Twin Peaks and the Mount Waterman Rendezvous

             Twin Peaks and the Mount Waterman Rendezvous
                             28 July 2001

I surrender -- I won't even attempt to list who was hiking in the
group that went to the rendezvous by way of Twin Peaks.  Byron
Prinzmetal, Mars Bonfire, and Carleton Shay, our intrepid leaders,
were of course there.  But the participants were ever-changing,
signing in and out, jumping ship to different hikes.  My mind totally
boggles.  I've no idea how the leaders of the various hikes kept it
all straight, but they seemed to have done just that.

Because our group had a bit further to go, we started hours earlier
than the other groups, and were on trail, going up ("Nobody warned me
this would be uphill!") the trail by 7:30AM or so.  One of the icons
in the schedule billed this as an an educational hike, so Byron
promised we'd stop and admire if we ran across a snow plant.  We
eventually did, but it was so scrawny and desiccated that we hiked
right on past.  Our educational interlude instead involved being
introduced to that old standard, the Jeffrey pine.  "Sniff the bark,
notice how sweet it smells!"  Yeah, right -- I think this Jeffrey pine
sniffing stuff may just be a plot to turn us all into tree huggers.

We'd ridden in the same car all the way to the trailhead with Chris
Davis, and he and Brian had done some extensive "geek bonding",
discovering their mutual interest in the Unix/Linux operating system,
and exchanging numerous arcane anecdotes from the Stone Age on the
Internet.  But it wasn't until something was said about the recent
drive-up peakbagging in the Los Padres that he made the connection
between the Brian and Karen he'd shared a ride with, and the Brian and
Karen he knew from here on SCHIKER.  "Oh, you're Brian and Karen!"
There ended up being a symmetry here -- on the way down from Waterman,
he asked me if I'd tried wearing my socks inside out, like he'd
suggested on SCHIKER, to avoid those annoying blisters.  "Oh, you're
Chris!" I responded.  I mean, I knew he was Chris, but the Chris I'd
met on SCHIKER?  I suppose this is already perfectly obvious to
everyone here, but ... wow!  The people who write and share here on
SCHIKER are actually real people, and sometimes one gets lucky and
meets them.

Er, meanwhile, back on the mountain, we eventually arrived at an
intersection, with Twin Peaks to the left, miles and miles away with
thousands of feet of elevation loss and gain in between, and Waterman
a mere fraction of a mile to the right.  It was hot and still.  It was
only going to get hotter.  Asher signed out, and said he'd wait for us
on Waterman, maybe sign back in there.  Upon being accused of
exhibiting common sense, and noting Byron's failure to talk anyone
else out of the trip (and he tried, Byron definitely tried), Asher
suggested that instead of common sense, he must be uniquely in
possession of UNcommon sense.

He may have had a point there!  The rest of us turned out backs on
Waterman, and started the 1000' or so descent to the saddle between
Waterman and Twin Peaks.  This was pretty uneventful, though there was
a certain amount of scrambling over or around the occasional tree that
had fallen to block our way.  One was particularly annoying, requiring
many of us to pull ourselves up onto the trunk using some handy branches.
My first Class 3 tree?

Once we hit the saddle, our nicely graded trail was at an end, and
instead it was time to go up the side of the mountain on a steep use
trail.  But we were the few, the proud, the slugs -- we took it one
slow step at a time.  There were places where for every foot forward
I stepped, I slid back several inches.  "Just like Galena!" someone
assured me.  Oh, great, I have more (and worse) to look forward to???

At last, we were at the top.  After some lawyerly finagling (because
this was Twin Peaks, did it count as two peaks? did we have to do both
to have it count at all?), we decided it made much better sense to
instead celebrate Byron's awesome accomplishment -- by successfully
navigating us to the top of Twin Peaks, he's led every peak on the
list.

Well, we did debate breaking out our goodies then and there and
partying away, but kept thinking of all the good people waiting for us
on Waterman.  So after a long break (was it five minutes?), we were
heading back down towards the saddle.  There was one place which had
been particularly nasty to scramble up on the way up, and when I got
back there on the way down, I just knew that my feet were going to
slide out from under me and I was going to go down it on my butt.
Deciding it was more dignified to make a feature out of a necessity, I
simply sat down in the gravel and deliberately slid those ten feet.
Y'know, it was almost like being back in grade school, on the
playground slide?  You could probably charge people for having fun
like this!

Eventually we were back at the saddle, and then were headed back up
the trail we'd descended mere hours before.  At some point, Byron
observed that it was only 3/4ths of a mile to the summit, if we left
the trail and ascended this handy gully.  ("Is this a world-class
gully?"  queried Brian, still feeling a bit left out from not having
descended that world-class ridge last week.  The response?  "No, for
that you'll need to go to Galena.")

Finally, Ingeborg thought she heard voices, looked up and ... there
were people: we'd made it to the rendezvous!  Fashionably late, yes,
but not that far behind the previous group.  There were definitely
lots of people having lots of fun, eating lots of food.

Ping and Ingeborg took turns pointing out famous people to me.
"That's Frank Goodykoontz.  That's Southern Courtney.  That's Rosemary
Campbell."  And so on.  Hopefully there won't be a quiz later, as I
have to confess I didn't get them all sorted out.

All good things must come to an end, though.  After awhile, Byron
gathered us back up, and we headed downhill to the cars.  Where I
discovered that, oops!, those cookies I'd taken along to share at the
rendezvous, that I'd lugged up Waterman, then up Twin Peaks, then back
up Waterman?  Er, blush, I never took them out of the my pack.  Oh,
but hey, there's always next year, right?  (Anyone want a stale
battered cookie?)