February 8, 2015
Not Back to School Camp is one of my very favorite things to do, and advisee group is one of my favorite things to do at NBTSC. At the recent Joshua Tree session, I led my 40-somethingth advisee group, and documented our getting to know each other:
1/20/2015
1/20/2015
1/21/2015
1/23/2015
1/24/2015
1/25/2015
Last day of camp, 1/26/2015
January 11, 2015
I’m especially glad to have my mom present for her birthday today. We came close to losing her twice in the last year–scary, painful experiences, but quite clarifying. It can be difficult to know what someone means to you without experiences like that. The best way I can think to say what I learned in the last year about my mom is that she is the heart and soul of my family and that when she does eventually die, the world she’ll leave us with will be more sad and empty, less rich and inspiring than the world we get to enjoy today.
So today I’m celebrating my mom and her 66 years.
Mom, after Christmas 2014, with Christina & Julian
Mom, after Thanksgiving 2014, also with Christina & Julian
Mom in 1951, with her brother Don.
November 24, 2014
In chronological order:
Pano with Dandy, Grace & Yared on the way to camp
Margie, Yared & UHaul
Staff loading into Latgawa, some frozen in action for my pano
Pre-camp staff meeting
Staff watches sunset pre-camp
Evan, Emily & Tilke
Spencer & Yared
Camper conquers giant stump
Opening circle
Song leading
Evan warms up for his monkey act
Swimming pool
Yared & Nathen…err…Skylar
Pasta-making workshop
Skylar asleep behind meeting
Last meeting shot
Advisees acting out each our embarrassing stories
More embarrassing story skits
Yared & Evan play pool volleyball
The minnows
Ping-pong table hangout
My awesome advisee group
Staff + graduate meeting
2014 Latgawa graduates
Reanna & Dandy tow the U-Haul
Zen & Yared pump up Grace’s flat
Grace shows off her new trailer back in Eugene
July 5, 2014
I’ve been learning to ride a motorcycle for about a year now. Lately, that’s looked like taking my youngest brother’s old dirt bike out to find microconfluences.* This gives me a reason to take longer and longer rides from home, and takes me to spots I wouldn’t have thought of to go. Each of the following three that I found last week took me on the longest ride of my life so far.
They turned out to be on Sunny Sands Drive, the road I used to live on with family friends, the Murdys, when my family moved back to Joshua Tree in the early 1980s. The first microconfluence was so close to their house that I dropped by for a visit, but they weren’t home. It was just off Sunny Sands and Border Avenue:
Sunny Sands Drive. I used to spend evenings on this road with my friend, Chad, as a kid, playing “Don’t Break the World,” AKA trying to tunnel through big dirt clods without breaking them.
This was as close as I wanted to get to the spot (34.2x-116.3 or N 34 12′ x W 116 18′), as it was in the driveway of this house. It’s about 200 feet directly in front of me in this photo. You can see the Bartlett Mountains in the background, AKA Rollie‘s Mountain.
From Maps With Me
The next was east on Sunny Sands all the way into Sunfair, which is technically a neighborhood of Joshua Tree, though we all tend to think of it as it’s own place.
This is looking down into Sunfair from the north tip of the Bunker Mountains. Sunny Sands is the road heading off into the east. The microconfluence is close to where Sunny Sands ends. You can see the dry lake to the right, where all the washes in the area empty to. You could call our valley the Sunfair Dry Lake Drainage Basin.
The spot, 34.2 x -116.25, or N34 12′ x W116 15′. The closest mountain is Bunker Mountain. To the right of that is Bartlett Mountain. Beyond them to the left are mountains in Joshua Tree National Park. I believe these are called the Little San Bernardino Mountains. Behind them, just left of center, you can see the peak of San Jacinto Mountain. Reanna and I just took the tram up there last week.
Pano from the spot
Screenshot from Maps With Me
The third spot was technically not on Sunny Sands, because of a weird jog in the road. It was on Fairmont:
Looking west towards the spot. You can see Pipe’s Canyon, the gap in the mesa in the distance, and the San Bernardino Mountains beyond that, with San Gorgonio. Big Bear and Big Bear Lake are up in those mountains.
34.2 x -116.35 (N 34 12′ x W 116 21′) is about 100 feet into the desert across the street. You don’t want to get too close to people’s property in north Joshua Tree. They are probably nice but may have a gun and might not like you taking a photo of their yard.
Pano from the spot
Screenshot with Maps With Me
*As defined by Charlie Lloyd, a microconfluence is a spot with latitude and longitude even at 100ths of a degree. I’ve been finding microconfluences which are also even at minutes of latitude, which I think of as “minute-microconfluences.” This puts them a few miles apart at my latitude. Links to my microconfluence adventures are here.
June 15, 2014
I was in the gym after work on Thursday and realized I’d rather be hiking. I decided to find the minute-microconfluence nearest the entrance of Joshua Tree National Park, which turns out to be N34 6′ x W116 15′ or 34.10 x -116.25. (Altimeter seems to be broken most of the time these days, so I downloaded DMS converter between DMS and decimal coordinates.)
It looked about a mile from the park entrance parking lot, so I parked and headed northeast through open desert from there–an area I’d never walked through.
I got some great vistas on the way.
Sunfair dry lake through a notch
I was impressed with how every patch of soft sand was filled with tracks.
I thought this trek was taking me over ground people don’t really go, which may be true. The spot, though, turned out to be a few feet from Burro Loop Trail, which I would definitely take over the through-the-desert approach next time.
The area
The spot
Panorama from the spot
The coordinates on Maps With Me*
And a couple hundred feet down the trail right next to the spot:
On Maps With Me I found I could put a bookmark on the coordinates I was looking for and then get a direction and distance indicator that led me eventually to the spot. It was good enough to be useful.
April 22, 2014
Reanna and I took a drive into JT National Park after work today, to see the wildflowers before she leaves for a natural building workshop at Quail Springs Permaculture. We parked along the road and hiked a few minutes south to see a microconfluence. It ended up being a fair scramble, too, 3/4 of the way up the pile of rocks behind Reanna here:
It was a bigger challenge to find the exact spot up on steep rocks than in previous, flat spots (here, here, here & here), because of the climbing and being a bit out of breath, but more fun, too. Here’s the spot:
And the view from the spot:
And the proof according to Altimeter and Maps With Me:
April 10, 2014
I drove to a nearby microconfluence today, on my lunch break. (Others here, here, and here.) It was beautiful. It’s just north of Rincon and east of Quail Springs in Joshua Tree:
The area
The spot
January 21, 2014
Last week I realized that I’ve been working near a latitude and longitude microconfluence in Twentynine Palms, so I walked over to it on my lunch break.
Screen shot of Altimeter app
Screen shot from Maps With Me, showing metric coordinates
And the microconfluence itself
The spot is in the front yard of a house on the southwest corner of Two Mile Road and Aztec Avenue. You can see the yard through a gap in the “hedge” that I’m shooting through, with a concrete U driveway on the other side of that awesome cinderblock wall.
The funny thing about this adventure was that it took finding three microconfluences on Two Mile Road (the first two are here and here) before realizing that Two Mile Road is right on 34.15 degrees north latitude (34 9′ 0″) all the way from Joshua Tree into Twentynine Palms, even though the road doesn’t go through. (Copper Mountain is in the way.) I didn’t expect such consistency from early Morongo Basin road builders. I see that I can find three more microconfluences just by following the line of Two Mile Road between Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms, probably climbing part of Copper Mountain in the process.
The purple dots are microconfluences. From left to right, Joshua Tree, Sunfair, Twentynine Palms.
The same basic area on Google Maps. JT National Park is south of the highway, Copper Mountain to the north in the middle. Two Mile Road is not paved in JT, so it’s hard to see. I think you can click on this image to see it bigger.
January 8, 2014
I don’t carry a cell phone in my pants pocket any more, unless it’s in airplane mode or turned off. Several months ago I read and agreed with Tim Ferriss in The Four Hour Body that you probably don’t want a radiation emitter cuddling with your testicles. He apparently tripled his motile sperm per ejaculate during an eleven-week program of no phone-testicle cuddling, cold treatments, and eating Brazil nuts. So I carry my cell phone in my breast pocket if I have one and in my hand if I don’t.
The problem is, I also care about my heart, lungs, muscle, bone, and lymph nodes which my cell phone is now cuddling with. And I don’t care for the phone-strapped-to-arm look. I often just keep it turned off or in airplane mode, which is fine. I don’t mind not being on call to everyone who has my phone number.
But now I am actually and professionally on call. My work has a two-week rotation for therapists to be on call 24 hours a day for crisis intervention and I’m on until next Monday. My work cell has to be on and it has to be on my person or I will likely miss a call. So now I’m carrying two phones.
Oh, what to do?
January 4, 2014
I took the dirt bike out to find my second microconfluence this afternoon. (See my post about the first here and about Charlie Loyd’s proposal of the idea here.) I’ve decided to go after what I’m thinking of as “minute-microconfluences,” which are microconfluences as defined by Charlie (decimal degrees at the hundredths) and also intersections of minute-lines of longitude and latitude. This is partly because they are farther apart and so feel slightly more… well, rare if not important, but mostly because the app I have that reads latitude and longitude in real time does so in the minute-second version. Perhaps this will offend metric purists, but I guess it would be nice to write something important enough to metric purists to cause offense.
I found it just north of Two Mile Road and just east of the cement factory. To the north and east were Sunfair Airport and Sunfair Road, respectively.
I found that my minute-second reading app and my decimal reading app disagreed a bit with each other, so I took photos of a fairly large area to be sure I had the actual spot shown:
Looking just north of west over the spot
Looking just west of north over the spot. Concrete debris in the background is the north end of the cement factory.
The sunset heading home was the best part.
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 