crush.

no. 8056 [part two of three ... chance].

2012-01-30T23:51:00.000-08:00

So this is still just a story some fifteen years or so in the making of the search a journey of sorts for the perfect piano. Part one is here. This then is the second of a three-part story of an age-old Bechstein.

part two. [chance]

‘About a year’ the guy said when I asked how long this shop had been in Portland.

I didn't catch his name. Corner of 11th and Alder downtown for now but they were relocating in a month or so across the Willamette. After our brief introduction I moved quick past the Estonias and Schimmels and others up front towards the back of the store with the brick wall. Back there was an L167 with the high-polish Madrona finish. Not a favourite but a similar piano that I sat down to twelve years ago or so in a small piano shop in Tacoma and what led me to this absolute fascination I have with the Bechstein piano. And here - finally - was a Bechstein dealer closer than a couple thousand miles south or east.

I played a few notes then moved on. And there one was ... a D280. The nine-foot concert grand. I had never seen one in person. Too bad I am still far too self-conscious with some suited salesman nice as he was sitting at his desk or mumbling a conversation into his phone to really play. To try to break a string or two (Liszt broke plenty of strings!). So I tinkered some on it is all. No true banging out the cadenza to Ferocity And Fragility or any of the other crazy things I have stored in my head. I moved over to the more reasonable seven-foot-seven-inch C234 slapped with a price tag of only $163,000 versus the $212,000 of the D280 and played a few phrases from the song I was working on at the moment. Took some photos with my iPhone. Grabbed all the sales brochures they had just for fun. Then wandered back to the salesman.

"Find one you like?" he mused with a slight grin most likely just generally amused at the fact someone was toying on a two hundred thousand dollar instrument wearing canvas Toms shoes and a beatup Mountain Hardwear fleece hair all unkempt from a wool headband meant to ward off the bite of a proper cold northwest winter afternoon while outside the light faded from light blue to pink. It was New Year’s Eve day.

"Well no ... but I have an antique Bechstein and was interested in your experience with rebuilding - particularly with Bechstein pianos since you're the only dealer on the West Coast."

I don't know if this took him aback or if he took me any more seriously but for a bit then we talked back and forth while he showed me a late nineteenth-century Chickering or some other American make of a piano that they had rebuilt and shimmed the soundboard me only half-listening since if a piano is not German I am really not interested. I had mentioned mine would need to be shimmed and perhaps recrowned. But he said they had a direct line back to the Bechstein factory in Berlin which did interest me.

So he passed me the card of some guy named Lotof who turned out to be the shop's owner to whom I would shoot off an email with some photos of my 1875 Bechstein attached to get the conversation started. I told him I was undecided about refinishing that I actually quite like the one-hundred thirty-five year-old worn patina scratches and all but that I know it needs all new hammers installed and voiced and the action completely reworked with perhaps new strings and soundboard work but that I wanted to maintain as much of the original parts as possible.

And it struck me while there how I was reminded playing the new Bechsteins of the utter uniqueness of an instrument - mine - nearly a century-and-a-half old. Made from trees felled before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Utterly handbuilt and delivered on horse-drawn carriage weaving through littered cobblestone streets of some late-ninetheenth century European city. The engravings on the soundboard much more illustrious than the new pianos with inscriptions of how they were built for the majesty of emporers and kings (majestät des kaisers und königs in proper German) and inscribed with the address of the original factory on Johannis Strausse in Berlin.

And the timbre. The sound. How Bechstein's scale design back then just shortly before the overstrung scale became the norm had the tenor strings pass through the bass bridge giving that most important section of the piano one of the most sumptuous near-liquid but still powerful tenor voices imaginable. The action is a double-escapement type similar to the patented action from Sébastien Érard just a few years before the German Louis Renner designed his (and which has been used primarily in all fine pianos since). It was ahead of its time. There is not another like it. This piano here in the corner of my living room one day will be given new life and it will sound absolutely one-of-a-kind.

-----

There was a period then of silence. Maybe two years. It of course seemed much much longer.

A period I mean between pianos. The WG57 was long gone only memories now and the scratchy-sounding hiss of an audio cassette that tries its best to capture the sonority of the low bass strings. The crystalness of the treble. But cannot. Not even close.

I could not long live without a piano of course and so I began searching again this time with a bit of practicality I had lacked just a few years earlier but seemingly inherited with a bit more age no longer that impulsive twenty-year-old who must have a grand piano shoved in tiny living rooms decided whilst sitting on kitchen counters. So an upright it would be. But I still required a big sound and so I only set my gaze on the four-foot ones.

This time it didn’t take long. I was already sold on the Weber as an excellent and economical instrument with a powerful dynamic that nearly matched what I heard in my head. So a quick trip back to Helmer’s had me signing over a few more thousands of dollars for a new W121 polished ebony upright. Delivered to a rented house off a quiet gravel road a carpeted living room much more practical again than the cramped dusty wood-floors of my former days. Not long after dissolution in tow it moved out with me to a little duplex where I would play it loud up late Julian fast asleep in the room on the other side of the wall never waking. My finger slipping at one point and playing an F-sharp instead of an F and finding amongst a wash of fortissimo minor chords the B major. I remember it clearly scrawling the melody in a sketchbook lying open on the music desk the sforzandos and quadruple forte markings etched in ink dripping on the page I had written it so furiously. Thus was found the ending to an enormous concerto for piano and orchestra.

The Weber could barely contain the sound.

-----

Sergiy. Sergiy Skhabovskyy was his name.

I found him one afternoon by chance. I was on a lunch break surfing around the interwebs when I decided to check out this site called Ebay. Had only heard of it but never used it. So I signed up. Then remembering my promise to myself that one day back sunny autumn in the Tacoma Helmer’s shop how someday I would own a Bechstein grand and with the world of browsing now at my fingertips no longer confined to just the dozen or so piano shops within a couple hundred miles of home I typed the name Bechstein into the search field.

And got a hit.

He lived half a world away. A city that was a blip on a map to which I could only point but knew nothing about. Kiev. Ukraine. He was a piano and customs dealer there and apparently had been trading pianos for years. Aged pianos that had found their way somehow or other from Europe east across once an Iron Curtain now gone just the Caucasus range into Russia and ultimately to him. His online storefront allowed him to sell pianos now to the western world - mostly the United States. Afterall he was selling mainly European brands many of them unheard of and unappreciated here across oceans. Brands that had been around since the dawn of the modern piano. Bösendorfer. Pleyel. Grotrian. Steinweg. Blüthner.

Bechstein.

It seemed too good to be true. An 1875 six-foot-one Bechstein grand that I could actually afford. Though I had started the journey of finding this piano years before with those three chords on a mahogany five-foot-nine it was only just beginning.

I called Kathy later that evening from my tiny apartment. Explained to her in rapid excitement what I had found. The dilemma. Which was basically in order to afford this perhaps chance-of-a-lifetime I had to sell my perfectly acceptable Weber upright on which I had found the B major. That Weber meant something to me even if I knew it was not a Bechstein. And this was also a bit of risk this business of chance. A hundred-and-thirty-some-year-old piano online sight unseen halfway around the world from an eastern city in the Ukraine?

Seemed almost as ridiculous as convincing myself at twenty that I needed a grand piano.

I’d have to fly back to Missouri during the auction for a planned holiday visiting family. In fact it would close the morning I arrived dazed and sleep-deprived stumbling off a redeye flight from Seattle. My sister Kari picked me up at the airport and took me back to her little house parked at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac lined with giant cottonwoods. I followed her in and made my way to the tiny couch having explained the situation on the ride from the airport. How the auction was going to close. Kari didn’t have a computer so she drew me a map to the neighborhood library. ‘Take my car’ she said and went to crash herself. I laid on the couch frantically going over everything in my head. Couldn’t sleep. Not even close my eyese. It would be so easy to just fall asleep I remember thinking. I was so tired. Not have to get up drive her ridiculous monster of a car that nineteen-seventy-six solid steel red Chevy gifted from our grandmother to find a computer at the library hope one was available park myself on it waiting watching the seconds tick down to the end of the auction. I knew nothing of sniping. I thought I’d just wait until a few seconds before the auction ended before putting in my bid. Little did I know ...

But I had made up my mind.

Shrugging off sleep for later as I all too often tend to do I got myself up and grabbed her keys to follow her little map. Finding the library without trouble there was a computer in the middle of the main room where I sat down. Logged in. Five minutes or something. My mind was still racing. Four minutes. Should I? What if this thing was crap? It was all original. Would have to be restored. Thousands of dollars.

But it was a Bechstein.

Three minutes. One bid. So it was just going for the asking price. I’d have to put in a bid of at least fifty dollars more. Two minutes. The library suddenly seemed too warm and stuffy compared to the crisp outside. Could I do this? I’d miss the Weber. There was nothing wrong with it. But it wasn’t a Bechstein. It wasn’t a Bechstein. One minute. Time was flying. The seconds ticked down. I typed in my bid. Watched the clock on the wall as the second hand ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Waited. Held my breath and clicked ‘place bid.’

-----

‘Congratulations! You are winner!’ the email from Sergiy read in broken English.

Through a string of emails spanning the next couple of weeks I had printed out back then and found dusty in that box of music stuff he and I worked out the details of shipping a six-foot-one grand piano from the Ukraine to Seattle. Customs. Escrow. Inspection.

It arrived here in a wooden crate a month and a half later. Cleared customs at the airport and was heaved into a truck. Driven south to that little duplex of mine brought in through the front door and set up in the far corner of yet another cramped way-too-small-for-a-grand-piano living room.

But it was real. Part of me couldn’t believe it.

The first order of business was to find a technician to come and look it over. Make sure it was okay. I found the slip from Emmanuel Piano Service dated the seventh of November oh-five. Didn’t charge me anything and scribbled in the lines of the invoice how it needed a full set of new hammers and backchecks. Several tunings to bring it back up to A435 - he wasn’t recommending tuning it to the modern standard of A440 (where the A above middle C - A4 - beats at four hundred forty cycles a second). And two treble strings were broken and needed to be tied off.

As he gathered his tools putting them back in a worn old leather satchel he stood up straight and I remember him looking at me and asking me how much I paid for it. I told him. He paused for a second as if to think that over I don’t know before telling me it was worth four times that - smiling - and showing himself out the door.

-----

It took a few moments for the realization to sink in after I saw the screen flash that I had won the auction. I remember just leaning back in the chair and sitting there. Time passed. Eventually getting up again and grabbing Kari’s keys to make my way back to her car back to that little house of hers under cottonwoods losing its big yellow leaves the end of that Missouri September.

‘So?’ I remember her asking as I came through her front door exhausted not just from the redeye but the whole ordeal it seemed. In my typical sense I non-chalantly explained how I now owned a Bechstein. Then crashed back on her dusty couch.

Turns out I could have just as easily lost. Not knowing how Ebay worked at the time and with someone already having placed a bid and me only placing mine fifty dollars higher ... if that someone had put in a max bid just a penny more than me he would have won. A penny. I didn’t realize this until months later. I hadn’t really known what I was doing afterall.

But it was meant to be. Or something like that I told myself. Just meant to be. The whole thing.

Sitting up late on kitchen counters in crowded apartments over casseroles scrawling notes adding and subtracting. Deciding out of the blue nowhere even to really put one that I needed to have a grand piano. Traveling north and south between Seattle and Portland looking in every piano shop finding a five-seven Weber and being told to check out the six-foot. Despite my reservations of what difference five inches might make shrugging my shoulders but regardless following his advice and heading south. Instead of just finding it and leaving deciding to walk around the rest of the shop finally in the last corner spotting a five-nine mahogany piano which on the fallboard read plainly and simply: ‘C. Bechstein.’ Sitting down at it. Reaching out to touch the keys. Playing three chords. Dying inside the sound of it absolutely unbearable. Sitting down one afternoon during lunch to check out Ebay and remind myself of my need for a Bechstein. And searching. And finding. Staving off sleep after a cross-country redeye to follow a scribbled map to a library to find a computer to place a bid not knowing what I was doing. The other guy not having placed a bid higher than mine.

Winning.

All of it. The search was over but the journey was not.

-----

No. 8056 - the eight-thousand-fifty-sixth piano Carl Bechstein crafted in his factory on Johannis Strasse in Berlin - as I have come to call my piano - needed attention. The invoice from Emmanuel Pianos proved it. It was old. Worn. Tired. I would sit up nights silence filling the room under the pale light of a single lamp wondering whose hands had played it? What music had they played? Its journey across mountains and oceans. After it all one hundred thirty-five years it found its way to me. And it needed to be restored.

It would be some time before I would find myself wandering into that Bechstein dealer in Portland some freezing New Year’s Eve day wearing canvas Toms and a beatup Mountain Hardware fleece hair all unkempt from a wool headband to ask a kind man about restoring it.

But I had gotten a sense of its depth of tone. Its character. Its sound. And I knew it was all there waiting ... just waiting to be unleashed.

to be continued ...

bach and beauty and bureaucracy.

2012-01-25T21:25:00.000-08:00

Johannes Brahms once wrote about Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for violin in a letter to Claire Schumann -

‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’

And it is with this piece that a dude in jeans, a t-shirt and ballcap started his forty-five-minute-long violin concert at a metro station in Washington D.C.

One thousand and ninety-some people passed by. Seven people stopped to listen.

'What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.'

W.H. Davies writes to begin a poem entitled Leisure (six stanzas later he ends it with ‘A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’). What - of the nearly eleven hundred people that walked through the metro lobby that morning - only one single person realized was that the dude was in fact a world-reknown violin virtuoso who had just sold out a concert in Boston a few days before where tickets went for an average of a hundred bucks a piece. And his violin was a 1710 Stradivarius worth a reputed three-and-a-half million. Dollars.

It was a sociological experiment that the violinist - Joshua Bell - had agreed to when approached by the Washington Post. The idea of course was to see that if under less-than-ideal circumstances (a bustling train station during morning rush hour chocked full of policy analysts and project managers and budget officers and consultants and bureaucrats suits and ties and all scrambling to get to work) and cloaking the identity of the performer under jeans and shirtsleeves beauty so-to-speak could - as Emmanuel Kant may have envisioned - transcend it all.

But alas ... it did not.

People just said they were busy when asked afterwards. Had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed him to compete with his 'infernal racket.' It seems perhaps the explosion in technology has in some ways limited - not expanded - our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly - with large thanks to the likes of the Facebook and Google and their filter bubbles - we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And cram our iStuff with music we already like.

No time to stop and listen to something that would have apparently made Brahms blow his brains out because of its beauty.

So it sort off makes me sad I guess. Maybe cos I’ve been on a Bach kick reading a couple of books and watching a couple more documentaries within the past few weeks about the late great Glenn Gould. Maybe cos even the pitiful and notoriously-retarded Youtube comments on a recording of Bach’s Chaconne by Itzhak Perlman are littered with things like ‘Not even Plato had the fortune to listen to such music’ and ‘Pure magic, plain and simple’ and ‘It is the sound of God when he cries.’ Maybe cos I hope that I would have stopped had I wandered through that particular metro station that particular morning even if I did not recognize the Chaconne in D minor.

Because hopefully I would have recognized the beauty and taken a moment or two to soak it in. Soak it up. Remember how Kant said ‘the beautiful itself is either enchanting or touching, or radiating or enticing.’

And leave then having been reminded ... it is everywhere.

Looking out over a sea of mountains rising above valleys of clouds immersed under a shimmering sun. My son when he smiles without inhibition before he realizes he is doing so his hair in need of a cut so it is starting to curl. A strain of a Bach melody held on the D string then taking off furiously building and building to some ultimate end that should be able to most certainly transcend it all.

2011-12-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

I came home from work one day not too long ago to find one of Julian's many Calvin and Hobbes books (umm, mostly handed down from me) on the kitchen counter. There was a Post-It note to turn to page 91. So I did.

And this is what I found ~

Umm, wow. I about lost it (though I am a sucker for Calvin and Hobbes).

But I need to remember this more as I work furiously at music and remodeling and this and that. Remember that there's a kid that calls me dad that sometimes just wants to play.

Remember that.

Soon enough he'll be all grown up and not want to play with his dad.

Remember that.

The sheetrock can wait.

That idea on the piano can wait.

That email can wait.

Remember that.

no. 8056 [part one of three ... imperfection].

2011-12-12T23:35:00.000-08:00

So I've been sort of blogging since June maybe July randomly here and there the story of an old piano of mine off to be restored a bit.

It may have been interesting. Probably not. But this goes back way before that long before I found No. 8056 then and is all of it some fifteen years or so in the making of the search a journey of sorts for the perfect piano. Maybe someone coming across this can relate. Of finding that one instrument on which to bear it all. I of course think pianists are a passionate lot and that the piano is one of mankind’s greatest inventions but obviously there are all instruments and perhaps many musicians for which this kind of passion applies.

But this is the story of an age-old Bechstein.

part one. [imperfection]

There really is no better sound in this world than a just-tuned piano other than perhaps none at all as in complete silence found only high up in the mountains on glaciers far removed from everything watching clouds scrape over ice without making a sound. Without the cancellations of duplexed and triplexed strings beating out of sync the piano gains a devouring volume. Nearly too much for this little living room in which I find myself this afternoon. It has a certain power to it that it does not have at any other time and a perfection in its imperfections. Made especially clear through the routine and drudgery of tuning where only one string at a time is tweaked and where it is easy to get quite used to the rather insipid sound that creates. But then - once having finished all the keys - then the task begins of tuning the unisons - over two hundred of them in all – and the sound begins to take shape. Builds on itself the physics of it all beautiful.

After far too much time spent on keyboards in Logic samples stored as binary codes in this whirring Mac beside me the inexplicable acoustic power of a hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old German grand piano strings copper wound by now-antiquated machines and hammers voiced by delicate hands nearly a century-and-a-half ago the soundwaves upon soundwaves multiplying on top of each other until nearly exploding is an absolutely phenomenal sensation to behold.

-----

Fifteen years ago now I think. I could not explain at the time why without a place to put it living on maple-lined quiet streets in tiny upstairs apartments up creaky flights of stairs making pennies an hour all of twenty years old completely out of nowhere I talked myself into the idea that I must have a grand piano. Absurd it was. And so after scrawling calculations on scraps of paper and more scraps of paper adding up and subtracting from and figuring out how to stretch every last dime maybe going without food so that I could sit at a grand piano and bang away annoying all within earshot I began The Search.

This entailed Friday nights raining and dark autumn in full swing driving from Tacoma to Seattle and all points in between even the Bösendorfer dealer in Portland visiting every piano dealer I could find. Some were gracious and took me seriously. Others told me to quiet down me hammering big fat chords that there were lessons going on in the back and what is this twenty-year-old doing looking at the grand pianos anyhow surely we could interest him in a more reasonable upright there that one in the far corner?

And then one afternoon I found myself wandering into the Helmer's Music in Tacoma. I had just about nailed my search down to a five-foot-seven Weber I came across at the Helmer’s in Federal Way. ‘Check out the six-footer down in Tacoma before you decide’ the guy up there told me and sent me on my way south.

And so I wandered the store from one far corner to the other of course because I had to maybe there was something else afterall at last finding the six-foot Weber stashed amongst a handful of other Asian grands and having a go on it. Hard to compare but I wasn’t sold on the few additional inches which of course would mean a few additional thousands of dollars.

Wrapping up I finished circling the store and there in the back corner a mahogany 5'9" piano impeccably beautiful and so I snuck up to it for a closer look. Hmm ... ‘C. Bechstein’ it said on the fallboard. Never heard of it. ‘Pianoforte-Fabrick von C. Bechstein Berlin’ graced the soundboard. German. I was drawn to it. And so I took a seat at the bench and held my breath. Played exactly three chords. And that was it. I was done for. I must have a Bechstein grand before I die I told myself in an instant before exhaling still sitting at the bench running my fingers across the keys.

The Search was over.

Too bad for me scraping pennies together to pony up for just the Korean-made Weber that this particular German Bechstein had a pricetag of ninety-three thousand. Dollars.

But it didn’t matter. I would own one someday.

-----

‘Weber WG57 5’7” ebony 6 mos sacrifice $8k obo’ the newspaper clipping read I found tucked in a box heaping full of music stuff from years past. Sacrifice. The word broke my heart.

I guess I only had it for six months that five-foot-seven polished ebony Weber grand for which I had spent all those months looking. The advert was dated November seventh nineteen-ninety-nine and the paperwork stuffed in a once nice but now ragged Weber sales folder from April of the same year. No doubt the worst financial decision I had ever made buying on a complete impulse sitting on kitchen counters in my sisters’ old second-floor apartment above Thomas Street on Capitol Hill over hot chocolates and potato casseroles and Nantucket Nectars I ended up keeping a mere six months before having to sell it losing several thousand dollars in the process several thousand dollars this twenty-two-year-old really did not have to lose.

But no regrets.

I look back and remember certain moments on it as if they were yesterday. An evening alone a theme raging in my head going over to it crammed into a corner of a living room barely bigger than the piano old worn hardwood floors sitting down and banging it out everything exploding in that moment the theme to what will become the fortissimo opening to a second concerto for piano and orchestra. The enormous B-flat minor chord as loud as I could hammer it on that five-seven. A switch to the D chord even more enormous. The fat copper bass strings were thunderous their sound rebounding off the plaster to fill the small space with an immense wall of sound unbearable. The sound was big but yet not big enough. I always wanted it to be bigger as big as what I heard in my head and the Weber could not suffice.

That’s not why I sold it though six months after all the work I put into searching for it months and months almost as long as I ended up owning it. But I had to in order to get to No. 8056. I just didn’t know it at the time. It was all a progression of sorts.

And the cost was worth it. The memories continued to pile on top of each other.

Putting together a film of short recordings for my older sister on eight-millimeter videotape me playing various snippets pulled from reams of comb-bound sketch books I had made and improvising the rest as I fumbled with them leafing though the pages scrawled with ink. The chord change from D-flat to E-flat minor huge an ending to a concerto yet to be written for now years and years all still in my head. An idea in F-sharp minor furious uncontained. Another in E-flat. I asked for the audio cassette recording a few months ago I had mailed to her years and years back but have yet to dust off an old cassette deck stashed somewhere in order to listen to it again and reminisce. Maybe pull some ideas from. Work them out develop them some more. A theme just an idea still to the second movement of another concerto for piano and orchestra sketched out on the keys of that Weber. In those six short months I even moved it from that first tiny apartment it called home to another tiny apartment from where it would leave me to move onto other hands other notes waiting to be played. Every now and then I think about it and wonder where it is? Who is playing it and what are they playing?

But no piano I have ever owned or played has escaped me. I seem to have memories of them all.

A grand piano in the middle of the wide-open orchestra rehearsal room at the neighborhood college back in flat muddy Missouri close enough that I would walk to crisp autumn nights crunching leaves over the campus lawn finding the piano through the window sitting there alone cracking the door open wandering over to it sitting down and playing interrupted at some point by a security guard not amused with my ramblings. Must have seen the light or heard the racket and came looking. I never returned. A Steinway D my sister Kathy the one to whom I gave the low-fi recording made on the Weber years before that had talked the janitor into letting her know where the D was stashed on the stage of her college’s auditorium. So one night we snuck in and pulled it out from its little climate-controlled vault out onto the stage her disappearing quietly to go sit somewhere up high in the mezzanine alone while I banged away on it at one point a student maybe in charge of watching out for hooligans like us maybe just passing through the halls walked up beside me on the middle of the stage and without missing a note of whatever I was fumbling to play I remember looking up and muttering ‘hey’ and he maybe assuming I had permission or maybe not wanting to bother me just playing the piano nodded and left us be. A Kawai grand in the sanctuary of a Mormon church in a proper Midwest town the secretary kind enough to let me in and play for maybe half an hour Kathy sitting quietly in a pew nearby. A crap old Wurlitzer spinet I was renting from Sherman Clay in a crap old apartment in Tukwila one night alone watching the movie Shine for the first time halfway through getting up stumbling over to it in the dark clicking on the dim piano light and throwing down the beginning motif to a first concerto for piano and orchestra influenced heavily in that very instant that single moment in the dark by the raging piano of Sergei Rachmaninov. A broken-down upright stuffed in a practice room at a small college in North Tacoma a farewell performance of sorts to a now lost love. The WG57. In time but before No. 8056 another ebony polished Weber this time an upright W121.

My mother’s tiny woodgrain Kimball spinet and Beethoven and my first piano sonata in D-flat.

At the top of the scrap of notebook paper folded and torn I found in that same box as the newspaper clipping I had written ‘penny toss!’ Scribbled in columns beneath were numbers dollar amounts of rents and bills and such. I guess after all the math all the addition and subtraction and crossing out and refiguring I was leaving it all - the decision to buy not any piano but a grand piano ten thousand some dollars - leaving it all to chance. To chance by flipping a coin. Whichever side - I can’t recall - that I decided would seal the deal and make the Weber mine even for those short six months had apparently landed right side up.

But definitely not by chance.

-----

The moving slip from A and J reads December eighth nineteen-ninety-nine. It too is folded and worn. I saved all these scraps of paper. I’m nostalgic I guess. It escapes me though at this point who it was that bought it from me. But I remember the two guys coming in. Taking off the one leg on the front left corner and lowering my piano for only such a short time already someone else’s down gently then from that awkward position heaving it up onto its long side to remove the other two legs. Lifting it with a collective grunt from there up onto the cart then out the front door. Down the stairs. Into the back of their truck. And gone.

But that was just the beginning.

Because of these scraps of paper mostly the one with the columns of rents and bills and such and the note to toss a penny I went searching without knowing or without reason or even an understanding then to find a five-foot-nine beautiful but more than just beautiful piano that stirred something in me the instant I played it a perfect combination of the airwaves around me from the copper and steel strings the spruce soundboard all handmade in Berlin by a piano maker named Carl Bechstein of which before that moment I had never heard.

It would be many more years until I would find mine.

to be continued ...

first frost.

2011-12-10T20:59:00.001-08:00

Happy Christmas ... time to listen to some Veils ...

audio at last.

2011-12-08T20:32:00.001-08:00

In order to celebrate the arrival of No. 8056 I had taken the liberty of ordering a couple of condenser mics before it arrived. This evening I was finally able to set them up. Record something. Weird listening to the result. The only time I've recorded a piano was maybe twelve-plus years ago on digital videotape which I transferred to an audio cassette now old and scratchy-sounding full of hiss.

So it's weird.

Weird listening to a recording of my piano that sounds exactly like my piano. I squeezed the mics in over the strings. Adjusted the gain just below clipping. Inserted a touch of reverb and EQ and played something simple.

I'm not sure what it is about microphones and recording but they and it are just cool. Up until now Logic and its piano samples were my way of capturing ideas usually late late at night. But now ... now I will be able to record the Bechstein.

Amazing.

eldorado.

2011-11-28T18:45:00.001-08:00

So I was going through an old box heaping with music stuff to research writing the complete story of No. 8056 mostly filling in the gaps coming across invoices for piano movers and clippings from newspapers of pianos I have sold to get to the Bechstein and in the heaps found a printout a few pages dated August 2003 from a no-doubt-now-defunct website called peakspeak.net (maybe has since morphed into summitpost.org) on climbing Eldorado that apparently I wanted to climb even way back then and it included the poem of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe that I - well - quite liked.

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old -

This knight so bold -

And o'er his heart a shadow

Fell as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow -

'Shadow,' said he,

'Where can it be -

This land of Eldorado?'

'Over the mountains

of the moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldy ride,'

The shade replied -

'If you seek for Eldorado!'

fertig.

2011-11-22T00:02:00.001-08:00

'You've got yourself a Bechstein,' Clark exclaimed as we wrapped up the voicing.

I had made the trip to Portland to check out all the work he had put into my piano over the last what nearly six months since two burly dudes had wheeled it out my front door down the stairs and into their truck as we followed them north to their next pickup us on our way to work.

It was cold out. Not as cold as nearly a year ago when I first went through the doors of Michelle's wearing my canvas Toms and a beatup Mountain Hardware fleece. I remember the light. Purple. Pale. I liked it cold then. And I liked it cold now. Was supposed to dip into the twenties.

But this time was different. I wasn't here to find out what their deal was. I was here to find out how my piano sounded with new hammers, a couple tied-off bass strings and a completely reworked action and damper system. I had only spoken to Clark over the phone so this was the first time meeting him. He appeared from the backroom and we shook hands then he whisked back there me in tow.

And there it was.

I had seen it a couple of months ago. Looked sort of lonely sitting in the middle of a big room lined with old grands on their sides and uprights in various states of disrepair. He asked if I wanted to take notes as he recited to me all the work he had done. When he came up for air he sort of motioned for me to sit and said it would probably be best if I played.

I hadn't touched it in half a year. I rattled off some big chords up and down then a theme I have been working on for 'Singularity.' Nothing much. It was hard for me to get into it with Clark eyeing me from behind and another technician over in the far corner tinkering on an upright taking this key out putting that key back in all under the harsh buzz of the fluorescents. But I tried to ease into the moment of playing my piano for the first time in months as best I could knowing it was important. Had to get a feel of the sound of it despite knowing this was not my living room and I was far from ease.

Instantly though I knew it was too bright in the treble. Clark nodded and switched me places after pulling out his voicing tools. He carefully went to work on the D two octaves above middle C three ... four times shuffling the action in and out between each. On the fourth there it was - I heard it instantly. The softening I was looking for. I nodded instantly and we caught a gaze that told me he heard it too. Then he quickly went to work on the couple of octaves above that before sliding the action back in to have me play it again.

I could tell a difference and we agreed we shouldn't do any more until it had a chance to settle back in its home. Didn't want to get to a point that couldn't be undone.

And that was that.

As he worked on tying off the action so as to keep it from getting damaged on its ride back north we chatted a bit about his upcoming trip to Alaska to do some tuning for someone's Bechstein. How we both had it on our lists of places to visit. How the scale of the mountains would be hard to comprehend. At some point Katie had slipped out to go visit a friend who lived nearby. I asked Clark a bit about his background as he told me some about my piano.

He had never worked on a piano this old. It was caught in the middle of the years where the piano took its biggest (and more or less last) transformation ... when the modern Renner action was developed along with a full plate and overstrung scale design. Mine has hints of them all and as he pointed out was way ahead of its time. He told me how frankly he was surprised that it turned out as beautifully as it did and how he wasn't sure it would when he decided to undertake this little project I presented him. I asked him how often it was that it didn't turn out?

Before answering he seemed anxious to tell me how he had agreed to take the restoration on despite the uncertainty because I had been into 'tone and touch' from the start and nothing else. I don't care and didn't about the cosmetics of the beast ... just wanted it to sound its potential that I could always hear from the first time I sat down to play it after uncrating it on a dock in Seattle and hauling it south to heave it into my cramped living room. And for which Clark gave me credit - admitting to me even he couldn't necessarily hear it when he first started working on it. But because what was important to me was what was important to him he liked the project from the beginning.

And then he told me it's happened less and less as he's gained more and more years of experience - the not turning out in the end thing. But that this instrument was one-of-a-kind and worth the risk. And sure I knew in the back of my mind he was selling me on the work he had done and thereby his expertise and potential future service should I need him to come to Seattle (which I very well may) but I didn't get the sense that was why he was telling me all he was telling me. He had an honesty in him that I picked up immediately and was only reassured for feeling the more we went back and forth.

He seemed surprised at what I all knew about this instrument that more or less controls my life the bit about the way the upper treble hammers needing to be in the exact spot when they hit the very very short strings in that section because the strings are divided into sevenths and the hammers hit on the first node a seventh its length from the tuning pins to avoid unbearable overtones. I got a raised eyebrow and a quirky smile for that. 'How do you know so much?' he asked me wryly. Short of a good answer I quickly replied that I sort of like pianos and left it at that.

The action tied off and secured back in the belly - the fallboard closed and music desk reinserted - I could tell Clark was anxious to be off to his next appointment for which he was no doubt already late. And I felt better. I arranged over a quick phone call to Lotof no doubt enjoying his Sunday off away from the shop to include a follow-up appointment back here at home in the spring. Give my piano some time to settle. Break in. Play it a bit. Then have Clark make the trip up here to do the final voicing and adjust anything that may get out of whack over the next few months.

And that then really was that. It was getting dark out despite not yet even being five o'clock. Before I could leave though there was one last thing I wanted to do. No one was there except Kim sitting politely at his desk mulling over some paperwork. As we wrapped up the payment I said I was going to wander around quick to play one of the new polished and shiny Bechsteins to compare to mine. He pointed to the back and suggested I try out the nine-foot D on the stage.

I wandered over to it. Set down the box of the original hammers from my 1875 Bechstein Clark had handed to me on a metal folding chair off to the side and sat down on the bench. There was definitely an air about this thing. A solidness and power to it that impressed me. I played the pianissimo theme of 'Singularity' up to its explosive section where it hits the F major. Had to restrain myself. Maybe he was on the phone or something and I was too reserved to really pound on a two-hundred thousand dollar piano that wasn't mine. It did sound amazing.

But not like No. 8056.

It didn't have the same history. The same story. The same character of sound. Built from trees felled pre-industrialization by hands now long gone - it was too new. And so I found the old Blüthner nearby that was here last time when I was talking to Lotof about having my Bechstein restored. I played the same theme. Didn't catch the price but I'm sure it was expensive. It had been completely restored afterall. But mine sounded better than it, too.

Satisfied then - I got up. Zipped up the collar on my old fleece. A delivery kid had come in while I had been playing the Blüthner and was talking to Kim about another late night. As I passed them I waved and thanked him and he smiled back. With the of the box of old hammers tucked under my arm I pulled open the door and headed out down Stark as the streetlights flickered on and my breath froze in the November northwest air.

lacrimosa [day of tears].

2011-11-19T01:12:00.001-08:00

Holy shit.

Umm, sorry.

There was a statement that flashed on the screen upon hitting play on the Mini for the film 'The Tree Of Life' that said simply how the producers urged the viewer to turn up the volume very high to truly experience the film.

And this piece by Zbigniew Preisner is an utter testament to that statement.

It may be since I heard Sergei Rachmaninov's D minor piano concerto that a piece of music has so completely and utterly shocked and amazed me. Coupled with the vision in the film of the creation of Earth it is a powerful experience.

Umm, this video though will utterly not do it justice.

But the music is out there.

Find it.

Play it.

Unbelievably loud.

Play it unbelievably loud.

Crush all the air around you lying in a dark, empty space and let it wash over you.

The soprano voice rising ever-higher.

Joined by the choir.

And the orchestra.

Ever-higher.

Ever-higher.

Ever higher.

the theory of the singularity.

2011-10-27T20:03:00.000-07:00

It is just an idea.

A theory.

The singularity. The still-hypothetical emergence of artificial intelligence through technological means. An eventual merging of technology and human biology of sorts. A point when computers are no longer in our pockets but rather we ... become ... the computer. Of course we will not realize when this happens and so the very idea of the singularity will form more as what has been termed an 'intellectual event horizon.' We will not see it coming. It will have already happened.

As autumn is now in full swing and I am wrapped up for the next six months indoors it is time to move forward with this project of mine called Carbon. There are three songs on the immediate to-do list. And a fourth close behind. All ideas are both sketched out as well as compiled into some rough samples in Logic.

This is one.

The first. This idea of the singularity. A minute-ten. A chord progression in E minor. An enormous furious piano scales and thousands of notes as fast as I can possibly play. Up and down the keyboard. Hammering on the low end. A raging orchestra. Brass. Strings. Timpani. A huge C major. A symphonic choir. And a voice. In my head still but trying - as in all of the stuff I write it seems - trying to rise above it all.

julian and maddalo.

2011-10-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

... and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where 'twas our wont to ride while day went down.

This ride was my delight. I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

And such was this wide ocean, and this shore

More barren than its billows; and yet more

Than all, with a remember'd friend I love

To ride as then I rode; for the winds drove

The living spray along the sunny air

Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,

Stripp'd to their depths by the awakening north;

And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth

Harmonizing with solitude, and sent

Into our hearts aëreal merriment.

~ Percy Shelley

the loneliest mountain.

2011-10-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Luna Peak in the distance from the summit of Black Peak

We were sitting at Vivace on Yale sipping white velvets (at least I was ... I think ... it might have been caramel) and I was reading some article in Backpacker magazine about extremes - the tallest tree, place with the most snow, quietest spot and such - and among the list it mentioned what the writer considered to be the loneliest mountain ...

Luna Peak.

I liked the idea. The sense it conveyed. Buried higher and deeper in the Picket Range of the North Cascades than any other peak, the article stated ~

You’ll need determination and navigation savvy to reach 8,311-foot Luna Peak, the rarely visited highpoint of the remote Picket Range. From Big Beaver Landing, it’s a 16.5-mile bushwhack that ends with a class 4 scramble.

I wholly intend to climb it next year for a view like no other - one direction to the southern Pickets the other to the northern part of the range. Fury. Terror. Challenger. Whatcom. Triumph. Despair. All the incredibleness of the most rugged slice of mountains in the lower forty-eight.

1955 - 2011.

2011-10-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

~ Steve Jobs, Stanford University, 2005

Dude - you changed my opinion of computing. With your OS X system you had me hooked. I remember it - the moment I realized working on a Mac was awesome - beautiful - revolutionary. I've got a dozen or so now all humming away none very new most old still going. Still going.

Wish you were too.

prelude in c.

2011-10-03T23:12:00.000-07:00

So it was a while ago. Maybe a few months. Practicing Hanon I sort of got tired of it and just started playing this arpeggiated C chord and came up with this little melody I obligingly and I guess quite simply called Prelude In C.

It really is nothing at all. Just rambling when I should have been practicing. I played it too quickly in places during this take. I messed up a note or two.

I hear it all quiet on a huge piano the spaces in between the notes. The rests at the end. The diminished chords. Then launching full-on into the song Isolation a few hundred decibels louder after an interlude with heavily-overdriven guitar.

But for now ... for now I'll leave it with its simple end.

(Prelude In C available for the time being only from that link)

_cheers

(image courtesy of nasa.gov)

clark.

2011-10-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

Friday morning. Ten o'clock or something. My phone rings. An eight-oh-five area code I don't recognize but I pick it up anyway. No one there so I hang up. A few seconds later it rings again. Same number, but this time there's someone else on the other end.

'Hey Thom - it's Clark the piano technician.'

Oh yeah - from Michelle's. Clark ... the sole guy working on restoring my Bechstein. I haven't talked to him in over a month so I was glad to hear from him.

'Just wanted to let you know it'll be two or three weeks before I'm ready to have you come down while I start to voice the hammers' he says.

Not having much to update me with the last time I talked to him end of August this bit of news was exciting. I still miss my piano. A lot. But I had sort of done good putting it out of mind. Getting by with a Steinway sample in Logic. But not the same. Not even close.

So he's working out the kinks in the pedals now and sounds like some last tweaking of the action before I'll get another call from him to set up a day to head down to Portland and spend in the shop listening as he sculpts the sound of the Bechstein to my liking before doing a final tuning.

The only caveat being that I am well aware of the fact his shop is not my living room and the acoustics of the place factor a great deal into the sound of an instrument like a piano. But it'll have to do. Mostly I am going to make certain he keeps the quality of the piano that I have always sensed was there but not quite heard since I played the first notes on it years ago. It has always been missing ... which is why I am forking over what I am forking over to him to bring it out. A tenor I can only imagine. A treble that doesn't pierce. A pianissimo like no other. A fortissimo in my living room that will blow away the neighbors down the street.

I am still hoping the sound will blow me away, too.

annual autumn holiday in one hundred seventy-one words.

2011-10-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

23 september.

Campground just outside the town of Banff.

Only one night in the Bugaboos.
Glacier cracking and moaning.

Weather moved in.
Rain.

Drive through Kootenay spectacular.

Light amazing.

Glimpses of impressive mountains with fresh snow.

Glaciers.

Sound of wind through the trees over din of car camping.

Smell of pines.

So much better than a hotel room.

Posh Nemo air mattress.

Pillow.

Poofy down bag.

Going to sleep good tonight.

Finally tired.

Stars.

Up before eight.

Pulled on wool zip-T.

Chilly.

Campground waking up.

Into town of Banff.

Coffee.

Up Bow Valley Parkway.

Moraine Lake.

Hike to Larch Valley.

Throngs of people.

Ugh.

No wilderness here.

Drove Icefields Parkway.

No wilderness there.

Cannot be impressed by glaciers viewed from the sides of highways.

Lots of driving.

Back through Kootenay.

Light less impressive.

No clouds.

Hotel in Idaho.

Shower felt good but miss the smell of outside.

Already.

Wind in trees.

Cozy-warm in down bag.

On puffy air mattress.

Pine sweet.

Stars.

More stars.

wilderness clichéd.

2011-10-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

So during our trip to the Bugaboos a week or so ago and a few other Canadian provincial and national parks (Banff and Jasper and Kootenay) I gained some perspective on what seems to be an entirely American notion of 'wilderness.' In addition last night a trip to Half Price Books yielded a find of a large-format book of Ansel Adams' called The American Wilderness.

In time I plan on writing up my thoughts in particular to wilderness from what I gleaned as being the Canadian approach to such and now of some thoughts on the Adams' book, but for this post went back to a journal entry I've up until now left unpublished (if you can call blogging about it 'publishing'). Coincidentally, it was from another annual autumn trip of mine and Jeff's (we do this every autumn - take a trip somewhere and do some backpacking and sightseeing and have visited places from Yosemite to the San Rafael Swell and points in between from the Rockies and Sierras to the southwest and now the Canadian Rockies).

In this entry below I recount our trip last year where we detoured a bit south to the Maroon Bells (on my request to be fair) and my thoughts on having hiked a couple easy miles up to Crater Lake beneath the pair of impressive north and south peaks ...

-----

25 september 2010.

Maroon Bells. Sitting here at Crater Lake after a two-mile hike with a throng of others. Found a spot above the lake nestled in the quaking aspens listening to the sound of the wind through the leaves over the sound of people yapping down by the lake. The view is astounding. And the aspens have turned their brilliant autumn yellow. There is a dusting of fresh snow. The weather is about as perfect as one could ask for. All ingredients mixed together begs the question can wilderness be a cliché? And in asking that in fact seems to me to be asking the bigger question that I think of often climbing and backpacking the mountains of Washington brutal and honest in their indifference weeding out the throngs of tourists the trails from foggy valley bottom to craggy peaks thousands and thousands of feet high steep ... is clichéd wilderness good or bad? That hordes of people stomp along the the two-mile trail to Crater Lake under the Maroon Bells to eat their fruit and brownies and take their photos under cloudless bluebird skies. Do they really truly walk away with a respect and awe for our natural world having been mesmerized by the sound of the wind through the aspens of the smell of air evergreen forest of the sight of these imposing peaks? Or just a postcard photo of themselves and another place they can tick off a list? Like Delicate Arch the other night. We didn't take the three-mile hike instead opting in the little light there was left for the shorter viewpoint just to see it if only from a distance. Got there right as the sun dipped below the horizon to see - literally - a hundred people lined up shoulder to shoulder tripods and all along the ridge west of the arch perched precariously on a canyon edge. Did they leave with an Abbey-esque reverence for the place or just another stupid photograph of an arch at sunset photographed by millions? Does accessibility like this do more harm than good? Or maybe more accurately simply does it do any good at all? Surely not everyone can have the respect for nature as Abbey and Ruess and their deserts or Muir and Adams and Manning and their mountains. So they just take their photos. Maybe they think twice about sustainability. Of the idea of the seventh generation. Of preserving wilderness rather than exploiting it. Or maybe they just sigh cos they had to take a bus up here to the Bells in an effort to reduce the pollution instead of driving their car cos thirty years ago even then it was obvious all the autos were wreaking havoc on the mountain air and the meadows. Maybe all they take away is a photo of them under blue skies and a kind of place I think is often misunderstood if not at least underappreciated so no harm done but no good either? People tossing water bottles and such on the ground. A kid carving something in the pristine bark of an aspen his mother standing nearby not noticing or saying anything. In the end do the throngs of tourists to these places help or hurt? Maybe I sound cynical or maybe I have turned elitist or into some old curmudgeon. Talked to some climbers headed down the trail behind us they had a go on Pyramid but turned back a hundred feet shy of the summit finding themselves on a bit of ice while their crampons and axes were tucked safely back in their trunk. Oops. But they get it I'm certain. How many now did we pass on the trail who also get it versus how many who did not? Just up there for their scrapbook photo from the lake a hundred feet from the bus stop only to turn around to head back home. Maybe that sounds elitist. Maybe not. I think of the trips I have planned that I hope to make before the snow starts to fall in earnest back home. Kool-Aid Lake in the North Cascades. I'll leave the same throngs of tourists behind lollygagging at Cascade Pass and head up the daunting if not slightly intimidating climbers' path carved into the side of Mixup Peak and then up to Cache Col to drop down on the other side under Mixup and Formidable and Spider to pitch a tent or toss my bag at the shores of Kool-Aid. The other trip of course to the Enchantments like I do every year a grueling ten-mile approach up six-thousand feet in itself weeding out the tourists and the ones who don't really care or don't get it leaving only those that do and who enjoy the solitude of one of the greatest little corners on Earth. Not like the Maroon Bells. Not like Delicate Arch. Bumping elbows with a hundred other photographers all with their tripods and expensive cameras just to take a photo that has already been taken a billion times. Manning writes -

'Wilderness - genuine wilderness - is the sum of many processes of life and death, growth and decay.'

Such places are the last of our primeval landscapes. The few surviving samples of a natural world to walk and rest in to see to listen to feel to comprehend and understand. To care about. There isn't much of it left. What there is (and this is key) is all that all of us will ever have. And all of our children. And so on. It is only as safe as people - knowing about it - want it to be. But do enough people know? So I come back to that question. Are the mothers and fathers with the strollers scrambling off the bus to get a view of the Maroon Bells in fact spreading the good word to their children that this wilderness is here and is finite? Is not safe and needs to be preserved? Maybe they will not take up mountaineering. Or head up and over Buckskin Pass to peer to peaks beyond. Maybe they will never again step into wilderness. But they will have had a glimpse. And is that enough?

-----

It is interesting to read my thoughts from last year given the perspective gleaned from this last trip to Canadian 'wilderness' in the Bugs and a trip into dare I say more traditional wilderness a couple weeks ago up to Whatcom Pass in North Cascades National Park. I feel I have gained a bit more insight into the idea and essence of wilderness since jotting down those thoughts sitting next to Crater Lake amidst all the others who had made the quick trip there, but that still - even back then - perhaps reveals the path I am headed - elitest or not - in my view of wilderness.

Not to jump too much ahead of myself, but pulling a quote from the Adams' book to close seems to sum my thoughts and direction perfectly and as succinctly as possible ~

'We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth, or we don't.'

a glimpse.

2011-09-14T23:19:00.000-07:00

Sixteen miles in. Six-and-a-half hours from shouldering my pack twenty pounds or so back at the Hannegan Pass trailhead earlier that morning. It was just about four in the afternoon. Another mile to go Whatcom. I had to command my legs to move up over the overgrown trail hot in the three-p-m sun. And then just below the pass I hit the sub-alpine zone. A beautiful scene of Brush Creek meandering and cascading through open heather meadows sprinkled with pinks and purples contrasted by greens and greys. It smelled amazing. A certain alpine freshness. I found the campground and a spot on which to toss my pack before heading up the last couple hundred feet and quarter-mile through heather to the pass for a bit of a break. Crested it with views east into the Little Beaver valley and Whatcom enormous rising from the rocky ridge that led south. Challenger was blocked from view. I'd have to climb higher before I could see it which I would in a bit. And then Luna from even higher. Right now writing this in my tent by headlamp Moby on headphones is mixing with the sounds of the chirping outside. The moon is bathing this alpine basin around the Tapto Lakes above Whatcom Pass washing out all but the Big Dipper. Cassiopea. Tired. Long day. Wandered around the basin away from where I set up my small camp to check the place out after dinner while the sun set behind Shuksan and Ruth to the west seemingly very very far away. I had passed by Ruth earlier that morning on the way over Hannegan. Am looking forward to sleep. Have on my Sacred Socks cozy-warm wool but it's crazy-warm outside. I don't think it's even supposed to dip much below sixty tonight. 9:23. I'll probably try to sleep and write more tomorrow. Have all day to myself up here before I head back the eighteen-plus miles to Spencer. Hoping for clouds or some beautiful light like we had on Sourdough two weeks ago or Cache Col two weeks before that but no such luck tonight and not really expecting it for tomorrow. This trip is just for a glimpse. A glimpse east into the crazy-wild Little Beaver valley. A glimpse of the crazy-remote Challenger. And Easy Ridge. And Whatcom. The Pickets. Finally. Morning now. The sun was late in getting to me camped here under this ridge to the east. But now it is here and I have already finished my essential morning cup of coffee the sound of a snowmelt stream nearby. Sitting on granite warm in the sun. Can tell it's going to be a warm day even at six-thousand feet. Already had the thought of swimming in one of the lakes crazy for September. A slight breeze feels heavenly. I can see Shuksan towering over everything to the west. And Ruth in front of it. Whatcom of course and the whole of Easy Ridge spread out to the south. Had some lunch and then climbed back over the ridge holding the Tapto basin for an absolutely incredible view of Challenger and the Little Beaver valley. I sit down now on some lichen-stained rock and pause to listen. The monumental cascades of waterfalls coursing down deep into the valley make a constant muted roar miles away. I can see pockets of glacier remnants clinging to life on the ice-scoured north side of Challenger. There's a lake even tucked under the sheer shadowed wall where the Challenger glacier stops abruptly somehow seemingly to defy gravity. As far east through the valley that I can see the landscape mellows. Ross Lake is hidden from view but I wonder if I can see Desolation Peak? I'll have to check a map when I get back. The breeze has mostly disappeared and I am reminded of how out here only the elemental matters. A breeze to ward off both the last of the bugs before the Autumn chill drapes itself over the mountains and the heat of the sun. No sound but that distant roar of waterfalls. Complete peace. I think back to the hike yesterday to get here. And about wilderness like this in general I guess. There are two other tents back down among the Tapto Lakes. I saw one guy head out on his way this morning. Then another. Not sure to where. Then silence. And still ... silence. What if there was a car ferry up Ross Lake to the Little Beaver valley? Or worse a road around it maybe turning the wild lake empty of any motorized boats into another place of a Lake Tahoe sort. Then say a road up Little Beaver smack up to where the insane geography of it finally impeded civilized travel. Then a parking lot there. And from that spot once crazy-wild wilderness maybe an Alps-like tram up here to Whatcom Pass. So that everyone can see this wild silent splendor that is this place buried deep in one of the wildest spots in the lower forty-eight. Except then it wouldn't be silent. It would certainly be more accessible. The seventeen miles in from Hannegan was probably a breeze compared to the eighteen mile easterly approach up the Little Beaver. Granted it doesn't need to be done in seven hours but regardless. It's a very long haul to heave pack up and over two passes. The ferry-slash-car-slash-tram option would be so much easier this place today would instead be thronged with people all clambering for the view. Afterall it is mindblowingly-spectacular.

But no ... thankfully. That other option is not yet an option.

And so I sit here on this ridge in shorts and shirtsleeves and flip flops where trees give way to rock a slight breeze completely by myself. The shadows on Challenger lengthen and swallow up the tiny lake I spied earlier. The folds in the snow on the glacier become more apparent. The light softens. And all of this to only that distant sound of cascades soon to silence with the coming of winter. I am enthralled by silence. In awe of this glimpse into such a wild place. And grateful to those who maybe sat here at this same spot and saw a wilderness worth preserving. I realize that in my staunch defense of wilderness preservation I also know not everyone can sit here and gaze and gasp at the sight of the Challenger glacier or immerse themselves in this sort of quiet. And searching for an answer or maybe more a justification I decide or maybe even know that is what makes it special. That those people who just drive the cross-state highway and pull off at the Diablo Lake overlook maybe only do so to stretch tired legs and point and say 'look at that mountain!' ('that mountain' being the six-thousand-foot relief of the north face of Colonial - a fantastically-wild climb). Take a photo of Diablo's glacial-silted turquoise waters and continue on their way. Sure they've seen something but I tend to think (or again justify) that they have not connected. There is no effort. Just a photo op. So with no effort it can be argued ultimately has any benefit been gained? Will they rush home and phone their legislators to support and save wild lands? Maybe. Not likely though I'd be willing to bet. But the one who treks up the mountain passes through fields of heather and wildflowers and granite far-removed with everything they need on their back grueling at times blisters maybe sore muscles for sure to finally arrive seventeen miles and hours and hours even maybe days away later to throw down pack. Sit. Stare. And take note of the silence of wilderness. Glimpse into its core. Spend a night or two or three or more sleeping out under the Milky Way. Open a tent fly up to the sheer vastness of trees or meadows or mountains or skies. Watch an icefall crash on a glacier across a valley as old as time. What can they learn? Take away? Much likely more than the passerby numb down there just winding around the bends of a highway as it contours the same landscape those who hike can feel inching across it by boot. Going now to scout some tarns or streams or rocks looking for a good foreground to strike against the incredibleness of Challenger. Not sure what the evening will bring but know it will be spectacular. I'll be dying to be done as I crawl back up Hannegan on my way out tomorrow. Then down. Down down down to the trailhead. But still grateful to have been here. Still in awe at such a place. Still reminded this was just a glimpse and I will most definitely - most definitely - be back.

Trip stats -

:: 17 miles one-way to Whatcom Pass (2000' gain to Hannegan, 2600' loss down to the Chilliwack crossing, 3000' gain back up to Whatcom Pass); another 1.5 miles to Tapto Lakes with an additional 1000' gain/300' loss; total time from trailhead to Tapto Lakes = 7 hours

:: The ranger back in Glacier apparently thought I was insane for attempting Tapto Lakes in a day confessing she normally takes three and subsequently actually would not give me a permit to Tapto for both nights instead suggesting I stay the first night at Whatcom Pass before heading up the rest of the way and still smug at thinking I wouldn't-slash-couldn't make it which of course did not stop me from, well, camping at Tapto Lakes both nights. Stupid rangers.

:: The cable car crossing of the Chilliwack was awesome despite hearing that there is a log draped over the river downstream at the ford.

:: There are lots of fly-infested camps along the Chilliwack buried in old-growth forest (not that there's anything wrong with that) for those less-inclined to attempt the entire trip in one day (umm, not that there's anything wrong with that either).

:: There were signs of bears at Whatcom and down below at Graybeal camps but I never actually saw one.

:: I may have become slightly delirious on the way back down the Hennegan trail through the Ruth Creek valley long-ago clearcut by the good ol' troopers of the US Forest Service so that all hikers now unfortunate to come down (or even more unfortunate to go up) in the afternoon get blasted by the sun no relief from what should have been a pristine old-growth forest hike but now just endless clumps of maple and other such brush and thus I may have been yelling at a fly that was pestering me once I finally reached the trailhead and was just desperately trying to get in my car and leave and there may have been a family or two having a nice lunch in the picnic shelter wondering what was wrong with that dude yelling at a fly and flailing his arms around.

:: The north fork of the Nooksack River makes a prime spot in which to dunk head, arms and feet after enduring the God-forsaken Hennegan trail which nearly quite literally never ends and for which even an attempt to drown the mundaneness of it out with Placebo's 'Battle of the Sun' proved futile.

:: Regardless ... this trip is utterly incredible. No, really. Utterly. I will be back.

home.

2011-09-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

I am home here climbing along ridges above clouds

seas of white.

I am home here on front covered porch wood old but not peeling scarf wrapped around neck steaming mug

wrapped in hands.

I am home here in front of piano old and beautiful and worn

imperfect.

but I am

not home here.

at the edge of light.

2011-08-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of light.

The mountains are your mind.

~ Gary Snyder, excerpted from The High Sierra Of California

granite grey sierras below and topaz blue sky above.

2011-08-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

Day Two. Trying to find a rock on which to sit where there's a breeze even slight so I can enjoy my coffee in peace from the mosquitos. I'm watching this group of three climbers wandering around this basin near Sailor Lake where J and I made our camp last night. Not sure where they stayed maybe down lower at Dingleberry. We met them coming up the trail yesterday morning and breezed by them pretty much leaving them in our dust. Last night we climbed up this ridge separating Sailor and Midnight Lakes and didn't see any signs of tents or people below. Could've been the hard side light but this place seems pretty remote for now. The first night was kind of restless for some reason. It's not really cold but my feet were which kept waking me up. Julian seemed to sleep soundly as usual so that made me happy. It's quiet now. Just the sound of this outlet stream from Sailor and the waterfall below Hungry Packer Lake above us. It was an impressive sight from the ridge last night - Hungry Packer - still littered with chunks of ice along the northern and western shores. Maybe I'll get a shot of it and Picture Peak on our way back through here in two days after we have a go at crossing the Sierra Crest via a col beneath Mount Haeckel at just under thirteen thousand feet. The rangers had promised solid snow above ten-five but we're here at eleven thousand feet and there are just patches of the stuff. I can tell higher up there is more - and more than usual - but my worry of spending our Sierra summer sleeping on snow is no matter. The basins here are what I wanted and how I always picture the Sierra littered with the squatty hulks of juniper pines and granite boulders open for exploration. Today the plan then is to climb back up that same ridge and continue on up to the col. Then drop down the southwest side more-or-less directly into the most spectacularly-remote Evolution Basin to meet up with the John Muir Trail winding through and head a bit north for Evolution Lake to set up camp. The original plan was the literally closer-by-a-mile Sapphire Lake but from photos I checked out back at the hotel in Mammoth Lakes it seemed pretty desolate there. Great for photos as I for some reason am particularly drawn to remote and desolate Sierra scenes but not so great for camping and trying to hang our food where the tallest thing around is maybe a six-foot boulder. It seemed Evolution Lake was surrounded by pines and places to hang our stuff and I guess then just that much more hospitable and inviting. I do like the quiet J still in the tent not sure what he's up to maybe playing with George and Stanley trying to keep away from the swarms of mosquitos. Yesterday back in Mammoth we were eating breakfast and watched as a young couple geared up for their own backpacking trip. The girl set down her pack outside the lobby door and I spied a stuffed Tigger sticking out of a water bottle pocket. I poked J and pointed to it and we laughed. He said he felt better knowing he wasn't the only one taking stuffed animals into the wilderness. So we're back now and I'm sitting on a rock in the shade to jot down some thoughts before heading off to cook dinner. Big day. And it's only four-something in the afternoon. We gave Haeckel Col a go. Climbed seven hundred feet up the ridge on our way to the cirque beneath Haeckel and everything was going marvelously. But all of a sudden we found ourselves quite quickly on some pretty sketchy terrain. There was seemingly no easy way around this couple-hundred-foot-tall knob of granite talus at the top of the ridge. We tried climbing high to get around it and traverse more-or-less to the top of the cirque but it got pretty dicey and I turned us around. Julian threw out some suggestions but they all ended up cliffing us out with drops of anywhere between twenty and fifty feet to the dusty solid ground below that which then in turn led up to the cirque. We ended up backtracking to the top of the ridge and skirted down lower to find a narrow loose gully leading a couple hundred feet down to where we could then climb easily back up and into the cirque and all the way up past Lake 12345 and finally the col to crest the eastern Sierra and get our first glimpse down into Evolution. The gully was not pretty nor did Secor's guide or anything else I read about the route to Haeckel Col over the past couple of months ever mention any of this sort of terrain but it honestly seemed there was no other or easier option. I had figured it to be a pretty straightforward - albeit inevitably more difficult than trail - cross-country hike and final climb to the Col to get us to the coveted Evolution Basin and putting us more remote than we had ever been on any of our Sierra adventures. We had been going for three hours to get to that point and still only halfway to the Col - a mile away and maybe eight hundred feet higher. From the top of the crest, we then still had to drop down three miles and sixteen hundred feet to the JMT and then another mile or so north on trail to Evolution Lake. Four maybe five more hours I was guessing from the base of that gully. I could tell J was overwhelmed. I had led us down to the base of it and J had followed expertly negotiating terrain that likely no eleven-year-old had gone. At the bottom once again on solid ground we gathered ourselves and talked a bit. He was as much a part of our plan as myself and I wanted to make sure he knew that. Make sure he knew if we turned around we could explore the wildly-fantastic Sabrina Basin for our remaining three days. No worries. No worries at all not one single bit. I admitted to him that my plan had been ambitious. That off-trail terrain always takes longer than plodding steadily along on-trail. That I hadn't considered the eleven-plus-thousand foot elevation at which we were doing all of this us just a couple of low-landers from Seattle. So with a bit of a heavy heart for both of us we decided we'd turn around. Go back. I know he was so excited to get to Evolution Basin. Just like on Agassiz last summer I had put together a route that pushed him until he made the call to go back. But realizing and telling him that was part of my job. To push him beyond his comfort zone with no worry of ever turning around. But I still felt a bit guilty. To get his hopes up of such an incredibly wild trip and then have it be out of reach. But also just like Agassiz as we headed back down the ridge - taking a shortcut from near the top straight down to Hungry Packer Lake - we talked about the adventure. He told me how it was just not meant to be this time and there was a reason we would not get there. His insights were spectacular. He shed a few tears it seemed maybe surprisingly at least to me out of some sheer gratitude he felt and then I wiped away a couple of my own as I listened to him tell me how fantastic all of this was and gave him a big hug. Maybe at the end of the day despite being a total hack I am doing alright with this kid of mine. I was so proud of him back up there I thought as a smile came across my face. He was so ambitious. So excited. 'Dad let's try going up there' or 'Dad how about going down here?' he asked with exuberance and experience beyond his eleven years taking it upon himself to try forging a route ahead. I got some photos of him climbing with the granite grey Sierras below and topaz blue sky above. Even that last attempt down the steep and loose and sketchy gully I was hesitant to go but no ... he persuaded me to give it a try. The kid is a climber at heart. Desperate to experience wild places just like his dad. To give this or that a go despite an uncertainty hanging over it all and a col a mile away and almost a thousand feet still-higher. No fear. Just eleven-year-old legs that wear out much faster than his incredible spirit which seems to show no bounds and for which I start to tear up thinking about. So no Evolution Basin this year. But just like Agassiz yet again no worries. It's really not about the destination we agreed. Be it the summit of a fourteen-plus thousand-foot Sierra peak or a super-remote basin most people take days to reach by trail. We were in the mountains and 'we never have a bad time in the mountains Dad' he told me. And then as we neared the base of the ridge and the edge of the lake - also like on Agassiz - we spotted our first marmot eyeing us from a sunny rock. As we approached he quickly jumped into his burrow, but Julian blew his marmot whistle on his pack strap and the little fellow immediately poked his head back out and called back in reply. It's just about dark now and I'm writing this by headlamp in the tent while Julian tries to sleep next to me. He's not feeling super-great tonight maybe the altitude we hit at the top of that ridge. I'm waiting for the Milky Way to come out. Maybe will try for some photos.

Day Three. At last found a spot on a granite recliner above the icebergs quickly melting out away from the bugs. There's enough of a breeze to keep them away for the moment. J is throwing rocks at the ice. The chunks at the shore I included in my attempt of a photograph last evening of Picture Peak reflected in the lake are gone today. Melted. An enormous waterfall of snowmelt plunges over the sheer cliffs above the southwest shore of the lake. It's an impressive sight. It's hard to be motivated under the blistering sun and cloudless sky. I just wish a storm would roll through to shake things up a bit. Sitting in the shade found a spot away from the bugs now thinking back to our third day in Dusy Basin last summer. How the clouds had rolled in that morning and changed the light. How I also had sat under a juniper pine in the shade middle of the afternoon zipped up in down against the ever-constant wind mesmerized at the changing shadows as the clouds chased each other from west to east across the blue afternoon Sierra sky. How much more incredible Dusy Basin seemed. Which maybe is unfair I realize. Maybe it's cos we haven't had any drama here with the weather. Maybe cos a quick climb up the ridge towering over us to the north gives a view back to Owens Valley and Lake Sabrina. Maybe cos we're not in Kings Canyon or any national park for that matter. But unfair because Picture Peak is really quite impressive. And we can see glimpses of the summits of the Evolution peaks surrounding us on three sides high above and at least sense their remoteness. It is amazing. But for some reason I am afraid I may leave here feeling slightly disappointed without knowing really why. To think of a reason I go back to our past Sierra summer holidays. The first one Julian was eight. I had an overly ambitious plan then as well. Two back-to-back double-digit-mile hikes under the weight of full packs for us both. After our first trip fell a mile or two short of Thousand Island Lake under the shadow of Banner Peak and we set up camp next to Badger Lake for our second we headed south to climb over Kearsarge Pass at just shy of twelve-thousand feet into Kings Canyon and dropped down a thousand feet to camp by the lakes under the crazy-impressive craggy Kearsarge Pinnacles. From the top of the pass we could see an afternoon thunderstorm raging in the remote heart of the park to the west. Each day we were greeted with changing weather. It was hot and we swam in our underwear in the lakes and dried off on warm sun-bleached granite. I remember tossing a pad on the ground and lying next to a stream one morning thinking of how fantastic and unbelievable it all was. I didn't heft a tripod or any of the medium-format gear I had brought along but instead left stuffed in the trunk back at the trailhead just my small but trusty G2 in hand to try and capture the place. But the four-megapixel pics still remind me of that spectacular spot. Of J wrapped in a towel staring up at peaks awash with alpenglow. The following year we were actually aiming for Dusy but a fire on the highway leading up to South Lake scuttled our plans so instead we backtracked our way to Yosemite and spent a night at Cathedral Lake. A thunderstorm had rolled in like clockwork during the afternoon giving me a bit of concern having chosen to leave the rainfly tucked back in the trunk rather than carrying it but the light and clouds later that evening were more incredible beyond any description I could ever muster. And last year of course we did indeed make it to Dusy Basin. We had missed a spectacular thunderstorm the evening before we arrived instead witnessing it from the safe haven of the town of Bishop. But on that third day the clouds arrived and the light that evening was miraculous. We're not far from Dusy now as I think about it. Maybe ten miles or so to the east. So maybe on all of those earlier trips we had just gotten lucky. I don't know. I do know I am weird and think there is just something - something magical about being in a national park. Particularly Kings Canyon and the North Cascades. Probably the two most inaccessible national parks in the whole collection of them scattered across the West and the rest of the lower forty-eight. And that of course appeals to me. Of crossing into them on foot over impressive mountain passes. And I think to the idea of climbing over those passes and the sort of magic then that brings. It's of course because of the remoteness. Of being on the other side of the rest of the world. Kearsarge Pass into the eastern heart of Kings Canyon. Bishop Pass into the northern heart of Kings. Over Easy Pass then dropping down into the fantastic Fisher Basin. Jackass Pass on to the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range of the Wyoming Rockies. You cannot see a road from the other side. Had we made it over Haeckel Col we'd be out there. Evolution Basin is pretty remote. Maybe more remote than anywhere short of the Cirque of the Towers I have ever been. And I really think it's that allure that now more than ever appeals to me. No doubt about it. And so maybe when it comes down to it that's the reason afterall that I feel this tinge of disappointment. And I say tinge because of course it's been an incredible trip. And we still have two days left. And I can't do much about the weather. But yesterday's attempt to climb over the crest will absolutely go down as one totally unforgettable moment. Just like Agassiz. These tougher times the ones where we're together in it one hundred percent the ones where I'm admittedly for better or worse pushing him beyond what he thinks he can do end up forging some unbreakable bond between us. Not really wanting to create a repetitive theme of over-ambitious trips for my still-young son I like to think of that at least to alleviate the bit of guilt that hangs over me for my failed plans. I see now the idea of five miles a day was not necessarily over-ambitious. But maybe those same five miles over rough terrain off-trail above eleven thousand feet over sometimes sketchy terrain and crumbling Sierra cols was. As opposed to sitting in one spot like we did in Dusy - although we did explore each day - I do like the idea of moving each day. See new sights. New angles. So next year I'll have to remember that. Maybe look again at the trip I originally planned for us deep into Kings Canyon over Kearsarge and Glen Passes to Rae Lakes and Sixty Lakes Basin. All trail. I liked the bit about my plan of two days of work followed by a day of rest and just exploring and then the two last days working again to get ourselves back to civilization. Despite my plan this year I am still left amazed. Amazed at our time spent here so far and of course amazed with him. Even if maybe it ultimately was the sight of the col from the bottom of that dirty gully seemingly high above and still far away too knowing we had as far to descend that blew the wind out of his sails it had not blown the wind out of his spirit. Like he said there was a reason we would not make it to Evolution this year. But we will. We will.

Day Four. Well we moved our tent for the third night this time in between Sailor and Hungry Packer Lakes in this big open granite basin Picture Peak towering above us to the south the outlet stream from Hungry Packer flowing through with quiet calm. I am sitting on a rock in the sun. It's still early listening to Moby's 'Stella Maris' and 'The Violent Bear It Away' watching the water fall its course. I love this time of day in places like this. The sun just having risen over the mountains to our east the shadows still long it is still quiet. Last night was spectacular. Never even saw a single person yesterday. After dinner early around five-thirty Julian grabbed for his summit pack and me for my camera and a liter of water and we headed off to climb the other ridge separating us from the Moonlight Lake basin and Thompson Ridge to the east up to the base of where Picture Peak fell abruptly to Hungry Packer Lake far below. Halfway up I stopped to snap a video of J climbing up a snowfield to me then past the setting sun blinding behind washing out the folds and crags of the mountains everywhere alpine and unveiling themselves to us from this new height. I felt an energy I had not felt yet on the trip surrounded by such desolate incredibleness. The Clyde Spires. Wallace. Darwin. Powell. Lamarck. The whole of the Evolution range lay awash in backlight. We could see Echo Lake surrounded in a deep granite cirque still covered in broken ice. I took photos of Julian climbing up. And then more photos. And knew instantly this was the highlight of the trip. I had needed this. This alpine setting remote-feeling and barren above the trees a world of ice and rock still even end of July. Scrolling through the pics later in the trip I could flick from the first frame I took on the trip to the last earlier that evening and thoroughly enjoyed the juxtaposition of the first CA-89 stretching straight out from Monitor Pass a few wispy clouds clinging to an otherwise flat blue sky to the last of J on a ridge the sun behind jagged Sierra peaks mountains and granite surrounding him seemingly in all directions. After our nightly ritual of washing up in frigid stream waters we took turns going through our pictures and looking at them all. When it was dark enough he and I scrambled out of the tent to a spot nearby to shoot the stars. The sky was littered with ten thousand of them and the silky stream of the Milky Way hanging overhead arching its way down to meet the horizon to the east beside Picture Peak. He was excited his camera was able to capture the scene and it was fun feeding off his excitement of the moment to try to take some pics of my own. It was a perfect evening not too cold. Us both wrapped in our warmest layer of light insulation to ward off the just-slight chill before tucking ourselves back in down bags for the night. But first some Uno by headlamp of course. Then to fall asleep to the sound of water falling its course from the mountains to the ocean. Today our plan is to pick up our camp one last time and head cross-country over that ridge we climbed to try for Haeckel Col and pitch our tent somewhere near Midnight Lake with its impressive view up to Mount Darwin. And of course directly on the other side of Darwin ... Evolution Lake. Separated from us by the thirteen-thousand foot crest of the Sierras. No clouds again today. Sitting in the tent with a slight breeze. We found a pool in between Midnight and the outlet stream that we'll try dipping in later this afternoon once we've had a bit of lunch. Almost down to the last of our food. Probably didn't bring quite enough but we'll survive. I'm realizing for some reason that out in this crazy-wild splendor it's hard for me to relax instead always feeling a need to be doing something or exploring somewhere or just on the move. I want to go climb. Go wander. But I know I should just enjoy relaxing in the still-quiet of these mountain afternoons just reading from the book I picked up back at the ranger station in Mammoth Lakes of John Muir's 'My First Summer in the Sierra.' I thought it would be fitting reading his rambling but lyrical prose as he describes his love affair with his aptly-named Range of Light. Or writing in this journal. Back from a dip in the pool. The water was cold! Maybe not as cold as the ice-laden waters of Hungry Packer but still too cold for swimming. The bugs are still swarming. But ... clouds have begun to roll in! It's hard for me to contain my excitement sitting in the tent constantly gazing out every minute or two to see how much they have multiplied and billowed. I can tell weather is moving in. There's a palpable feeling in the air I feel dialed into and I find I quite like watching the weather change in the mountains. The Sierras. The Cascades. A classic afternoon thunderstorm brewing here for sure. I can see an enormous cumulonimbus cloud ever-building to the north over the Owens Valley its top having just begun to flatten out to the telltale anvil shape of a perfect maybe slightly menacing-looking thunderhead the underside of it and the surrounding clouds turning more and more grey as the minutes pass. The wind picks up and howls through the tops of the juniper pines as we find ourselves under the shadow of a cloud for the first time in four days! Just to be safe I've guyed out the four corners of the tent. There is a ginormous cloud building over Darwin and the Sierra crest. It really is fascinating to witness this all from our vantage point on this high granite plateau-of-a-basin. Thunder! The distinct rumble still far away in the east. And now in what seemed like just seconds the cloud to our east beyond the ridge has darkened and broiled and I know in an instant it's headed our way now probably unleashing its rains over Sailor Lake and the basin where we were earlier today and I suddenly realize our slightly-exposed position in the thinning of treeline at eleven thousand feet. Enough so to cut dinner short to scramble down the trail and check out other options more protected amongst the trees. Finding some pretty quickly I raced back up to kickstart Julian into action. We stuffed what we had lying about in our packs and picked up the tent carrying it full of our bags and pads and everything else down the trail. Dumped it and quick staked it out with a handful of heavy rocks and jumped inside just as the rain began to pour all around us. The thunder intensified as we breathed a sigh of relief huddled again back in the tent the fly whipping about precariously but held stout by the solid granite weighing down its corners us tucked in our down bags and blankets sheltered amongst these pines. The thunder is coming from the west now so the storm has already passed over us. 6:25. Reminds me of the night at Cathedral only then I had opted not to bring the rainfly so I had crammed our tent under some low pines and draped our towels over the top as the wind howled all night overhead. Here and now time for some Uno to wait this storm out. 7:04. Rain more or less has subsided. Opened the fly doors and can see clearing blue skies to the east. I stepped out of the tent to check on the weather. Yes it had passed. And in its wake left clouds and light unbelievable! J and I both grabbed for our cameras and were off. He said he would try to catch up to me but by the time realizing where I was I had already left for another spot. I laughed and told him I moved fast with light like this cos it doesn't last and changes in an instant. We shared the tripod and I swatted away or tried to swat away the swarms while he focused on taking photographs and then we'd switch. The light changed ambient from hues of purple to pink to orange. We found crashing waterfalls amongst the granite boulders and patches of summer snow. Slabs of polished granite. This place in this light was too spectacular almost to behold. A spectacular final evening we were able to share before we hike out tomorrow morning. There is a quaint and humbling feeling hunkered down in a tent its nylon walls zipped up to a thunderstorm raging outside first crashing to the east then overhead then to the west abating and leaving in its wake a whole new world refreshed. The granite dries quickly I found. The birds were out and singing. The wilderness exposed in its most raw form. I am always impressed and grateful for the experience of riding out a storm in the mountains and this one was no different. Now here under headlamp writing this we tuck ourselves in after our final nightly ritual of washing up next to each other along a stream scrubbing off the dirt from a full day in the mountains. Brushing teeth. Hanging food. Or what little is left now. To snuggle in and look at each other's photos one last time before a few hands of Uno 'just one more Dad' Julian pleads and to which I cannot say no. Our last night of sleep peaceful to the sound of water but all else quiet the rest of the world.

Day Five. Morning of our last day. Last night after darkness fell the clouds completely evaporated to once again reveal the stars and the whole of the Milky Way. J took some more photos. I tried to get a shot of the tent under the trees the Milky Way streaming above but was having trouble with the focus. Don't think they turned out. It's quiet again now. Just a few clouds clinging near Mount Darwin and far north in the distance across the valley to the White Mountains. Maybe another storm is brewing. The hot air hanging over the Sierra crashing with a cold mass moving south from the Pacific Northwest. Home. J will be up soon. With the bugs buzzing back to life we'll no doubt be anxious to quickly break camp and head down the trail to Spencer patiently awaiting our return. Real food. Swimming in the Bishop pool a few leaps off the diving board for me maybe the big slide for Julian. Our holiday isn't over but I know tomorrow I'll be ready to just be home. It's a long drive. But all the same I have come to realize that after each trip each time into these wild crazy-beautiful places I leave with photographs and memories and - and maybe most importantly - an even deeper more insatiable desire to return.

--- journal entries dated July twenty-six through July thirtieth, John Muir Wilderness, California

in the meantime.

2011-07-14T00:43:00.000-07:00

I think it's official tonight. I miss my piano.

Sitting on big covered front porch wrapped in a light wool scarf listening to the rain fall around me an espresso in hand listening to Radiohead's 'Sail To The Moon' on vinyl the crackle and hiss adding to the ambience of Thom Yorke's dingy old upright piano chords filling the house wafting out the windows to me open this summer evening to welcome the breeze. It's been over a month since they hauled it out of my living room. I don't know time sort of all melts together it seems.

But I like dingy old uprights. And beautiful concert grands. And everything in between.

Just the idea of metal and wood copper and steel and brass and mahogany and spruce and ebony. And there is something maybe even magical the sound of a piano through open summer windows. I like walking around town quiet summer evenings shadows long somewhere on the air the sound of a piano coming from a living room. It seems rare these days. A piano or any instrument really.

Which is really quite sad I suppose. Or at least to me.

I cannot hear a piano in a song now without wishing to sit down old wooden ebony garage sale chair and play mine. To hear that wonderful tenor. I know it is for the best that it's gone for now. That when it is returned it will be infinitely better and I will be drowned in its sound like never before. But in the meantime.

In the meantime ...

a strange kind of love.

2011-06-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

And there it was.

Randomly I just put on some strange mix tonight house quiet so dialed up the volume on the stereo and came across a song by Peter Murphy (of Bauhaus fame) and stopped in my tracks.

That was it.

Or really really close. The idea in my head of how the voice sounds for my music. I love his range - how low he goes (how he hits that E2). He never gives the presence of the dynamic range I hear in my head for my own stuff, but leaves a sense it is possible and just instead chooses to sing restrained and holds back. It is a fitting soundtrack for the night ... turned up quite loud to let the reverb of his voice fill the room from all directions ...

the sun hanging low.

2011-06-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

I don't know but for some reason when Summer comes even if it's not quite here yet but Summer meaning I can open windows in the evenings cos the day was warm enough I always put on music I listened to years ago. It's not even Summer yet here by date and certainly not by weather still tucked away under heavy cloudy skies if the mercury tips seventy it's a good day. But it's warm elsewhere and I'm pretty sure it's warm where I used to listen to this music. I used to drive out these deserted country roads I can't remember now their names without cracking open a map which would seem to ruin the nostalgia. Highway C I think. Or K. Some letter definitely an old two-lane letter highway through cornfields past barns and old farm houses. I once had this crap but perfect first apartment down near the river. The Missouri River. Brown and muddy and wide and slow-moving like a wise old man dirty from a day in the fields but all-knowing and charming in his own way not anything like the crystalline clear waters from blue glaciers here flowing to the ocean. But I still remember the golds. Of the fields. Of the sun hanging low as I'd pass corn stalks golden a haze hanging above them this visual cacophony of insects fluttering catching the light squinting to see them individually not just a blur. Windows down on my little red Toyota or better yet no windows the breeze warm in my face on an old just-about-broken-down Murray ten speed on which I'd racked up a couple thousand miles over the few years I owned it before leaving it behind as I left it all behind the corn fields the golden-orange warm Midwest sunsets and cicadas and roads for the mountains and glaciers of the Pacific Northwest.

But there was this barn I found once deserted and quite literally falling apart. A truck was parked underneath an overhang that looked as if it would be crushed at any moment. I'd stash my bike somewhere out of view or park my car off the highway in the corn fields so as not to bring any suspicion my old inherited Pentax S3 a single-lens relic my Dad had gotten in Korea and bestowed to me that I used to teach myself exposure and aperture and how to judge the light slung over my shoulder and would crawl into the barn to find a battered staircase leading up to a second story open from decrepitation the roof having long ago caved in. Before getting there on headphones or amped-up late teenage adrenalin-inducing car stereo I'd have Michael Stipe stuck in my head climbing up that staircase 'Let Me In' or 'Country Feedback' or anything from the Out of Time album or Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon or a bit later in the summer yeah anything from R.E.M.'s New Adventures In Hi-Fi record. 'E-Bow The Letter.' 'Electrolyte.' I don't know for some reason his voice just fit with Midwest summer dusks. Low key. Unstrained. Delicate but totally. This was before landing somewhere in the midst of dark Brit Pop the likes of Suede and Radiohead in LA and after settling in Seattle. I wasn't even twenty yet. So I'd crawl up to the hole in the roof in that barn and just sit there listening to the country quiet down. Every once in a while an old beatup pickup or some station wagon would drive by. Only once did anyone ever notice me up there and I wondered what the old farmer thought some kid sitting in the hole of a deserted barn roof up to no good probably but he paid no mind and I kept listening to the cicadas and watching the shadows grow longer before scrambling back down to hop back onto bike and haul it back or maybe just amble around some more til well past dark. It was the country afterall and these lettered highways were deserted.

So now in my little house half a world away over a few mountain ranges and a continental divide I sit on my porch after a run windows open listening to Stipe sing 'You' delayed guitars fed through a classic Leslie amp cycling around and around. It's cloudy. It's not the same. I should grab a down sweater as it dips below sixty though it's not yet dark. It's not muggy like it was all those years ago Missouri country summers. I've moved on from deserted letter highways cutting through cornfields to glaciers and craggy peaks and alpine heavens but still look back can't help it when the calendar winds up in these Summer months and the windows get opened in the evenings. And the music hasn't changed. Not one bit. So I can put some on the living room stereo and let it echo through the house through open windows floating out on the breeze. It's not a decrepit barn falling in hole in the roof but I can still picture it. I can still picture it.

lotof.

2011-05-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

So Lotof called today.

'Hello Thom, this is Lotof at Michelle's Piano. I have some information about the time frame. There is a very strong possibility that we can have the truck in your area this week on Friday. Please call me so we can chat about it. If I'm not here, please ask for Ken. He's our moving manager and he can coordinate with you as well. Thanks, bye.'

That was quick.

-----

So we had gone to Portland this past weekend. Found ourselves on the southwest side of town donning sunglasses as we pushed open the doors of some outdoor shop where Katie found a 'Climbers Wanted' tee (and myself a windscreen for my new über-light Snow Peak Giga stove) and headed down Grand. Glanced off to the left when we reached Stark and there was Michelle's. Earlier in the morning we had walked up and back the sixth block of northwest Stark downtown stumped only finding a bank and some other business which was clearly not a Bechstein dealer.

They had moved since New Years Eve a few months ago and so here we were by accident. So we turned down Stark.

I peeled open the door and saw him sitting at his desk. He was on the phone so I wandered over to an old fellow nineteenth century black satin Blüthner set amongst a group of new polished Bechsteins. Played a few chords. A quick melody of some sort. Quickly he got up walked over and introduced himself as Lotof.

I introduced myself and how I had been at the old location on New Year's and given his card. He smiled and nodded. We talked about hammers and bass strings and felt and voicing and repetitive tunings and such carried on for a bit after all was said and done two or three months I'd be without my piano the hammers shipped off to the Berlin factory for replication and how they'd be contacting the head Bechstein technician from Texas for consultation on the restoration and so forth. A handshake. Keep me on the waiting list for a Seattle pickup I told him after he invited us back with a smile to a master class the visiting German pianist Alexandra Sostmann was giving that evening and we left heading back out into the sun of a surprisingly warm Portland afternoon to carry on.

---

Noticed the call on my phone this afternoon. And here I am and have been this evening ... debating.

Can I stand being without the Bechstein for a few months? I imagine how it will sound with new hammers and dampers and strings. I've been here before - imagining the sound, I mean. The tenor incredible already what would it be like? The felt a hundred and thirty-six years old. Worn. The action old and creaking under my fingers. Some keys sticking. What would it be like to play it all responsive and delicate? I can barely play pianissimo without fighting against the piano. Some notes won't play fortissimo when I bang on them.

But I sense it's there. I know it's there. Just waiting. But for what?

To be picked up by a gang of men to haul it out sans legs through my front door down the porch steps into their waiting truck off south to Portland to sit in a workshop torn apart while a factory - the same factory where it was likely built all those hundred-some years ago across oceans then carried on a horse-drawn carriage down cobble streets to an eager household to be given life - assembles a replica of the hammers for me to play? Then installed by competent hands and glued and voiced the worn patina given a loving polish to be wrapped up once again for a trip back north back up the stairs of my porch through the front door uncrated in my living room gently set down back on its legs lid propped open the guys standing back inviting me to sit down with a friendly gesture and play it and I ...

I hit a note ...

then a chord ... then a melody ...

Then I just start banging and the sound rebounds off the plaster walls and glass and the oak floors and back to me washing over and through me and I am totally at a loss ... or so I imagine.

'Sure Lotof - I can be around Friday - what's the delivery window?' I think I hear myself saying ...

evolution.

2011-05-19T00:12:00.000-07:00

So after a week's worth of research and a few emails to some Flickr contacts down in California, I've nailed down our summer holiday plan.

I know just last year I jotted down in my journal how I liked being able to find a place for us to settle in for a few days. To give J's legs a chance to rest and his imagination a chance to run crazy in amazing backcountry wild splendor.

But this year will be different. This year's plan is more ... ambitious. This year's plan is (dare I say) ... epic.

We'll be out for four nights and five days. The whole week. We'll have to negotiate cross-country route-finding for a couple of days (though there is nothing like being in the high Sierra above eleven-thousand feet just wandering). Climb up and over a questionable col along the thirteen-thousand-plus-foot ridge of the Sierra Crest separating the Bishop Creek drainage of the John Muir Wilderness to the north from the super-remote northern bounderies of Kings Canyon National Park to the south.

The place we'll be going: Evolution Basin.

I've had my eye on this spot for a few years but always thought it out of reach for even my well-adept-at-remote-backpacking eleven-year-old. It's a two-day trip in (whereas Dusy Basin last year was just a day's hike from the trailhead - at least for us). But as I weighed the options of getting into the Evolution Basin - of which there were many from Lamarck or Haeckel or Wallace or Echo Cols to even going the long route over Piute Pass and all the way around Piute Canyon to the southwest (out of the question - that's for people who actually like the long way around which does not for better or worse define myself) - I finally landed on a Class 3 route over a col of the Sierra crest that will drop us more or less directly into Evolution Basin where we'll then have two days in which to wander.

It will be absolutely off the hook. I'm excited about the potential light. And shadows. The alpenglows of the the high Sierra summer are truly indescribable. As the nineteenth century geologist (and first director of the USGS) - Clarence King - put it -

'The Sierra Nevadas crest a line of sharp, snowy peaks springing into the sky and catching the alpenglow long after the sun has set for all the rest of America.'

And we'll be out there.

This trip goes along nicely with my whole personal plan of going even more remote this year, which as of now apparently also includes trips with J. And will help pave the way - as each year I exhaust the more traditional approaches and hikes into Kings Canyon - for future trips that will be more remote and off the beaten path so-to-speak. So next year maybe we'll visit the northern flanks of the Palisade crest and the Palisade Glacier, or the flip-side of the Palisade Basin which last year we merely glimpsed into from Knapsack Pass. Or Sixty Lakes Basin (under the shadow of Mount Clarence King itself) and Rae Lakes over Forrester Pass (a trip I foolishly and over-ambitiously came up with back when J was all of eight and for which we fell drastically short - instead camping for two nights at Kearsarge Basin after a still-heroic climb for an eight-year-old boy over a twelve-thousand foot Sierra pass).

Unfamiliar routes to familiar places maybe. Leaving the trail for the open country of this high alpine environment that - as photographer James Martin wrote in his book Sierra - 'invites exploration.'

J can do it. Heck, maybe we'll even climb Haeckel or Wallace this year on the way to Evolution. We'll see. However it turns out - for four nights we'll revel under the stars (planning it this year around the new moon as well in order to witness the Milky Way from the remoteness of the Sierra wilderness) and bask in solitude unprecedented. And he'll come back with more strength, more humility, more appreciation. Maybe remembering how Thoreau once put it that 'You are rich in proportion to the things you don't need' and the lessons I try to teach him while we're out - how important it is to strip away all but the bare necessities and to appreciate it all.

Yeah. Word. And like I said ... epic.

one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today.

2011-05-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

I started the final term paper for my senior-year of high school advanced English lit class with a similar sentence that Harvey Sachs uses in his book The Ninth: Beethoven And The World In 1824 ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125, is one of the most precedent-shattering and influential compositions in the history of music.

To be precise, mine went something like this ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in D minor, the "Choral," his one hundred and twenty-fifth work, is and will always remain his greatest, most monumental gift to all mankind.

Before anyone draws any conclusions - or calls me out for possible plagiarism that garnered me a perfect 'A' for my rather scrutinous diatribe of Beethoven's Ninth (beating the to-be valedictorian's grade by nearly a full letter and prompting his mother to insinuate to mine that she must have also helped me on my paper, to which my mom could both honestly say she did not as well as report back to me it seemed his mom had apparently helped him) - keep in mind I handed in that term paper in 1994, and Sachs' book was published last year. Maybe Sachs got hold of my term paper somehow ...

Regardless, it was one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today that - in a small Viennese theatre named the Kärntnertor - that what was indeed to become nearly-unilaterally-thought as the greatest achievement in Western music (and dare I say all of art) was performed for the first time by a hack-by-today's-standards smattering of musicians and vocalists.

Similarly, Beethoven is just-as-nearly-unilaterally considered of epitomizing and in fact being 'the quintessential genius of Western culture.' About his last symphony, the Russian revolutionary and at-times-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin whispered to conductor and composer Richard Wagner in 1849 (a mere twenty-five years after its premiere performance), that 'if all the music that has ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives.' The Ninth is considered 'both an extraordinary, living musical organism and a milestone in the history of civilization.' And so on.

The superlatives for this monumental work and achievement can continue ad infinitum. I certainly spared none in that term paper that I perhaps somewhat pompously but honestly and affectionately titled -

Uhh, yeah.

To continue in my pompous-even-at-eighteen-years-old vein, I then indicated on the second page of said paper that the complete (emphasis used for real back then) orchestral score and a sound recording of the symphony (I did though leave out the terse suggestion of how only Zubin Mehta's live performance with the New York Philharmonic from back in 1983 could be considered worthy of listening) should be used when studying my paper, as well as that 'a thorough understanding of introductory music theory is assumed of the reader.' I was fun even back then. And apparently also just a smidge opinionated.

I included an English translation of Freidrich Schiller's An Die Freude ('Ode To Joy') and then - over the course of eleven carefully-typed, double-spaced pages (with no help from my mother, by the way) proceeded to prove - through at times a bar-by-bar 'critical analysis' of each of the four movements along with historic snippets much like what, over the course of two hundred pages, Sachs tries also to accomplish - that indeed this was Beethoven's greatest gift to mankind.

It wasn't hard.

I didn't use the term 'unilaterally' above (twice even) for no reason or without just cause (or at least not to my over-opinionated-self). I wrote about how Beethoven was never certain about the use of a choral finale or - for that matter - the theme of the 'Ode' itself. It is widely-known that he was what Sachs called a 'write, rewrite, and re-rewrite man ... not a wholly-spontaneous creator.' He went on to say that 'Beethoven knew that perfection was impossible.'

But back to my paper ... I wrote of its 'gigantic proportions' (before I had discovered the gem 'ginormous') and how it more-or-less was responsible for effectively bridging the gap between the Classical and Romantic eras of music history. I quoted Donald Tovey - a notable musicologist among other things - who once wrote 'of all the single works of art, of all passages in a work of art, the first subject of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has had the deepest and widest influence on later music.' To which I responded in my own attempt to back up his statement ~

The opening pianissimo fifths, subdominant and dominant in the key of D minor, gradually quicken and pile up into a colossal wave of the descending D minor triad ...

and how Beethoven masterfully built the tension through the use of a gradual crescendo lasting for six bars.

And on and on. And on. And on.

How the timpani comes in playing the dominant F to the key of B-flat. How the second movement ends on the major parallel triad of how it began (parallel keys share the same tonic, in this case the D) and how Beethoven again does this modulation in the fourth movement at bar 230 while seven bars later the movement proceeds to its second section and the tempo ups to the marked 'Allegro assai.' And how - as the movement draws to a close - 'Beethoven is unrelentless in his quest for power, piling tension on top of tension' while 'the chorus is nearly shouting, doubled rhythmically by the entire orchestra.' Of how the orchestra tries to bring the symphony to an end in bar 936, 'but it takes three more powerful, fortissimo quarter notes, enforced with pairs of triplets by the entire woodwind section and the rumbling thunder of the timpani, to finally conclude the symphony.'

How it all ends on the triad it sought to build way back in the opening bars of the first movement with those pianissimo descending fifths ... the D minor.

It should come as no surprise then that I - as a rather self-described precocious teenager - did in fact own a copy of the complete score of this symphony, and would listen intently sitting alone in my room on my bed thumbing through it bar-by-bar, line-by-line, page-by-page as the music unfolded. Unaware of my surroundings. Completely drawn in. Absorbed.

Beethoven was well-known to be scornful. Conceitful (there was only one Beethoven after all!). Pompous. Even hostile - constantly lashing out at friends and acquaintances only to come crawling back quickly after seeking their forgiveness for his verbal brutalities. But at the same time, he portrayed a perfect juxtaposition of a love for humanity but contempt for human beings. A sense of his own musical superiority but physical frailty. An affection for others 'inextricably bound up with affliction.' So on May the sixth, at the final rehearsal for the following day's concert, the composer 'stood at the theater's stage door and embraced, one by one, each of the amateur orchestra and chorus members who were participating, gratis, in the proceedings.' He was grateful. And humble. His own humility had crept in for a moment and taken over.

I could go on of course. More than I already have. My own history admittedly quite tied up with Beethoven. Like of how there is a reason I strongly feel - like the second movement of the Piano Sonata in C minor, op. 111, shows in that Beethoven took us so profoundly into his heart and - as Sach's put it 'into the heart of the Universe' - that anything that followed would have been 'impossibly anticlimatic' - be it Beethoven's Fate or ours that there is no tenth symphony.

That there is not because similarly - in his Ninth - he took us further into his heart than ever possible from any other composer or any other musical work before or after - that he simply had to leave this Earth before he completed another. From those opening pianissimo fifths of the first movement to the blistering Scherzo to the strains of the most-eloquent and beautiful of all slow movements to the grandiose finale and crashing end.

'What must have run through his mind as the ink dried on the last notes?' Sachs asks.

It is hard for me to imagine the mind that can come up with the idea that 'all uniform motion is relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest (as in, no privileged reference frames) from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including both the laws of mechanics and of electrodynamics, whatever they may be' - otherwise known as Special Relativity.

But even more difficult for me to imagine the mind that can come up with two-thousand-two-hundred-and-three bars of music that can bring the whole of humanity to its knees.

It has been often said in various but similar ways that if everyone on Earth could hear (insert composer's name, be it Bach or Beethoven or Mozart), there would never be another war. Beethoven had no idea his last symphony - with near-exponential vigor following the premiere performance - would take on a life of its own and come to epitomize more eloquently than any other musical work this particular sentiment.

The summer following that historic evening one-hundred-eighty-seven-years ago today he - disgruntled and grumpy with his affairs and those around him - ran off to the country to escape the throngs of Vienna and take up residence alone as was his custom. To put the symphony behind him and begin working on his final (and again - thought nearly-unilaterally to be the most extraordinary in the genre) string quartets.

And of course then - unknowing of the Fate of the Ninth - Beethoven died just shy of three years later.

I think of myself - that kid sitting on his bed in the dark my ears wrapped with headphones listening painfully loud to Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic to click on a reading lamp so that I could trace the notes of the score with my finger as it poured itself - as indeed Beethoven poured himself - out to me. To be wowed. Intoxicated. Absorbed. I thought then as I do now that - indeed ... the Ninth Symphony is Beethoven's most monumental work, and his greatest gift to all mankind ...

... then ... now ... and for all eternity.

2011-05-02T23:19:00.000-07:00

'You are so weak on this Earth made of granite ... '

gear lust, er ... list.

2011-04-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

So part of this year's plan was to go lighter/farther/faster (faster will be tough, but I can definitely shoot for lighter and more remote). And along with that ideology comes a few new gear items for the year -

- Montbell Crescent 1 solo tent -

I've had my eye on this tent for a couple years now. Time to pony up for it - I say 'pony up' cos REI doesn't carry Montbell so I'll have to (*cough*) actually pay retail ... And I know - it tips the two pound goal for a tent at 2 lbs. 6 oz. (packed weight). But short of just tarping it, this thing is s-l-i-c-k. And I plan on doing at least one or two solo overnight trips this year (mostly for photography but also cos I tend to think it's good for the soul).

And ... paired with the GoLite pack below (1 lb. 10 oz.) and either my REI Flash UL 40 or Marmot Hydrogen 32 (both just over 1 lb.) bags - the three still add up to the ultra-light holy grail of under 6 pounds for the tent/bag/pack combo.

- Snow Peak Trek Starter cook set -

Yeah, this kit is wicked cool - holds the stove and a fuel canister inside the 700mL titanium pot (and an extra canister on top if needed). Weighs in at eight ounces for the whole deal. Uhh, yeah - eight ounces ... hot chocolate at night (along with a hot meal) and instant coffee (or white trash mocha) in the morning will always be on the menu.

- GoLite Peak pack -

Tried this puppy on one evening at the Seattle REI and shoved about thirty pounds in it - fit like a glove. Under two pounds (1 lb. 10 oz.). About 40L (size large). Check. Check. Check.

- Black Diamond Ultra Distance Z poles -

Okay, so this is probably the most exciting piece of gear I've discovered this year (the other three aren't new - this one is) - a pair of these carbon fiber poles tips the scales at a whopping nine ounces. Uhh ... that's about the weight ... of one carbon fiber pole. And (wait for it ... ) no camming device that will eventually break! No flick locks even - just whip 'em into place like a tent pole and never worry about them. I just ordered these - and cannot wait to try them out.

And from last year -

- Cascade Designs NeoAir pad (size regular 72" length) - 14 oz. - the most comfortable air mattress I've ever slept on in the backcountry and cannot feel the cold of the snow through it - this piece of gear is absolutely stellar - a rock star and well worth its minimal weight in gold as they say

- Black Diamond Raven Ultra Pro ice ax - 12 oz. - this thing is awesome, but I have to admit for the more technical climbs I've done I've wished for something with - well - a bit more heft to feel more secure (so for those I carry the lightweight Petzel Aztarex tool - the lightest ice tool out there)

- REI prototype single-wall 2-person Duet/Ace SW tent (put into production for a year I think before being pulled) - weighs in at 3 lbs. 15 oz. packed and stuffs down to nearly half the size of my next lightest tent, the REI Quarter Dome (which makes sense cos it's a single-wall without a separate rainfly and body)

Now just need to head out ... cannot wait. Just what'll be the first trip ... ?

introduction.

2011-04-21T23:04:00.000-07:00

This piece I am calling Introduction (Live) is available for streaming and/or download on my reverbnation page (or above right in the widget).

---

Apparently 'introduction' in Latin is - well - 'introduction' (as well as in French, another language I like to use for titling). And to think I was going for something that sounded cool ...

But Latin because of this verse I came up with today -

prope finem
opus est in
tamen illic 'nos tempus

to go along with this completely random idea I worked up today in Logic.

So it takes some imagination I must admit. A theatre (or heck an arena). The lights slam off and the place goes dark. Silence. More silence. Then this loud static. In and out. Joined by a four-part symphonic choir chanting the Latin phrase above. And it builds. More samples. Lots of smoke. MIDI-controlled lights timed with the static and tubular bells slice through it at points strobes fire in sync with it all. Videos flashing also in sync. Of polygons bending and warping and fitting themselves together colliding and rockets lifting off and photos of galaxies.

But anyway ... just an introduction of sorts. Whatever nonsense I heard in my head to introduce and then launch into Ferocity And Fragility. And a few more tricks learned whilst mixing this in Logic all thrown together in a day.

---

... actual website under construction but coming soon ...

gagarin.

2011-04-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

So today of course marks the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin. Despite accolades and applauds from scientists and politicians on both sides of the Iron Curtain, it stung on this side. For sure. The Soviets had beat us. It didn't matter that less than a month later we repeated the feat by hurling Alan Shepard up into space. But Gagarin's accomplishment - and thereby the Soviet's - did achieve one very important thing for this country ... it launched our obsession of sending a man to the moon.

Some may postulate that it was out of fear that the Soviets - should they gain the upper hand in the ever-escalating space race - might set up shop on the moon and build a base that would allow them to launch ICBMs back at us that drove our obsession of landing a man on the moon. But I tend to think (and I say 'tend to think' cos I, well, wasn't born yet) that was either based on paranoia or just a clever disguise to mask the real reason for our obsession: we had to win.

We as in the whole country. You. Me. Your next door neighbor. The milkman. Even the President. Afterall, we were the United States. We had something to prove.

So Kennedy - just a month and a half after Gagarin's orbital flight - then issued the proclamation that we must - by the end of that decade - land a man on the moon.

Some derided the dream as lunacy. Others viewed it as just another strategic move in the Cold War chess match between us and them. So what if it was totally masked in the name of defeating Communism. Rather than a battlefield in Afghanistan under the guise of the almighty Oil, Kennedy chose instead space as the loftier field of battle on which to wage war with the Soviets.

He cautioned Congress of its impending expense ($9 billion dollars in 1960) but they approved it without even batting an eye. And - much to the President's delight - the country answered his siren song. The entire country. Every one of us (I know, like I said technically I wasn't born yet but I'm just being figurative here).

For nine years the Apollo space program made the nightly news as it soared ever higher (yeah, literally and figuratively this time). The technological hurdles were immense. Certainly daunting. At times thought impossible. But collectively - and with the support of the Congress and the President on down to every American whose blood pulsed to beat the Soviets and prove our country was still the best - and with our brightest minds and technology at the time - Kennedy's decree became reality of course on July twentieth of ninety-sixty-nine.

How had we accomplished this seemingly impossible task? This seemingly insurmountable goal? In nine short years?

It is hard to imagine now I think just how insurmountable - how absurd - it probably seemed. We had committed ourselves to going from merely hurling a man into Earth orbit above the stratosphere to launching a crew at escape velocity out past the Earth's comforting gravitational pull (or the solar system's push, depending on your theoretical view of gravitational force) out and out ... to the moon. But not just to the moon for maybe a quick peek at it up close. No. To physically land on the moon. And not just to land. But to return safely back home of course.

Yeah. Wild. Insane.

But we did it. We did it ... huge. And we did it before the end of that decade - within ten years of first orbiting the Earth.

How?

How - fifty years ago - before the advent of all our (seemingly) new-fangled technologies - had we accomplished such an ambitious feat? We look back at video from mission control and gawk at the now-archaic computers thinking how did we do it with those things? It was this question that bugged me all day.

We did it, I surmise, because of one reason. And one reason only. Because (wait for it) ... the mandate came to us from the President.

Sure, America was all hot and bothered about Communism. And we were smug. And we had gotten undeniably beat to the punch by the Soviets with Gagarin's historic flight. But still - Kennedy did a fantabulous job of riling us up. He got us inspired. In the days of ordinary men still wearing ties to work - we were motivated. For a lot of reasons. National pride. Defeating Communism. Because our President told us to be.

And we succeeded.

So it wasn't so much the how? that bothered me I guess, but rather the more poignant question of why? Why don't we see that sort of national ambition anymore? Are we that apathetic? That tuned out? That absorbed in our Facebooks and whether or not our tweets have been retweeted to give a damn about anything meaningful and important and big and exciting?

In short ... could we accomplish Kennedy's goal with the same technology then but with the apathy we collectively as a nation display today?

That's what bothered me all day. And it bothered me because it seemed rather painfully obvious the answer to that last question was a big, fat resounding NO. As in absolutely not. No way José.

And - unfortunately - to prove it, all we have to do is substitute X for Y where X equals landing a man on the moon in under ten years and Y equals, oh - I don't know - say finding an ecological, economical and sustainable alternative fuel source to the big, fat, smelly, disgusting oil on which our society and economy has lived off like the prodigal, un-motivated forty-something-year-old son still living with and mooching off his mother.

I surmise an alternative already exists. The technology to discover and produce it anyways. We may have even already discovered it. But who the bloody hell cares? Shut up already Britny Spears (sp?) released a new album and I just accepted my thousandth friend request on the Facebook.

But that's not entirely fair. Because it's not really that, afterall. It's not us necessarily. It's them. And by them I mean quite literally our pathetic, corporate-run lame-duck government.

My theory so goes that back in the 1960s (before good ol' Reaganomics) corporations were not what they are today. And our government was not controlled by them. So the President could issue an insane mandate like 'within ten years we're gonna land a man on the moon' and Congress could respond with a boisterous 'hell yeah we are!' And that ... that then inspired the whole country. And yeah - we got it done.

So imagine for a moment the same vitality. The same vigor. Obama getting up from behind his cloak of corporate politics and interests and insisting that we - the United States of America - by the end of the decade - find and implement a replacement energy source for oil. I know, it sounds absurd. Funny, actually. But wait ... so did landing on the moon. And then imagine Congress gets on board. Shifts our taxpayer dollars from sleezy bank bailouts and hostile military efforts in our undying attempt to secure every last drip of oil for ourselves to a fully-funded, blank-check program to turn the tide for humanity by ending our dependence on fossil fuels. We have the brains. The know-how.

So the scientists get to work. There's a palpable fever in the air as we race to come up with the solution. Maybe other countries join in the fun because it's not us vs. them anymore and like it or not America is seen as a leader (which is a double-edged sword, cos when we suck - like we do now - the whole world knows it). It (gasp) makes the nightly news and we (even bigger gasp) actually tune in.

Think we could do it?

Of course we could. Absolutely. No effing doubt about it.

Think it'll happen?

Yes. Absolutely ... when we run out of oil.

When we realize it's either that or the end of our society and our iPads as we have come to know. When we realize it's either that or back to our nomadic ways. Or even better - our extinction. Then we'll frantically invent the solution. It might just save us. Just like the kid who's used to getting all A's so he waits until the day before the big final exam to study thinking he's got it under his belt. Maybe he passes. Likely. Maybe he doesn't. But if he does, then no harm done, right? Cos he got to party that much more without bothering himself with studying.

And it's not really our problem afterall. And by our I now mean you and me. Here and now.

Predictions for peak oil have been and still are all over the place so all of those filthy rich dudes in navy suits running the corporations that in turn run those filthy rich dudes in navy suits that run our government will be turning into oil themselves before we run out. And in the meantime they get to party that much more.

So where's the inspiration?

Why isn't there as much inspiration in doing what's right - if even for those who have not yet lived - and thus for the ultimate survival of our species if I dare say - as there is in beating the Soviets to the moon? Why must we collectively continue to wade in apathy and self-centeredness rather than being like the geeky, proactive kid who sits up in front with his square-framed glasses answering all of the teacher's questions and acing all the tests not because he got lucky but because he wanted - no, needed - to get every answer right. To prove to himself, to his teacher, his parents, his friends - the whole bloody world so-to-speak - that he could. Deep down we were jealous of that kid. We didn't admit it at the time but we did to ourselves and our own kids years later.

So bravo Gagarin. Bravo.

Our past is chocked full of accomplishments as great as this. Greater, even. And we have so much untapped potential. What though ... the question I always come back to ... what of our future?

reblog_003.

2011-04-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

So I am trying to plow through Stephen Hawking's A Brief History In Time which is sort of amusing cos normally the only time I find to read is late late at night sometimes after having had several glasses of wine which makes reading something like this a bit entertaining ... like trying to understand general relativity and the difference between Newton's absolute time and space and Einstein's relative time and space and how light bends as it crosses through a particularly strong gravitational field, thus making a star near in-line with our sun appear to be in a different position in space than it, well, actually is ... and so on.

But of course Hawking writes much about Einstein (Hawking of course is widely-considered to be the brightest theoretical physicist since Einstein himself), and so randomly perusing through my old blog again I came across this little quote I had posted -

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

~ Albert Einstein

Well put. There is much trouble caused I believe when we consider ourselves 'superior' to other life on Earth.

Yes, through evolution our brains have increased in size of course to the point now where we have the capability to write symphonies, determine to the millionth-decimal place the relationship of a circle's diameter to its circumference, question our own reason for being and so on and so on and on and on. Remarkable. Absolutely.

What seems to get overshadowed though with our anthropocentric thinking - even from a religious point (and - without getting into a religious debate - I only say that because of the irony that it tends to be Western religions holding onto this idea despite dozens and dozens of contradictory statements in the Bible, of which this one is one of my favourites) is - given our position - a clear direction that we are tasked with caring for and being stewards of the Earth and all its varied life. Not to - because of some self-imagined superiority - harm and pillage it for our own selfish gain.

And - at least from where I'm sitting so-to-speak - it would seem this act of stewardship can certainly be carried out without our thinking of ourselves as superior, which inherently then puts us at odds with everything else on Earth.

Einstein was just trying to remind us of this. That life is beautiful and we are more similar to all of it then maybe we sometimes think. Certainly more inter-connected to it then we often realize.

It's nothing new and - like right and wrong - through our evolution and upbringing we all know it to be true. And ... maybe most importantly I feel ... remembering this and practicing it is necessary and a critical component to our continued survival.

ps - it is no coincidence in either the fact that Einstein's statement can be taken to also mean 'being separated from the rest' as holding ourselves up in our drywall boxes because that's where we feel comfortable and safe rather than getting out and experiencing nature in all its grandeur and uncompromising power and beauty (and no, this does not mean stopping the car at the roadside pullout to quick take a snapshot of some mountains), or in the irony that in doing so (getting out into nature) often creates the very ability in us to understand better how similar and connected we are to everything, thereby shedding ourselves of the notion of any sort of superiority complex ...

murals and megapixels.

2011-04-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

So ... REI is opening a new store in Olympia, Washington next month and a month or so ago I was approached by the designer assigned to the store graphics if she could look through my images on Flickr to possibly use one or two. Now if I haven't made it terribly clear through this blog or over on my Flickr, I have never thought too highly of my own photography and consider myself more or less a complete hack etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah. So it clearly was the PR work of some folks at REI other than myself who pointed her to my stuff and her subsequent asking me to use a couple she had found that apparently her client (in this case, the visual team) actually apparently liked.

The funny part of course is that I do all of the retouching and prep work for all of the photos and signs found in all of the stores, so ... when this mural job came through I got to work on, well, my own photos for a change.

So this photo of Hidden Lake will grace the wall behind the store's cashwrap, while this pano of Rainier will hang above the front entrance -

But maybe the coolest part was the timing - about this same time I had been considering a DSLR with more res than my 20D - a 35-mm-esque, not-too-shabby 8MP that has served me so well these last almost-two-years since making the leap to more-or-less abandoning film (although I thought it was cool the designer kept selecting an image that I had shot with my trusty $40 Ciro-Flex TLR 6x6cm garage-sale medium-format camera that I would have had to rescan at a high-res in order to enlarge to the size she needed but that of course was totally doable since it was, well, medium-format film).

But anyway ... in order to be able to capture even more detail and blow up my photos even bigger (yeah, than four hundred-something inches), I needed more than 8MP ... so an immediate follow-up opportunity to score a used Canon 7D - with a more-like-medium-format-18MP sensor - presented itself and I lept at it. And in the process realized how I have never - umm, as in ever - bought a new piece of photo equipment. Ever. Garage sales. Craigslist. Hand-me-downs. Etc. Yeah - I'm cheap, I know. It was a leap last year to buy two additional lenses, but I - well - bought both of them used so there.

So in testing out the new-to-me 7D, I have to admit I've come to the conclusion that it is an awesome piece of kit. Feels solid. Feels pro. The shutter makes a quiet-but-satisfying kunk. The screen is lightyears more impressive than the tiny one on my 20D. There are three custom all-settings options right on the mode dial. It of course shoots HD video. And so on. But all of this makes me sort of laugh and cringe at the same time when I slap on my cheap, plastic Canon lenses ... that is, until I remember just how bloody awesome those cheap, plastic lenses are when viewing a recent pano I shot (still taken with the 20D though) up at Baker when we hauled it up there last month for the annual snowcamping trip -

That's a screenshot viewed at 100% in Photoshop - it's so tack-sharp and full of detail I could stare around at it on-screen at that size for hours peering into and at all the shadows and trees and folds of snow and depressions of crevasses and on and on. Cheap plastic lens my *** - that 55-250mm Canon deal is the, well - real deal (on a Canon APS-C crop sensor, of course). I think some people tend to get too worked up over having the most expensive gear ...

But anyway - I'm excited for another year of shooting (and yes, I know - the irony of being excited to shoot photos that I am also convinced have already been taken better by others and millions of times before me doesn't necessarily make sense) - the 7D will be awesome to heft along with those plastic lenses and my kick-arse Canon 10-22mm ultra-wide on all those trips I have penciled in already for the upcoming season.

And it'll be fun to wander down to the new store when it opens to check out my, err, REI's new murals ...

ad infinitum finis.

2011-03-28T00:46:00.000-07:00

"So I stumble across your blog and I'm astonished to the point of sorrow at how beautiful this stuff is. All of it. The music that is somewhere between the sound that the Universe makes as it spins, and the melody that exits two lover's mouths as they kiss.   Incredible. All of it."

So it is finally finished. A piano sonata of sorts and a concerto and a rock song all rolled up together somehow. It is called Ad Infinitum. It is available in three parts (sans vocal line of course) for streaming/download on my reverbnation page.

---

And for some reason this one means something. I don't know why. Maybe cos I've been telling myself all this while that I needed at least three demos before I could start really putting this sh*t out there. Maybe cos this one stretched every fathomable ability I have performing, composing, orchestrating, recording, mixing and mastering. Maybe cos it seems to come closest to this mess I always hear in my head. Every day. Whilst walking back and forth between offices at work. Doing dishes. Running. Trying to sleep. Trying to concentrate on anything else.

And so this is the third.

_cheers

2011-03-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

ca-den-za
n.
1. An extended virtuosic section for the soloist usually near the end of a movement of a concerto.
2. An improvised or written-out ornamental passage played or sung by a soloist, usually in a "free" rhythmic style and often allowing for virtuosic display.

[Italian, from Old Italian, cadence; see cadence.]

Cadenza often refers to a portion of a concerto in which the orchestra stops playing, leaving the soloist to play alone in free time without a strict, regular beat and can be written or improvised depending on what the composer specifies. It usually is the most elaborate and virtuosic part that the solo instrument plays during the whole piece (think 'classy predecessor of the guitar solo'). At the end of the cadenza, the orchestra re-enters and generally finishes off the movement on its own or with the solo instrument.

Some notable examples of cadenzas include the first five minutes of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto in B-flat minor (with it's enormous chords), the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto in E-flat major (where Beethoven in his typical style specifies the performer to play exactly as written rather than improvise) and - of course - the incredibly difficult and quite monumental toccata-like (or simply 'virtuosic') cadenza in the first movement of the infamous 'Rach 3' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D minor.

ad infinitum.

2011-03-03T00:38:00.000-08:00

... to continue forever, without limit, non-terminating, repeating ...

So the inductive hyphothesis goes 'if a statement holds true for some n, then the statement also holds true when n + 1 is substituted for n.' The proof was written over a millenium ago to prove in part the validity of Pascal's triangle which is a brilliant but simple array of binomial coefficients that continue ...

... ad infinitum ...

we have traveled to distant stars
searched through mirrors at who we are
at where we are from
at where we have come
our infinite sequence is one
by inductive proof must continue ad infinitum

This is just the first part. This was the easy part. The second part and ending will be my most ambitious orchestration and recording yet in an attempt to feebly put to soundwaves what I hear in my head.

MP3 sans straining vocals is available for streaming and download on my reverbnation site.

_cheers

mind-numbing cold showers.

2011-02-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

I totally stole this photo of me towel draped over shoulders miles and miles deep in the backcountry having climbed down to the base of a frigid waterfall to take a shower bivied up above Hidden Lake with views to glaciers and the Cascade Pass peaks flip-flops and shorts sunglasses and ball caps dropping my little tiny container of shampoo in the rocks scrambling to find it to stick my head under mind-numbing cold water but loving it all of it nothing else like it to dry off quick under July North Cascades sun the bugs had gone off by then to go sit on my sleep pad and crack open a book nothing no sound just silence still and perfect and blissful.

I want to take a shower like this again soon ...

to be or not to be.

2011-02-10T00:46:00.000-08:00

There are those people some of whom I know intent on letting Fate run its course. Holding true and steadfast to an ideology that embraces a notion that whatever is going to happen to them will happen without their intervention or doing. And so maybe they languish waiting. Maybe not. Maybe what they are expecting to happen happens. Maybe not.

And of course there is an equal and opposite force those that live on the other end of the spectrum. Pushing their agenda to no end doing whatever it takes. Shameless maybe. Successful maybe. A bit of both maybe.

Nothing wrong with either. Cos like with all of our differences we humans we need all of us each one - the meek and the strong. And everything in between. Those who hold back need someone to push them here and there. Those that push need someone to reign them in every once in a while.

I remember it being hard to share my photography. I don't know why. It was personal at one point I think I recall but not sure. But then I slowly started bringing it out. Did some shows. Even sold some prints. Started posting to Flickr. Not sure why it became easier. Maybe cos I thought it was all crap anyway so who cares? I didn't any more. Convinced to the core and to the end all of what I have photographed and will ever photograph has already been done better and certainly the photos I have taken are no different and no better than any of the other hundreds of thousands of photographers doing the exact same thing.

But with music. With music it was always different. It is different.

Yes I am realizing I need to break out of this shell I have created and lived in most of my life. But maybe only maybe and only because I can permissibly make the slight but certain distinction between a photograph of a mountain photographed millions of times already and a strain of a melody conceived somewhere only in the recesses of my mind that I find a way unbeknownst even to me to figure out and render shabbily on a age-old worn Bechstein grand.

Out of a perceived sense of obligation I feel the need to share it as it does me no good playing this all to myself on this old piano here in the corner of my living room. What I've put out there has been difficult in part no always because it is but a fraction of what I hear in my head. Always enormous. Always overwhelming. Always grander than even sometimes I can envision so much so I feel at times to go mad over the immensity of it all.

But I can share it only to a point. I realize this now. I made one drastic mistake blasting out a lame and pedestrian suggestion to my small Facebook lot. Never again. Felt sick after. Maybe not sick. More just gross. I realized quite suddenly and quite powerfully just then something I have known all along in any regard: that I am not that opposite force. I hold back. I am not one to push myself on others. This is not to say I cannot when the time is right step out and seek out others in which to help as I understand and though perhaps begrudgingly accept as a whole other and just as vast and just as enormous of a challenge. I know that I can with the understanding as difficult as it is to admit that I cannot do this entirely on my own. That I can accept. I just write music and play a bit of piano.

That's it. That's all I ever want to do.

And so thankfully maybe there are those others maybe just a few or even one or two that can support those of us who just do one thing and one thing only and I will be fortunate enough to find them. I will continue to record and post music but not push not ever in the hopes to find those few people who may see this same vision I have but am not always if ever the best at putting out there. In this new paradigm of the age-old business of music I hold on to the belief hopefully not naïvely there are still some out there that want to find talent for what it is and want to help develop it. To be the ones to push for us. For ultimately in the end maybe there is one person one person somewhere who will hear one of those strains of a melody heard from some place in my head and be blown away as I have over others melodies and who would not have had I languished. Waiting.

just about unbearable.

2011-01-29T12:01:00.000-08:00

Last year at our annual bike-around-Lake-Tapps-Island-mega-garage-sale-extravaganza I picked up a burr grinder for five bucks (didn't work, needed a part) and a USB turntable (didn't work, needed a part). No worries for either. A twenty-dollar burr for the grinder and it was as good as new. And a seven dollar stylus for the turntable rendered it back to life.

The first reason: the receiver I got to replace my older one did not have a phono input (phono voltage is much lower than line-level - so-called RCA - so the receiver/preamp must have a dedicated input labeled for phono because it then takes the miniscule amount of voltage a turntable stylus outputs and transforms it to line level before sending it off to the amplifier). So my turntable I've used for years and years was more or less useless. And this new one had line-level out.

And the second reason: I love vinyl. Yes. I love vinyl.

I love evenings spent incense or candle burning one light flickering in the living room corner the crackle and ambience of a good vinyl recording filling my space. I love summer barbequeing running back and forth from the kitchen to the grill an old Neil Diamond record blasting windows open cos its warm and it fits for summer. A record of Mussorgsky's grandiose Pictures at an Exhibition cranked so loud even with the cover on the turntable flipped down the feedback loop starts to become unbearable the neighbors probably wondering what's going on in there all that classical music but because classical music can only be listened to at near-unbearable levels.

And that's why I am breaking back out the vinyl. Most of my classical collection is on vinyl. And I need to immerse myself in it to remember what it is I am aiming for while writing and to not get sucked into the hole of sameness where ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of current music resides. Or something like that. Because I do not want to write a rock song. I want to write a piano concerto. A piano sonata. A symphony of sorts. All embedded in a rock song. With lots of dimished chords. And unconventional progressions. And ...

And anyway. I need to listen to more classical music. So I unburied the old wooden crate I scored back in LA that is my vinyl collection from under the Bechstein and moved it to the front corner of the living room.

And I thought some organization was, well, in order. So I flipped through my little collection ...

Ah yes. 1976. The. Greatest. Recording of Beethoven's monumental Fifth. Carlos Kleiber. He was the sh*t. The real deal. Viably one of the greatest conductors of all time. Hardly recorded anything. Fanatically particular with the works he did conduct. A perfectionist to the core. German. He knew Beethoven. Well, not literally. But he knew how to conduct Beethoven.

Kathy, Kari and I were browsing the vinyl section of the old Seattle downtown library when they lived on Capitol Hill back ten or twelve years or so. I was pawing through the Beethoven section and came across this twelve-inch. Checked it out and took it home. Gently placed it on the turntable delicately setting the stylus down as it spun up. Bumped the volume way up. Sat back. And there it was. From the first couple of bars I knew the tempo was brilliant. Perfection. The dynamics exactly as they should be. I had heard dozens of recordings of Beethoven's C-minor symphony over the years. None of them sounded like this. None. This was it.

Flipped through some more.

Suede's Dog Man Star. Best. Pop. Record. Of. All. Time. Songs the likes of The Two of Us. The Asphalt World. Still Life. Holy sh*t. Still Life. A symphony in itself the orchestrations incredible.

Lots of Suede 45s. Love 45s. Suede was always a band known for producing spectacular b-sides. I remember borrowing my friend's copy of Trash - the guy responsible for getting me into Suede a few months earlier playing Dog Man Star one day the two of us working out back at the Scottsdale Goodwill then The Two of Us came on and I hit repeat instantly and listened to it for hours the rest of the afternoon while the sun set behind the Maricopa Mountains west beyond the city of Phoenix me plopped on the open backend of a semi trailer - with the b-side Europe is Our Playground set to repeat for hours on end (yes, one turntable I owned year's past had a repeat function). Late nights putting on vinyl recordings of songs like High Rising and My Dark Star. Sweet F-A. Brilliant.

Not sure if any other recording of any other piece of music has ever effected me as much as Wilhelm Backhaus' playing from 1960 of these three particular Beethoven sonatas (coincidentally, the same three sonatas on Vladimir Horowitz's almost-as-perfect but still brilliant recording - which I also own on vinyl - made over a period of several years back in the early seventies). Listening to it one evening on headphones I discovered rather quite surprisingly how absolutely critical the symbiotic notion of imperfection is to the equal but opposite notion of perfection. How the two are intertwined. Balanced. And necessary. Backhaus was brilliant. And no coincidence he played a Bechstein ...

Then there is my signed vinyl by the three guys one gal of The Veils I picked up at their show in St. Louis. Missed them that summer three years ago when they played at the Crocodile in Seattle. Didn't see the news they were even touring until that had passed but in a week they were playing a tiny bar in St. Louis. I booked a ticket that night.

Got to see my family and drive into St. Louis just around the corner from the Budweiser brewery this dilapidated bar in a sorta-sketchy area got there too early so walked a few blocks to another slightly-less dilapidated bar and had a Guiness from the tap. Closer to show time I wandered back in time to see them pull up in their battered white van they had driven that afternoon from some hole in Oklahoma. Unload all their own gear and set up. There were eight people there. I had hooked up with the owner of the place beforehand to make sure I'd get a ticket. Told him I'd be flying in from Seattle. Guess I didn't need to worry about it selling out but he gave me a beer on the house for my effort anyway.

When Finn asked for requests my first was of course The Leavers Dance but he didn't seem too interested in playing anything from Runaway Found (the album I've labeled as the second greatest pop album of all time, right behind Suede). So I tossed out One Night on Earth which they did play. F-ing incredible. I was just about in tears.

After the show I chatted with them all a bit. Apparently I had bought their last vinyl copy. So they all signed it. I also picked up a t-shirt now all worn out ragged turned painting shirt mostly.

So I should probably also use this turntable for its other intention - converting vinyl to MP3 of course so I can have some of this stuff in a bit more portable format. But still. Nothing quite like putting on a vinyl record and turning up the volume to just about unbearable.

studio update.

2011-01-25T12:31:00.000-08:00

Not sure how it came to be but back around the end of 2008 I decided quite matter-of-factly that I was going to invest in a way to record my music. Not sure how I landed so matter-of-factly on Logic Pro but I don't remember it taking long. Maybe cos I work on Macs. I remember being surprised I could pick up a copy of (at the time) one version back for around a hundred and fifty. A whole recording studio more or less for a hundred and fifty bucks. Cool.

And then I got lucky finding a controller. I went into Guitar Center to take a look at the one I had in mind and discovered a much nicer one in their used section (had a scratch but who cares) for the same price so I grabbed it. I also remember having a fun time trying to carry this sixty or seventy pound keyboard out the store and opening the door (it was a little awkward) while two dudes that worked there sat and watched me have a hard time. Sigh. Guitar Center sucks but whatever. I make a point not to frequent it, and less of a point of ever actually buying anything from them.

Anyway.

So with a pretty sweet controller tossed on top of the Bechstein and Logic installed on my aging but still rocking G4 dual 1 gig, I grabbed a little desk from Ikea that sorta worked and plopped it in the corner of my living room behind the Bechstein and set up shop -

It worked. Kind of. But as I recorded more and learned Logic more it got old standing to play the keyboard. And not being able to reach the top octave and a half or so on the Bechstein cos the desk was kind of in the way. And having to look sideways while recording. And having all that stuff on top of my piano. And so on.

So I scrawled out a wishlist for this year. Another 23-inch Apple Cinema Display so I can see even more of my arrangements. Bigger near-field monitors (it's amazing though what even sitting and, well, actually facing the ones I have is and how much better that sounds - yeah, I know - brilliant). And a burlier computer since my trusty G4 was showing its age.

So I scored a five-ish-year-old G5 (not the one I wanted, which would be the dual quad-core two-and-a-half-gig monster) but for next to nothing and it seems to do the trick for now. And then set out to find a keyboard stand or desk that would suit my workstation needs. So (sigh) I headed back to Guitar Center to check out what they had (before ordering from somewhere cheaper online of course) and it was while roaming through their stuff that I realized hey - I could make a double keyboard rack work by just leveling the top tier and using a shelf from Lowes I already had set across the supports. Done.

The next complication was finding a stand that put the height of my keyboard as close as possible to the height of the Bechstein so I could just swivel between the two. Apparently they don't really make stands to be played at while sitting as in - like - on a piano bench. But moving past the too-tall X-type stands and onto the (thankfully even beefier, according to the reviews) Z-type stands - there were two options and I found a screaming deal online at Musician's Friend for one under a hundred bucks. So it's now in my living room corner -

At its lowest height it puts my controller's key tops about an inch higher than the Bechstein's. I can live with that. Next - those bigger monitors (either KRK or M-Audio - the KRKs sound flatter which is perfect for mixing, while the M-Audios have a bit fatter bass and treble which sounds better for sound reinforcement while playing ... ). They'll probably need to go on stands but I already have a pair picked out. And that second display.

And to keep working on this next arrangement ...

cheers

ugh.

2011-01-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

The text below was copied directly from the NOAA website for the upcoming seven days. No. Really.

Tuesday Night: Snow.

Wednesday: Rain.

Wednesday Night: Rain.

Thursday: Rain.

Thursday Night: Rain likely.

Friday: Rain likely.

Friday Night: Rain likely.

Saturday: Rain likely.

Saturday Night: Rain likely.

Sunday: Rain likely.

Sunday Night: Rain likely.

M.L.King Day: Rain likely.

This is why the North Cascades have glaciers. This is why the North Cascades have glaciers. This is why the North Cascades have glaciers. This is why the North Cascades have glaciers. This is why the North Cascades have glaciers ...

one little visit.

2011-01-01T21:13:00.000-08:00

"About a year," the guy said when I asked how long this shop had been in Portland.

I didn't catch his name. Corner of 11th and Alder St. downtown for now, but they were moving. I was a little worried cos there were 'store closing' signs posted everywhere with offers of sixty-percent discounts, but it turns out that was just because of the relocation they were planning in a month or so. I moved quick past the Estonias and Schimmels and others up front towards the back of the store with the brick wall. There was an L167 with the high-polish Madrona finish. Not a favourite, but a similar piano that I sat down to twelve years ago or so in a small store in Tacoma was what led to this absolute fascination I have with the Bechstein piano. And here, finally, was a Bechstein dealer within a couple thousand miles.

I played a few notes, then moved on. And there one was ... a D280. The nine-foot concert grand. I had never seen one in person. Too bad I am still far too self-conscious with some suited salesman nice as he was sitting at his desk or mumbling a conversation into his phone to really play. To try to break a string or two (Liszt broke plenty of strings!). So I tinkered some on it is all. No true banging out the cadenza to Ferocity And Fragility or any of the other crazy things I have stored in my head. I moved over to the more reasonable 7-foot-seven-inch C234 (only $163,000 versus the $212,600 price tag on the D280) and played a few phrases from the song I am working on at the moment. Took some photos with my iPhone. Grabbed all the sales brochures they had just for fun. Then wandered back to the salesman.

"Find one you like?" he mused with a slight grin, most likely just generally amused at the fact someone is toying on a two hundred thousand dollar instrument wearing canvas Toms shoes and a beatup Mountain Hardwear fleece hair all unkempt from a Smartwool headband meant to ward off the bite of a proper frigid northwest winter afternoon while outside the light faded from light blue to pink.

"Well, no ... but I have an antique Bechstein and was interested in your experience with rebuilding, particularly with Bechstein pianos since you're the only dealer on the West Coast."

I don't know if this took him aback or if he took me any more seriously, but we talked back and forth for a bit while he showed me a late nineteenth-century Chickering or some other American make of a piano (if a piano is not German I am really not interested) they had rebuilt and shimmed the soundboard since I had mentioned mine would need to be shimmed and perhaps recrowned. But he said they had rebuilt a Bösendörfer and had a direct line of communication back to the Bechstein factory in Berlin which did interest me.

So he passed me the card of some guy named Lotof who turned out to be the shop's owner to whom I will shoot off an email with some photos of my 1875 Bechstein attached to get the conversation started. I told him I was undecided about refinishing (I actually quite like the one-hundred thirty-five year-old worn patina scratches and all) but that I know it needs all new hammers installed and voiced and the action subsequently reworked, with perhaps new strings and soundboard work but that I wanted to maintain as much of the original parts (and thus soul of the piano) as possible.

And it struck me while there how I was reminded playing the new Bechsteins (even the C. Bechsteins which differ from the Bechsteins lacking the 'C.' designation on the fallboard in that all materials for the C. line are handpicked from German forests and metals for the strings and such are from cities like Röslau, whereas the 'Bechstein Academy' line lacking the 'C.' use materials found elsewhere but are still hand-assembled in the Berlin factory) of the utter uniqueness of an instrument nearly a century-and-a-half old. Made from trees felled before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Utterly handbuilt and delivered on horse-drawn carriage weaving through cobblestone streets of some late-ninetheenth century European city. The engravings on the soundboard much more illustrious than the new pianos with inscriptions of how they were built for the majesty of emporers and kings ('majestät des kaisers und königs') and inscribed with the address of the original factory on Johannis Strausse.

And the timbre. The sound. How Bechstein's scale design back then just shortly after the overstrung design became the norm had the tenor strings pass through the bass bridge giving that most important section of the piano one of the most sumptuous, near-liquid but still all-too-powerful tenor voices imaginable. There is nothing like it. This piano here in the corner of my living room one day will be given new life and it will sound absolutely one-of-a-kind.

But in the meantime for fifteen minutes or so I was able to walk amongst a gathering of them immersed in a quality like no other. Though per my norm of how I probably did not show it, I was excited out of my mind. New or old, I am still convinced the Bechstein pianos represent the finest pianos in the world. Someday I will find a concert grand in which to play, where I will pound out themes stored up for years and years only fit to be played - as DeBussy put it so well all those years ago - only on a Bechstein.

upgrade #1.

2010-12-23T20:16:00.000-08:00

So with the recording and mixdown of Ferocity And Fragility it became painfully clear my trusty 1.0Ghz dual G4 - my first Mac and the one that has been my Trusted One - was spent. Well, not entirely spent. But not up to the task of thirty-plus Logic tracks all loaded down with effects and such. And I really want to move on from the supplied Logic samples to much better ones for piano (namely, a particular Bechstein sample I have in mind) and orchestra (and possibly symphonic choir) which require significantly more CPU and RAM. Significantly. They are enormous.

So an upgrade to The Studio was in order. Namely, a beefier Mac and bigger monitors (to come soon) to properly monitor and mixdown.

This is not the one I really have my sights on (which is the G5 2.5Ghz quad core - read EIGHT processors on four chips loaded with 16GB of RAM) but I could not pass it up and hopefully it will work in the meantime -

A 2.0GHz dual processor with 2.5 gigs of RAM that I will upgrade to eight gigs if it passes the test ... which is to run through F&F without having to freeze every track (the test will be to leave all of the non-piano sample tracks unfrozen while at the same time being able to leave at least one of the, uhh, three piano samples running unfrozen and ready for editing).

So time to pick another element from the periodic table in which to name it and to properly add it to the family ... And I still will likely get that G5 quad monster in the near future but without loss of this one - I can enable Logic's node capabilities and use its two processors over the LAN to help with the computing.

...

Oh, and Uranium passed the test (all tracks unfrozen CPUs operating below redline with some headroom even to spare) -

And without fail I am working on another song project incorporating more instrumentation and orchestration to be uploaded when it is finished (or as a sample beforehand once it is at least a bit further along).

cheers

2010-11-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

"The point behind all this fuss about pianos: the MUSIC they make and we, with our own two hands, can become at least for a few moments, immortal. For you see, all the shouting over political and religious issues will never accomplish what a single, simple piece of exquisite piano music will accomplish."

--- from Grand Obsession, Perri Knize

Which of course made me think of the passage from T.S. Eliot's The Dry Salvages where he writes ~

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

ferocity and fragility.

2010-11-23T00:40:00.000-08:00

MP3 files (the song had to be uploaded in three parts) available for streaming/download on my reverbnation page. Or playable from the widget at the top of the column on the right ...

---

The idea.

Finally. It is finished. I posted the intro a while ago. But this is finally the whole thing. A song in three parts fourteen minutes long. A piano. An orchestra. A choir. A band. A voice. And now it is finished. This is just a demo. This is just the beginning.

[is there still hope for us?]
[is there still time for us?]

we torture ourselves
we have all this fear
we have all this rage
we have lost ourselves
through our course of action
our ignorance sustained
what have we learned
what have we to say
of how
of how
we have lost our way
and we
and we have lost our way

we must be the ones to save us from ourselves while there is still time

there is still hope for us
(if we learn)
there is still hope for us
(if we see)
there is still hope for us

The voice singing to the rising crescendo above the orchestra and choir as it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds there is still time for us.

...

cheers

the most incredible place of all.

2010-11-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

So I have 'published' my first book (titled This Is The Most Incredible Place Of All). Weird. I'm not sure if it's really considered publishing. It's mostly a Christmas gift for family (sorry to spoil the surprise for any fam that reads this). Maybe I should say I have 'printed' my first book.

Anyways–it will be available in an 8x10 landscape softcover as well as a larger 11x13 landscape hardcover with dust jacket. The two versions will be exactly identical in content, but the larger format allows for both–well–larger photographs as well as more white space so everything does not seem so crammed on each spread. I'm making the larger one for myself really, but I wanted to have the smaller, more affordable softcover option for anyone who actually wants to order the book (the hardcover version will also be available in a week or so once I finish reformatting the design).

---

So this evening I picked up the first two that I had ordered (as a test) off the porch (and I bought two at a time cos I had purchased a pretty awesome Blurb Groupon - $20 for $60 worth of books - and it doesn't matter which city's Groupon site you use since it's an online deal - I bought mine from Colorado Springs or something). Opened the package and took a look–and despite being hard to impress on just about everything ... I was impressed. As in really impressed. The image quality was absolutely stellar. And the colour was dead-on to how I had meticulously retouched it. It took some basic color management (for those that don't understand color management, Blurb does a really good job of explaining it and how to set it up on their site) and I had to call them out on a flaw in their workflow (which involved neglecting a conversion to their printers' profile when making the PDF file from InDesign because without that conversion and thus no images tagged with profiles the spread previews looked really horrible online)–but once I ironed all that out I uploaded a final PDF and waited to see how a book would turn out.

Like I said–I am really impressed. I'd like to fix the spine of the softcover, but Blurb doesn't give as good of specs for the softcover variable width spine as it does for the fixed hardcover spine (they do provide a calculator but the safety margin on either side of the spine in my book's case was equal to the spine itself so they're clearly giving themselves some room to not be exact getting the spine copy lined up on the, well, spine) and the two books are assembled with the title on the spine aligning differently on each copy. Also, my only other nitpick is one of the two books was scored (this is a good thing) on the cover near the spine to make it easier to open. Not sure why the other one was not.

But overall I am blown away at the quality. And for a preview of the book, Blurb allows anyone to scroll through select spreads (of my choosing - didn't want to give it all away) with a little Flash player (and from there you can view fullscreen, see the book info and even order a copy if you're interested) -

This Is The Most Incredible Place Of All by Thom Schroeder | Make Your Own Book

---

80 glossy pages
13 tri-tone black and white photographs
22 colour photographs
12 essays
Selected quotes

Available in 8x10" landscape heavyweight glossy softcover ($39.95) and 11x13" landscape hardcover with glossy dust jacket ($89.95)

2010-11-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

Sad story.

Joseph Puryear - a photographer and climber and Washington native - recently died while climbing in a remote part of the Himalayan Range in Tibet.

When asked earlier where his climbing heart lay, Puryear's reply echoed in every ounce my own sentiment ~

"It’s hard not to say my own home mountains the Cascades, but really my heart lies in all alpine travel and exploration off the beaten path and away from civilization."

...

(the photo is one of his most popular taken high on the Infinite Spur on Mt. Foraker six thousand feet above the glacier below)

climb list 2011.

2010-10-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

First snow storm in the mountains and am already starting next year's list -

- Storm King - approach from Park Creek either via Cascade Pass and down into the Stehekin Valley (for the first time) or up from Lake Chelan (also would be for the first time) ...

- Formidable - approach over Cascade Pass and climb the south face. Camp at Kool-Aid Lake or bivy at the Spider-Formidable Col.

- Buckner - north face. Enough said. Third time's a charm. July.

- Challenger - Pickets. Finally. Yay.

- Ruth - summit this time. Early. Maybe camp up on the high east ridge for alpenglow and early morning shots of Shuksan's spectacular and terrifying north face. Maybe combine with climb of Challenger.

- Eldorado - from Sibley Creek/The Triad side this time. Camp high. Summit in the evening. Spectacular.

- Black - possibly. In the fall, maybe? Camp at Wing Lake.

- Snowfield - this was such a cool area when we climbed Colonial this year. Impressive. Possibly in combo with the Isolation Traverse below ...

And then backpacking -

Thorton Lakes - the Pickets. Again. Easy. With J.

Ice Lakes - in Autumn - maybe?

Kool-Aid/Yang-Yang/White Rock Lakes - see Formidable above - so combined. And at least the first, maybe the second, possibly the third? But if all of those then, why not just the entire Ptarmigan Traverse? Which would include climbing at least Dome and Le Conte and ... but definitely Dome.

- Thunder Creek - sweet. Long weekend. Three days. Start north, head south. Car shuttle. Get to know the valleys of the North Cascades a little better.

- Isolation Traverse - ok ok this is ambitious but just jotting it down ...

- the Enchantments - Autumn - hopefully ... maybe? Or maybe Ice Lakes or Black Peak ...

- the Sierras - of course. Kings Canyon. Yosemite. Julian. A week. Summer holiday. In-N-Out. Duh. Somewhere spectacular. Remote. Time to lounge for a few days. Let his little legs rest. Explore. Be a kid. In the mountains.

The whole point though of all of these is to mark a change. In direction. In both climbing and getting out in general. No day trips anymore. At least the same as this year if not even more über-ultralight next.

More remote.

No roads visible from any summit. No hard climbing routes (with the one possible exception of Buckner's damn north face of which I must, must, must climb). Mellow. Scenic. Deserted. But out there.

Already. I can't wait.

whether or not to just listen.

2010-10-21T23:48:00.001-07:00

A late start. A wrong turn just after Hennegan Pass. Back track. Two and a half hours to here. Two hours without the wrong turn. A tight timeline. Fourteen hundred feet from the summit staring up at it from this high alpine ridge the North Cascades in every direction. The northern Pickets. Mount Redoubt. Whatcom Peak. Mount Challenger. I stop finally to pause and am startled by the silence. How quiet it is. A slight breeze warm in the sun crests over where I stand. A bug or two fly past my ear. Rockfall far in the distance. I just stand still for the first time in hours and listen. Look up at the summit from here. I could make it. I would have to haul but I have crampons and ax to get me to the top. The glacier is not opened up much and I spot a seemingly-obvious route. Mount Shuksan and Baker glisten in the autumn afternoon sun. Beckoning. Or. Or I could stop here. Pull out the sit pad acting as pack frame of sorts and plop down on a rock. Eat the fixings I brought with me. Soak up and absorb the silence. Not a soul in this valley. Probably not in the next. Or the next. This mountain vista is mine temporarily and I could own it for the next hour or so until the setting sun urged me to get moving back down shadows growing longer and higher up the valley walls. It is warm enough to be sitting here in shirt sleeves. I cannot describe the views or the silence. They must be earned. Experienced. Or. Or I could rush up to tag the summit quick. To see the north face of Shuksan though washed out at this hour. I could no doubt see more. More than I could from where I stood despite the already insatiable view. See. And then it hit me: but not hear. Cos all I would hear would be the crunch of my crampons on the ice of the glacier heading up. My own breathing. I could see from the summit for a few minutes before having to race back down. Or. Or I could save it. Save it for another day when Shuksan's north face was not blinded in shadow. I could let the sun wash over me. Enjoy this moment tucked away in these mountains for which I feel such a deep connection. I feel remote but then stare over at Whatcom and Challenger and sense their even more remoteness two valleys over from where I now sit here on this rock in the alpenglow. On the east ridge of Ruth there is this enormous cirque carved by glaciers scraped bare and smooth down to rock thousands of years ago itself falling thousands of feet down into the Chilliwack River valley where the Brush Creek Trail winds its way to the nearly-impenetrable Whatcom Pass. And beyond that lie the peaks of the northern Pickets. Whatcom. Challenger. Fury. Luna. I do want to see them. This is certainly a special and extraordinary place. There is the ice of glaciers. Granatic rock. Vine maples on fire middle of October. Firs. Cascades of creeks and rivers Ruth and Copper and Chilliwack from those same glaciers offering the intrepid climber the ability to see. I know I will be disappointed if even slightly for having chosen not to rush up to the summit. But it is so peaceful here. Time flies. Shadows lengthen. Light falls. I want to stay but know I must leave. The Ruth Creek valley is filling with darkness while high up on this ridge I bask in alpenglows and I could stay here indefinitely as I would like to think. But I gather my things. Take a last few photographs to remember the light and the shadows and race down.

-----

And all the while. All the while back down thinking to myself of the difference between seeing and listening. I have always wanted to see. To see from the summits of these peaks. To more and more peaks. Oceans of them. Above cloud-filled valleys glistening with emerald green dews and soaked from Pacific rains. To see from ice and rock. Always a race to the top. Then back down. Eldorado in a day. Sahale. Others. Seeing from the summits to distant peaks. But unlike today suddenly so sudden as if to catch me quite literally by surprise I discovered that leaves no time to just listen. Listen to the silence of these mountain vistas. Instead of racing to the summit just taking a moment to sit down and listen. I was amazed. My breath was taken away. Maybe more so than had I reached the summit out of breath no time to pause. No time to hear. What did it mean to just sit on a mountain ridge beneath the summit of an icy peak with views north to Redoubt and beyond and south to Cascade Pass and the majestic Glacier Peak rather than stand on the summit itself? Watching the light change. Clouds move. Disappear.

It sounded amazing.

2010-08-31T21:18:00.001-07:00

"We poked along the high trails, wandered through the grasslands, let the mountain wind blow away flat-land cares."

~ Theodore Roethke, excerpted from The Wild Cascades Forgotten Parkland

lights.

2010-08-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

Totally random. The other night just wondering whatever happened to Interpol. Turns out they've been putting together a self-titled fourth release due out next month. And have the song above out for free download and distribution (smart). Joy Division-ish and dark as hell Paul Banks' pleading baritone just like the Interpol we have come to know. It took a few listens but is now on repeat.

Is now on repeat.

Is now on repeat.

and a final reprieve.

2010-08-24T15:53:00.001-07:00

"Everything is impermanent: thoughts, lives, mountains, stars."

~ Gary Snyder, pulled from North Cascades Crest by James Martin

an infinite regress.

2010-08-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

Aristotle argued that knowing does not necessitate a paradox because some knowledge does not depend on demonstration.

To explain he writes ~

“Some hold that, owing to the necessity of knowing the primary premises, there is no scientific knowledge. Others think there is, but that all truths are demonstrable. Neither doctrine is either true or a necessary deduction from the premises. The first school, assuming that there is no way of knowing other than by demonstration, maintain that an infinite regress is involved, on the ground that if behind the prior stands no primary, we could not know the posterior through the prior (wherein they are right, for one cannot traverse an infinite series): if on the other hand – they say – the series terminates and there are primary premises, yet these are unknowable because incapable of demonstration, which according to them is the only form of knowledge. And since thus one cannot know the primary premises, knowledge of the conclusions which follow from them is not pure scientific knowledge nor properly knowing at all, but rests on the mere supposition that the premises are true. The other party agree with them as regards knowing, holding that it is only possible by demonstration, but they see no difficulty in holding that all truths are demonstrated, on the ground that demonstration may be circular and reciprocal.

Our own doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative: on the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premises is independent of demonstration. (The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premises from which the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those truths must be indemonstrable.) Such, then, is our doctrine, and in addition we maintain that besides scientific knowledge there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the definitions.”

~ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Book 1, Part 3)

And of course with all of this in part comes a theme. It seems I cannot help it. Two themes actually. Both enormous. Both exploding. Raging. F-sharp minor. Progressions. Over and over. A Bechstein enormous sound here in my living room windows open eyes no doubt blocks away rolling what the F is all that racket!? An enormous orchestration. An enormous symphonic choir. All going on this in my head tonight must quiet but cannot. Cannot. So I must apologize.

lying out underneath a blanket of stars.

2010-08-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

On requisite walk tonight. The neighborhood quiets down. I see them. There they are. The Big Dipper. Polaris. Cassiopeia. Leo. I saw them last night too. Only last night there were more. Millions more. Those same constellations were there too of course but lost in the magnitude. Wrapped in down just a sleeping pad tossed on the rocks next to Upper Silent Lake buried high and deep in North Cascades National Park. The shadows of Fisher Peak and the immense north face of Black Peak hanging glaciers and all rising to the west. I just laid there staring. Counted twelve meteors leftovers from the Perseid a couple leaving trails behind them after they had disintegrated in atmospheres invisible. I could not help but to stare overwhelmed the Milky Way arcing overhead tracing its way across a pitch black night sky all of it there to remind me of how small I am. The vastness and immensity of it all. How many billions of light years had the light from that star traveled to reach me? Billions. Of how we are all spinning out of control but stabilized by the sight of the stars just covering me as if to say at least one of them out there I have traveled three-point-seven billion light years to reach you so do not forget that. Yes you are small. Yes you are weak. Yes you are frail. Sometimes you try. Sometimes you fail. But do not forget that.

Do not forget that.

ferocity.

2010-08-10T18:24:00.000-07:00

This is part of the mess. This is just the introduction. This is nothing.

And there is an MP3 linked here in case the player does not work.

I must now finish the piano cacophony that comes in after this introduction. And then the rebuilding and utter crescendo of all the instruments this all just came to me by accident out of nowhere like everything else of course and at last then the ending symphonic and slow and beautiful and haunting and wonderful probably only to me but that is okay key signature and tempo changes and a Bechstein in a corner alone and an orchestra and all of this shit once in my head then in Logic now out there.

cheers

this mess i hear.

2010-08-06T01:13:00.001-07:00

For whatever reason it just looks messy. It is messy. And I cannot seem to get the arpeggio or the huge massive minor theme or the quiet simplistic motif or the interlude or the cadenza or the looping synths or the strings or the strains of a Bechstein then huge triple forte chords or the samples or the ending out of my head.

... someday I will actually finish this mess.

seas of granite skies of blue.

2010-07-31T22:18:00.000-07:00

summer holiday 2010.

'You can't take this for granite.'

~ julian

27 july. Day Four. Summer holiday. It's not quite ten o'clock in the morning and we've been up and around. Had my coffee. Trying to get some sun but it's crazy-windy today. Keeps the mosquitoes at bay I guess but it makes it tough to relax. Trying to figure out a plan for today. We will probably relax this morning then have some lunch by the water and a little more relaxing. The water is cold so not sure about swimming especially with this wind. Then maybe around two or three o'clock or so head up for a go of the summit on Agassiz. Last night was spectacular. The clouds had all disappeared but the light was still good. Running around looking for places to shoot. Need to explore to find new ones for the next couple of nights. There is another lake under Isosceles Peak that I want to check out for sure for a different perspective of this Palisade range. And of course Palisade Basin need to decide if it's worth packing up all of our stuff and moving or just trying to take some photos when the light is good and then getting back here before it gets too dark. It's quiet. The stream between these two lakes where we are camped cascading is all I hear. Julian is off climbing and exploring. The wind is dying down. But then it is warm at last. Yesterday's hike to Bishop Pass was good. We made great time the first couple of miles. Then I think the weight of Julian's pack started bothering him. And then there were the steep switchbacks up to the pass. But he made it! Eleven thousand nine-hundred and seventy-two feet. An elevation record for him. It was when we started down that he got sick. We were almost to Dusy Basin and had stopped for a bit of a break when he walked off came back and told me he had thrown up. Aww. It took me by surprise cos two years ago at the tender age of eight we climbed up to Kearsarge Pass some fifty miles south of here to just shy of twelve-thousand feet and he had rocked it whereas I had come down with a splitting headache. So I did not even consider the altitude of Bishop Pass. We hurried down to the basin and I found us a good spot to set up our little camp above two lakes overlooking the Palisade Crest to the north and peaks unnamed to the south where the trail wound down and down to finally meet up with the Middle Fork of the Kings River and the JMT on its way either to Evolution Basin further north or Mather Pass to the south. I quick tossed up the tent and Julian took to crawling in and crashing immediately. He was out the rest of the afternoon. So I had a few hours to set stuff up and then wander around myself. I napped on a rock with a view to the lake and the Palisade peaks. Then went to find a rock chair on which to toss one of our sleeping pads and read a bit from 'The Alchemist' which I had brought along to finish during the next three days out here. Julian finally woke up and we made dinner in time to finish up before the light started to do its thing. Then there we were running around us each trying to take our own shots in this most spectacular granite basin at eleven and half thousand feet. As the light wound down I was wrapping up and glanced up to see he had found a rock above on which to sit and write in his journal. I grabbed the long lens and fired off a couple of frames. They are my favourite frames of the whole trip. Reflections of mountains and skies and alpenglows none of them compare to a shot of my son on his own three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of granite and mountains just taking his own time being his own self journaling his experiences in these mountains remote and far removed from all he knows but yet perfectly comfortable in it all. Perfect. And unforgettable. He is across the stream from me now. I have tossed a pad on this rock relaxing watching him climb some boulders and cracks figuring out ways to their tops. To solve their 'problems.' He really is quite a good climber despite my lack of any formal instruction. I need to be sure to tell him that. Sometimes I think I criticize him too much. Am too hard on him. He is still just a ten-year-old boy. But I am sure to tell him how proud of him I am. Haven't seen any kids hiking through here. No one close to his age making the trip up and over Bishop Pass six miles and three thousand feet of elevation into this basin as he makes his way up a crack on another boulder off in the distance. I like the subtle sounds out here. The wind through the Juniper Pines. The constant sound of white noise from the stream. Occasionally the sounds of birds. The flapping of the nylon tent fly gently in the breeze. Silence. The sun is exhausting so now escaped into the tent for a while before we gather our things to try for the summit of Agassiz. It seems like the wind has died down and it gets stifling in here even with the doors open. Full moon last night killed our chances to see the Milky Way. It pretty much rose as soon as it started to get dark. Bother all. Well off we go.

28 july. It is early. The sun just peaked up between Mount Winchell and Thunderbolt Peak across the lake. The water is still glass. The moon is hanging low about to set behind a range of peaks whose names I do not know but from which Observation Peak seems to rise the tallest among them. I crawled out of the tent to sit on this rock overlooking it all Julian still tucked inside asleep. The sun glistens off the waters. I am wrapped in my sleeping bag. It is quite beautiful. What strikes me odd when I think of sunrises and sunsets is I can watch the shadows shorten instead of lengthen as I more accustomed to seeing. Going to go make some coffee soon. Moby and some others make a good soundtrack for this particular morning. There is still a chill in the air until the sun has had a chance to warm things up a bit. So we started our climb yesterday at two. Headed cross-country straight up past the lakes toward the base of Agassiz. We had made good time Julian excited and after an hour were already scrambling up talus towards the gully I guessed would take us more or less straight up to the summit nearly two thousand feet higher. Talus and scree steep me leading slowly always making sure Julian was doing okay. As we climbed higher we could see a big group huddled far below back at Bishop Pass. He was doing so good. Approached thirteen thousand feet. Another nine hundred to go and I figured we could just make it by five o'clock which I had set as our turnaround time. But then everything changed in an instant it seemed. He just broke down. We stopped together and decided where we were would be our summit. No worries. How proud of him I was I told him over and over. He cried and asked that I not think of him as a crybaby. I could not tell him enough how much that did not even cross my mind. To take a look at where he was. The summits of peaks we could not even see a thousand feet lower now visible far off in the distance. A haze hung in the sky muting the sun. And when he asked me that I about lost it high on this ridge mountains and lakes and wind beauty surrounding us waiting for him to catch up then almost near me asks for a hug and I said that was exactly why I was waiting for him so that I could give him one! And to tell him again how amazing what he did really was. I reminded him as we descended how one of my jobs of being his dad was to push him to try things he could not or would not think he was capable of doing by giving him the opportunity to try. He nodded in between tears. He said how he was inspired by me how I could have easily climbed Agassiz. I told him I turned around many times on mountains because I was scared. Wanted to make sure I got back home to see him. Wrapped in down warding off the bit of wind and this morning chill as the sun rises higher and the moon sets lower I look back and think back to moments with him and that one on Agassiz will always stand out. So we didn't make the summit. No matter. I led down stopping every so often for him to catch up. The way back seemed ten times as long as when we were headed up excited at the thought of standing on top but he kept after me his little legs taking him around and over boulders and granite and streams. With our camp he called 'home' in view we saw a marmot and his spirits lifted instantly. We do love the marmots and had said earlier how our trip would not be complete until we saw one. He got a good picture of it and then once back crashed in the tent while I started dinner. We ate on our rock. Then after he promptly went back to the tent as I wandered away exploring for a new subject or perspective in which to shoot the impending evening light. But the sunset came and went with little show and I made my way back up to our camp to climb up on our rock and found Julian below shooting reflections with his tripod and camera. We've had lunch now. We took some final shots that evening then made our way to the tent after finishing up the requisite chores of washing up in the stream and brushing our teeth under the stars. A bunch of hands of Uno led up to us switching off the lantern and bidding each other a good night. Clouds have rolled in! The wind is still pretty consistent and I have gone from sunbathing on granite in just shorts to pants and down sweater all in the matter of an hour or two. I am sitting on this granite rock now as the sun comes and goes clouds streaming in and out overhead. I do not know but all of a sudden from this perspective I feel a sense of awe. There is so much granite. I can still hear the little stream below but looking out across the lake to the Palisade Crest peaks and the jumbled mess of granite in every direction it is quite something to behold. It is again so quiet. Just the stream and at times the wind. Shadows move across the face of Agassiz and Winchell and Thunderbolt and Palisade changing the scene by the second. The lake moves in and out of shadow. The wind at times howls through the junipers. I am excited for our upcoming little expedition over to Knapsack Pass and Palisade Basin this afternoon. With the clouds there are photos to be taken seemingly constantly as the light shifts and changes with their every move. I will miss this place of granite and mountains and skies and winds and water. I will miss the quiet. I will miss the time spent with Julian just he and I no distractions except the occasional marmot sighting or photo-taking opportunity. I will miss just relaxing no real agenda other than to soak up some sun and scenery exquisite beyond my pale descriptions and lame photographs. There is absolutely no one around. It is just the two of us. I am relishing it. Counting every moment. Tomorrow we pack up and head out. Back up and over Bishop Pass and down to South Lake. Julian has wandered off now somewhere to go play or climb or explore he has seemingly the whole world of this rocky basin at eleven and a half thousand feet he worked so hard to get to in which to play. The clouds continue to build on the other side of the pass they seem to be intensifying. We have yet to see a thunderstorm build over the mountains while out here. Thinking we may have missed our chance as Sunday evening seemed to have been quite intense. The sunset from the town of Bishop was all mad-crazy red and beautiful and I had remarked to Julian pointing in the direction of the Palisade peaks if only we were up there then! But we would be the next night. And the next. And the next. And I am excited for tonight.

29 july. We headed out around two again cross-country over hills and boulders and around tarns and streams. It was pretty easy-going especially compared to our climb up Agassiz the day before. Some more boulder hopping over talus slopes Julian confessing that was his favourite part. He would hop from boulder to boulder with the ease of a mountain goat picking our route traversing up towards Knapsack Pass under the immense bulk of Columbine Peak. A few more steps he led up and then we were there. And the view. Wow the view! Straight into the heart of Kings Canyon National Park and the Eastern Sierra spread out before us. The rest of the Palisade Crest peaks. North Palisade and Thunderbolt still. But also Middle Palisade and Disappointment Peak. Mount Sill. The peaks east beyond Mather Pass of the Eastern Sierra Crest. Split Mountain. Goodale. Mount Pinchot. And so many other nameless or more likely named but unknown to me. A whole world of granite and sky fell before our feet. Layers and layers of it in all directions. I took some panos. Julian took some too. I took some shots of him standing on a ledge with the backdrop of granite behind. We had a bit of a snack. Hung out just in awe. Then we headed back to camp for supper back the way we came past the lake beneath Isosceles Peak. Promptly after we ate the light started to change so we grabbed our cameras and headed out for the next hour immersed in our craft of trying to capture it. The clouds had held! The light was spectacular. It is now the next morning as I write this and the sky is still littered with them blocking out the rising sun behind Winchell and Thunderbolt to the south and east the mountains look amazing here from this rock littered with cloud shadows our final day. Julian is still sleeping but will no doubt be up soon to join me. We had stayed up last night outside the tent in awe at the stars. Much to our delight the Milky Way came out. We saw the headlamps of hikers coming down from Bishop Pass in the dark. Picking out constellations we cannot see from home. I spotted Leo. We tried our hand at remembering others that seemed familiar. Julian was taken aback in amazement and wonder of the magnitude out here and we got stiff craning our necks for so long the night air still warm without the chill of any wind of which to speak. Cannot say that for now the wind is back and it is chilly just sitting here on this rock. Trying to soak up this place as much as I can before we load up and shoulder our packs for the climb back up the pass and down past all those lakes to Spencer and eventually home. These three days have been spectacular. I learned a couple of years ago to try to find a spectacular place where we could get in to and then just spend a couple days relaxing and exploring rather than constantly being on the move. His little legs are strong and have taken him far but it is good to just let him play. Digging in the dirt under the Palisade Crest. Climbing granite boulders in the Sierras. Playing with Stanley and George. Being free no constraints short of his own imagination. I cannot imagine being a ten-year-old in a place like this free to be a kid and explore and have to myself. I have to provide him these opportunities to let him grow and be himself as he told me last night during our star-gazing fest how the mountains change you Dad he said to me. I asked him how? He said they make you stronger and appreciate nature more. I could not have said it better myself so instead let his words echo off the distant granite and come back to us sitting on our rock. He makes me awfully proud. I smiled to myself and held him tighter. Under more stars than either of us have seen in far too long and the graceful streams of the Milky Way a quiet like no other the shadows of these immense granite peaks Agassiz and Thunderbolt and Palisade stark against the night sky we fell silent.

-------------

30 july. We are now in Redding having covered just about half the distance home from Bishop. When we got back to town yesterday after our hike out we went to the Bishop pool and took a shower and swam. Julian and I went off the diving board. There was a huge water slide. It was the best five dollars I spent the whole trip. All the while under a ninety-five degree Owens Valley sun dry and hot as can be expected end of July. This morning heading out from Mammoth Lakes north on US-395 driving past the left turn for CA-120 just outside of Lee Vining with some hesitation. That was the road that led up Tioga Pass into Yosemite National Park and a lineup of cars this morning waited to make the left turn to do just that as we cruised by headed instead north past Sonora Pass back up Monitor Pass and winding back down first through the northern Sierras past Tahoe then through the oak hills and onto Sacramento. It was tough saying goodbye to these mountains I will not see again. Until we come back that is. I kept looking back. Of course there are things to which I look forward to getting home but of course it is always tough to leave as I sit next to this pool in the hot afternoon sun watching Julian splash around and try to dive without kicking back his legs. I give him some instruction. I'll join him shortly then we'll go for our last In-N-Out. Relax a bit this evening. Maybe take a walk after supper. Already repacked everything back in Mammoth. We'll get up early. I'll try to find coffee here in town and we'll jump on I-5 for the long drive north. It will be good to take a shower in my own shower. Sleep in my own bed. Feel the breeze through my own windows. Lie in my own grass. Look forward to our next holiday.

summer holidays.

2010-07-23T15:06:00.001-07:00

!!!

Our upcoming trip ... I lost count at something like 3583288712504 lakes ... We will be climbing Mt. Agassiz (which will be Julian's altitude record at nearly fourteen thousand feet!) while also perhaps checking out a cross-country route over Knapsack Pass to see what Palisade Basin holds (I'm thinking it just might behold a bit of spectacularness). Who knows. We're just going to wander around granite peaks and swim in cold pristine alpine lakes under the sun (and possible afternoon thunderstorms!!!!!) and generally enjoy being where there will likely be very few other people surrounded by granite and quiet. Oh, and more granite. And some more. And more. And more. A little effort goes a long way.

Here's to summer holidays.

cheers

!!!

sun gangs.

2010-07-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

For it has been awhile since I have posted a song. And this is a good one. This kid writes some incredible music. Simple. Second only to the tour de force of Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler though on a completely different level which of course was Suede for all of only two albums. And his voice second only to Brett Anderson still though on a completely different level. Painful. Strained. Good on repeat after it gets dark and quiets down.

Anyways ... so here it is. I quite like this simple version.

cheers

strains of herodotus.

2010-07-06T02:20:00.000-07:00

I probably should not post this cos it was thought up and recorded in a day. Sunday morning this simple totally basic pathetic arpeggio in my head so sat down at the Bechstein for a bit. Played. I don't know I liked it totally basic all pathetic. Looped it to itself. Then to some strings. Banged the ending on the piano. Some change to B chromatic then to end on E♭ minor. Quick mastered the 2-track but very rough. As always just an idea. Just an idea that conveys nothing or so I think. If anything this is less messy than the other song I am working on which is totally jumbled and crazy right now in my head. And the dozens of others some enormous cacophony I cannot quiet down. I still hear it looping. I hear a voice singing rising with the music to some total crescendo lyrics scrawled ink in a notebook lying on top of the Bechstein its ebony scratched and worn. I hear the enormous E♭ minor chord. I hear a louder orchestra than Logic or some digital domain can contain. I cannot get this out of my head but must go to sleep. For now.

We gaze beyond the veils
beyond the seas beyond the stars
we seek to find the light
to find the way to hold what is ours
beyond our sorrows beyond our pains
to prove in time our finite loss yields infinite gains
like histories before us we strain

we strain

we strain

we strain

we strain

...

An MP3 file is linked here. Cheers. Goodnight.

just a bulb some glass and a piece of paper.

2010-06-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

It has kind of gotten routine. Open image. Adjust in Camera Raw. This move. That move. Yaddee yaddee yada. Blah blah blah.

But today I was just scrolling through some photos and came across this one -

Eh.

A shot I took of Mount Conness across Tolumne Meadows in Yosemite when Julian and I were scrambling up above Lower Cathedral Lake on a backpacking trip last summer. Way back when I had posted it (it was actually the first shot I posted from our California vacation) a guy I know here at REI commented had I tried it in black and white?

Nope. I had not but thought maybe some day I'd get to that. Well, today I did.

And it made me realize wow how lame it has been the routine. Of open image. Adjust. Blah blah blah. On auto pilot. Here I found myself actually thinking. Sort of pouring over and through the shot kind of mesmerized with the different contrasts and light among the peaks and the trees and the sky. You know sort of like hunkering over a negative on a light table. Under an enlarger in a darkroom peeling back the layers looking where to dodge some exposure. Burn in a little more. Develop a test strip only to do five more trying to get the exposures just right before committing to a full size sheet of paper cos you didn't want to waste any.

There on the left of the frame. The peak in the far background not catching any light. The one in front of it in the sun and the one in front of it partially in shadow. Three different contrasts – shades of grey – all right there. And on Conness the south face partly shadowed and partly lit up by the sun it all going on at the same time. The other smaller peaks around it all caught in different levels of contrast. I went over it methodically sort of dodging and burning slowly like I would in the darkroom.

Then the sky. Then the trees in the foreground some lit up but the shadows heavy as the sun slipped lower on the horizon. It was cool. Opened up the shadows giving them less exposure. Burning in some midtones giving them more. Dodged some highlights. Here and there. Making sure they were bright but not too bright. Delicate. All a balance. Then adding the different tones to give the image some depth like it would have if it was a silver gelatin print bathed in stinky but all too nostalgic chemicals. Not too warm but just slightly.

All to end up with something like this ...

And I remembered for a little while I guess that spark of excitement over a photograph. What it was like to care a little bit more. Nothing really just a photograph afterall. But to be hunkered in the dark a red light over in the corner running back and forth the smell of chemistries in the air just a bulb some glass and a piece of paper.

one foot in front of the other and other such ramblings.

2010-06-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

"It's amazing what you can do when you put one foot in front of the other."

Leading the last bit to the top of Desolation Peak.

So while heading up to Desolation Peak I was thinking of the last couple of trips. Three thousand feet up. Another thousand and a half to go. Darryl huffs those words in between steps up and and up. The last couple of climbs have been well I dunno. Uneventful. Which is just a different way of saying boring I suppose. So reading back through the reports they seem well I dunno. Uneventful. I'll just say it: boring. Comparing the two Buckner reports one to me at least seems impassioned and purposeful. The other mundane maybe even forced. The difference? Well, we were stopped on Sahale both attempts. We had just about the exact same weather although it was a little better on the second go. Clouds raked over Cascade Pass below us both times. We basked in the sun above. Oh yeah. On the first time out we saw a helicopter circling around the Taboo glacier on Torment. And two days later I found out an experienced climber had died in a freak accident. A chunk of ice on the bergschrund broke off underneath him and he fell in to the void.

That's the closest I've ever been to a climbing accident. I've read about plenty. I know plenty of people who have been much much closer. Involved in some cases. Or brought into them just by being there. I've even known of a couple people from a climbing class I took years ago who have since died climbing. So I know that cloudy evening after hearing the news a couple days later I felt like I had been punched I guess. That guy had twenty-five years experience. Twice my own. A wife. A daughter. Nobody's safe.

But that's all just playing it up really. Unless we stay inside our drywall boxes all our lives we're not safe so to speak. But that's too obvious. Duh. Regardless the news impassioned my writing and I felt a sense of purpose to that one. I look back on Constance and Buckner [remixed] and nothing. Of course it was cool being there. Of climbing. Of mountains. Well more so Buckner than Constance. By a factor of at least a hundred. But that was it. Nothing else exciting to report. So why did I bother?

When it's a boring read to me I can only imagine how boring it is for someone else. So what? So I look back on some other at least to me impassioned posts. That first Buckner report. A solo trip into a fantasy world. A trip with my brother to the Winds. Rambling on about blisters. A night alone next to the Grand Canyon. Those are interesting to me. I can look back and remember why I wrote them. Most of them were started with pen and paper. A small notebook I carry with me on climbs and backpacking trips and stuff to jot things down so I don't have to rely on a faulty memory after I've returned. All of them are tagged 'journal' cos they were written from that.

So is it as simple as that? That I shouldn't feel obligated to write up every trip I take? So we try to climb a mountain. Big flippin' deal. So what. If nothing exciting happens I should not force myself to write ten thousand words on the ordeal. And not only if nothing exciting happens. If I am not inspired to write I shouldn't. There. Done.

So what the heck is this post about? To write ten thousand words about how I should not write ten thousand words? About nothing? Hopefully not. That's not the plan at least. The plan well I got hiking up those four and a half thousand feet to a lookout tower atop a little-known peak called Desolation deep in the North Cascades wilderness. I was thinking it before Darryl opened his mouth and said what was on my mind. I've thought it before. The whole concept that seems rather quite amazing of how after only a couple of hours (on our own power - that is essential) we can find our surroundings totally and incredibly changed. From power-boating along a lake staring up at mountains surrounding the place in every direction to two or three hours later looking down on that very same landscape. How? Duh.

By putting one foot in front of the other.

It's not hard. Well, for some maybe more so than for others. But really it's not. Every half an hour we climbed a thousand feet. And that seemed pokey under the circumstances (those being the facts I was carrying less than ten pounds and wearing trail runners on a great trail - much different than thirty pounds in mountaineering boots over snow). So a couple hours after being dumped at the boat landing on Desolation we were looking way down at Ross Lake and across to a pretty fantastic scene spread out around us as we made the last steps to the lookout and the summit. Two hours. Maybe two-and-a-half.

What else could I have done in that time? Watched a movie. Worked of course. I dunno lots of things. Some productive. Others not so much. Not the point. With a little effort and a couple of hours I changed my perspective. I would have loved the chance to sit down against my pack leaned up on the lookout. Look around. Pull out my journal and write something for real. Whatever was on my mind. Not anything forced cos I felt I had to say something about some trip or other. But something real. Unplanned. Just rambling. Cos rambling sometimes is the best.

lenses and stuff.

2010-06-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

I am kind of stubborn about some things. I mean all things. So I have always sort of cast off the idea of multiple lenses. Oh and I'm sort of cheap too. Like as in I have one lens why would I need more? But recently a shot taken of Buckner's north face from clear across the Eldorado icecap on the summit of Klawatti Peak made me change my mind. It was an impressive shot and had to have been taken with a long lens.

So after much debating I decided to up my arsenal of lenses. Well, I didn't really have an arsenal. I had the 18-55mm kit lens. Plastic. But it worked fine and was sharp enough. Trouble is there is no way I could ever get a shot like that of Buckner with just that lens. That and I was getting bored of taking the same kinds of photos cos I was limited to such a narrow focal range.

So I looked into the options. There were a lot of them. Kind of staggering actually.

There was of course going with the über-expensive Canon L lenses. At over a grand each I was quick to dismiss that option given the fact I take photos purely as a hobby and there is really no reason for me to spend that kind of money on a lens. Now something for my house - that would be a different story ...

Next up was the über-zoom option - a lens with an extreme focal range like 18-200mm+. That would be convenient cos changing lenses I am assuming will be somewhat of a pain while hiking or climbing. Trouble with that is all the reviews of those sorts of lenses said the same thing - that those ultra-zoom lenses tend to lack sharpness at the wide-angle end of their range, which I would use a lot. So that was out.

Then I found the perfect lens - the plastic (and cheap) complimentary lens to my 18-55 - the 55-250mm (and on a crop-sensor 20D like I have that's a focal range out to 400mm in 35mm/full-frame speak). The reasons as I saw them were pretty simple -

plastic build to some = crappy; to me = lightweight and in the case of the 55-250 half as much as a comparable L lens (something like 14 oz. vs. 24) and I shoot 95% of my stuff in the backcountry after having hiked or climbed in for miles so every ounce counts
cheap - like I said, I don't take photos for a living - I wanted something good but affordable
IS - image stabilization - helps cos shooting at long focal lengths means you have to up the shutter speed to keep from getting jitter/unsharp photos (when shooting handheld the rule of thumb is 1/focal range-th of a second; i.e. @ 200mm you should shoot at least 1/200th second) so this should help since that is not always possible when stopped down
one reviewer remarked that if you liked the sharpness of the 18-55 (I do - it's fine from my hobby perspective) you would similarly like this lens

Sold. Picked it up off of someone on craigslist. So that gave me a range from 18-250mm.

Trouble is I have really wanted Canon's 10-22 ultra-wide lens for a while. And some dude was selling it on craigslist for a hundred bucks cheaper than I have ever seen it listed there or anywhere else before. Of course I shouldn't be spending money on lenses, but at the same time I have a bunch of trips planned this year (Dusy Basin in Kings Canyon NP to say the least) and it would be cool to have a really wide-angle lens. I had already read all the reviews - it's a sick lens. Basically an L in sharpness and contrast but without the red stripe around the lens barrel.

So I bought it. Ugh.

But now I have a focal range of 10-250mm (16-400mm in 35mm/full frame format) which is pretty impressive and should work for just about everything.

-----

So after using them for a couple of trips into the North Cascades (climbing Mt. Buckner and hiking up Desolation Peak) I am actually surprised at the fact I have found way more use for the telephoto than the wide. I think to the extent that it will be the lens primarily mounted to my camera but we'll see how it goes.

Regardless, that should do me for a while. Oh, except now I need a new camera bag to fit the longer lens (well, for what it's worth I had made one I found at a garage sale last quite awhile) ...

slices in the ice.

2010-06-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

Buckner is on the right; Boston on the left with Ripsaw Ridge connecting them.

18 june 2010. So we were trying again for the steep remote north face of Buckner buried in the heart of the North Cascades. We were trying again cos last August there was not enough snow to climb it. So we were back now in June. Turned out last year's snowpack dwindled quickly so that by July routes normally climbable a month or two later were not. Glaciers were cracked open. North faces bare down to rock. And this year's snowpack with the winter that seems to be dragging out through June has left the mountains caked heavy with the stuff. The meltout is slow. We found cornices resembling enormous tidal waves high on Sahale. A belay up steep ice to the Sahale-Boston col with no runout dropping far below to the Davenport glacier. A quick shout to a pair of climbers trying for Sahale from the Quien Sabe and Boston Basin. Then turning around.

Buckner alludes me still.

.....

I found Matthew sitting in the sun outside The Original Bakery in West Seattle where I was supposed to pick him up from him having taken the ferry over from Vashon. He had finished his coffee and was reading the paper catching up on the World Cup apparently while no doubt enjoying the unexpected warmth and sun. I slumped in a chair across from him to soak it up myself for a bit before we crammed back in the truck for the long drive to Marblemount and up the Cascade River Road. We were really in no hurry.

Our plan was to grab a permit for the Sahale glacier camp that evening which we knew was only maybe a four-hour climb and near the summer equinox we had light until ten o'clock or so. Then we'd get up around four the next morning to climb Sahale, traverse around Boston to gain access to the upper Boston glacier, descend the glacier to the base of Buckner's north face, head up, summit and drop down the south face into Horseshoe Basin across the Davenport glacier and back up to our camp to grab our stuff and haul it back to the car. It would be a long day. A very long day. No really. A very long day. Most of the descriptions of the descent route included the word 'grueling.' I assumed that was no coincidence.

But eventually we surmised we should go and we jumped in the truck to hit up northbound traffic on I-5 to Mount Vernon. It was absolutely gorgeous out I remember thinking. Unexpected. I think the forecast had said mostly cloudy or something to that effect but the forecasts have been wrong for the past couple (or few) months so I have not really been paying much attention to them. It's just a really weird year weather-wise and has not made any sense. And I am quite sick of it. But this day was beautiful and we were enjoying it.

We made the turnoff before Marblemount on Ranger Station Road to have Ranger Joe grant us permission to camp at Sahale. Matthew and I talked about the whole permit system sitting on the tailgate of Stuart a bit later at the Marblemount Drive-In (formerly Good Food and to prove it or more like confirm my suspicions to such I by chance found the old Good Food sign stashed around the side of the building). About how we understand the need to limit the number of people staying in certain areas but on the other hand about all the times we have been to those areas to find them nearly deserted. And the fact that most rangers seem more like police officers treating everyone with just a bit of smug and contempt rather than helpful backcountry experts eager to talk about and share these wild lands as one might expect.

We finished our greasy spoon food in the sun then got back in the truck for the long twenty-two mile haul to the Cascade River Road's end a couple miles shy of Cascade Pass. I've been down that road a few times. It would get old if it didn't gain access to some of the most spectacular mountain country in the world. Mountains jagged and rugged in every direction. The higher you climb the better and further the views. Eldorado. Forbidden. Johannesburg. Torment. Formidable. Magic. Spider. Mixup. Sahale. Buckner.

More than I could possibly ever know or explore.

And glaciers. Glaciers. Glaciers. Inspiration. Cascade. Quien Sabe. Forbidden. Klawatti. Eldorado. Boston. The largest non-volcanic glacier in the lower forty-eight. Looking at a topo map of this place nearly gives me the shivers. The blue and white contour lines denoting them set in lovely contrast against the brown and green of the rest of the landscape. I decided a few weeks ago I want to find a huge map of the Cascade Pass region of the North Cascades to frame and hang on my living room wall. Seriously.

All that to say the drive is not bad. Neither one of us had really packed before we left. I had just thrown all my stuff in my truck and Matthew was borrowing a pack I brought for him so we dumped all our gear into the bed to sort and weigh and contemplate. To bring or not to bring? Do I need that extra pair of socks? Damn I forgot to bring a t-shirt so I guess I'll wear the cotton one I was wearing. Do we want ice screws? Three or four pickets? Decisions decisions. Finally we stuffed our packs and shouldered the load that seemed quite manageable (among our gear I was carrying my three-something-pound two-person tent and trying out a Neo Air nearly microscopic sleeping pad) and left the truck for the trail.

It was warm as we set up the switchbacks to Cascade Pass just after three-thirty. The pass is visible from the parking lot and I remember eyeing a route directly up underneath the shadowy and imposing and downright ugly north face of Johannesburg up and up to the pass. It looked like it could go since snow still hung around. Maybe for the way back.

The hike up to the pass was enjoyable. I started out ahead but quickly fell behind as I stopped to shoot clips of video. Mostly to record the sounds and quiet of the forest. Trickling water off soaked logs. Small waterfalls along the way. A grouse in the distance. Just quiet and still forest air. A few times I'd glance up and see Matthew a few switchbacks above.

I had time to think to myself. Nothing remarkable or revolutionary mostly a reminder of sorts is all. A reminder about why I like to do this sort of thing so much. The sweat and the sacrifice I guess. The sweat from pushing myself. Up and over high mountain passes. Along nerve-wracking steep snow ridges and rock faces. And the sacrifice of some comfort to gain access to these places rugged and pristine that defy description but that are beautiful beyond any. When the light spotlights one peak basking in alpenglow while behind dark clouds brew setting it off. Or the spectacular sight of a rainbow dropping out of skies hit by the setting sun against seemingly invisible rain drops scattered beyond.

There is something wholly unique about hiking and climbing in these North Cascades. About how you start so low and end up so high. In forests dripping from rains seeming to melt in the sun. Filtered sunlight striking a trail switchbacking up and up. The soft crunch of boots on dirt and mud. Every so often a peek through out beyond to mountains rising high above river-carved valleys overflowing with green. To finally break out above as the trees and mud give way to rock and ice. The soft crunch of boots to a hard crunch of crampons. The sounds of climbing gear clanging against itself that lend a sense of seriousness to this outing something more than just a simple hike.

We made it to the high camp a little before eight o'clock. Everything was under snow so we stomped a rectangle in it and used some pickets to flatten it out before setting up the tent. Matthew fired up his trusty Whisperlite and we melted some snow for soup and hot drinks and water for the next day. I took some telephoto shots of the layers and layers of peaks as the sun slipped lower in the sky towards twilight. Then we climbed in the tent for some dinner before wrapping up in down bags bundling up against the cold mountain air for the night.

4:22 a.m. 19 june 2010. Matthew woke first and unzipped the tent fly. It was already getting light and a cold breeze through the tent whipped us into action. We quickly munched on some breakfast before tying into boots and harnesses for the climb ahead. The snow crunched under foot as I headed off towards the summit of Sahale for Stage One. This was the easy part. Or so I thought.

I reached the spot where we had bivied last August this time around completely covered in snow just a few rocks barely poking through. And then up the steep now snow-filled gully towards the summit and the Boston-Sahale col that we had made short work of last summer now looking at the last pitch while Matthew caught up I shouted down maybe we should break out the rope and set up a belay. It was only maybe sixty or seventy feet but it was awfully steep and there was maybe only thirty or forty feet of runout before a sheer and exhilarating drop to the Davenport glacier far below.

When he reached me he uncoiled the rope while I drove in a picket and an ice ax to tie myself into. I said I didn't mind leading and grabbed his pair of pickets and my second ice tool and set off on a running belay. I got maybe only twenty feet or so underneath an overhanging rock cliff where the snow had begun to unconsolidate and melt out unpredictably. It kept giving out underneath my weight and I'd slide down towards the drop. Snow and ice I kicked up scattered down the slope and quickly disappeared over the void. I backed down some to place a picket in something more solid before trying again. I didn't like it. 'Matthew want to give it a try?' I resorted shouting down to him. I pulled the picket on my way back down to him and traded him spots only this time setting up a true belay for him as he headed up in my footsteps. After some time he got past where I turned back and led the rest of the pitch to the top of this snow field where he could peer over and beyond to Boston and the corniced ridge that lay between us and what we assumed were the upper reaches of the Boston glacier.

We talked strategy. He saw a climber pop up below on the Quien Sabe having made their way up from Boston Basin and shouted a greeting. Could we get past the corniced ridge? Well could we safely get past the corniced ridge. We agreed someone might be able to but neither one of us was feeling super confident about it. And so after maybe fifteen minutes - around eight in the morning - we turned around.

I belayed Matthew back to me then on further down. He placed an intermediate picket on his way down for me and as the slope mellowed off he shouted up to take him off belay. I followed as he belayed me down. Took the rope from him when I reached him and he quick set off back to camp while I descended only as far down as where we had bivied last year to sit on the one exposed rock and soak up the view. Cloud caps swirled over the north flanks of Buckner and I strapped on the telephoto lens to shoot some photographs. I took some video. Just hung out there by myself taking it all in.

And thinking to myself.

Like Constance had we given up too easily? Was our redline so-to-speak a few notches lower than it was years ago? Or were we just being smart? Safe? It seems a fine line and to me then at that moment at least a little fuzzy. Even the snow the last twenty or so feet to Sahale's summit was unconsolidated and crap enough to make Matthew nervous so we didn't even try to go for that. We probably could have pushed ourselves. The thing about this climb was where we turned around was sort of the part where up until that point we were not committed. We could easily get back to our camp and on down Cascade Pass and home. But just past that spot maybe somewhere along that corniced ridge I don't know we might have crossed that point and been committed to going all the way up and over Buckner. I know that weighed heavy on my mind. Maybe Matthew's too.

And it would have been a long day. Possible but long. We had climbed Eldorado in a single sixteen-hour day car-to-car. We had a couple of long days on Stuart. But that point of commitment being on either side of it makes a big difference. We trust each other's judgment in the mountains. That's why we climb together. Neither he nor I are trying to push the other too much.

So as I sat on that lonely rock soaking up sun and mountains I was just glad to be there. In that spot. The valleys to the west below filled quickly with clouds but the sun beat down from where I sat. I watched them rake over Cascade Pass exactly how they had last August. I watched Hidden Lake disappear from view swallowed whole. I watched Matthew a mile or so away and a couple thousand feet lower ambling around camp.

Nine o'clock. The clouds were climbing up Sahale Arm. Fast. Time to gather my stuff and head down to join him. It didn't take long and I was walking up to the tent to toss my pack on the ground before packing myself up so we could head back down.

We glissaded the steep slope leading up to the camp and ten minutes later found ourselves engulfed in the clouds we had eyed from above. Whiteout. Luckily our tracks had not completely melted out so it was a simple task of just following them all the way back along the arm to Cascade Pass where we finally broke out of the cloud layer to grey and dull below. No more sun for us that day.

Like we had discussed we opted to head down what Matthew named the Cascade Pass Direct route back to the truck. Instead of taking the trail and its thirty-seven switchbacks we'd just shoot straight down for the parking lot that we could see from eighteen-hundred feet above. At least that was the plan. Unfortunately I apparently dismissed my instinct and replaced it with dumbness and just followed a set of boot prints we could see going down down down. About seven or eight hundred feet down - halfway - the boot prints just stopped at a rather large cliff. Matthew thought we might find the person responsible for them camped out in a tree well or something cos there certainly was not a second set heading back up. And there was no getting around this cliff even after a short debate of possibly trying to setup a rappel off some trees or rocks or something to the void below.

So up we climbed to within four or five hundred feet of the pass in order to head over closer to under Johannesburg where the snow dropped at a reasonable angle all the way down to the parking lot. We had to mix it up with some slide alder and blossoming devil's club but what North Cascades climb is complete without that? Eventually we found a way that would go and once the slope eased we plopped down and glissaded most of the way to the parking lot. One more thick patch of alder and devil's club and we broke out to the clearing where a couple of picnic tables were perched for people to enjoy a lunch on a nice day under the constant waterfalls and crashing ice avalanches of Johannesburg's infamous mile-high north face.

We breezed past them. Dumped our stuff next to the truck. Changed. Chilled for a bit before heading back down for a shake at the Marblemount Drive-In. For whatever reason Matthew always has to have a shake post-climb. I am not complaining. Just saying. Same lady working the window. I missed the sun at seven thousand feet. We told ourselves next year. July. We'd be back. August was too late. June to early. I want to walk across the Boston glacier weaving around crevasses. I want to climb the north face. I want to glance down leading up to the shadows cast by Ripsaw Ridge the crevasses of the glacier slices in the ice far below. I want to stand on the summit of Buckner. Maybe more so than any other peak I have ever climbed. Some day. Definitely some day. Just not this day.

But it's okay. It's okay. Buckner will still be there. Waiting.

matters of the least importance #1.

2010-06-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

Five days until summer. Yes, summer.

This morning ... I could see my breath. Yes, my breath. In the rain.

matters of the utmost importance #4.

2010-05-28T18:18:00.001-07:00

Thump's Hairbender. Best espresso roast ever. We made the trip from Smith Rock to Bend, OR just to get some.

out of infancy.

2010-05-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

"Yes, it could be considered 'relatively tiny' compared to the ocean. And Earth could be considered 'relatively tiny' when compared to Jupiter. But Earth and it's oceans are still home, and we still need them both. There is a profound disconnect happening here. "

~ comment on the Huffington Post article about BP's CEO Tony Hayward's remark that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is "relatively tiny" compared to the "very big ocean"

-----

Hayward's remark made me sad. Very sad. I am not really sure how else to react at the moment. But I liked the quote whoever it was wrote. It reminded me of Sagan. Of Pale Blue Dot where he starts off writing ~

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

Reminded me of how yes Earth is our only home. Of how yes we forget how tiny and fragile we are. Sagan spent years fighting NASA to get them to turn the cameras on Voyager 1 back towards Earth after it had left the solar system to remind us of this. To inspire us. To convince us to take care of it. To cherish it.

We humans have taken trillions of photos over the years on glass plates and pieces of plastic smothered in silver halide and on thin pieces of charged silicone. Photos from wars. Photos of babies being born. Photos of the insides of ourselves. Photos of atoms. Of mountains. Of profound pain. Triumphs. Other worlds. Of nebulas and quasars billions of light years away. Of people laughing. Crying. Dying.

But of the trillions of pictures taken over the last hundred or so years there is one generally considered to be the most influential photo of all time (this can perhaps be debated now since Hubble captured the Ultra Deep Field image in 2003 but up until then ... ). Taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968 while in orbit around the Moon it is referred to simply as Earthrise.

It is a picture taken - closer than Pale Blue Dot - of home. Our only home. The one we've been entrusted with to take care of. Cherish. From that distant vantage point in orbit rising above the lunar surface can be seen the western edge of Africa. Antarctica. The Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere. Blue and green. Beauty beyond description. Beyond anything I can think or feel or say.

And yes. It is tiny. We are tiny. Tony Hayward is tiny. But when - when will we grow up out of our infancy?

2010-05-17T13:07:00.001-07:00

"We all travel the milky way together, trees and men ... "

~ John Muir