Caltech

Joshua Tree National Park - Camping

Wednesday to Friday, March 23 - 25, 2011

We left 8 A.M. in morning Wednesday. We were expecting about 14 people to show up, a drop from the 19 that originally signed up to go to Yosemite. Only 10 people came. So we ended up not needing one of our three rented vans. After a quick repacking, we emptied a van and returned it. Then we were off to Joshua Tree! 

Three hours of sleep later, I woke up to start working on the volunteering projects. Meanwhile, Adam and Tazo, two grad students who were leading the trip, set up camp for us so that we can focus on the project. When we arrived at the camp site, everything was ready for us! It was like bell service. They set up the five tents and put our sleeping bags and stuff in them.

 
 
Our camping area was quite nice. :) And the tents were nicely set up for us. 

So what did we do first? FOOD!

After an afternoon of kicking away rocks, yanking out metal rods, and jumping on folded fences, we were all extremely hungry. Since Caltech Y originally bought food for 19 and packed food for 14, the 10 of us had lots and lots of food to demolish, which were were more than happy to do.  :p 

 
Yumm!

After a delicious meal, we cleared out the picnic table and put out the fire. Most of us got ready for bed just after dark. I wanted to sleep outside, but it was particularly windy that night, so I decided against it... and thank goodness I did.

Athena and I shared a tent, the largest tent of the five we had. We had a bunch of extra sleeping bags since we prepared for more people, so I decided to take an extra one to put underneath. I get cold pretty easily and the ground is pretty cold even with a sleeping pad underneath. I also brought earplugs to help me sleep better. That way neiboring camps won't disturb me much. So I slept pretty well... until I felt something pushed me from the side.

I woke up in the pitch dark, took out my earplugs, and discovered that the thing was the tent. The wind was howling outside and stakes much have come loose. I sat up to look around and found Athena was awake, too. "Jeanne, I'm glad you're awake. The tent has pools of water in it." I had no idea of this since I was pretty warm. I must not have felt it since I had an extra layer underneath. I was about to say, "Well that's interesting" and lie right back down since I just wanted to return to my previous state of slumber, but at that moment, the tent almost collapsed from the wind. So instead I said, "Hmm that's a good idea." 

We got out of our sleeping bags and stood up. Ohmigod, it was COLD! And more interestingly, the tent was blowing this way and that so much that it was about to fly away... Well, Athena and I are pretty small, but not that small. We ran to the van and got in. Somehow, the van felt even colder than the tent, but at least the van wasn't going to fly away anytime soon. Athena leaned down the driver seat and (I think) fell asleep. I had a hard time sleeping because once I get cold, it's almost impossible to get me warm again, and I can't sleep when I'm cold. So I just sat there awake staring out the window. And outside my window was this silhouette of a DRAGON! Now, I'm a pretty geeky Techer, but I know dragons don't exist. This one, though, seemed a lot like a dragon. It would sway a bit with the wind but stayed still otherwise, thank goodness. In any case, I couldn't take my eyes off it, trying to figure out what exactly it was made of. 

Finally, dawn broke to reveal the dragon!

 
I spy a dragon. Do you? 

That Joshua Tree almost drove me insane. Now apparently Joshua Trees are named because they looked like Joshua (from the Bible) with his arms out the sky. But to me, the look a lot more like dragons. Therefore,  I hereby move to change the name of Joshua Tree to Dragon Tree. All in favor say "aye!"

 
Our tent got blown into the bush/tree next to it and got a huge rip.

Thursday night went about the same. We had some more barbequeing, but we also had some spaghetti that Athena prepared before the trip. She's awesome. 

That night was incredibly clear. I decided that the wind storm was over and that it must be OK to sleep outside. It simply can't be windy both nights we were there. Anyway, I took my chances. I stargazed quite a while before I got into my cocoon. 

Pic from Peter Gao of the stars and my flashlight. The stars that night made the first night's wind seem trivial. 

Breakfast and lunch on Friday, the last day, was like "Now everyone eat as much as you can because we have so much leftover food!" 

 
Don't be fooled. These people are happy because they have food...among other things. :p

 

 

 

 

Joshua Tree Hikes

Thursday, March 23

Hidden Valley Trail

About 1 mile loop with little elevation change. Perfect length. So the trail has a lot of these rocks, pictured below.

 
 

Coachella Valley... I think.

 
   

Fortynine Palms Oasis Trail

About 1.5 miles each way and about 300 feet of gain. 

 

At the trail head:

  

A bit further up:

And even further up:

Techers outside of Tech... ohmigod!

Look at that trail to that tiny oasis!

A resting place is a picture place!

 

Nearing in on the goal:

And the 49 palms up close

They are quite nicely and interestingly situated.

 

Cottonwood Spring:

Which had an arrastra next to it:

 

 Miscellaneous: Skull Rock

 

 

Weeding at Joshua Tree

Friday, March 25, 2011

The other project that we worked on at Joshua Tree National Park was simple: identify the Sahara Mustard plant, yank it out of the ground, and stick it in your garbage bag... probably to be burned since they have seed in them. 

We drove to a completely different area of the park. We were no longer in the Mojave Desert, which is covered with Joshua Trees. The Colorado Desert is instead covered with Creosote Bush.

Pic of a Creosote Bush from desertusa.com. These things were literally everywhere. Our weed project was a few miles from a hill like in this picture.

First thing we got on the project was this info sheet: 

 

Why is the Sahara Mustard wanted? These plants are not indiginous to the region, but they thrive here. As a result, they take much need nutrient such as water away from the native species. (See some pictures of native plants in my other blog.) We were there in time to catch the live plants before their pods pop to release their seeds. So our mission was to take out as many as possible. This might seem like a pretty simple task, but finding them in a huge desert where they are widely dispersed was not such an easy feat. But once we found them, we seemed to find a lot of them. 

Pic of baaaaaaad mustard!

But before we were set loose to go find them, we were given this (somewhat frightening) sheet of paper:

 Rattle snakes. Yikes!

On the back of this sheet were some interesting statistics and emergency actions (and such) to know about rattlesnakes.

 
Back of the rattle snake sheet. Look at the boxed stats. Crazy, huh? Suddenly it occurred to me. This is why they made us sign all those papers before we started volunteering! :p  (Except NPS does have insurance for volunteers, so we would have been covered.)

What's even more crazy than the rattle snake handout each one of us got was that I actually saw one! 

 
Pic of really scary poisonous baby rattle snake sleeping in the sun. I figured if they can really only attack something that's about half its length close, my hand would be ok if I zoomed in... a lot.

 
Among the 10 or so of us, we got a lot of these mustard plants!

 

 

 

Volunteering at Joshua Tree - Fence Removal

Wednesday, March 23

As soon as we reached Joshua Tree National Park, we dove right into the work. We met with some park leaders and volunteer coordinators at the visitor center and quickly signed some consent forms. We were given two projects for our three day stay: turtle fence removal project and sahara mustard weeding project. I was pretty familiar with weeding. (Really there isn't much to be familiar with. You just identify and pull.) But I had no idea what the turtle fence removal involved. What does a turtle fence look like? Are we talking metal or wooden fences? Is this hard manual labor involving hammers and stuff? We soon got to the fence site, and we found that turtle fence was in fact made for turtles.

Pic of Gerardo by the fence. 

They're about a 1 or 2 feet high and held up by these metal rods that are just hammered into the ground tied to the mesh fence with metal wires. At the botom, the fence is bent 90 degrees to fold along the ground. Along this fold, there are large rocks to hold the fence down so that turtles to get through by digging under it.

Why is there a fence in the first place? They were doing some kind of construction and the turtles in this area are endangered and thus protected. This fence was put up to prevent the turtles from wondering into the construction zone where they might be crushed to death.... :(. But now the construction is complete (actually it has been completed for two years), we can take this fence down and possibly reuse the materials for another fence.

So to take this fence down, we needed to do the following. And like true Techers, we made an ... (anti)assembly line out of this for maximized efficiency. 

1. Cut/unwrap the wires that attach the mesh to the rods. We were given wire cutters, but they were really more of a hassle to use than just untwirling them and yanking them out. This was probably the easiest job. 

2. Pull out the rods from the ground. Maybe this was the easiest actually.

3. Kick away the rocks that hold down the fence. This might seem rather trivial, but my toe was hurt many a time by kicking these rocks. Why didn't I just pick them up and move them? I felt like I was ultimately winning in the game of least energy used if I just hurt my toes a couple of times instead.

4. Flatten the mesh. There were lots of plants in the way, so this wasn't always so easy. Sometimes these plants came with bugs, too! So you might say this was even dangerous... gasp!

5. Roll up the mesh. The hardest part of the job. These things like to stay flat. Rolling it up involved a lot of energy to keep them rolled to continue rolling them. Again plants and bugs got in the way. 

6. Jump on the roll to flatten it. This was the funnest step. I felt like this was the sweet reward after exerting all this energy in rolling up the fence. 

Pic of Athena rolling up the fence.

 
Pic of a rather large beetle in a rock ditch after I kicked it away with my foot of steel.

 We did this for about a couple of hours with some breaks here and there. The next day, it took us another hour or two to finish removing the entire fence, which totalled about 2 miles according to our estimate. 

This project was not the most stimulating, but we did get some awesome scenery out of it. Look at this!

 
Pic of the area around the fence. Just look up.

 
 
What you see if you look to the left of the one above.

The park rangers were quite impressed with how quickly we worked. I think they would be more than happy if Caltech Y came back for Alternative Spring Break every year. :)

 

The Extra Day of Spring Break

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Greg said he would email us by 9 A.M. this morning to let us know what our alternative spring break would be. By 9:15 A.M., I got antsy and decided to call the Y to see if there was anyone there. To my surprise, Greg picked up! Who would have thought people go to work during Caltech spring break? "The email is cooking," he said... well maybe take out the quotes. Ten minutes later, my curiosity was finally quenched.  The trip would be to Joshua Tree National Park (YAY!) and we would depart a day late 8 A.M. in the morning (boo0).

But this was my chance to prove to the world that in fact Caltech students can come up with (lots!) of fun things to do while not working! So here is an account of my adventure with the extra day gained, thanks to the snow storm in Yosemite.

First things first. Roll my eyes open around 11 A.M. Ponder the meaning of life for ~7 minutes. Think about what I did yesterday and what I want to do today. Wonder if I'm going to take this long to get out of bed tomorrow, too. Maybe I'll go to the Getty today. Check the weather there. Check my email. Roll myself out of bed. Clean and actually wake up with breakfast. Look at my pantry and pick one of my three cereals in stock. Get myself some blue milk and bon appetit! And oh look at the time. It's now noon.

Pic from Wikipedia. See how pretty?!

If I'm going somewhere, I usually think about people at Tech who would want to come along at least for the ride if not for the incredible company. Soon, I rounded up Jonas (exchange student from Denmark also happens to be my boyfriend), Dorea (exchange student from London), Wenqi (exchange from Edinborough), and Musab (lowly frosh). The traffic was... bad, as usual.

 
Pic. from LA Times. Yes, the news does cover things that we see irl.

An hour later, we got to the parking lot and found a spot about 5 stories underground. So get this, the Getty Museum is actually quite happily situated on the top of a hill. In order to get to it from the parking lot, we have to take a ...

Pic from lovetoeatandtravel.com. Sounds like my kind of web site.
 
I love trains. And Sheldon Cooper loves trains. I mean who doesn't? 

So what's in the Getty Museum? All kinds of art: paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture, china, arhitecture, gardens... they even have random walls in the middle of their plaza that kinda make different sounds when you tap on it (preferably not with your knuckles as we found out).  

Pic from Dorea, who managed to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Now that's talent.

We also looked at (and appreciated!) some art. I think I liked Degas the best from (one of many) collection we looked at. 

And this...

Pic again from Dorea. I thought it looked like a lady in a dress with her arms sticking up to the sky, but some of us disagreed. What do you think?

Pic from Dorea. We had a great time at the Getty. They also had a nice cafe, so we're fed and happy in this picture. Left to right: me, Jonas, Dorea, Wenqi, Musab.

There were nice gardens where we walked around and rested. Well, I rested while the rest of them did this:

Pic from Dorea taken by Musab of Dorea and Wenqi... and me.

The Getty closes at 5:30pm, but we didn't quite want to go home yet (because Techers just wanna have fun!). So where did we go? To Walt Disney Concert Hall, of course! 

  

Pic from Wikipedia. Frank Gehry is a genius.

The St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra was performing that night and rush tickets for students are only $10! Plus, some of us had never been to a classical music concert! We headed there with a lot more of that traffic stuff and arrived just in time to have dinner at the cafe and attend the concert. 

Pic from Dorea. The view from our seats was fantastic, as is the view from any seat, I'm sure.

 We heard Russian Easter Festival by Rimsky-Korsakov, which was fairly short and exciting. Then they played Cello Concerto No. 1 in E flat major by Shostakovich, a much longer piece. I can't guarantee that we were all awake for that one, but it finished with more or less a bang, and we certainly woke up to enjoy intermission in the garden. 

  

Pic from Dorea. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in fact has an outdoor garden on the (I guess) second floor that is open to the public, where the unique rose fountain made of china is located.

After intermission was Brahms Symphony No. 4 in e, which I liked a lot. Now after this performance, St. Petersburg Phil got the longest standing ovation I have ever seen in Disney Concert Hall, and this was the 11th time I had been there. So they did an encore, which lasted about 5 minutes. Maybe it was the inflation of appreciation from the long applause or maybe I was just excited to walk around again, but that 5 minutes piece (which I can't name) was the best piece played that night. I think the audience tried to get them to do another encore, but they very politely exited the stage. In any case, it was quite an eventful day.

 So how did the idea of the Getty Museum and Walt Disney Concert Hall happen upon such a haphazard Caltech student? Simple. The world wide web! We Techers might not "just know" where to go for the Los Angeles attractions, but we know how to use the internet. (Go figure!) Then there are people like me who try to encourage everyone to see more of LA. I think the myth of antisocial Caltech students is totally busted.

 

 

 

 

 

The Change in the Wind at Yosemite

Monday, March 21, 2011

We were supposed to leave for Yosemite tomorrow, but we got an email from Greg Fletcher, who works at the Caltech Y, saying that all roads to Yosemite are now  closed, and our project has been canceled as a result. We will expect another email with update of whether a trip will happen at all and if so where. Some places under consideration are Joshua Tree National Park and Owens Valley. Personally, I'd like to go to Joshua Tree just because I've heard so many (nondescript) good things about it. But meanwhile, since we no longer have anything planned for tomorrow, maybe I should come up with something to do. After all, it is spring break. I have no sets. 

Myth: Caltech students don't know what to do with their time when they're not working so they just end up either snoozing or gaming in their rooms.

Busted? mmm. You should make that call yourself... read my next post.

 

The Prep for Yosemite

March 16, 2011

Today at 4pm, we had an orientation meeting for get ready for the Yosemite trip. I was pretty excited. Last time I went to Yosemite was with the Caltech Y as well for the "Y Hike". It was June 2010 just after school ended for us. I remember I was working on EE113: Feedback and Control Circuits and was frantically trying to finish my last project in time to leave for the hike. Of course, as Techers always manage, I did somehow finish and pack frantically to hop on the bus for five hours of ohmigod sleep at last. I remember some beautiful nights outside with very bright stars and great scenery on the hikes. So needless to say, I was more than enthused to be going back.

We went around introducing ourselves and (of course) throwing out random facts about us. The most common random fact was favorite color. I promise we are more creative than this... most of the time. The schedule was for us to do about three days of volunteer work mostly in the mornings with the afternoons free for day hikes and such. We would go from Tuesday noon til Friday night. We would have cabins instead of camping outside because the weather was anticipated to be pretty cold. A bit disappointed, but I'm sure I'd be even more disappointed if I didn't have toes or ears anymore. Our group leaders would be Adam, a grad student in materials, and Taso, area coordinator for residential life. And I am thrilled that Athena, who works at the Caltech Y, is also coming with us. Last time I hiked with her at Yosemite, and we had about the same pace in hiking. :) The group totals to almost 20 people, mostly undergrads but some grads. After getting a rundown of what we need to bring, we were dismissed. 

Note to self: get earplugs... for better sleep. :p