Mark

Mark is a guy from Michigan who lives in Switzerland. He's a photographer, occasional writer and trained research engineer. His free time is sometimes monopolized by mountain touring or travels. On occasion he attends and presents at BarCamps and blogging events.

Buffalo

Locations,

The best part of visiting your old home in Michigan when you live in Switzerland is getting the chance to taste the flavors that you can’t get in Europe. Although I didn’t hit up Taco Hell I did sautée Buffalo. Many people think I’m a vegetarian, possibly because I usually talk about chick peas and tofu curry when the topic of food comes up. The truth is I’m an omnivore (minus the fois gras) and buffalo is the only meat I really like to eat. I don’t hunt them in the wild and pull out their warm hearts to set their spirits free, but I do cook them with onions and whiskey.

Essential ingredient

First I sautée the onions in Plugra. Plugra is like the most awesome stuff to sautée in. It’s basically a high priced butter from Europe, something like a Western version of Ghee, but those in-the-know might correct me and it might just be over priced clarified butter. Plugra doesn’t need to be refrigerated and melts on contact with any heated thing.

Ingredients

Next drop in the buffalo, break up the meat and add whiskey. American or Canadian whiskey is needed, none of that blended foolishness from the islands.

Add sauce

Add barbecue sauce near the end. I also use Detroit Greek Town seasoning, meant to invoke the flavors of the Greek-ethnic restaurant/casino part of Detroit. The food from Greek Town is so good that it rivals the offerings I found in Athens. The seasoning is a bit of a gimick, but I use it anyways.

Add sauce

It helps to wear a tie and aviator sunglasses. Take your picture in front of dried New Mexico peppers if possible.

What to wear

Serve in a warm pita with yogurt cheese. Eat while watching Sex and the City or a comparable DVD like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Malcolm X, the Road Warrior would also be a good choice.

Up close

Before heading back to Europe be sure to follow up by heading to the shooting range and popping off 200+ rounds of .22 ammo from your bolt-action rifle; because, to my current knowledge doing that in Zurich is as rare as finding buffalo in a Swiss food store.

Cooking United States Buffalo Whiskey

The Gonzo New Year

Zurich,

Editor’s Note: The following was recieved this evening from an undisclosed location in the postal code of Zurich, Switzerland. The return address was scrowlled with GONZO and sent C.O.D. We accepted the charge, of course, for our man in Zurich has always come through on deadline, but this may be his last submission to the magazine. Our fact checkers are working overtime to track down the details, but it appears as though our correspondant in Europe has taken a vacation from his mind after the first day back in the office after the start of the New Year. Any information you can provide may prove invaluable to his safe return as a regular contributer to this fine publication.

Gonzo

The first work day of 2007 – I woke with some sort of deep hatred for the notion of any industrious or worthwhile pursuits in life. Why did I get out of bed? I should have hid there under the covers, locked the door and pulled the blinds and ridden out the first waves of fear and madness as the Hell of the New Year began to loom right straight in front of me.

Recoil…throw the demon back into its pit and board up the door to its lair. But this won’t do, trying to skip the New Year is like trying to ignore your birthday. We invented the concept of time – but God Dammit, why can’t we just turn the clocks off and stay in bed? This is the year of paradox and regret, you see – the culmination of my PhD nightmare is set for a finishing date in July of 2007 and I’m responsible for getting myself into it. How will it all play out? How will the beast develop?

You dropped my fool soul on this Earth dear Lord, and now I have to deal with it. Now there’s my mistakes to account for – July, Oh dear Lord, why did I tell them I’d have my PhD finished by July!!!! Nothing is quite so difficult and revolting to the mind and nerves than trying to smile at 8 a.m. and say "Frohes neues Jahr" to everyone at the office. Why yes, "a Happy New Year to you as well." You fall in love and everything is going great, that’s the time to freak out you see – that’s when the hammer comes cracking down and splits the fool head all across your white wall.

No padding on these, no sir – I haven’t’ been committed yet and am still allowed to roam free with all the healthy heads though rooms with solid walls and door frames. Yes…Happy fucking New Year. I’m screwed and making a B-line for the responsiblility-free environment of the nearest asylum, what’s your resolution? I know a phychiatrist you see, she’ll check me into a fine Swiss Head-Hospital, no questions asked.

The Great Shark Hunt – The Death of Ruben Salazar – Aztlan – and the ’72 Campaign Trail. Oh, why God, why did I read those fool articles. Thompson’s (Hunter S.) words fill your head with violent musings of vile words and aggressive sentence structures. A cookbook for bleak outlooks and depressive premonitions.

There’s no guarantee you see, no real concrete words are on any books anywhere saying that anything will work out in 2007. And why – Oh why God did I complicate matters by putting in that application for the research stay in Japan? A two month stay in Japan, and the dissertation is supposed to be finished and submitted before stepping on the plane. What if I’m actually accepted and sent to Tokyo? I’m too crazy to turn down a trip like that. Let’s not face the Bastard, let’s jump off the ship before the iceberg and airlift ourselves away to Greece.

Techno Claus

Photography, ,

IF you know where to shop, the well-bankrolled photographer can buy many beautiful accessories for chic portrait sessions and produce really fantastic photos with high key lighting and limitless imagination. I have wet dreams about Lastolite products. Their stuff is collapsible and fantastic and generally costs enough to blow my bank balance for the whole of next year. And since I don’t know where my funds will be coming from twelve months from now, I figured I’d not drop a thousand bucks on their inflatable white background.

I did, however, co-host a Christmas party with my flat mate. Due to the size and generally cluttered state of my room we rarely have parties in the apartment. But every year I make the effort to make the place acceptable for a gathering. Our Christmas party included the baking of cookies, the drinking of Gluhwein, and then relaxing in front of my white wall, which was soon painted over with the projection of some movie to entertain us for the evening.

After watching Christmas with the Kranks and Along Came Polly I played music via iTunes and turned on the Visualizer.

Those in "the know" are familiar with the visualizer function of iTunes. It syncs seemingly random computer generated colors and patterns to your favorite song selection.

I hardly ever use the thing because on my 12" G4 PowerBook the techno wonder color symphony is actually quiet boring. But when viewed on my apartment wall: higher than I can touch, wider than my arms can reach, well…the techno wonder symphony is so mesmerizing that you just sit there like a cat following a laser pointer – thinking,

"So this is why people take drugs. Now I get it." I am a cat and this is the laser pointer on the wall…and I’m chasing it, meow, meow.

Contemplation

Naturally, I had to photograph myself in front of it. It wasn’t my idea, of course. I’m very unoriginal by nature. I just capitalized on the idea after my girlfriend snapped my picture with her handy Canon – the one that she keeps in the chic red-leather case. Sadly she faded into the night before I pulled out the Minolta 7D and the f/2.8 Tamron lens. I generally find the cable release to be too long, but it was the perfect length to trip with my toe as I posed behind the techno light show.

A Light

Accessories were needed; my will to be weird oozed out and I felt like an extra in that scene from The Doors movie where Jim meets Andy Wahrol.

Wave

A quick search of the place revealed some cigars left over from Cuban night, sunglasses found in the bathroom back in Michigan, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s my dad brought over two years ago (sometimes Jack and Coke is the perfect accent to the night), a Zipppo I never use, and a jacket from We in Zurich.

Off Air

The photos were not clean or perfectly exposed, but unlike a lot of the crap portraits created by people who get paid to do this stuff, I kinda like looking at them.

Sun Flare

Christmas Photography iTunes

Toy Vault

Deep Thoughts, , ,

In his keynote talk at the 2006 EMPA PhD Symposium, 1991 Nobel Chemistry winner Richard Ernst said that if you want your children to grow up with a creative mind, then they should grow up in an old house full of rooms to explore filled with things to discover. It’s cool that my parents still live in the house that I grew up in. Cool because when I come to visit, as I did over Thanksgiving 2006. I can walk the paths I used to follow and explore perspective, the contrast between where I was and where I am. Part of the reason that I am as I am is due to the toys I grew up with. Just as most of my clothes came from second hand stores, probably 90% of my toys were procured from the half-off bins and church rummage sales. This meant that I had at least three times as many toys as anyone else I knew. And while I had a plethora of the standard Legos, I also had a lot of G.I. Joes, Star Wars, as well as random things most Michigan kids had never heard of, like Playmobil.

Toys large

My walk down contrast lane lead to me photographing various toys, still sitting on shelves in my room and haunting the shadows of the basement.

Star Wars et. alMask close up

 First, I should say that while much spunk is made about violence in toys and on TV, it’s a sad pathetic short-cut in thinking to say that these things directly lead to violent children. Because by all accounts, if you really look at what I grew up with, I should, by that logic, be some sort of CIA mercenary. While the thought did cross my mind once or twice, I must have just gotten it all out of my system playing with "toys" like a belt of dummy .50 caliber machine gun ammunition.

50 Cal toy

Star Wars toys just look cool, you can replay every scene from the movies and make up storylines that include G.I. Joe. Or you can mix the Star Wars miniatures with the Vietnam era plastic warriors that are driving a WWII era German truck.

Micro imaginations

And who didn’t want plastic army guys to fight miniature wooly mammoths while getting accosted by Muscle Men?

Plastic universe

My room is an interesting place, because it’s present form was set up after college. The alcohol influence is apprent, and fits quite well with the childhood day dreams. She Ra was always hot, and standing in front of an empty Jim Beam bottle she just drives Hawk Eye (from Mash) crazy. Probably the reason he was laying back in the Beam shot glass.

She Ra and Sesame Street

I don’t know the connection between Superman and Papa Smurf, but Ernie seemed to be inciting a confrontation between the Japanese super hero dudes and their tiny monster.

Superman and Papa Smurf

For some reason the Flash was sitting in a shot glass and my teddy bear was chilling beside a tank that used to be commanded by my 1967 vintage 12 inch G.I. Joe.

The FlashTeddy and Tank

In the end the Rancor hooked up with Barbie, she was turned on by the soft side of the beast inside.

Rancor and Barbie

Two of my most influential virutal role models were also represented, the cool headed badass Yoda sits atop a copy of Hell’s Angels, written by the eternal Gonzo demon, Huter S. Thompson.

Yoda a-la Thompson

Toys Star Wars Barbie Rancor

Quotes

Deep Thoughts

I like to live my life in quotes. Tiny bits of inspiration and demise that ingrain in my brain and refuse to leave no matter the medicine. A woman’s look, a jagged teacher’s scowl, unintended slivers of approval and rejection weave their way through your spider web and form the silk fabric called your life. How to handle the bleak vastness of it all?

Come as you are.

Taken out of context, out of the original environment, placed into a new sphere, movie quotes, lyrics, bits of spoken words, they inspire no matter the journey. Part of getting through life is just figuring out ways to keep your inspiration burning hot and to maintain that lust for continued existence. That clique, that over done plot line, that thing that gets me up in the morning.

The Gods envy us.

How does watching Natalie Portman blow up Parliament with a train load of explosives in V for Vendetta make the challenge of my PhD easier to handle? She’s fighting political oppression in a 1984-Orwellian future London and I’m sitting in a present day office enjoying a well paid PhD job and depressed with screwing things up.

But somehow it works.

Somehow watching her beaten down by V and reborn without fear makes the fool stress and confusion abate.

Abstraction, take an element of one thing, and transpose it onto another. Like tracing an image of the Earth on to the shadow of the Moon.

Where’s your will to be weird?

Take Edward Norton’s character from Fight Club and transpose it onto my situation. Replace a boring insurance job with the mundane details of a research project. Take out the influence of loveless fathers, replace with indifferent teachers, and use mountaineering instead of bare knuckle boxing.

Instead of physically challenging myself with destructive acts like bare knuckle boxing I climb mountains and balance on rock ridges.

All the elements are there to form a transition from the mundane to confident researcher, morphed into weekend mountaineering warrior. For some reason, things just click.

Does this mean you should take all the elements from your favorite movie and mold your life around them? Ah, no…that’s like stalking the person you think you’re connected to, the one who doesn’t love you back. That’s like falling for Mary, she only makes you feel good about yourself, but it’s not love that you feel, it’s just an unhealthy obsession.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Find those elements of inspiration that work and extract what you need to make your journey through life easier to bear and figure out.

Then the mountains and the work and the broken flowers don’t seem so fatal and maybe the vastness of your life becomes digestible.

Sweet Home

Locations

The last time I was at the house I grew up in – my physical anchor in life, was just after my trip to California in March. After I visited Kate in SanFran, after the wine tour and the Wild Things T-shirt, and the excellent Thai dinner, I flew home to Detroit. Sometimes when you’ve been away for a long time, you want to get back to your roots. Recall things from the childhood dream and get a taste for what it would be like to be back in that post womb phase of your life. Climbing trees was a hobby of mine as far back as I can remember. If it was summer or winter I would often be found hanging and climbing in the front yard. My favorite tree was a weeping willow. It had died many years ago, but still had strength in its branches despite the little critters that ate it from the inside out. Its knots and branches were excellent training ground for what would later become rock and later ice. I even practiced with my ice tools on its decaying trunk. So it was with sadness that I learned it had been cut down. I had wanted to do the job myself, but my father had had other plans and a professional cut the beast up into manageable pieces. This was not good enough. It was my tree. I had become a part of it, it had trained me in my vertical escapades, and now I did what any tree climber would do to the teacher whom now lay butchered on the lawn. I finished the fucking job. My tool of choice was a double bladed axe my grandmother had given me for my birthday many moons ago. I twisted and twirled the double bladed Viking blade around my body like Connan the Barbarian. Behind the back, around the head, get the momentum going,

Thunk!

The chopping

I sliced through the decayed masses like fingers through warm butter over nan at a tandoor festival. The deed honed my arms and I felt one with the willow as I had years ago when I swung from and scaled its body. The end had come. I tossed the split pieced into the woods to nourish the next generation and silently thanked the Great Spirit for this tree that had nourished my climbing ambitions. Our circle was now complete.

Fashion Fool

Fashion,

I had a will to be weird on one Friday night, which for me entails not wearing sandals and trading in the climbing jacket for a blazer. The decision process took about a half hour. First, I was thinking of the black DKNY jacket, but it didn’t go with the dark blue (2% Kevlar Polo Sport) jeans that I wanted to wear (plus it felt a bit too stiff and dressy). The green corduroy Levi safari jacket was promising, but I wanted something lighter, and although I kinda liked looking like a Beetle wanabe-reject, it was too dark to wear the sunglasses which would have been necessary to complete the ensemble. I finally settled on the Alagash olive green travel jacket with leather elbows and no shoulder inserts. At this point my sister is probably asking the same question she asked me when I was showing her my Purple Doc Marten combat boots, “are you sure you’re not gay?” Underneath I wore a dark-stripped white H&M button-down shirt. There was gel in my hair and high-gloss Dr. Martins on the feet. Around my neck I wrapped a Sakes 5th Ave. scarf my mom probably paid less than 1$ for 10 years ago at some second hand store in Michigan – but something was missing.

Grid spot on face, back light FujiGA

To complete the look I tied on a bright red tie (also H&M). The scarf covered up the top of the tie so as not too look to pretentious (who wears a tie outside of work?), and the bright redness of it peaked out nicely over the top of my stomach when I pulled the jacket back and put my hands in the jeans pockets. After all, how else is one supposed to casually walk through Zurich on a fine fall evening? I call this my laid-back but dressed up. Cutting but comfortable. After all, clothes are unnatural if you’re not comfortable in them – costumes are only for Mardis Gras and Halloween. Otherwise you just seem like a trend-jailed fool trying to look cool but all the while projecting a feeling of uneasy make-believe. Ineffective and sad to look at.

Better tie lighting large

I’m sometimes shy and it takes some motivation for me to get up the courage to be comfortable and wear a blazer-type jacket in public – but I also sleep on glaciers, and I had a Will to be Weird. Sometimes you have to face the fear of looking foolish when going out in a fashion nebulus of the world (like Zurich). But really, if you do it with fearless confidence it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. Besides, life gets boring if you don’t take a few reasonable risks here and there every once in a while, and since I had no plans to galavant across mountain ridges this past weekend, the fashion risk would have to suffice to keep my senses peaked and primed to effectively handle whatever life would reveal.

Pizol

Climbing, ,

Sometimes you have to get out and prove to yourself that you can do something besides wasting away behind a computer screen Mon.-Fri. On Sunday morning I took an early train to Bad Ragaz, and from there planned on taking the cable car to the top and then head up Pizol. Pizol is the mountain to go to from Zurich for a day of skiing or an easy glacier climb. In September I took my dad there for a short 4 hour hike that turned into a 7 hour ordeal and, as he tells it, almost killed him. That was back when the ski area is a hiking heaven. The cable car takes you from the valley at 546m to the Pizol hut at 2222m and from that elevation one can frolic in the Alpine sun. The cable cars run during the winter, but this being some time inbetween the tourist seasons, well, the mountain transport was abandoned and not in operation. Of course, I had paid 30 CHF for the trip and had no intention of turning back. So I started hiking from the valley. Through roads and wooded trails and then snow, I finally crested a ridge and strapped on my snowshoes for the final approach to the hut at 2222m. There were a few impediments along the walk, mainly the fact that all the wonderful yellow, never-get-lost hiking signs had been taken down for the winter and I lost an hour going the wrong way along trails that lead no where that I wanted to go. From the hut the summit was only another 400 vertical meters. It was 3pm and the skies were grey. Pizol is not a hard assent. It’s the uncrevassed glacier you learn on and most people more or less run up it for kicks. But these were high winds with no sign up letting up. Plus, going for the summit would mean descending the glacier and mountain ridges in the dark, possibly in fresh, unsettled snow. I knew in my soul that I could do it. But while I am a bit crazy, I am by and large not a particularly stupid person. Plus, I have this unwritten pact with my mom; she doesn’t hassle me about not living in the US and more or less supports my ambitions – and for my part, I more or less promised that she’d never have to come visit me in a small cemetery in a quiet Swiss village. I didn’t attempt the summit and instead descended the slopes on snowshoes, soon finding my way to the trails leading down through the woods. Before leaving the alpine level I looked back towards the summit. The skies around Pizol were clear and painted in those fleeting layers of red and magenta mystery that master landscape photographers can barely capture with any true integrity. I could have made a weather-safe ascent, but I also have time till they kick me out of the country, and ignoring the effects of global warming, mountain summits, unlike women, will always be there, and there is no reason to attempt the peak if things seem a bit hairy. It was dark and the forest, while not threatening – did evoke Blair Witch Project chills all along my spine. There was a full moon, and while it looked romantic enough, it was also covered in clouds and the crunchy fall leaves seemed to follow a bit too close to my heals. I spun around once or twice to see if a tree Nome was stalking me with a hatchet. Eventually I came to one of those covered bridges, the kind you see Ichabod Crane walking along before the headless horseman makes a move for his neck. At any moment I expected Johnny Depp to come at me from behind wielding a giant candy cane Scythe. An hour later I was down in the valley and on a train headed to Zurich. There was a Budweiser (the Czech kind) beside me and a chicken-avocado wrap between my teeth. I was reading Wicked, the book about the misunderstood Witch of the West. A little girl in the next train stuck her tongue out as her car passed by. Without hesitation I returned the salutation with my own out stretched collection of pink soft tissue and taste buds. She seemed astonished, and my inner child smiled.

Prayer Flags

Glacier Napping – Oberaletschhütte (un)Tour

Climbing, , ,

Let’s recap, get all the facts in place – establish the sequence of events that lead up to me deciding not to do anymore multiday hiking this year.

Early Saturday AM: Bought a ticket to Blatten, the plan is to hike up the Oberaletsch Glacier to a hut (Oberaletschhütte) and the next morning climb the Fusshorn, a somewhat secluded, somewhat taxing alpine rock climb.

Mid Saturday AM: Got to Blatten and found there’s not much there, no cable car to Belalp and nothing makes sense according to the map. I double check the bus stop; Blatten, it says Blatten. For sure I’m in Blatten. By chance I look at my guide book and note that there are actually two small Swiss towns that are essentially in the exact same part of the country but are separated by a few rather giant mountains and glaciers and are both called Blatten. As you might guess, I bought a ticket to the wrong one.

Early Afternoon: Get back on the bus and take a train to the town of Brig. Wait for an hour to get to Blatten (the one I want).

Late Afternoon: At Blatten, catch the cable car to Belalp and start to hike. Now it’s 2000m and 4pm and ETH to the hut is about 4.5 hours. I have a headlamp and the correct map so I’m not worried. 20 minutes into the hike it starts to rain, not hard but enough to soak through the very breathable non-waterproof jacket I’m wearing.

Pre-Dusk Saturday PM: Get to the glacier, it’s not the traditional wind swept inclined flatness you might expect. This is a block glacier. A glacier that is essentially dying, the rocks that were encased in ice that was flowing down to the valley is mostly gone. The rocks remain and the ice and snow have formed a rushing river at the end of the mass.

By rocks I mean pebbles, small bits of the mountain carried by the rivers. I also mean sand and sentiment. Unfortunately I also mean fist sized rocks, body sized, up to mid-sized sedan size and a couple of Hummer H2 sized behemoths balanced here and there. In short, it’s great god-damed blessed maze of rocks and ice canyons. IF you know the way it’s easy. I have a headlamp, I’m not worried.

Late Dusk Saturday PM: It’s getting dark and the sky is covered in clouds, which means I can barely make out the land marks I’m headed for. I have a headlamp but with the cloud cover and light absorbing terrain I have a visibility of maybe 30 ft in front of my nose. To make things better, I hiked up the left side of the glacier, and when I tried to cross and head towards the hut I notice a rather steep ice wall drop off in front of my path.

Early Evening Saturday: Backtrack, try to descend into the middle of the glacier, somehow find my way through the rivers of ice where the water has carved out fantastic canyons, canyons with 30 ft walls that i need to find a way around because they were impossible to see in the dark.

10pm Saturday: I might be on a rock plateau, and if I keep going I might find the hut, but it might be another ice drop off over the horizon of my visibility. There’s no guarantee I’ll even find the hut if I’m in the general area of it and I haven’t seen a trail indicator in over two hours.

I say fuck it and call it quits.

The rains are done with and I put on all my warm dry clothes, new socks, eat an array of power bars and a curry for dinner, and lay down next to a compact car sized rock for the night. the good news is: those emergency space blankets really do work. The bad news is they don’t replace 0 deg mountaineering sleeping bags. I only have a small foam pad and my backpack to sleep on. I get maybe two hours sleep and spend the rest of the night shivering and trying to induce adrenaline rushes by imagining falling from a cliff. On the plus side the clouds clear now and again and I get to see the stars and mountains.

Early Sunday AM: I have a mad craving for a coffee and a chocolate croissant. I skip the climb and start hiking to keep the uncontrollable shivers at bay. I get off the maze of rocks and eventually to the Zurich direct train at Brig. I sit down with some pastries and a coffee and am content. I resolve to spend no more nights in the mountains (this year).

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Like that validates my stupidity)

Decisions

Deep Thoughts

Much spunk is made about decisions. To survive you have to get involved and make choices in life. Maybe you stay up at night wondering if you should make one or not, because, of course, you have to make one or two eventually. After all, they make the world go wrong. You make one and then wonder if it was right or not.

All those factors, those variables to consider, what if the camera cost too much? This bike doesn’t have shocks, but it does have the disc brakes. Should I run the fatigue test with a median strain of 0.10% or 0.20%? And maybe I’ll buy a mountain bike later, which would make the shock variable moot. Hey, let’s go find Osama, no wait, ok…invade Iraq.

There’s right and wrong – good and evil in the world. We’re taught this from birth, and it’s the basis for many beliefs and books. But when are choices really black and white? How do you know if it was the right decision? You think you know, but do you really?

If something goes wrong it generally just means you did something that your boss didn’t agree with. You know for sure it was the wrong course of action because your ears are physically being assaulted by his voice. Or maybe it’s more subtle, the wife throws something in your direction or the guy walks off in a huff.

But what does it mean if something is right? Well, no one yells at you or says that you screwed up. They’re silent because there’s nothing to complain about. You still get a paycheck and everything goes on, da doom, da doom doom doom.

In most situations you can’t understand and anticipate all of the factors that will eventually establish the criteria for that lonely little decision being the Right choice. But if things start to go wrong, just change the game, rewrite the future history – and make some new decisions.

Break the original decision up into manageable pieces. The path from black to white has a maximum of 256 shades of Grey (if you’re looking at a computer screen) and you can lean very far in either direction without being totally black or blown-out bleached white. If things start to wrong, just make some new decisions and swing back to the correct course.

Above all, don’t be afraid to fail. When you get the fear of failure inside you start to hesitate and second guess yourself. With the exception of those universal moral truths, the only real failure is letting fear cripple your ability to choose between Pepsi and Coke.

But the only thing on my mind at the moment – the decision, the question to be answered, you know the conflict: should I try to solo the Fusshorn (and possibly the Aletschhorn as well) over the weekend or safely stay home in Zurich?

If there’s no post by next Friday, we’ll be able to convincingly say – in hindsight, that it was a poor course of action to follow.

Red tie on yellow

California

Locations

Let’s backtrack, let’s go back in time. Let me explain some history, some events that I never wrote about. During late April and early March I was in San Diego for the SPIE 2006 Smart Materials conference. My presentation got finished the night before I gave it and I felt drunk the whole time. Not because I "was" drunk. No, no, there was some sort of jetlag sickness afoot. Every time I moved too fast my motor skills lost their grounding and I had to scramble to regain my balance. The coffee probably didn’t help; I was drinking large volumes of it to stay awake. Nine hours of jetlag seems like a good idea when Zurich is cold and grey. But it was somewhat grey in San Diego as well, so my soul saw no immediate justification for the turning of the inner clock on its head. Ah, but soon the conference was over with. Done, extinguished, and as generally happens I wondered what the point was. I stopped by the airport early Thursday morning to catch an Alamo shuttle and soon was getting lost somewhere around La Jolla – looking for Highway 1 and views of the fabled Pacific coast. I got on the main road eventually and things began to fall into place. Not on the philosophical or emotional, or even the metaphysical level (not that I know what those are anyways). No, nothing was solved and nothing mattered. I just felt at peace because I didn’t have to do anything. I made my way up to Big Sur. It’s a favorite topic on photography forums in reference to travel in California. Everyone wants to know what highway to drive up for the best views. Few ever ask about what trail to hike up. They say anywhere on Highway 1 is timeless, and they’re right.

Somewhere along Highway 1

But after the plane ride, sitting in conference talks, and now in a car seat for unforeseeable hours, I was desperate to feel squishy ground below my Chaco sandaled feet. Having no camping gear I opted for a day hike and found myself moving quickly up Mt. Manuel. The park pamphlet said it was 3000 feet high towards the sky. I was worried at first, I’m getting fat in my old age and rather enjoy doing nothing, but there was no need to question the need to explore. My feet were light and moved fast through the tree-lined trails. I pulled out my tripod and held it like a sniper rifle. I imagined myself as some sort of rebel in the jungle. Not the kind backed by the CIA of course, no, the true rebel, the one who had taken all the money and guns the CIA had given him, and then started his own covert agency. Or maybe something more akin to a Zapatista. I could have turned back when I saw there were still patches of snow on the trail. But I knew these thoughts to be craziness. I pushed on and reached the sunny top before my feet froze in the snow.

My View

The view, of course, was worth it. To the East were the snow capped peaks of California. To the West, a blue horizon and a peaceful Pacific wind. In between these vistas I found myself, my dirty feet, my soaked blue jeans and in my mouth the last satisfying bites of a tomato and avocado sandwich. Like Tyler said, "Nothing was solved, but nothing mattered."

The End View

Bordom Deflecting

Photography,

I fully admit it, I want to be a photographer. I’m an engineer, a scientist even, but I figure it’s all the same thing anyways. Writing, mountaineering, smart materials, I don’t see much difference between these different facets of my life. My latest boredom deflecting strategy has been teaching myself portrait lighting. When you don’t live with any beautiful women there’s really only one good way to learn lighting: photographing yourself.

Even if beautiful women did live in my apartment, I still would have to tell them how to pose, how to smile, etc. When it’s just me, I know more or less what I’m looking for, so I just do it without delay or discussion. The beautiful women can factor in later, if necessary.

A cheap 15 year old digital camera (relative cheapness) with IKEA soft boxes can do a lot. You have to keep the shutter speed low for proper exposure, but that just means the poses have to be static. Trip the shutter release with a climbing axe, strike a pose and wait for the 2 second shutter delay to fire. Recompose, repeat, and repeat until something looks good.

Once you perfect the technique on yourself, you have photos to show beautiful women to get them to stand in front of your camera. To be honest, I’d also shoot ugly men as well; it’s the lighting, not the subject that really counts. Lighting can make beautiful women look ugly and mean and it can make grumpy old men look happy and aloof. I don’t subscribe to the notion that lighting is good or bad, it just is. It’s simply the combination of light reflecting off of and being absorbed by different surfaces.

Having a poor subject (like me) is probably better to start out with anyways. This way no one can throw things in my direction if they don’t agree with the results of the photo session.

Hmmmmm