News and Views

A couple of weeks before I started the Big Hike, I had some inflammation in the first joint of the second toe on my left foot. That’s right in the ball of the foot and each step was painful. The podiatrist gave me an injection of cortisone and it was feeling pretty good when it was time to start hiking.

But almost immediately after I hit the trail in Yosemite Valley, the inflammation flared up again and I could barely walk. I hobbled along after the others, but I was in a lot of pain and was anticipating that I might have to drop out after we reached Tuolomne Meadows.

So I called my podiatrist and had him phone in a prescription of Celebrex to the pharmacy, and Gisele overnight delivered it to Tuolomne Meadows (for a $50 postal fee!). It arrived two days later just before I got there, and as soon as I started taking it the inflammation started to die down. Though I still experienced some discomfort, especially in the afternoons, it was tolerable and I was able to finish and enjoy the trip. I find that Celebrex works at least as well as Naproxen and with fewer side effects such as stomach upset, but unfortunately it is much more expensive.

This morning I saw my podiatrist, and we are going to schedule surgery. It seems that a bunion on that foot is throwing everything out of alignment causing the inflammation in the second toe and several other problems. Hopefully the bunion surgery, which he describes as simple, effective, and quick to recover from will take care of the problem permanently.

The John Muir Trail can be hiked from north to south (Yosemite to Mt. Whitney), or from south to north (Whitney to Yosemite). Most people do it north to south, as we did, for one very good reason: The elevation profile.

As you can see from the graph, the trail starts at 4000 feet elevation in the north (left side) at Yosemite. Although you rise to almost 10,000 feet in a couple of days, you soon come back down below 9000 feet. There are lots of ups and downs, but the general trend as you move south is higher and higher. This gives you a chance to acclimate as you go.

If you start in the south, within the first couple of days you have to climb to the top of Whitney at 14,508 feet. We met many people who had climbed (or tried to climb) Whitney without the acclimatization that we had gone through, and they were having a terrible time. For us it was no big deal, as we had already climbed over four 12,000′ passes and one 13,000′ pass, and had been sleeping between 11,000′ and 12,000′ most nights.

The other negative about going south to north is that you have to pick up a WAG bag before you start and carry it with you until you get to a waste disposal location, perhaps 10 days away. No thanks!

The Perseid meteor shower peaked on our last night in the Sierra. We slept at over 10,000 feet elevation that night and the skies were clear. The Milky Way stretched from mountain-blocked horizon to mountain-blocked horizon, and there were as many stars visible in the sky as I have ever seen.

I got up a few times during the night to watch the sky, but as usual I was unimpressed with the meteor shower show.

When one hears “Meteor Shower”, one might expect something like a water shower where the sky is filled with many meteors every second. Alas, a “good” showing for a meteor shower is an average of around one per minute, and that’s about what I saw when I got up. Interesting for a few minutes, but as the near-freezing temperatures penetrated my light jacket I only stayed out for about 5 minutes and saw about 5 shooting stars.

(So I chose this topic first…?)

The area around Mount Whitney gets so much hiker traffic that it could not withstand the usual human solid waste disposal method of burying 6 inches deep. There would be trenches everywhere and up in the higher elevations the number of rocks make digging a trench almost impossible. So the authorities require that you carry and use a WAG (Waste Alleviation and Gelling) bag. After use, the contents are double bagged and carried with you until you leave the Whitney area.

Here’s the outside packaging of mine before I used it. Notice that the handy chair shown in the picture doesn’t come with it. The actual bag inside is much larger — about like a kitchen garbage bag.

The bag does have chemicals inside that reduce odor, but it still seemed kind of yucky to be carrying it around. There are lots of cheaters, I’m sure, but the park service reports that they collect over 3 tons of human waste every year at the WAG bag disposal stations, so they certainly get used. I guess the cute name helps alleviate some of the yuck factor.

220 miles, 11 passes and an ascent of Mount Whitney. A helicopter evacuation of one of our party with an injured knee. Well below freezing temperatures at one campsite at just under 12,000 feet.

I came home with sore feet and 15 pounds lighter (160 going in, 145 now). I think I need to gain a little of that back before I start worrying about my weight again. I look positively skinny in my underwear. (No pictures will be posted.)

I’ll post more later about my solar recharger, hiking poles, the helicopter evacuation, the WAG Bag and other exciting details, but for now it is sufficient to say that it has been done.

Dale and I are preparing to hike the John Muir Trail in the California Sierra. It starts at Yosemite Valley, passes through Kings Canyon and Sequoia, and ends at the top of Mt. Whitney, 210 miles away. We will have to climb over several 11,000 and 12,000 foot passes on the way.

Dale left this morning in my van so he could pick up the Troverts (X and N) and their friend Dr. Suuz at LAX and then head on up to Mammoth Lake, where they will acclimate for three days. I will fly up to join them on Friday (yes, there is an airport at Mammoth Lakes), losing a couple of days of acclimatization to take care of some things here before I leave the low country. From Mammoth Lakes we will take a shuttle up to Yosemite on Saturday and start the hike on Sunday.

The JMT is not like the Appalachian Trail that Dale (Castaway) hiked last year. The AT passes through many towns along the way with lots of opportunity to resupply. The JMT is almost entirely in wilderness. We will be able to get supplies in Tuolumne Meadows, but otherwise we had to pack 3 boxes and send them ahead to be waiting for us at a couple of wilderness “ranches”. In one case we had to mail a box to a mule driver who will pack our supplies over a pass and meet us on the trail. I hope we both arrive on schedule.

The other main difference between the JMT and the AT (besides being less than 1/10 as long) is the high elevation. After the first day we will not drop below 8000 feet, while the AT peaks at 6600 feet and much of the way is below 3000 feet. That thin air takes a toll, especially in the first few days before your body gets used to it.

I have a quadricopter (4 bladed helicopter) that I thought was pretty big. Here’s a video of a really big one:

It won a prize for the first human powered helicopter to stay aloft for at least 30 seconds.

I recently read a very interesting book, “The Measure of a Nation“. The author compared the United States to thirteen other large, developed democracies (Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Netherlands, Korea, Spain, and the UK) on several factors, including health, wealth, crime, education, equality, freedom and democracy.

There is a general opinion in the US that we are the best in the world in almost every way. It’s certainly true that we have the largest economy and the strongest military, but an objective evaluation shows that we lag behind in other measures.

Health
I often hear that “America has the best healthcare system in the world”. However, US life expectancy is the lowest in the group, infant mortality is the highest, maternal mortality is the highest, and cost per person is roughly double any of the other countries. If we were a corporation the shareholders would complain that the highest cost for the worst results is hardly the “best in the world”. And medical costs here are much more likely to lead to bankruptcy than in the other countries primarily because of lack of adequate insurance.

Crime
The US homicide rate is more than twice any of the other countries. The incarceration rate is more than 4 times any other.

Education
The US ranks 10th on standardized test scores of reading, math and science, beating only Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece. This compares with the mid-20th century when the US was known for having the best educated workforce.

Wealth and Equality
We like to think of the US as the “land of opportunity”, where anyone can make it if they only work hard enough, that America is a meritocracy. But by several measures the US is very unequal. One measure of income equality, the “Gini Index,” being a rough measure of the ratio between those at the top 10% earning level and those at the bottom 10%, puts the US in 13th place among the 14 countries. And this ratio has been getting worse over the past 2-3 decades.

One could argue that this is only fair — the people at the top have worked hardest and deserve to earn more than the laggards at the bottom. Is the US a “land of opportunity”? One way to measure is to compare a father’s income with his son’s income. If poor fathers have poor sons, that indicates little upward mobility. If there is little correlation between a father’s wealth and son’s wealth, that indicates more socioeconomic mobility. By this measure, the US has far less mobility than any of the other countries. Children of poor parents remain poor. Children of rich parents remain rich. In Canada, for example, a poor son was twice as likely to rise to a higher income level than his father, compared to the US.

Democracy
By some measures the United States invented democracy. Other countries such as ancient Greece approached it, but the US was a real breakthrough that has been emulated by many other countries around the world, including the other countries in the study. The genius of separation of powers, checks and balances, and the Bill of Rights, have remained relatively unchanged over more than two centuries. Despite its brilliance, there have been blemishes over the years, such as slavery, internment camps, election fiascoes and racial inequality. So while other countries emulated us, none of them adopted wholesale our original model, but rather changed it where they thought it could be improved, in particular with the way elections are held, and especially the antiquated Electoral College.

The US model makes it almost impossible for third party candidates to be elected, and in fact voting for Green, Tea, or Libertarian parties is seen as “throwing your vote away”. Some countries use runoff elections, where if no candidate gets a majority of the votes another election is held with only the candidates getting the most votes. Australia has an “instant runoff” system that to me seems like the best approach. When you cast your ballot you rank your candidates in order of preference. Votes are first tallied on first choices. If there is no majority, then that candidate getting the fewest votes is dropped, and his ballots are reallocated by second preference, etc. until one candidate has a majority. So you can vote for your fringe party without any risk that your vote will enhance an opposition party’s chances.

There are many other measures of democracy and freedom discussed in the book, such as voter turnout, rule of law, government stability, the “voice of the people”, government accountability, gerrymandered districts and regulatory quality, all of which put the US somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Conclusions
The book went into much more detail than I can here, explaining the statistics with charts and tables, and with recommendations for improvement. I urge everyone to read it.

The United States of America is a wonderful place to live and better than 90% of the other countries on the planet. But let’s not keep fooling ourselves that it is the best in every way and that there is no room for improvement. Let’s adopt a little humility, face the problems and learn from other countries.

My mother just had surgery today for a detached retina.

I was at her house on Friday last week when she mentioned to me that she couldn’t see out of one side of her eye. There seemed to be a curtain over it.

That sounded like the classic symptom of a detaching retina, and I immediately called her ophthalmologist. They had her come in immediately. However, the doctor was unable to see any problems or damage to the retina. She referred Mom to a retina specialist, but the earliest they could get her in was the following Wednesday. The doctor seemed confident enough that it wasn’t a detached retina that waiting a few days wouldn’t hurt.

But on Tuesday Mom mentioned that the curtain had grown and was now covering almost half her vision in that eye. I immediately called the retina specialist and they had me bring her right in. This time the specialist could see that the retina was definitely detached. That was the bad news. The good news was that the detachment was in a quadrant that generally progresses slowly and there was no immediate danger of reaching the center of her vision (fovea centralis). So instead of going in that evening, he scheduled it for the following day, today, Wednesday.

So today Dale and I drove her 60 miles from her house to Sun City where the doctor performed surgery and fixed her retina.

The technique (Pneumatic Retinopexy) is interesting. There were two steps. First, he injected some gas into the eyeball. The gas bubble pushes against the retina and forces it back into place in the back of the eye. Then they shoot a laser to “weld” the retina into place. The gas bubble has to remain against the retina while it heals, so it’s important that she maintain her head in a specific orientation to bring that area of the retina up, so the bubble floats up against it. That means sleeping on her left side, which she hasn’t done in many years. She says it hurts her hips. Fortunately (?) she is taking Vicodin for the pain and so her hip shouldn’t bother her much tonight. She needs to continue this way for 7 days. Hopefully her hip will get used to it.

Prognosis is good. The surgeon said that as long as she lets that bubble do its work for a few days she should heal and recover pretty much all her vision, or at least all that macular degeneration has left her.

Now if they could have done that 55 years ago, I might enjoy watching 3D movies today.

The US Department of Energy has published an app that will calculate how much it costs to fuel an electric car vs. a gas car. They created a concept called an eGallon which shows how much it would cost to drive an electric car the same distance as a similar gas car would go on a gallon of gas. Here’s the average for the US:


Click on the image to see the active app and enter your own state.

As they point out in the article, on average it costs about 1/3 as much to drive electric, more in some states, less in others.