Gearing Up For Whitney

We're getting down to the wire here. I assembled most of my pack tonight. I wanted to actually pack it, but the new Therm-a-Rest is taking a lot longer than I expected to self inflate. The instructions say to let it self inflate when you first unwrap it, then let it sit inflated overnight before packing it up. So that's what I'm doing.

Food! This is breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 5 days. The first day's food is in the plastic bags to the right, separated into breakfast, lunch, & dinner. Those meals don't need to be in the bear canister, as they'll be eaten before we go to bed. Food: 10 Powerbar Gels (2 per day), 3 servings of banana nut oatmeal, 5 cytomax packets, 5 clif shot hot apple cider, 4 instant puddings, freeze dried blueberries, dehydrated apples, dehydrated apricots, 4 clif bars, 4 protein brownies, 1 Big 100 chocolate chip cookie dough bar, 2 Mountain House breakfasts, 5 Mountain House dinners (chicken with noodles, beef stew, beef stroganoff, teriyaki chicken, 2 instant cheese mashed potato mixes, 3 cup-a-soups, 2 miso soups, and one big bag of trail mix that will be divvied up into separate trail-food bags later.


Tuesday through Friday's food is in the bear canister. Mountain House dessert + breakfast, lunch, & dinner for Monday are outside the canister, as is the gel and trail mix.


Monday's food & trail mix packed in one bag alongside the bear canister.


Clothes! Monday through Friday's socks, base layers (wicking underwear & wicking long sleeve shirts), midweight synthetic thermal underwear (top & bottom), fleece pants, fleece jacket, waterproof/breathable pant shell, spare pant shell, spare underwear, & spare socks. Not pictured: waterproof/breathable jacket.


Toiletries & personal grooming: Toilet paper, trowel, camp soap, purell hand cleanser, toothbrush, toothpaste, waterproof/breathable jacket.


Personal stuff in a stuff sack + waterproof/breathable jacket.


Most of the essentials: sunscreen, medicated sunscreen lip balm, 2 LED headlamps, 1 LED lantern, waterproof matches, multitool, compass, iodine tablets, & hat.


Gore-Tex hiking boots, camp shoes, 2 3-liter hydration bladders, water filter, mug, daypack, spork, nalgene bottle, & extra stuff sack. Oh yeah, and my new Gorillapod SLR-ZOOM. That's the alien-looking black & white thing you see. It's a portable tripod that weights next to nothing and wraps around things like trees and rocks.


Mt. Whitney Zone trail map, First Aid kit, camp towel, disposable rain pancho, Ben Gay, ibuprofen, sudafed, & bug spray. I'll also be bringing a larger 24k trail map that I printed & had laminated. The first aid kit will likely be scrapped because we need a bigger one that will be shared among the three of us.


Gregory Palisade backpack & Marmot Sawtooth sleeping bag in its stuff sack.


A friend from work taught me this trick, the sleeping bag takes up about half its packed size if you squish it with your knee, then secure with a compression strap.


Not pictured were the Therm-a-Rest of course, spare batteries, and some reading material. This will be the longest trip I've been on; prior to this, I've only stayed overnight.

Wow, I haven't blogged since Friday. Heh.

I'm still getting everything together for the Whitney trip. We leave on Monday, and I want to have everything ready to go so I'm not all stressed out. On Saturday I went to the Folsom REI gear sale and they had more stuff than I've seen at any gear sale to date. But did I find anything that I wanted or needed? Nope. My wife found some shoes & boots for the kids, and Gregory got a marshmallow gun, but that was it.

I still needed more food for the trip, so I picked up a couple more Mountain House meals. With the Folsom store being so small, I decided to drive over to the Sacramento REI to pick up my synthetic thermal underwear. Come to find out, the construction on the store has made them reduce their inventory, and they didn't have anything in my size! So I drove to the Roseville store.

On the way through Roseville, I stopped off at Trader Joe's and got a dried fruit for the trip, as well as a cheese roll stuffed with ham and a loaf of dense bread. Good, good stuff. At REI, I picked up the thermal underwear.

Then today at lunchI ran 5.5 miles. I am just *loving* the weather lately! The high today's supposed to be 79, and while I was running it was a mere 64. 64 degrees!

I ran to the gym (3.25 miles, something like that), then did some weights in supersets of two:

1A: Bench Press, 3 sets of 6, 115lbs
1B: Dumbbell Curls, 3 sets of 6, 25lb dumbbells
2A: Chin-ups, 1 set of 2, 2 sets of 1
3A: Dumbbell Shoulder Press, 3 sets of 10, 25lb dumbbells
3B: Reverse Crunches, 3 sets of 10

Afterwards I ran the rest of the loop back to work, a little under 3 miles. I stopped the GPS timer when I stopped at the gym, then started it once I left again for accuracy. 50:18.79 for the loop, 9:13/mi which is almost :45 better than my last couple. I only worked the weights for 10 minutes. 726 total calories burned.

Today was another great run! Once again traffic wasn't cooperative. It has to be my timing coming up and going down the overpasses, but I always end up with 20 cars going onto the freeway whenever I need to cross! So I have to stop for sometimes 30 seconds or more for them, it sucks. At any rate, my pace was exactly the same as the other day, and my time was one second faster. And to top it off, I didn't feel like I did yesterday, which is great, hehe.

Most interestingly, the HRM and the GPS were IDENTICAL for calories burned: 690. I have no idea how that happened, the GPS is time & distance only. I suppose it's accurate at this point.

So anyway, 5.5 miles, 52 minutes, 690 calories burned.

Hey guys, I finally got around to trying out geotagging. It took some serious research to find the tools! It's still obscure for some reason.

A quick bit of background, part of the reason I took my Canon 10D with me on the last segment of the Tahoe Rim Trail was geotagging. I wanted to get the process down so when I take my trip to Mt. Whitney, I can have the pictures, with the GPS track, geotagged in Flickr, and mapped onto Google Earth. I haven't taken it to Google Earth yet.

So anyway, I took the pictures, and have the resulting jpegs in a folder. You can do this with the RAW files, but since I already had the jpegs on Flickr, I started there.

After lots of research I found a program called Geosetter. It works WONDERFULLY. When I put the .gpx file into the same folder as the images, once I clicked on the folder holding the images, it knew to use that file. It then was able to interpolate the data based on EXIF dates, and finally save the GPS data to the EXIF of the images.

Finally, I replaced the images already on Flickr with the updated ones. The process would have been a lot quicker had they not already been on Flickr, I could have just done one upload. You do need to tell Flickr that yes, you want to automatically map EXIF information.

Once I did that, the images were mapped within Flickr. Each image shows its city location, and a link to Map, which when clicked, shows the image on a map. Since this was backcountry hiking, I had to turn on the Satellite map. Here's a sample:



The rest of the images from that hike are here.

I apologize for not all the files being geotagged, but the images not taken by me didn't have timestamps. It seemed to work out pretty well! Not being a Picasa user, I'm not sure how it handles the images, but Flickr seemed to work out well.

I'll be geotagging a lot more images, as well as doing it for all the pictures from my upcoming Mt. Whitney trip.