Category Archives: Trips

Today’s part of the ski trip was to Boreal, since Mt. Rose winds were too high for much of any decent skiing. Another motivation was the need for my mother to go to Sacramento – so once my sister and I were dropped off, my parents left. At first, the main lift wasn’t open due to the massive amount of snowfall yesterday. We instead were forced to take the easy lift (the name of which I don’t remember), and have some fun in the freestyle parks.

After about two hours of skiing, the Accelerator started up, so we could reach the summit and ski down from there. As its name implies, it’s an accelerated lift – it actually arrived at the destination before the easy lifts, despite travelling nearly twice the distance. As it had opened up without the “cat” finishing its grooming on the black runs, we took the easier blue instead. Once there, we noticed the crazy depth of the snow – our poles easily sunk several inches into the ground without effort. Skiing in powder snow is a little different than normal – not only is it harder to turn, but travelling straight doesn’t necessarily keep you moving, as the snow piles up in front. Thus, the run took quite a bit longer than normal.

Eventually, the black runs were open. As some of the first on the trail, we had to wade through a little bit of powder, but it was fun. In the afternoon, I was forced to do SAT work, so not that interesting.

Highlight of the day (night): Blood moon on the winter solstice!
At about 11:47PM, the moon was entirely overtaken by the Earth’s shadow, leaving just a faint, reddish glow instead. Probably wasn’t smart to stay out there the whole time, but wtv =).

First day of the annual ski trip – I’m now here in Reno, at the Grand Sierra Resort. As they are nice people, they have provided every room with some semi-decent wifi: thus I will be posting some sort of an update every night or so.

Tomorrow (today) will be interesting, as we’re not going for the usual “wake up early -> go to Mt. Rose -> ski -> come back”, but instead are going to make the trip out to Boreal. This is partly because of road conditions: we had a hard time getting here, and lost a chain somewhere on the road, and partly because my mother needs to make a trip to Sacramento, and it’s in the same direction. Boreal, I think, has wifi, and I’ll only spend half the day on the slopes – the other half will be burnt on homework and suchlike. Although, since I won’t be there to attend to my computer, I think I’ll just leave it in the car =).

This year’s Family Camp was undoubtedly better than last years, primarily because the number of people was planned for and executed better. There was not a shortage of food, and the campfire, especially, was quite nice.

As large open fires were forbidden by the campground, we brought in an electric fire, and ‘lit’ it with thirteen torches. Thereafter, there were many quite well-performed skits, as well as the usual not-so-good ones.

I arrived back from Philmont at 1:06 AM this morning, and wrote this post from my in-Philmont journal entries. It was an awesome trip, and I think everyone should at least try to go once.

Crew Stats

• Crew Leader: Robert Ying
• Trek Number: 21
• Expedition Number: 626-E1
• Number of Scouts: 6
• Number of Advisors: 3

Day 1: On the Plane

On the first day of my Philmont expedition, we flew out to Denver, CO and stopped over there for about two hours. As I stated in my previous post, the time we had to arrive at SFO was somewhere in the vicinity of 4:30AM, and thus we were quite tired. The flight itself was rather boring – inflight entertainment has really gotten worse over the years, and they didn’t even give us peanuts to eat on the way. During the stopover, we ate lunch at the airport and waited for the Denver-Alberquerque flight to begin boarding. Upon arrival at Alberquerque International Sunport, we met up with the Blue Sky Adventures tour guide.

The 2009 October Campout for Troop 453 was a trip to Moaning Cavern, in Vallecito, California. As the actual cave location did not have campsites, we camped in the nearby Calveras Big Trees State Park (imaginative name, I know).
The cavern itself was actually quite interesting, seeing as there was only one entrance in, and it led to a 165-foot tall cavern – from the top. This meant that the first leg of the trip was to rappel down from the top entrance, about 95 feet of rock wall descent and 70 feet of free descent. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to speed-rappel, or it could have been even more fun than it was. On a side note, the guides seem to be able to break this rule at will, seeing as they did the entire free descent at nearly free fall, with a jerk up at the end to slow down and land safely. What was quite interesting, however, was that free descent is actually substantially easier and faster than wall descent, since you don’t have to worry about accidentally whacking your head against the other wall.
Once we were at the bottom of the cavern, we entered the lower caves, which were all much smaller. The largest chamber was about 2 feet tall, so it was not possible to stand. We had to crawl through the caves, which is actually different than what you’d expect. Many of the entrances are too slippery and to narrow to allow a person to go on their knees, and as such, it is necessary to move forwards by essentially swimming and pulling oneself along via use of small handholds and footholds.
A small highlight of the trip was the “Hotel California” cave, which was a small detour that we took from the main route. It was made mostly out of mud, and was easy to get into, but quite hard to get out. Exiting required a decent amount of flexibility, and a lot of trust in the guide, seeing as there wasn’t enough space to see where you were going. Several people in our group left small messages made out of mud on the walls.
One other thing we did was to experience total darkness. We turned off all our lights, and pointed the headlamps away from each other (LED lamps have residual lighting after being turned off). It turns out that when it’s dark, and you expect something to be moving, such as your hand, you will hallucinate its movement in front of your eyes – an eerie experience once you realize you can’t see anything.
On the second day, we stayed at Big Trees State Park and took a hike in the South Grove. When they say big trees, they really mean big trees. The size of the average “big tree” was about 25 feet in diameter, measured near the ground (about 20-21 feet at 6 feet). As surprising as that may be, the biggest one, at the end of the trail, had a diameter of about 26 feet measured at six feet above the ground! To put this into perspective, it was big enough to fit all the people with us inside with about half the space to spare.