holding a volatile asset. Everyone seems to be wrong some of the time.
Aside from all that, I've figured out how to zero my pocket queue — I use p2k to send 20 articles a day to my Kindle.
And, did you know you can get a subscription to The New Yorker for three months for $5 on Amazon? When I get through those I read books. Most recently I was working on Branson's _Losing My Virginity_.
Some good crypto newsletters:
Hammock setup: I've got the photos and details (weights, and where to buy) collected. If you're interested, let me know. Otherwise I'll get a PDF with the info up in the directory at Box and Mega eventually.
Until next time!
Colin
While I have you: On the carfree front Pontevedra, Galicia shows some sanity: “What Happens to Kid Culture When You Close the Streets to Cars.”