DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Continuing Web 2.0 coverage…

I snuck into the Tagging workshop when the guard’s back was turned. A couple great ideas were presented even in just the final 15 minutes.

• “the first derivative of tag popularity is interestingness.” Tag recency is a hugely valuable piece of metadata. Check out Flickr’s “hot tags” feature, broken down into categories (last 24 hrs, last 7 days). If you store timestamps with tags, generating these lists is pretty easy.
• community tagging is one of the next big things — what tags are new/popular in my community? For example, look at a geographic area as a community, e.g. “what tags are most popular in Berlin?”
• a neat new feature idea with no obvious implementation: expiration of interest. Let the user tag something in a way that expires after a preset period, e.g. “I’m tagging things about Greece now, but after my trip next month I don’t care any more.” I need to flesh this out more.

Also, I made this important technical discovery: when 200 people crowd into a room built for 150, it’s at least 5°F cooler on the floor.

6:45 am depart home
7:05 am arrive highway
7:06 am traffic jam. crawl about 3 miles in 40 minutes.
7:45 am brief respite from traffic, as inexplicable as the jam itself. no sign of accident or lane closure. drive 75 mph for 5 minutes. celebrate, briefly.
7:50 am another traffic jam. crawl about 3 miles in 40 minutes.
8:15 am seethe
8:30 am Web 2.0 conference starts without me. But! traffic opens up (inexplicably).
8:42 am arrive GGB toll plaza in just under 2 hours, avg speed = 35 mph
8:43 am hit traffic 1 mile past the bridge. WTF?
9:00 am seethe
9:10 am arrive Argent hotel. Elapsed time = 2 hrs 25 minutes for a 65 mile drive.

I rushed upstairs to the first workshop. The doors were closed. The guard said even the standing room was taken.

Later I learned that at the first Web 2.0 conference, only half the registered attendees showed up for the morning workshops. The organizers planned for 50% turnout this year. But apparently just about everyone showed up. All the workshops are overflowing into the hallways. People sit hip-to-hip or stand three deep in the corners. Between conferences, corridors are completely gridlocked.

The organizers are coping as well as they can, but as the morning rolls on only more people arrive.

The name sounds like an unfortunately cute play on the rough volcanic terrain. But the Bumpass Hell trail is in fact named for Kendall Vanhook Bumpass, who lost a leg when the ground gave way and dropped him into a 240°F pool of boiling mud.

The stench is awesome. Raw surphur, hydrogen sulfide, and any number of other noxious compounds boil out of the very bowels of the earth, propelled by steam at temperatures up to 464°F. Great clouds of wet gas hiss out of vents, plop out of mudpots, spray out of fissures, rise in steaming gouts to blanket the area with a low-lying funk. When the wind turns your way, you’ll see it. And then you’ll smell it. And then you’ll regret it.

Nonetheless, this was a fantastic hike. The trailhead parking lot was empty, so we enjoyed the trail in solitude. As with the Lassen Peak trail, this one is well-marked and maintained. It leads past a half-dozen staggeringly beautiful vistas, where the land falls away for hundreds of feet into the valley that formed when the original volcano (Mount Tehama) collapsed about 400,000 years ago.

The view of Brokeoff Mountain from this trail yielded one of my favorite pictures from the trip.

It’s an easy hike, climbing 500 feet in a mile, then dropping 250 feet into the stinking crater that inspired the area’s name.

To prevent any modern tourists from contributing a limb to whatever gods lurk beneath the thin, brittle ground, the Park Service has constructed a boardwalk system over the top of the active area, past incredible examples of boiling pools, mudpots, steam vents, and a runoff stream that looks like the output of a chemical plant (and is probably no less toxic). In the half hour we spent there, I learned more about geology than in an entire semester on the subject in college. (Then again, that might be due to the fact that everyone else in the class was on the football team.)

I imagine this is a popular hike, due to its unchallenging nature and otherworldly attraction. Do it early in the day to avoid chatter on the boardwalk and crowds around the mudpots.

See more pictures in my Lassen Volcanic National Park picture gallery.

Raphael bagged his second summit today: Lassen Peak, 10,457 feet. At ten months old, he’s a stronger hiker than I am — he didn’t even break a sweat. In fact I think he slept most of the way to the top.

The Lassen Peak Trail, as seen from the parking lot, is a laughably steep ascent straight up the mountainside. It’s enough to make the backcountry virgins keep their factory-fresh trekking poles safely out of sight in the cargo area of the “Eddie Bauer”-edition Explorer as they mull over their Starbuck’s and pretend they never planned to climb this mountain in the first place, and by the way isn’t there a nice paved interpretive trail around that lake by the park entrance?

I’m an experienced hiker, and I have to admit I was wondering how I’d get up this hill. That can’t be the trail, I thought. But looking left and right, I didn’t see a turnoff. Straight up is the only visible way.

At the point where a steep ascent would become a four-limbed scramble (or maybe eight-limbed in my case), I was relieved to see a switchback, invisible from below. The not-trail ahead of me was, according to a sign, the scar from past hikers taking shortcuts down the mountain. The sign didn’t mention that those particular shortcutters had to have been sliding out of control, “ass over tin cup” as my dad used to say. I mean, there’s no climbing down, much less up that hill; it was about a 45 degree angle. So I stowed my JATO bottles back in the lumbar pack and trudged around the corner.

Raphael collected comments from other hikers, as usual. “That’s quite a load,” said one guy, nodding at the baby carrier. “Yes, but it’s not a problem,” I panted, “we’re taking turns. He’ll carry me back down.” (Remember, the laughs come easier when the air is thin.)

The trail afforded increasingly great views of Lake Helen as well as occasional shots of the trailhead parking lot. (Which reminded me of the Hidden Canyon hike at Zion National Park, the most recent time I was able to see my car from 1000+ feet above.) It was well-maintained, clearly marked, and the signage was first-rate — color photographs, intelligently designed infographics, and informative text described interesting geological formations all around the trail.

The climb is a challenge. The elevation gain is just short of 2000 feet, over a roughly 2.5-mile trail, which averages out to a 15% grade. If you’re in good shape and you’re not carrying part of your family, you could reach the summit in about 65 minutes. I think I took about 90, putting me ahead of my Pike’s Peak ascent rate, although not by much. This was the first hike since Pike’s that I felt I really had to work at, evidence of spending too many hours in the studio and not enough on the treadmill.

The trail ends in a clearing with more signs and panoramic views of the park — and, on clear days, a view of Mount Shasta, 75 miles away. Most hikers stop here, as it’s a natural place to congregate. I appreciate that the NPS hasn’t built a gift shop here.

But the true summit is about 100 yards further on. There isn’t much of a trail, just a well-worn path across the ice field and around the backside of the peak. After that I lost track of it and ended up scrambling straight up the talus. From below it was a disheartening climb because the people at the top looked so small. Five minutes later, as I crested the peak, I realized the people were small because they were 11 years old.

There’s a solar-powered weather station up there, and not much else, except for the sense of achievement of finally finished the climb — by which I mean, there is literally nowhere to go but down — and the pleasure of having left 80% of the tourists behind at the end of the trail.

See more pictures in my Lassen Volcanic National Park picture gallery.

Q: What’s the difference between an RV park and a trailer park?
A: About $10/night.