Point Reyes - On Hard Difficulty

Meaning (for those of you non-gamers), not on "Easy" or "Medium".

Been looking forward to this hiking weekend for some time. Though none of our usual camping buddies was able to join us, K and I decided to go it alone (and miss E's birthday shindig, sorry E!). I needed the mental rest.

It started off badly, as I ended up needing to do about 3 hours of work on Friday. (Boo! Vacation delayed!) That took me until 10:30, whereupon I started gathering my stuff for packing. K had already given us a good head start (with my verbal commentary) during my work phase. We headed out around 12:30, stopped by TJ's for jerky and fruit, and got to Point Reyes around 2:30. After some initial administrivia at the Visitor Center to get our camping pass, we went to the Five Brooks staging area, parked, and hit the trail. First leg: 4.4 miles up, up, up! It was a nicely graded drivable road (Stewart trail) that went up to Firtop Mountain at 1,324 feet. Oof. Oh, and it was 82 degrees out. Double Oof. And there were yellowjacket warnings. Yikes! A few groups of horses passed us, and at one point K spotted a mountain lion. Double Yikes! We considered turning around, but another group of horses gave us courage (and cover) to proceed.

At Firtop, we met a group of cyclists celebrating their ascent of the mountain. As we proceeded down the steep trail, I marvelled, "They _cycled_ up this?" We took a hiking path down the aptly named Greenpicker trail, and made it into camp in plenty of time to pitch our tent and feel exhausted before having dinner. We couldn't find our tent pegs and it was so warm out, we happily slept under a fir tree with no rain fly. We also started a steady diet of ibuprofen. Total Hike Day 1: 6.4 miles.

Some uncomfortable tossing and turning during the night. We agreed we need new sleeping pads.

Since we were both prety wiped (we both had had migraines late in the week for one thing), Saturday we decided not to go for a longer trek down the coast but to look for ocean views from the Coast Trail. We don't normally stay at this end of the park, so were looking forward to different terrain. We hiked out via Glen Trail to the Coast Trail, and saw...lots of fog. Fog, fog, fog. We were very glad not to be hiking in heat like the day before, but the vista points were sadly obscured. Finally we turned a corner on the trail and saw...a mound of white rock jutting out of the ocean. K promptly gave his best voice-over: "And now on our left, Bird Poop Rock..." as that was what clearly gave it its color. Moments after that, the fog cleared and we were able to see the coastline down to Wildcat Camp and the faint coloring of Alamere Falls in the distance. Beautiful! We had lunch at Arch Rock and ambled tiredly back to camp. K found a nice stout walking stick and cleaned it up. Napping, dinner, and some bedtime reading. The sun never really broke through, and it was spitting fog when we went to bed. Total Hiked Day 2: 5.7 miles.

During the night: incredibly loud chatty neighbors, more painful tossing and turning, the slow increase of drips in our uncovered tent.

Morning dawned gray and drippy. The fog continued to condense into spitting near-rain, so once it was light enough (and we could no longer stand the water splups in the eye) we got up, took stock of our soaked items, and decided to head out as soon as we could. K made stand-up breakfast, while I slowly assembled our things and kept them as dry as I could. Mostly, our approach was to "put everything into a white plastic bag and walk." We'd already agreed the night before that we were going to take the shortest route back to the car. Not long after leaving camp, Kyle saw another mountain lion - much smaller this time, but unmistakably a mountain cat. This plus the very damp Greenpicker brook - er, trail - convinced us to change our route out from the shorter hiking paths back to the main Stewart Trail. We would have a clear view of the road and the horse traffic, leaving much less chance of cat encounters or slipping on the wet terrain. Slog, slog, slog, 6.4 miles and we were back at the car.

This was a tough trip for some reason. Our other stays have been at campsites that are far more accessible (Sky and Coast are 1.3 and 1.8 miles from parking, respectively, with not much elevation change); this trip we started by climbing 4.4 miles in 82 degree heat. We'd both had migraines recently. We were both uncomfortable sleeping on our pads. We got soaked. (Oh, it turns out the tent pegs had landed under the tent and we just hadn't noticed. "No wonder the ground was so uncomfortable!" K said half-jokingly, half-painfully.) And we didn't see much wildlife, except for K's mountain lion sightings - not exactly encouraging. I did get to greet a few big black offrushing beetles and a banana slug, but there were none of the usual deer.

Maybe we'll try again in October, or let it rest until next spring.

When life gives you lemons, play Halo

Or, no trip to Pt. Reyes in October.

We were supposed to go to Point Reyes again last weekend with our friends E&S, but instead both of us got very sick. My version included an inability to eat anything fatty, a generally nauseated feeling, and exhaustion. K's version was mostly about feeling like crud. Since I wanted to be distracted from feeling hungry and K wanted to be distracted from feeling like crud, we played Halo. We finished Halo 3 on Heroic, and started again with Halo (original flavor) and eventually got to Halo 2. Along the way we compared rendering complexity, interface design, and game design. it's very cool to see what has changed (quality of graphics, complexity/diversity of user interface) and what hasn't (basic weapons design and usage, HUD, cooperative play mechanics). NB: the fall-off-the-platform sequences at the end of 2 still suck.

Machinima enthusiasts are great Halo users as well, and apparently certain game elements were included in Halo 3 to facilite video creation - like providing an "at ease" stance when the Master Chief is carrying a weapon (he's not aiming his gun so you can see his face, making it better for dialog scenes). The guys from Red vs. Blue appear to have contributed some humorous moments during actual gameplay as well.

E & S did manage to get to Pt. Reyes on Saturday, whereupon their double-bagged trail mix was eating by an enterprising mouse. (Apparently the rangers knew about this and warned them, but no one quite counted on just how enterprising the mouse was.) They had a really good time, as expected. While we didn't exactly have a really good time, we were at least distracted for a time from feeling like crud. I was still tired into this last week, and kept resting.