Urrrrp!

Friday evening, I fly to London, and thence by train to St. Bees, Cumbria, for the start of my hike eastward on the Coast to Coast pathway (western half, only).

Sunday evening, I began feeling queasy. Queasy turned to nauseous, and nauseous turned to hanging my head over the rim of the toilet.  After several repetitions over the course of the next few hours, I eventually succeeded in emptying my digestive system of whatever was disturbing it -- including, so it seemed, the interior lining of my stomach.

Monday, I lay in bed most of the day.  No longer nauseous, but totally wiped out.  Just going downstairs to get a glass of water was an exercise in balance and determination.  Eating was out of the question, until I tentatively nibbled on a piece of toast in late afternoon, and then a small bowl of cereal before bedtime.

Today, I'm once again eating, but still languishing about the house -- lacking in energy, a bit spacey, but obviously improving.  I'll be ready for departure on Friday, even though packing will now be a last minute operation.  (It never takes nearly as long as I anticipate, in any event.)

But this entire mini-crisis has been a reminder to me of how the best-laid plans of mice and men, etc., etc. etc.  Even for a guy who loves to lay plans -- especially for him, perhaps -- fate throws the occasional monkey wrench ("spanner," I guess, since I'm bound for England) in the works.  I can't depend with absolute certainty on my body's working to perfection -- or even to the level of less-than-perfection to which I've become accustomed.  Even though I take Vitamin D tablets regularly.  I'm not a robot, a machine that requires only an occasional squirt of oil to operate on all cylinders.

Hardly original thoughts, are they?  And yet, when you're used to decent health, it's startling to find it lacking.  This has been, as I say, merely a mini-crisis.  But it reminds me that I'm mortal, a piece of living meat with an ever-shrinking shelf life. 

I have to learn to take nothing for granted.  And I need to fully appreciate these days when bad health is merely a temporary inconvenience, an irritation, a brief interruption in my well-laid plans -- and not yet an irreversible condition. 

Creation

As I recall vaguely from physics (and I do cheat with a quick look at Wikipedia), a "Hamiltonian" is an operator commonly expressed as the sum of operators corresponding to the kinetic and potential energies of a system in the form

where those little carets over the letters indicate operators.  I recall a professor saying that if you had enough information, you could theoretically write a Hamiltonian operator that would describe the entire universe in terms of energy at the instant of the Big Bang, and predict the universe's precise evolution, right up to the present and beyond.  Maybe what God really said in Genesis, he joked, was "Let there be the Hamiltonian."

Just a little physics humor.   Some of you may still be reading.

I was reminded of the Hamiltonian by an article in this week's New Yorker about a British computer programmer named Sean Murray.  Mr. Murray has written something like a Hamiltonian for his own universe -- a computer game called No Man's Sky, soon to be released, apparently, by Sony.  His universe, available for exploration and exploitation by game players, will contain 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets.  Have fun, kids!

Unlike most computer games -- and electronic games is a subject I know very little about -- Murray's game does not use vast amounts of memory to contain all the information required to portray each of those 18 x 10¹⁸ planets.  Instead, his game contains a number of algorithms -- read the article, if you need more information -- that generate each planet as it is visited, and give the viewer a graphic representation of the planet based on its size, orbit, chemistry, and other knowable features.  Most planets will be lifeless.  Some will be inhabited by various life forms.  Some may have signs of past civilizations, just as in real science fiction.

The design allows for extraordinary economy in computer processing: the terrain for eighteen quintillion unique planets flows out of only fourteen hundred lines of code.  Because all the necessary visual information in the game is described by formulas, nothing needs to be rendered graphically until a player encounters it.

I suppose we are now drawing closer to the features of this "game" that I now find so irresistibly fascinating.

[T]he game continuously identifies a player's location, and then renders only what is visible.  Turn away from a mountain, an antelope, a star system, and it will vanish just as quickly as it appeared.  "You can get philosophical about it," Murray once said.  "Does that planet exist before you visit it?"

Indeed.

I'm not interested in hearing your psychiatric comments on my personality, but I'm often surprised that I can leave an object on a table overnight, and find it exactly where I left it the next morning.  How clever of the algorithms (although until now I hadn't thought to use this word), I think to myself, to enable it to be recreated -- exactly as I left it -- as I re-enter the room after a night's sleep!

I've posted before about scientists (of unknown competence) who suspect that we are characters in a computer game, and that the game will crash in the near future because our own digital profligacy will have exceeded the storage capacity of our creator's system.  This theory makes as much sense as any other cosmology that unaided reason can devise.  My own suspicion is that the star kid who started up the game of Earth got bored long ago and left it running while he went to get lunch.  But damn -- his game had a good programmer.  I can stare at my computer screen, casually turn my head away and look at something else, and then quickly look back at the screen.

It's still there, unchanged.  Or -- it was instantly recreated for my benefit, unchanged.

Murray admits that some of the planets his algorithms create are boring.  But even when they turn out to be boring, they're interesting to explore just because they are new and unknown.  I guess the first explorers of, say, Australia might have eventually become bored.  But they kept at it, not knowing what was apt to show up.  And as one of Murray's co-workers remarks about their game's universe, "It is a bit like it really does exist, isn't it?"

Murray, and we the human race, may be learning what it's like to be God the Creator.  Which is a fascinating thought.

Sure.  It's all fun and games (and money for Sony) right now.  But -- as the story of the Tower of Babel reminds us -- it probably won't end well.

Into the abyss

Hiker walking past Vishnu
basement rock canyon walls

The bottom line is this -- the Phantom Ranch (see last prior post) remains beyond my reach.   I feel like Adam and Eve -- barred from Paradise by an angel with a flaming sword.

I arrived at the Grand Canyon's South Rim on Friday afternoon, greeted by light snow showers that, by Saturday, had become heavy snow showers.  Very similar to my arrival and first full day in April 2012.  And the forecast was for minimal precipitation on Sunday, with perhaps a ten degree warming trend.

Conditions sounded ideal for a repeat of my 2012 hike to the river with -- perhaps -- the opportunity for an additional push onward to the ranch.

But in 2012, I began my descent on the Bright Angel trail bundled up and carefully avoiding slips on ice for the first mile or so going down into the canyon.  On Sunday this year, it was already shirtsleeve weather at the top when I began hiking at about 7:50 a.m.  I reached Indian Garden -- three  thousand feet below the rim -- at 10 a.m.  The old-fashioned dial thermometer that the National Park Service thoughtfully provides, hanging on a tree, showed that it was already 70 degrees.  I still had another 3.5 miles (and 1,300 feet elevation) to the river, and another 1.5 miles beyond that to the ranch.  A mule tender predicted that temperatures would reach the upper 80s by afternoon at the river. 

In 2012, by the time I reached the river, it had been only 70 degrees.

It was a tough decision, because Indian Garden itself felt very comfortable, and I felt very good following the descent.  But the probable increase in temperature bothered me, and I (chickened out) (made the prudent decision) (choose one), and decided to descend no further.  If I'm ever to make the round trip to Phantom Ranch in a day, I'll have to do it earlier in the year, departing from the top in freezing morning temperatures.

As a consolation prize, I made the three-mile round trip out to Plateau Point, a nice view point with an excellent view of the boiling Colorado -- gazing down at the river as it churned about, taunting me, 1,300 feet below.

Indian Garden is a bit of an oasis -- a woodsy area with surface water (at this time of year), resting on an impermeable layer of "Bright Angel shale" that keeps the water from soaking away before plant roots can take advantage of it.  Below this last sedimentary level, the trail enters the "Inner Canyon."  The wide vistas about the canyon provided until that point -- and that figure so prominently in photographs of the Grand Canyon -- give way to steep walled, narrow canyons of dark, extremely hard, metamorphic rock.

Beyond the siren call of Phantom Ranch, it's this geology of the lower portion that attracts me.  Just past Indian Garden, the trail passes what is called -- without hyperbole -- the Great Unconformity.  During the eons that layers of rock were laid down, there was a period when millions of years of sedimentary rock were gradually built up, and then eroded away all the way back down to the metamorphic "basement layer."  The present sedimentary layers that today rise to the rim were later deposited upon this re-exposed basement, leaving a gap of 1.2 billion years of  geological record totally erased -- or as the Park Service describes it, gone like pages torn out of a book.  The hiker can see where the lowest of the "newer" sedimentary layers lie directly on top of a metamorphic layer that predates the sedimentary layer by 1.2 billion years.

And -- being language-obsessed as I am -- it's perhaps the names given these basement layers, as much as their interesting geological development, that captivates me:  Vishnu schist, Brahma schist, Zoroaster granite, Rama schist, and -- most ancient of all - Elves Chasm gneiss.  To a non-Hindu, at least, these are rather dark and forbidding names, calling forth thoughts of ancient legends of war and cruelty, and applied in the Grand Canyon to the darkest and most ancient of primeval stone and rock.

In 2012, I found it impressive to walk through narrow canyons of this material -- stone forged under great heat and pressure through countless eons, back before the smallest one-celled life forms first began questioning their place in the Universe.  It was like being present at the beginning of time -- a far more potent experience than simply studying examples of these rocks in a museum or along the National Park Service's (excellent) park walk displays.

Emerging from amongst those walls of Vishnu schist into the warm and welcoming arms of the Phantom Ranch, with its warm beds, steak dinners, and happy, laughing guests, would be like experiencing the emergence of intelligent human life fully-formed from the stuff of lifeless stardust.  Or so I like to think. And babble about.

I'll give 'er another try, maybe next year.  

On the trail

Over the years, a quick check suggests, I've posted five times about my trips to the Grand Canyon.  Perhaps I've exhausted the topic.

Perhaps.  But Friday I fly to Phoenix, and thence by car once more to my favorite park for pre-summer hiking.  A short visit -- I'll stay there just three nights.  I hope to do a little hiking.

In 2012, I hiked from the South Rim down to the river and back in one day.  Against the Park Service's fervid advice.  But it had been snowing up at the top (it was still April), and temperatures were quite pleasant at river level, so the usual fears of heat prostration didn't pertain.

Last week, temperatures down at the river were running in the 90s, and I had my doubts about trying it again.  But the weather has moderated over the past few days.  I'll just have to wait and see what conditions are like when I arrive Friday evening.

If conditions are ideal, I'd like to hike once more down to the river, and then another two miles up the river to Phantom Ranch.  Ever tried getting reservations at the ranch?  Good luck!  I tried to get accommodations for my family a couple of years ago.  They have to be obtained thirteen months in advance.  On the appointed first day of the month, you call the designated phone number over and over, hoping to get through while everyone else is doing the same thing at the same time.  All reservations for the month in question -- thirteen months in the future -- were gone within a half hour.

So if I can't stay at Phantom Ranch, I'd at least like to look it over and say that I'd seen it.  But getting there would add another four miles to my day's hike.

I was pretty exhausted when I arrived back at the rim three years ago.  And as folks are kind enough to point out, I'm not getting any younger.  We'll see.

The Grand Canyon is so beautiful, so awe-inspiring, so "awesome" in the real sense of the word, that it's silly to turn a hike in the canyon into some kind of "personal best" contest with myself, some kind of desperate attempt to prove that I'm still a kid.  I'll keep that prudent sentiment in mind this weekend.

I recall a Park Service sign pointing out that -- on average -- every two or steps down the trail takes you through another million years of geologic history.  That's something to think about.  Something to make one feel small and insignificant. 

But then -- as the one-time tiniest kid in my class -- that's always come easily to me anyway.  I'll let y'all know how things work out.

Pathfinding through the fells

Three weeks from today, I'll be flying en route to London, preparing to hike the western half of the famous Coast to Coast path -- as discussed in an earlier post.

This will be the fourth hike of this sort I've done in Britain, and I suspect the most difficult.  The path starts from St. Bees on the Irish Sea, cuts through the fells and dales (the ups and downs!) of the Lake District, and becomes more horizontal as it traverses Westmorland, ending up at Kirkby Stephen near the Yorkshire border.

Three years ago, Maya and I discovered how easy it is to lose one's path when hiking in the Lake District high country.  A combination of fog, rain, a faint path, and lack of signage finally doomed us.  We had to retrace our steps to our former night's accommodation and call a taxi to take us circuitously (and expensively) to our next night's rest.

I blamed myself for our misadventures, but the guide book I'm reading in preparation for the C2C (as they like to call it) warns us that the signage is intentionally poor in Britain's national parks (one of which includes most of the Lake District).  The point seems to be that real men don't need signs.  Hikers of the proper sort have a compass, a wet and soggy map, and the brains that God presumably gave them to put the two together.  Unlike American national parks -- whose shiny, well-engraved wooden signs remove all ambiguity as to the proper direction -- at least on dedicated trails.

The C2C path has standardized locations, of precisely known longitude and latitude, designated by number as "waypoints," points that can be located on my iPhone's GPS. I have downloaded maps showing the path's waypoints by number (and they are also marked on the sketchy maps provided by the company that has arranged my accommodations).  However, I'll be going into this hike with no previous "on foot" GPS experience, and I don't want to rely on aiming for waypoints as my primary means of finding my way over and through the misty fells.  (GPS waypoints are intended only as backups to more normal path-finding techniques, in any event -- you can't use them as you would a GPS in your automobile.  "Turn left at that funny looking oak tree and then follow the path for 3 tenths mile.")

No.  Luckily, I'm provided with an excellent pocket book containing highly detailed hiking maps along with precise instructions.  I just have to keep the book reasonably dry during inclement weather.  But the book does repeatedly suggest that various portions of the route are tricky to follow, even using its expert guidance.  The book's maps are sketches emphasizing landmarks, not contour maps.  I do have a good compass, and I'm hoping to locate contour maps -- at least for the area covered during the first couple of days, when route-finding will apparently be most difficult.

I always tend to worry about these difficulties more than proves necessary once I'm on the scene.  And it's a pleasant kind of worry, reassuring me that the hike will be a challenge, and that I won't be just trudging alongside a road (which, unfortunately, too much of the Hadrian's Wall hike -- as fun as that hike was, historically and scenically -- proved to be.)

It's a mere seven day hike, with a warm bed and great food awaiting me at each day's end.  If I get lost -- well, let's face it.  It's not like getting lost in the North Cascades.  Nor can I pretend that I'm Daniel Boone, struggling through an unknown countryside, and fighting off wild animals and Indian attacks.

But it should be enough of a challenge that I'll have a few stories to relate when I get home.