News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

We found a local restaurant that provides authentic Thanksgiving Day dinners, so Gisele, Devon and I got our ration of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberries and pie. No silky chocolate pie, of course, but apple and pumpkin. Everything was really quite good. Devon said it was his first Thanksgiving dinner in three years.

It still wasn’t quite the same as being home with the extended family, but a lot better than nothing.

When the food came we dug in so enthusiastically that it was half gone before anyone thought to take a picture. I won’t ruin your appetite with the pictures we then took of half eaten plates.

Gisele and I are leaving Tuesday to spend three weeks in Taiwan with Devon. Since he can’t come home for Thanksgiving, we will celebrate it there with him. I doubt that we will find any turkey, but a chicken dish in a restaurant will have to do.

We wish Derek could come with us, but he’s in the middle of job hunting. It would be a shame to miss an opportunity because he was out of the country.

We always fly coach to Asia. Round trip coach tickets can be bought for around $1000, while business class costs closer to $5000 and first class is nearly $10,000. So we can tolerate a cramped seat for the 15 or so hours of flying it takes to get there.

But over the years we have accumulated enough miles on United that we were able to do a round-trip upgrade. Not all the way to first class, and not all the way to Taiwan, but we have business class tickets to and from Tokyo. That’s the longest 11-hour stretch, so the extra comfort will be very welcome. And best of all, United has just installed lie-flat beds on these flights in business, so we will be able to stretch out and really sleep! The bad part is that we will get spoiled and it will be hard to fly coach again, but we just can’t justify an extra $8000 between us every time we travel. This upgrade is a once-in-a-decade treat!

Here’s an interesting XRay of my foot, post repair. Notice how straight the big toe is, and how the second toe is between the first and third where it belongs.

Compare that to the pre-surgery alignment.

There are three pieces of metal in that foot now. There is a long rod in the second toe holding it down in the correct position. That will be removed after about 4 weeks. There is a staple in the big toe where he made one cut, and just below the staple you can see a screw going in at an angle where he made another cut. These two pieces of metal (titanium) will stay in my foot permanently, and the bone will just heal around it.

They also gave (sold) me a huge stiff boot that I will have to wear for the next few weeks. Clumsy and heavy, but it protects the foot pretty well and I can walk in it without any real pain. I’m still supposed to take it easy.

The doctor discovered during surgery that my bones are unusually hard. He thinks it’s from all that basketball.

Bunion surgery went well today, at least according to the surgeon. I can’t tell because my foot is hidden within an inch or more of bandages.

Feeling is coming back, but so far there isn’t any pain. The doctor recommended that I take a percocet before bed, because I wouldn’t want full feeling to return with pain in the middle of the night.

They used propofol for general anesthesia. Love that stuff. They also used propofol for my colonoscopy last year. Both times I woke up almost immediately, fully alert with no grogginess, no nausea and there’s no hangover tonight.

I’ve been walking around a little, wearing a special shoe. I’m supposed to limit my walking and keep my foot elevated most of the time for the next few days, but it’s nice that I can get myself to the bathroom and kitchen. I’m not going to try the stairs tonight, and I’ll probably skip basketball tomorrow morning.

While coming down from 12,000 foot Mather Pass, I was hiking behind Dr. Suuz, and noticed that she seemed to be limping a little. She admitted that her knee was bothering her a little, but she didn’t think it was serious. Just as we were almost off the steep part, she suddenly stumbled and almost fell, clutching her right leg and exclaiming in pain. I rushed forward to support her pack and take the weight off, and help hold her up. A minute later she said she was OK, didn’t know what had happened, but hopefully it was a one-off.

But a minute or so later it happened again, and then again. I think at that time we all realized that her hike was over, and we found a place for her to sit down so we could all figure out what to do. Fortunately this had happened at the bottom of the climb down from the pass on a flat meadow with lots of rocks to sit on.

We pondered what to do. We were several miles from any civilization. We considered if she could hobble 10 miles over the closest pass to a road, but quickly abandoned that idea. We thought about hiring mules to come in and carry her out, but that would take a couple of days to organize. We thought about contacting the King’s Canyon National Park rescue service, but how to contact them? Maybe if someone had a satellite phone…?

Wonderfully, the first person passing by did have a satellite phone and made the call for us. The 15 minute call cost about $30, but it was well worth it.

About 3 hours later we heard the “thump-thump-thump” of a helicopter in the distance, slowly approaching. They weren’t sure exactly where we were, so they were following the trail up from several miles away. They later said that finding the right people was made more difficult because many people on the ground would wave at them, out of curiosity and interest, so how to tell when they had found the right ones? But eventually they did find us, and after flying in a circle around us came to land on a flat place nearby with the tail hanging over the trail. The wind blew dust everywhere and tipped over my backpack, but the landing was made safely.

We thought we would walk Dr. Suuz right over, she would get in, and they would be off, but instead they shut off the helicopter and a couple of paramedics came out and examined her. They concluded that she did indeed merit and require an evacuation, so off she went.

They buckled her in, and she went for the ride of her life through the canyons and over the peaks of the Sierra.

I was almost wishing my knee would fail, so I could go for a helicopter ride too…

Since coming out we have heard a little more, but we still don’t know the details of the injury. She is scheduled for an MRI that will probably explain it. For now she is back in Mississippi getting around on crutches.

Next time I go into the backcountry, I am going to look into taking a satellite phone. They are heavy and expensive but could be a life saver.

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.