Message posted by JB737 on April 12, 2007 at 22:01:42 PST:
I'll figure out the distances after uploading my track log. I'm still uploading and staring at things like JANET pix, including some night shots from the Tropicana that will blow your mind. The debate about upholstery color, for example, is now going to end. The resolution, if I must say so myself, is the best I have seen. I will almost certainly have to resolution-reduce the faces of the flight attendant (in the doorway) and a pilot (in the cockpit) in one particular shot. I'll do a separate post on that. I never climbed any part of Tikaboo itself, just the more northerly mountains in its range, namely the ones around the 7795 foot peak (which I call JB7795) 1.8 miles north of Tikaboo as the crow flies. I'd say that the farthest in I made it was maybe 1/4 or 1/2 mile more toward Tikaboo than that peak, before looping slightly north again to get toward JB7795. So I was maybe 4 miles from 375 as the crow flies, plus whatever distance my car was in. Of course, good luck hiking a straight line route through there! I'm sure I went AT LEAST 5 miles each way on foot, and again had a lot of work left to do, to get to either JB7795 or Tikaboo7912. And the 5 mile estimate was simply the reading on the Garmin GPS odometer, which routinely undercounts distance for various reasons when moving at any walking speed or in areas where GPS signal is even momentarily lost. I was moving slower on average than a walk, I can assure you, so the undercounting could be significant. A second method, generally much more accurate, will be to sort out the correct track-log distance, which will be a string of 0.02 or 0.03 mile (105 or 158 foot) line segments, the distance I walked to go each 100 feet may well have averaged 140 feet, zigzagging between bushes and obstacles. So my best estimate, until I refine it, is that I went about 14 miles roundtrip if you measure it step by step. And I still didn't get anywhere great for seeing Groom Lake! The loose shale where I was, is probably like what it is on Tikaboo itself. In my case, a long stretch of it was at exactly the maximum slope that it could be at without coming down on its own, which I am sure it regularly does when a boulder hits it from above. Stepping on it was a crapshoot each time. If lucky, it compressed the rocks together and held you, just like walking up stairs. If unlucky, it set the whole vicinity of your foot sliding down the mountain. You step upward 1 foot, and slide back downhill 3 feet, to 2 feet below where you started....making your climbing efficiency -200% for that step. And in the average case, it was like walking uphill on a treadmill, where a certain percentage of your effort was nullified by backsliding, making for something between 0% and 100% efficiency. I'd say that there was one stretch of 600 vertical feet where the efficiency was maybe 30-40% at best, making it take the effort of a 1500-2000 foot vertical climb on stairs or a nice trail. Coming back downhill, the sliding works to your advantage as long as you can keep your balance and keep from getting hurt. But the effort to keep your balance pretty much cancels that out, but still requires a lot less brute energy expenditure than going up.
Thanks. It was a severe challenge, and yes, I'll be back for more of it sometime.
In Reply to: Re: Grueling Easter, with zero Pave Hawks posted by Hank on April 12, 2007 at 16:46:39 PST:
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