Canoeing the Sudbury River

My little brother's high school graduation in June brought me back to Boston for a long weekend. As usual, my visit home provided my mother and stepfather the opportunity to ask boat-related questions and favors. Last time it was "can you help us buy canoe paddles?" This time it was "can you fix the canoe seats? My brothers and I spent an afternoon measuring and drilling holes in the new canoe seats, bringing the old green canoe back into service.

Moeke (= "mom" in Flemish) and I took the boat on it's maiden voyage, version 2,  down the Sudbury River near our house in Lincoln, MA. Here's a map:

To be honest, it's been so long since we did this short paddle that I can't remember much more. Oops. But here's my mother in her funny hat :)

Santa Barbara Harbor

A couple weeks ago my job brought me to Santa Barbara (~ 6 hours south of San Fran) to survey parts of Mission Creek and a beach lagoon. Naturally, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to have my gas mileage reimbursed and bring my kayak along, so I volunteered to drive. Wednesday was the first time I was able to get on the water since we worked a couple 13 hour days on Monday and Tuesday.

Not sure when I'll stop being amused by palm trees. They're just so tall and gangly looking!

Following advice from a local paddler, I started out at Ledbetter Beach, just upcoast of the Santa Barbara Harbor. I unloaded Big Purple and lugged it across the wide sandy beach to the high water line where I promptly seated myself and spent the next 20 minutes watching the intimidating waves crash uniformly on the beach. Not sure how to proceed, I made some wimpy phone calls to Dave/Morgan/Mike who told me to stop being a chicken and get in. 

Menacing waves at the breakwater.

While I didn't completely chicken-out, I ended up returning to the car and driving down-coast to the sheltered harbor, where I could avoid a solo surf launch. I scanned the boat names as I paddled down the aisles and realized that there are far fewer "joke" boat names here than in Upstate NY. Odd...

Sunset over Santa Barbara.

I paddled out into the ocean from the harbor and enjoyed bobbing up and down on the big swells, while avoiding the breakers. I landed on the little offshore sandbar (see map below) and watched the sun set over Santa Barbara for a while. It's such a cute little city. Apparently there are laws in place to ensure that it continues to feel like a little Spanish settlement with its red tiled roofs and missionary churches

(not) greeted by a seal on my way back to the dock

"A" Marks the launch spot in the harbor. The pier in the top left is Stearns Wharf.

I was a little bummed to have such a limited paddle in this beautiful SoCal city, but I'm sure I'll be back soon!

Date: Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Time: 1 hour
Distance: negligible

Solar eclipse, salt marsh, and a few sea lions.

May 20th 2012 was the date of the first solar eclipse since May 10th 1994, and what better way to enjoy it than to sun-gaze from a kayak on SF Bay? Doug (oceanographer and kayaker) and I left Oakland after picking up his boat at the Kayak Hotel, which is a glorified garage for communal boat storage by the Oakland Estuary. After a quick stop at a roadside fruit stand (yum! cherries!) we met up with Eddie (coastal engineer and kayaker) on the other side of the bay. The launch site was along Chesapeake Drive in Redwood City, close to the Stanford Boathouse. We parked in the shade of some trees (free parking! and launching!) and discovered that we were joined by some unusual birds making very loud squawking/groaning noises above. The sound was so ridiculous that I found myself giggling every time they started up. I would try to spell it if I could...

We set out with no ambitions other than to outlast the eclipse and test Doug's eclipse-viewing contraption. It was a breezy day so we stayed in the narrow channels that meander through the salt marsh. Power lines cross the south bay marshes in a number of places:

Eddie and the power lines.

We explored some side channels as we continued along the main channel, moving deeper into the marsh. A group of sea lions was sunning on the channel banks. When the eclipse finally started, Doug was  excited to discover that his contraption actually worked. We watched the little dark circle move across the sunspot passing through one page onto the other:

Doug using his snazzy eclipse viewer.

I like to take a more direct approach...  (proving that my camera would not explode). This clearly did not succeed at capturing the eclipse...

As we moved deeper into the marsh, the channel began to shallow and we played around in the mud now easily accessible. I gave Big Purple a nice facial (deck-cial?). Eddie's boat also got a secret facial (Shhhhh).

Amused by the amazingly smooth bay mud. Photo by Doug.

We pulled over to the edge of the channel to snack on fresh cherries and salty peanuts and periodically check out the eclipse. 20 minutes later we looked down to realize that we were now high and dry on the muddy bank. The tide had subsided significantly and the marsh was quickly emptying around us. We dragged our boats back into the shallow channel and quickly pushed our way out to the deeper areas. Not sure exactly how far we still had to venture to loop back to the dock, we decided to turn around and head back the way we came. As you can see in the map below, this was probably the right decision.

Upon arriving at the docks Eddie discovered the lovely mud facial on the back of his boat (now dried and solidly caked). After letting him wonder how he'd managed to make this mess I confessed and spend 5 minutes scrubbing it off. Cleaning off Bay Mud is like rinsing soap off with soft water.

Back at the parking lot we were greeted by the groaning birds, as well as my car, which they had turned into a Dalmatian in the 3 hours we were gone. No wonder these convenient parking spots were available! Time for a car wash.

Date: Sunday, May 20, 2012
Time: 2 hours
Distance: ~ 8 miles

Now that I'll be doing a lot of paddling in San Francisco Bay (and other large bodies of water), I think I'll start including a regional map in addition to the route map:

"A" marks the spot!

P.S. I'm pretty stoked about the new way blogger lets you view pictures in high-res when you click on them!

Introduction to BASK

B.A.S.K. is the Bay Area Sea Kayaking group, which apparently has over 400 members. I joined them shortly after Big Purple arrived to check out the group and meet some nearby paddlers. They conveniently had a new member paddle scheduled two days after my boat arrived on the Oakland estuary, which is only a 5 minute drive from my apartment.

We met up at the public launch site near Jack London Square. For the most part, Jack London Square tends to be completely dead, but on Sundays the farmer's market makes it a popular destination. It always makes me nervous to drive around the Square because a railroad runs along the center of the road. Apparently the maximum train speed is 15 mph, but when a train is coming all the side streets are blocked off, so you could theoretically get trapped on the road/railroad. Not cool.

Public launch at Jack London Square. Photo by Chris Amy.

The public launch also hosts the rental fleet owned by California Canoe and Kayak, which is a local paddling shop. I paddled here once in the fall, and they were able to rent me a plastic avocet (the same type as Big Purple), which was pretty exciting.

I arrived 5 minutes before the meeting time, which is apparently late for BASK-ers because everyone was already there! This was somewhat odd since I usually find myself having to drag people out of bed to go paddling with me. We launched promptly and paddled east, into the "estuary". It's certainly not the most scenic paddle, but we saw some interesting sites along the way. The route took us under 4 bridges, many of which opened to let boat traffic through:

Drawbridge #1

Drawbridge #2

Big barge from Portland. Photo by Chris Amy.

We stopped half way for lunch at the Tidewater Aquatic Center. The shear volume of snacks the BASK-ers brought to pass was quite astounding, and I will certainly bring more to contribute next time! Yum...

Chris took a bunch of other lovely photos, which can be found here.

Date: Sunday, May 6, 2012
Time: 3 hours ?
Distance: 7.8 miles

Refresher paddle on San Pablo Reservoir

Brief vent (Scroll down for a happier discussion):

California Parks like rules, fees, and regulations.

I sometimes think that moving here has made me more conservative (in the fiscal sense). I don't remember paying for park entry, parking, or launching during the summer I paddled on the 11 Finger Lakes. If we encountered someone who told us to pay, we could drive down the next dirt road and find a free spot to put-in. Also, night paddles are not illegal in NY. What I really wanted to do on Saturday was to have a peaceful sunset paddle on the reservoir, but I had to be off the water by 6:30pm (1.5 hours before sunset). 

I do understand why they have these (incredibly complicated) rules and fees. Virtually every freshwater lake within an hour drive is a source of drinking water for the Bay Area. It's important to protect these from any sort of contamination, so adding fees and inspections and prohibiting bodily contact keeps the number of visitors down and ensures that the water stays potable. 

There are just too many people here. 

The tab:

Parking pass: $6.50

Launch fee: $3.50

Boat inspection fee: $6 (I guess if they'd done this in NY we wouldn't have so many zebra mussels... I was able to talk my way out of this by insisting that my boat had not seen water in 8 months)

Total = $16 for a 2 hour paddle (and you can't even practice rolling!)

Happier discussion:

I like to keep my feet dry, so avoiding bodily contact was not really an issue. I spent two hours paddling out to the north end of the reservoir (where the dam is) and back. There were quite a few motor boats and fishermen/kids out enjoying the sunshine. 

The top of the earthen dam at the north end of San Pablo Reservoir

Easy Bay Municipal Utility District owns many of the reservoirs supplying water to the Bay Area. Reservoirs are often connected in series. San Pablo Creek was dammed with an earthen dam to create the reservoir, but it isn't the main contributor of water. The Briones Reservoir and the Pardee Reservoir (in the Sierras) both drain into the San Pablo Reservoir.

I guess they have Blue Herons on the west coast too :)

Fun wikipedia fact: In 2004 the Utility District reported that the dam was at risk of settling 35 feet if a serious earthquake were to hit, so they lowered the water levels and did some retrofitting projects (adding some concrete to the earth) which were completed in 2010. 

Too bad it wasn't lunch time!

From what I could tell (flooded picnic tables) the water levels seem to be back up, if not higher! Maybe this is a precaution since the snowpack is virtually non-existant this year.

Date: Saturday, May 5, 2012
Time: 2 hours 
Distance: ~ 6 miles

West Coast, meet Big Purple.

After 8 months of dry, solitary confinement in the garage in Penfield, NY, Big Purple finally joined me in California on Friday evening. She (is it a "she"? I'm not sure) was on the road for 5 weeks (jealous!).

I arrived at the beautiful Stanford Boathouse in Redwood City just before 8pm. The site was completely deserted and sun was setting over San Francisco Bay. I hopped out of my car and went through the familiar motions of clamping the saddles onto the roof-rack and threading the weathered blue straps through the cross-bars. It took me a bit longer to remember how to tie a bowline knot. Even after tying 16 bowline knots on each of 20 tarps at COE I still can't seem to remember it!

I spent the next 15 minutes sitting on the dock attempting to open my kayak lock by going through every possible permutation of 11-21-09 (or was it 23? 27?). The combo was programmed into my previous cell phone, which is now lying in the dirt somewhere in the hills behind Santa Cruz. No success... I guess I'll just have two locks attached to the cable! Maybe that will help intimidate kayak-robbers.

Around 8:15 I turned to see a truck pulling a huge trailer of boats along the winding wooded driveway. Albert, the driver, stepped out of the cab and helped me unload my boat. Her 16.5-foot length looked small amongst the rowing shells and outrigger canoes.

Albert helped me load Big Purple onto my car and left me to cinch down the straps while he delivered an antique rowing shell to another excited recipient.

It's possible that I grinned for the entire 40 minute drive home. There is something so comforting about driving down the highway with the nose of your kayak sticking out in front of you, the bowlines fluttering in the wind.

Pinnacles National Monument (a belated first post in California!)

Here we are again, with 8 months since my last post. To be honest, I have at least 5 posts started in my draft box with the best of intentions. I think it stems from my desire to document the details of everything. It's just too overwhelming once you've missed a couple months. Where do you start!? For now I'm letting myself skip the last 8 months. Maybe later I'll be motivated and fill in the (more-exciting-than-my-current-life) gaps, including some more Iceland posts, a few paddling posts, 6 weeks of unforgettable/hilarious/adventurous cross-country road trip posts, and 5 months of exploring my new state of residence (California!). Oh! How could I forget? My new job, which involves a lot of analyzing and a little bit of exploring beaches and rivers!

I'll start small, I guess. Pinnacles National Monument is pretty small (maybe that's why it's called a monument?). It's a national park about an hour southwest of Monterey Bay, in the town of Paicines (which, from what I can tell, consists of an intersection between two small county highways). The drive to the park was lovely! This is assessment likely has more to do with the fact that I was taking my new (used) car on a trip for the first time, the sun was out (68 degrees!), and it was a Sunday morning so the Bay Area traffic was somewhat tame.

Since all the Californians were in Tahoe pretending to ski in puddle of slush, the park was very peaceful. I only encountered a few hikers on my 8 mile loop.

The first part of the trail took me to the Bear Gulch Caves and Reservoir (Californian for murky puddle). The entrance to the cave had a daunting sign that read, "Caution: Flashlights Required." Since this was my first longish solo hike experience, I started having flashbacks of 127 Hours. I took a 3 minute water/digging-for-headlamp break before entering the CAVE. 2 minutes later I was back in bright daylight and feeling rather sheepish. The next few caves were similarly brief, but still fun to squeeze through. Apparently the caves are often closed due to wet conditions and for bat habitat, so I got lucky!

Bear Gulch Caves

At the end of the caves I arrived at a cute little reservoir. I didn't spend too much time there since it's apparently the place for romantic couples to hang out at 11am on a Sunday - awkward. Onwards!

Bear Gulch Reservoir

The next bit was pretty steep and dry. Here I'd like to pause and say that what I really miss about the east coast is the lush-ness of the woods. Even when you're in a forest in the middle of winter in California, it feels like the moisture is being sucked out of you.

This steep trail took me up to the "High Peaks," which are the spikes most commonly documented in photos taken at Pinnacles. These neat geologic formations are thought to be part of the Neenach Volcano, which was split by the San Andreas Fault. The Pacific tectonic plate moved up and took the Pinnacles with it. Since this particular type of rock is very erodible, it led to the visually appealing smooth rock outcroppings that remain today. (Here ends my attempt at knowing anything about geology)

The trail through this section is very narrow and steep (up long staircases cut into the boulders) - it was a lot of fun! Since there aren't really any trees you have a great view from pretty much any angle. I paused here for a delicious lunch featuring the amazing avocado (which is affordable year round!):

The High Peaks (left) in Pinnacles National Monument

On the way down I accidentally missed my turn for the Condor Gulch Trail and ended up adding a few extra miles, but I ended up seeing 3 condors circling above my head for the rest of my hike. Pinnacles is part of the California Condor Recovery Program. On my hike I saw one of the resident ornithologists monitoring the condor populations.

Here are a few more pictures from the hike down:

Manzanita trees have really stark red bark. They're evergreen and drought resistant! And very pretty...

A little bird with a blue back... not sure exactly what kind!

I'd really like to get back there and hike up to the Pinnacles in the evening or early morning, when the sun is at an angle that makes for interesting lighting - I think it would be a spectacular sight! Oh, one more thing I should mention. This park is an excellent place for outdoor rock climbing, so I need to make a point of meeting climbing gear-heads in the Bay Area to take me climbing... if you have any connections let me know! :)

An ambitious first paddle of 2011

It's May, and this was sadly the first time Big Purple has touched H20 since... November? How sad. I guess that's what's necessary when you chose not to work on your masters of engineering project for the majority of the year. Yesterday was my final presentation, so now there are many paddling trips in the works (in my mind...).

Anyways, Rob and I met up at East Shore Park at 8 am. We were on the water by 8:10 am, paddling North along the familiar east shore of Cayuga. Although my project had me out on the lake in a motor boat many times this spring, it's just so much better in a kayak! :)

Soooo.... I got a new computer, and I've been converted to Mac, so I'm playing with the fun picture settings :)

As we were passing Bolton Point (a little over 2 miles up the lake), we decided to aim for Myers Point. It was a slightly ambitious goal since Rob had to back at COE for a meeting at noon, but we were keeping a good pace, so we went for it anyway. Ten minutes later, the wind naturally started to pick up from the South. This helped push us along to Myers Point, but it certainly made the paddle back feel like a kayaking treadmill.

Nice lighting on Salmon Creek

Around the point the lake was completely calm, and we went for a short exploratory paddle up Salmon Creek, which runs along the northern side of Myers Park. Rob spotted a very cute family of Mergansers:

The paddle back felt very long (it took about 45 minutes longer than the paddle out!), but we managed to make it back by 11:45 am.

Date: Friday May 13th, 2011
Time: 3.5 hrs
Distance: 12.3 miles!

On the radar for the near future: a day paddle on Skaneateles Lake, a sunset paddle from Long Point on Cayuga Lake, and a day paddle on the northern end of Cayuga Lake by the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in Seneca Falls.

Iceland #1: First Impressions of Ísland

Upon arriving at the Keflavik International Airport (about an hour southwest of Reykjavik, the capital) at 6:30am, we made our sleepy way to the rental car counters. An arbitrary decision to choose Hertz resulted in a very expensive rental of an automatic car (I recommend you learn to drive manual before renting a car in another country). We headed out to the parking lot and wandered around for a while until we found the corresponding license plate. Our first impression was "wow! this is fancy/cool. woooo heated seats!". (This did not last long once we realized the ground clearance was very very low... more on that later.) It also managed to make itself look like a car commercial in every location we parked it. I'm not sure whether this was a function of the location or the car.  

In accordance with my favorite writing style (lists), these were our first impressions of Iceland!

Somehow everything in Iceland looks epic. It seemed like every landscape, waterfall, mountain, beach, and herd of horses we encountered was very visually dramatic. Maybe it was the stark contrast between the snow and black lava, or maybe it was the way the sun would shine at an angle through the ever present layer of clouds. I'm not a particularly good photographer, nor is my camera very fancy, but my ratio of exciting to boring pictures was much higher on this trip...

Iceland smells like sulfur. We noticed this as soon as we left the airport. Now that I think about it, we must have gotten used to it because we stopped noticing it after about the first day. The hot water in Reykjavik smelled very strongly like sulfur though...

Anywhere outside Reykjavik feels very deserted - at least in the winter time. Every once in a while we would pass a car driving by on the ring road (the road that goes all the way around the island), but it wasn't a common occurrence. For the first few days, when we were traveling along the southern coast, we actually had a hard time finding food. The only places that are open reliably in the winter are convenience stores on gas stations. This impression may have been exacerbated by the fact that we arrived at 6am on a Sunday, and everything was closed all day...

This is one of the few countries where we could pass as a natives. Although nearly everyone speaks English, we were almost always first greeted in Icelandic, after which an awkward look of confusion quickly converted the conversation to English. I guess I have to go to 65 degrees north - one parallel from the Arctic Circle - a place where people are incredibly pale and light-haired, to fit in.

It kind of looks like the moon (or Colorado in the winter time...). Big expanses of very level yet bumpy lava fields punctuated by nearly vertical cliffs down to the ocean and up to the mountains.

Traffic lights make sense! In addition to having a single yellow light as a warning to slow down for the upcoming red light, they use the yellow light when transitioning from red to green by having both red and yellow illuminated. This makes it so there isn't as much of a lag time from when one direction of traffic stops and the other starts.

On a similar transportation note, HUGE tires (and studded tires) are very prevalent. These can be very helpful when getting around anywhere outside Reykjavik in the winter. More on that later... 

The yogurt is amazing. I was recently informed that Icelandic yogurt is the next yogurt rage after Greek yogurt, and I'm in full support. The brand that's popular there is Skyr. Yum!!

The dried fish is not so amazing. Found in any convenience store, these bags of fishy smelling strips of haddock make you feel like you're chewing on leather that tastes like rotten sardines. We had to be really hungry to try these.

This last impression wasn't really a "first impression." It was more of a conclusion that we came to with some other travelers in our hostel. Iceland does an amazing job of screening the photos you find online so that you manage to (wrongfully) convince yourself that it never snows there. There is snow in Iceland for most of the year! Don't let your Google image search for Iceland convince you otherwise...

It's time for some new adventures...

It's been a while. I've been a terrible blogger. It's been a very strange couple months -- maybe it's because I haven't been doing the outdoorsy things that I love nearly enough! But I'm hoping to be back in full force for a while, at least until my master's project takes over my life in April.

I'm happy to be back with news of some upcoming adventures. In the works is a 5 week summer roadtrip with Marika, my best friend from high school. I am ridiculously excited to finally get to explore the middle of this country! I'll post more details about the route/plans soon.

The adventure that currently has my full attention is...

Iceland!

Yep, my trip to Nepal revived/reminded me of my excitement and interest in traveling, so I spent some time searching for plane tickets to cool new places over spring break. Here's a really neat section of the kayak.com (the website that I usually use to buy my plane tickets... it's just a coincidence that it happens to be named the way it is!). This page lets you type in a starting airport and shows you the prices of all possible destinations with ticket prices. This led me to realize that Iceland was a very convenient 4 hour non-stop flight from Boston for only ~$450! After talking with a few people about their trips to Iceland and only hearing good things, I decided to buy a ticket.

I'll be heading over there in less than a week with Simon, a Boston friend from my New Hampshire internship last summer. We are currently discovering that traveling in Iceland in the off season will certainly be an adventure. The roads can be in terrible condition, making travel outside of Reykjavik a nightmare. We're hoping to venture out of the city during the first half of the week, and explore the city for the last few days. Hopefully this will give us enough of a time-cushion when we get stranded on a glacier somewhere.

Some items on the very tentative agenda include:

• Lots of hiking/walking around
• Checking out the cliffs/fjords on the coast
• Finding a volcano (and hoping it doesn't explode and keep me from getting back to my graduate project...)
• Seeing the northern lights (assuming the stars align... or something)
• Visiting Gullfoss - a huge touristy waterfall! 
• Geysers!
• Visiting a geothermal power plant, because we're nerds like that. 
• Visiting the famous Blue Lagoon for an afternoon
• Museums in Reykjavik
• Staying at farms around the country. They have a really neat program that lets tourists stay in farmhouses - all you need is your sleeping bag. I guess it's the Iceland version of a B&B?
• Kayaking?????? Still looking into this option since I can't imagine I will be dragging all my kayak gear over there.

 Yay! More to come soon :)