Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend, Texas

We went on a little adventure over the extended Thanksgiving weekend a few weeks ago. Friends invited Andrea and me to go canoeing on the Rio Grande, in Big Bend in the western part of Texas.

The drive from Austin to Terlingua is about eight hours. Andrea, Jean, Kristina, and I enjoyed the luxury of being able to take most of Wednesday off and to get out of town early. We piled a bunch of gear and ourselves into a 4Runner and made it to our destination in time for dinner and drinks at the fun Starlight Theatre. Our other old and new friends arrived long after we had cuddled ourselves into our down sleeping bags in the parking lot of the Far Flung Outdoor Center at sub-freezing temperatures.

View of Big Bend Ranch State Park from the Rio Grande

We rented canoes, which seemed like a significant reduction of hassle compared to dragging individual boats from Austin to Big Bend, and had Far Flung shuttle us in our cars to the put in at La Cuesta in Big Bend Ranch State Park. I was amazed by how much stuff fits into these boats -- amongst other things, we traveled with two camping tables, plenty stoves and cooking gear, a (national park-mandated) fire pan and portable "waste containment system" (toilet), and of course many coolers full of food and beer.

The border between the US and Mexico in Big Bend is pretty much represented by the Rio Grande, providing for a US and a Mexico bank of the river. It was enjoyable to spend a few days oscillating back and forth between the two countries without being subject to scrutiny by immigration officers at every occasion. The only person we met on (and off) the river during our 4-day trip was a lone law enforcement ranger in his canoe, just after we entered Big Bend National Park and before getting into the canyon. The majority of animal sightings on our ~30 mile trip were cattle and horses on the Mexican side.

Rock Slide rapids, Santa Elena Canyon, as seen from the Mexican side of the slide

The most exciting part of the trip surely were the Rock Slide rapids, not too far from the beginning of Santa Elena Canyon. A huge number of impressively sized boulders are piled up against the Mexican canyon wall, and several of them strewn across the water channel provided for the most challenging rapids on this trip.

Andrea and I managed to pin our boat against a boulder sticking out of the water right before the Rock Slide. Luckily, nobody got hurt and we managed to get the boat off the rock easy enough. And the trouble of packing all of our stuff into waterproof bags and containers paid off. Our two most experienced paddlers ended up running all of our six canoes through the Rock Slide, with some of us being bowmen and others (including me) scrambling through the dry part of the slide on foot.

Our camp for the last night, across from Arch Canyon

The canyon with its steep limestone walls is truly beautiful. In fact, everything of Big Bend we saw on our trip makes me want to go back. Maybe for some hiking for a change? We certainly didn't starve on this trip, either, having organized dinner responsibilities into a different group of four for each of our camping nights. And the company turned out to be most excellent, despite the fact that some of us hadn't really known each other before this trek.

Jean compiled a little video of our trip from her GoPro footage:

Navigating the Rio Grande by canoe was a whole lot of fun. I'm glad I got to go and experience this with my friends. Before I commit to another canoeing trip I probably should spend some time improving my sternman skills, though. ;-)

Bye, Bye, Fun-Employment!

Fall is upon us in Austin, and it has been a year since I began my temporary retirement. (Technically, that year has been over for a few weeks now. I'm just now catching up with the blog.) This means that it is time for me to start earning money again. I decided to do my own thing and work as a freelance consultant for IT security for a while. Check out Secuilibrium's website!

But this also means that it is time to reflect a little bit on the past year.

View from the Chimney Rock Trail in Capitol Reef National Park

If you have been following my blog, you know that -- beyond any doubt -- I have had a splendid time! Now that I'm back, people keep asking me: Which of my adventures was the best? This is a tough one. There wasn't one that wasn't fun. Nepal was a fantastic way to start things off, and an environment I had never before experienced. Caving in China was a blast. And so was hanging out with old and new friends in various parts of Mexico and Europe. Burning Man was an incredible experience. And all the little side trips just added to the amazement.

I hadn't read as many books in a long time as in the evenings up in little tea houses in the Khumbu, thanks to my Kindle. Sitting out rainy days in Puebla and hiking around in the karst gave me a lot of time to ponder ideas about what to do next and scribble into my little notebook. And I got reminded of the awesomeness that are inspiration-instilling podcasts while driving around the western US in my little pickup truck. Somewhere I read the other day that traveling and driving are some of the best activities to foster new ideas. I can readily agree with that.

I know many people who claim that they wouldn't know what to do with their time if it wasn't for their work. I'm not one of them. If I had the money to retire for good right now, there would be tons of caving and other projects to pursue -- there are still a bunch that I never got to in the past year. But since that's not an option, I am actually quite excited to get back to work and put a somewhat different spin on information security than what used to be my main bread and butter. Many ideas have been spooking around in my head, and there are a number of topics I want to look into. Hopefully, working as a freelancer will give me opportunities to do this!

The beard's back to normal. (Photo: Logan McNatt)

I also thought about pursuing a completely different career. Importing caving gear from Europe, working as a rope access technician, ... But in the end, it turns out that I love technology, and am still passionate about all things information security.

Having been back in Austin for a few weeks now without plans or a budget to travel extensively in the foreseeable future has its plus-sides, too. More time to hang out with my friends, be involved in the local caving and security communities, catch up with old contacts, ... Thanksgiving is around the corner and will see a road trip to Big Bend National Park.

Another fun thing is catching up with a year's worth of my favorite online comic strips. If you are curious about what makes me smile on workday mornings, here they are:

• Questionable Content

• Scenes From A Multiverse

• Dilbert

• Kevin and Kell

• xkcd

xkcd: Exploits of a Mom

I would like to thank all of you who have supported me over the past year instead of calling me crazy, those that have had encouraging words for my endeavor to start my own consulting business, and everybody who is sharing their advice with me. It's good to have friends in the world!

This blog will probably see less frequent entries in the future, but I'll keep it up for occasional posts about outdoor exploits and such...

West -- a Roadtrip

After Burning Man I spent a couple of weeks driving the Tacoma around the Western US, visiting friends and parks. What a beautiful country!

Obviously, that was before certain parts of congress embarrassed all of us and shut down the government, including our National Parks. ;-) But while the parks were mostly open during my trip, once I left Nevada and got into Utah they were pretty wet and sometimes flooded. I ended up in the weather systems that would eventually make it to Colorado and cause lots of rain and flooding everywhere, resulting in a canceled canyoneering trip that I had been looking forward to for a while, and somewhat limited hiking options whenever there were canyons involved...

Navajo Arch at Arches National Park

My destinations included:

• Hoover Dam -- quite an impressive engineering feat
• Lassen Volcanic National Park -- very scenic
• Redwood National and State Parks -- I enjoyed hiking in the tall trees and camping at the beach
• Point Reyes National Seashore -- includes a Tule Elk preserve, just outside of San Francisco
• Zion National Park -- left a day early when the weather prevented most hiking options
• Bryce Canyon National Park -- fascinating landscapes in midst of a cloud layer
• Kodachrome Basin State Park -- cute
• Capitol Reef National Park -- beautiful colors
• Arches National Park -- great time hiking the primitive trail loop around Devil's Garden
• Mesa Verde National Park -- interesting artifacts from another time
• Colorado National Monument -- drive-through after the wine fest in Grand Junction
• Capulin Volcano National Monument -- on the way to Amarillo, worth stopping for
• Palo Duro Canyon State Park -- fun mini-Utah in northern Texas

Batgirl at the Colorado National Monument, with some weather in the background...

This was the last big trip of my year off. It's time to earn some money again. Stay tuned for a blog post with conclusions and what's gonna be next, to follow some time in the next weeks... :-)

Redwoods in Northern California

Burning Man

A shark-themed art car. :-)

The first time I heard of Burning Man and wanted to go must have been in Germany, sometime after college, a dozen or so years ago. This year, I finally made it. For those of you who have never heard of it, Burning Man is somewhat hard to describe. Maybe sort of a community-driven, creative, alternative, fire and art festival? For about a week, folks of all age and background descend into a self-erected city made out of temporary tent and shade-structures in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Burning Man's core principles include self-reliance, inclusion, and anti-materialism, and participants come here in order to live out their hippie, counterculture, or whatever other ideals.

A participant-driven zoetrope with a monkey and a serpent, in a not-too-heavy dust storm on the playa.

Deciding to go this year was a no-brainer: I had the time, and several good friends of mine were already planning on going. Surviving a week in the desert, being part of a theme camp and its activities, and having fun with costumes and the like take a decent amount of preparation in the months and weeks before the event. The remaining two weeks after our Europe trip I was busy getting bits and pieces together; building a swamp cooler out of a bucket, pond pump and computer fan; making costume pieces; etc. Since -- for once -- I had the time, I decided to drive the truck to Nevada and spend some weeks afterward on a road trip.

Helium-filled balloons on a string in the wind over the playa. Also very impressive at night, since they each were paired with an LED light. Another art installation in the background.

And what a good time it was! Roaming the desert on bike or foot; with friends or alone, making new friends; looking at art and crazy costumes… A lot of art installations on the playa are climbable; a lot of them involve fire or other things glowing at night; and a lot of them are made of wood so that they can be burnt in the end. Not to speak of all the art cars, also known as mutant vehicles -- the amount of effort and skills that must be going into building all these things seems endless. My schedule, as almost everybody else's, shifted more and more toward a nocturnal one as the week progressed.

The Temple of Times is burning.

I also watched a talk about the geology of the Black Rock Desert, went to a champagne brunch, and explored many camps' activities and events. Seeing the Man, Temple, and other art burn on the playa was fascinating. I stayed with a smallish theme camp organized by friends of mine. Our camp's contribution to the general craziness included a bat-themed merry-go-round and chill space, and a margarita party. The options to do stuff out on the playa were without limits.

I'm glad I went, and I plan on going back.

Caving in Slovenia, and Other Europe Fun

View from the summit of Viševnik

A week of congressing in the Czech Republic was followed by a caving expedition in the heart of Slovenia. More time spent in the Alps after our earlier trip to Austria, but this time our friend Matt had invited Andrea and myself to join him on Viševnik mountain. While living in Slovenia for two years, he had spent time developing the area into one of his caving club's project locations.

Camping was comfortable. We set up in a clearing about 200 meters away from our parking spots on a service road in the Triglav National Park. From there, it was another short (but steep) hike to our main cave: Evklidova piščal (Euclid's flute) is a fairly technical cave, currently somewhat over 400 meters deep and -- due to some additions as a result of our expedition -- a little over 2 kilometers long.

Garmin and Matic setting up the survey gear in Evklidova piščal -- a DistoX connected by Bluetooth to a PDA for sketching. None of those old-fashioned instruments and paper that most of the Texas cavers still use. ;-)

Caving in Evklidova piščal was, well, not quite as comfortable. I went on one survey and exploration trip in the cave with Matic and Garmin, two of the Slovenian cavers who had joined our contingent of about eight American cavers for the week. Lots of constrictions and fairly tight meanders required a fair amount of squeezing and climbing in all sorts of directions (upward, downward, sideways), only every now and then interrupted by relatively benign rope work. At the end of the day, I was completely exhausted, had ripped a huge hole into the butt of my PCV suit, and felt like an unprepared and too-big-for-the-cave novice caver, compared to my new Slovenian friends who I'm sure I slowed down significantly. Hadn't had this kind of experience for a while! ;-)

Other days on the mountain involved ridge-walking (looking for caves) on a plateau that features both tons of exposed limestone and a lot of mountain pines; registering locations of karst features and potential caves by means of GPS; and surveying a number of smaller caves. One of the biggest results of the expedition was the discovery of a new cave that was pushed to a little over 300 meters depth and keeps going. Very exciting!

Panorama of the plateau that we spent our time on in the quest for new caves.

After a week on the mountain, we took a break for two days of "tourist caving" in some of Slovenia's best-known and famous caves and karst. This included walking through some huge caves and limestone bridges in the Rakov Škocjan park, visiting the famous Škocjanske jame show cave, and rappelling down (and climbing out of) the impressive entrance shaft of Kačna jama (Snake Cave).

Tiny caver marked for scale in the Kačna jama entrance pit.

This concluded Andrea's and my participation in the Slovenia expedition. Together with friends from Austin, we headed from there to Berlin to visit with some friends of mine for three days, bike around the city, and eventually make our way back to Austin.

Andrea emerging from a yet-to-be-named cave on the Viševnik plateau.

Ice Cave Touristing in Austria

Before attending (and presenting at) the International Congress of Speleology in Brno (Czech Republic) at the end of July, Andrea and I went on a pre-congress excursion to some of the most fantastic ice caves in Austria. (Ice caves, roughly speaking, being caves formed in rock -- typically limestone -- and having perennial ice formations in them.) For a week, Austrian speleologists took us (and a number of other cavers from around the world) on a tour of these marvels in the Austrian Alps.

Beautiful rillenkarst in the Austrian Alps...

We spent most of our time in and around the Dachstein massif of the Northern Calcareous Alps. A good number of the caves we visited were commercially operated show caves, where we either pretty much stuck to the tourist trails and snuck in in between regular guided tours, or in some cases went into the cave after it had closed for the day and veered off trail to follow our guides through non-commercial parts of the cave. These included Dachstein-Mammuthöhle, Dachstein-Rieseneishöhle, and Eisriesenwelt.

Ice crystals in Dachstein-Mammuthöhle.

Our most involved trips went to Schwarzmooskogelhöhle and Eiskogelhöhle. Hiking to the Schneevulkanhalle (snow volcano hall) of Schwarzmooskogelhöhle took us through some beautiful scenery in the Alps, while the hike to Eiskogelhöhle was more straightforward, but required a number of skills inside the cave. Most of our caving trips involved wearing crampons to be able to move around on ice floors.

Rappelling into Hall of the Circe in Eiskogelhöhle.

A bonus caving trip not on the original itinerary took us to Kraushöhle, which did not contain any ice, but stands out as a cave formed by hypogene development. (Meaning, dissolution driven by water from below, rather than water cutting downward into the rock. [PDF]). And our last day took us to one of the eastern-most ice caves in Austria for a quick visit before heading to Brno.

A frozen waterfall has formed a huge ice stalagmite on the floor.

The excursion was extremely well organized and offered a good deal of education on ice caves in general and the genesis and other geological aspects of the particular caves we visited. We made new friends, and learned to enjoy Austrian schnapps -- in particular Zirbenschnaps, made from pine cones. Good times!

Two Months in (Mostly) Texas…

More rain showers and cloudy weather than expected gave me plenty of excuses to procrastinate cleaning my expedition gear after getting home from Mexico. No big deal, since I hadn't planned on using it much in May and June anyway. It was time to try and get some of the projects done at home that had been piling up on my to-do list for years. 

The outdoor guard kittens that come with our rental house are preparing for another work night...

Some of the activities I ended up keeping myself busy with included:

Learning How To Slaughter a Pig

Our friend Vico taught my friend Jean and me the basics of killing and butchering a pig. Obviously, besides a sharp knife, mastering this endeavour takes more training than doing it once -- but we got an excellent introduction. We spent an afternoon shooting a wild hog that Vico had caught earlier, trimming off the skin, and dissecting the meat. A good anatomy lesson, too!

Learning how to butcher a pig...

Visiting Chicago and Iowa

Andrea and I spent a week out of town during my time in Austin. We flew to Chicago and touristed around for a few days, something we had been wanting to do for a long time. And took the train from there to Ottumwa (Iowa) to see her parents. Good times were to be had, including a lesson in shooting a variety of guns.

Andrea shooting a cowboy (lever-action) rifle...

Playing With Car Electrics

It had been on my list for a long time to improve the setup of the auxiliary battery in the Tacoma, now my only vehicle. It took me several days of planning, shopping for parts, and fiddling around to move the inverter it powers to a spot in the cab where it wouldn't block the second jump seat anymore; to connect some of the existing and a few new power outlets, as well as the stereo, to the auxiliary battery; and to wire a remote switch that lets me join the auxiliary with the main battery to give the main a boost if it runs out of juice. Success! It's nice to have a car where you don't have to worry too much about drilling holes into the chassis to run wires through, too… ;-)

New wood panel to squeeze more power supplies into the middle console... Ugly, but it works.

In between, it was time to pack again for the next trip... (And of course, there are still tons of projects left on my to-do list.)