An Early Getaway? Training for Whitney starts NOW! Not really, we were just looking for an excuse to get away. I’d been a normal Monday-Friday working person for the past three months and so with my first set of shifts, we wanted to make the most of my four days off. I left work Friday…

“Stay home for Christmas if you want to see the New Year.” This was the advice from Bay Area officials announced in early December. And so we did just that. The rest of this story is a fantasy, what we dreamed of doing over the Christmas break, with doctored photos to match. To those I…

Straight Back Into It I worked for only four night shifts before we hit the road again. The original plan was to hike from Onion Valley to Mount Whitney, summiting the highest peak in the contiguous United States with our mates Vanessa & Kyle. Unfortunately that wasn’t happening due to the fires covering the state,…

Launch After two SOLID weeks of cutting, shaping, wiring and building, Air Force One was ready for her maiden voyage which just so happened to coincide with a heat wave. The second last day of the build, Dan had been up on the roof cutting a huge hole for a rooftop fan while getting himself…

The Days Before Making the most of our time, I slept in the back of Ramsie after my Friday night shift while Dan drove us up to Lake Tahoe’s Northstar Ski Resort. It was raining in the Bay Area so that meant it was snowing up there. I had a great sleep, woken up only…

When I was in France, my very good mate Kevin called asking if the notes in the Thailand Climbing Guide I’d given him were mine. Of course they were, I told him. Why?!?!?!??!? He’d booked a last minute trip to Tonsai with his girlfriend Claire. Oh????? What dates? Can we crash the party???? When I…

Thanks to my employer, I spent a short week in Grenoble, France, meeting people from synchrotrons all over the world and taking in as much technical information as possible. It was an intense week of knowledge, networking and a small bit of exploring that I very much appreciated. Thanks to the US Department of Energy’s…

We found out we’d be attending Burning Man back in May of this year. It took no less than nine friends helping me in an attempt to get tickets in a “click the button at the right time” process that resulted in only one person being successful. Thanks to that person, my mate Rob in…

On Friday towards the end of my day shift a reminder popped up on my phone to message Kathi. I’d met her and her husband at Joshua Tree right at the very start of my solo Astro travels and we’d made fast friends and managed to meet up a few times over the next couple…

We went to Big Sur to do a lazy, flat twenty mile hike with hot springs at its middle, but we ended up hiking 25 miles, climbing the steepest mountain on the west coast of the US and going higher than the Grand Canyon is deep. Surprise! Since finishing work for the year, I’d spent…