breathing underwater is fun

I went scuba diving for the first time last weekend....it's amazing. Evelyn and I took a scuba class at UBC to get certified. The class consisted of 4 sessions in a pool learning how to use the gear and learning what to do if anything goes wrong. Although it was expensive, our instructors were really cool and the class was really useful. The most important thing is not to hold your breath and not to ascend quickly, because your blood will start boiling and your organs will explode and you'll die a very uncomfortable death. But it's really not that hard to not die, which is cool.

It was good to have the pool sessions because it took a little while to get used to the gear and took some practice to commit the necessary skills to memory. Being a former swimmer, I was comfortable underwater but taking a breath went against all of my instincts. It was easy to get used to, though, and soon enough I was gliding along the bottom of the deep end fascinated at my fish-like ability to breathe underwater.

The class culminated in four open-water dives to put our newly learned skills to the test. We did two dives a day for a weekend at Whytecliff Park in West Vancouver. Wearing a 7mm wetsuit with an additional 7mm core covering, we were immune to the cold of the Canadian Pacific ocean. Whytecliff is cool because it's a marine protected area, so there are no boats and there is a lot living down there. You'd think the cold waters of the North Pacific would be pretty barren, but it turns out they're teaming with life, you just can't see it from the surface.

In scuba lingo, "the vis was shit", but below about 30 feet we passed the halocline and it cleared up a lot. Did you know there are 3 foot wide starfish? Neither did I until this weekend. They could probably eat your face. And there were hundreds of them. Like, not just a starfish here and there, the starfish covered so much of the bottom that sometimes it was hard to even tell there was sand beneath them. In the open spaces, there were also a ton of halibut chillin' and looking goofy in the sand. And the anemones....way bigger than the ones you see in aquariums. These ones were as big as my head, at least. They could probably also eat your face. There were also some other cool animals here and there, like nudibranchs, which are neon-colored sea slugs, and there was a lion's mane jellyfish with a giant (I mean fucking huge- biggest jellyfish species in the world huge) bright orange bell and tentacles dragging five feet behind it.

Some of our dives were just to explore and others were to work on emergency skills, but they were all awesome. And at the end of the weekend I got this cool certificate, which should come in the mail as a real card soon. There doesn't seem to be a rotate photo option on this website, so here it is sideways:

Then, on Friday, I got to put my new scuba skills to use. Jess, a girl in my lab at UBC, needed help collecting crabs for an experiment. Evelyn and I volunteered to help, so we went diving at Belcarra Park which is a Dungeness crab hotspot. The dive was cool, although not that exciting. There wasn't a whole lot of life other than crabs, although there was some long eelgrass with fish swimming around in it. The crabs were cool though, some of them were tiny and others looked like they would pinch my whole hand off if I grabbed them the wrong way. We caught the crabs by finding their eyes poking out from under the sand and grabbing them from behind. Unfortunately, I didn't get to take any home for dinner that night.

It was only about 11am when we finished the dive and we had our gear rented for the whole day, so we decided it'd be a good idea to skip work and go diving again somewhere else. While everyone else  (there were 5 of us collecting crabs) headed back to UBC, Evelyn and I drove up the Sea to Sky highway to Lion's Bay. There is a dive site there called Kelvin Grove. Unfortunately the only photo I have is from the parking lot, but you'll have to believe me that the scenery is amazing.

The beach was about a 5 minute walk from the parking lot, which is a lot carrying full scuba gear. From the beach you can see giant snowy glaciery mountains to the west, steep islands rising out of the water to the south, and bright blue glacial water clashing with the sea water to the north, and more giant snowy mountains to the east. There is a rock wall on the south side of the beach which is where we dove.

We swam along the gently sloping whitish sandy bottom until we reached the rock wall. The wall seemed to continue infinitely but we only got about 50 feet deep before we ran out of time. It was like going to a really incredible aquarium where you can touch things and swim with them and get as close as you want all while breathing underwater. Pretty amazing.

The upper parts of the wall were mainly covered in sunflower stars ranging in size from an inch to 3 feet, with their zillions of legs reaching all over the place and their tube feet crawling along the rock. I didn't have an underwater camera, but here's a picture I found on google of the starfish at Kelvin Grove:

As we got lower down we started seeing a lot of tube worms too- serebellids or serpulids, if I remember correctly from my marine ecology class. They are really cool, they live in tubes that they build in the rock and they filter feed with giant feather-like extremeties that fan out from the opening of the tube. When you poke them, they retract their feathers in the same way an anemone retracts its tentacles.

There were also some cool nudibranchs and chitons, and tons of awesome fish. The rock wall was filled with cracks and crevices with brightly colored striped fish hiding in the cracks and what might have been a wolf eel hiding in a crevice. Brittle stars lined the rock lower down with their thin legs snaking around small algae beds. Jellyfish propelled themselves above us, looking eerie in the dim light of the subtidal zone.

The coolest animal, in my opinion, was the sea cucumbers. I had never seen a sea cucumber before and had imagined them to be pretty boring, kind of like the vegetable. Sea cucmbers are actually way cooler than land cucumbers, though. The ones at Kelvin Grove were 3-4 feet long and covered in menacing looking spikes. They really weren't menacing though; when I poked one I realized it was soft and jello-ey, and the spikes are just for looks. They're interesting animals, because when they get agitated they shit out their guts so that predators will eat their guts and the animal itself will then go into hiding for a while until it regrows the expelled organs. Pretty smart, eh?

Here's a photo of a sea cuc at Kelvin Grove:

 

No Shame on the Mountain: Garibaldi 7/14- 7/15

Garibaldi Provincial Park is an amazing place. Situated in the Coast Mountains just north of Vancouver and spanning about half the area of Rhode Island, this park includes many of the glaciers surrounding the Whistler Blackcomb ski area. Our previous experience in Garibaldi was a ridiculously difficult hike to a ridiculously beautiful glacial lake, which we came across on accident. That story will be covered in another post.

Day 1:
This hike was rated medium difficulty (well, at least the first 9km were), so we assumed it'd be a breeze compared to the "extremely difficult" Garibaldi hike we had done a few weekends before. Turns out that wasn't the case. This time we were carrying heavy backpacks, making the medium difficulty hike seem much harder than it should have been. Also, people are tougher in Canada. Medium difficulty to a Canadian is really hard to an American. The trail was very well maintained though and there were enough switchbacks that it was never impossibly steep.


About 5km in, there was a turn off to a viewpoint called "The Barrier". It's right off the trail and definitely worth checking out. Its like a giant natural dam which holds back Garibaldi Lake on the other side.

The Barrier

Ev on the way to the campsite

Taylor Meadows

The turn off to Taylor Meadows is around 6km in, which is another campground that is slightly closer than Garibaldi Lake. We continued onward to the lake, but a bit after 8km a ranger stopped us and told us that the lake campground is full and we have to turn back and stay at Taylor Meadows. Under normal circumstances I would have been upset about this, but due to the name of the meadow I was pretty OK with it.

We set up the tent and then set off to the lake to check it out.

The view from the lake shore was pretty nice

The water was quite blue

Very very blue

Once we got back to the campground we cooked some lovely dehydrated chicken saigon noodles. There was a little bearproof food shelter where we ate and kept our food. The guys next to us had brought candles and wine glasses and were having a nice candlelit dinner, we traded them some of our beer for some of their wine. Sleep came easy after a days worth of lugging backpacks up a mountain.

Day 1 total: 14 km


Day 2:

Situated in a nice shady spot, we were able to sleep in until 10, when we were woken by the buzz of mosquitoes and the discomfort of thin sleeping pads. After a quick breakfast we set off for Panorama Ridge. The going was slow, as this was significantly steeper than the hike we did the day before and we were significantly more sore. About 3km in we hit the snow, and from then on the trail was covered with patches of snow. The hike had some nice views:

far away mountains

bear killed a moose?

caught a glimpse of the lake

black tusk

bearded forest

 but the best views were at the top:

Garibaldi Lake

Helm Glacier

The wolf pack at the peak

Some gnarly clouds were rolling in and we weren't dressed for the cold, so we didn't stay at the peak for very long. The last bit of the hike up was pretty sketchy and involved a lot of scrambling up snowy rocks so we were a bit worried about getting back down without falling off a cliff. Luckily we met some Canadians at the top of the ridge who had come prepared with a plan. They had seen a youtube video of people sledding down the big open snow bowl alongside the trail and they had brought garbage bags to sit on and slide down the mountain. Having brought no trash bags, we weren't sure we'd be able to follow them, but they reassured us that the people on youtube did it without anything to sled on. The Canadians, speaking in their awesome Canadian accents, momentarily contemplated the best way to sit on the garbage bags. "You gotta cut leg holes in it and wear it like a diaper." "Like a diaper, eh?" The first guy pulled his diaper-bag up to his chest and took a running leap, yelling "No shame on the mountain!" as he careened down from the ridge.
Ev and I followed closely after, using just our pants as sleds. Since it had been hot down in the meadow where we began the hike, I had worn only board shorts, which I immediately regretted. After about 10 seconds everything went numb and I forgot about all pain as I enjoyed the ride of my life, picturing myself as a penguin going down the slide in a giant arctic playground. As I thought I was nearing the end of the snow, I dug my heels into the ground in an attempt to slow myself down. This did nothing but launch large clods of snow in my face, temporarily blinding me and causing me to remember how incredibly cold I was. I finally came to a stop, realizing that slowing myself down had been completely unnecessary, as there was a large flat area that would have stopped me long before I hit any rocks.

Here's a video of Ev going down the top part of the mountain. It gets a lot steeper towards the bottom, but by then our fingers were too numb to use a camera.

From there we hiked down the rest of the way, with a brief stop to befriend a marmot, and picked up our backpacks at the campground and headed back to civilization.

Day 2 total: 20.5 km
Weekend total: 34.5km






If you're in the Vancouver/Whistler are and interested in doing this hike, check out the BC parks website at http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/explore/parkpgs/garibaldi/ It has really good information about the whole park and where to camp and where to hike. I would definitely recommend going to Panorama Ridge and sledding down. Bring a garbage bag or big piece of cardboard or something to keep snow from going up your pants. Your tent's rain fly would also work well as a multi-person sled.....I wish I had thought of that earlier. If you have the time, black tusk also looks awesome, but you'll need a helmet to climb it because of falling rocks. Camping at Garibaldi Lake would be cooler than in Taylor Meadows because the campground is right on the lake, but both are nice. There are a lot more mosquitoes in the meadow, though. You're supposed to pay $10/person/night to camp there, and the park rangers check the campgrounds to make sure everyone has a permit, but if you avoid them and just leave when they walk by your campsite then you could probably get away with not paying. That's kind of a dick move though because it's a really nice park and that money goes towards maintaining it, so if you don't pay then you might have bad mountain karma.

Special Guest Daft Punk! Paradiso 6/28 - 6/29/13

Just kidding about the title...unfortunately. But even without Daft Punk, Paradiso was amazing. It's an electronic music festival at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Washington. Yeah, there's seriously a town called George Washington, and there is a gorge (geographical feature) in George (city). After a pretty crazy day of packing and cleaning and moving out of our apartment and into a new one, Evelyn and I left for Seattle. 3 hours later we got to Tyler's dorm at University of Washington. My friend and roommate of the past two years, Tyler, is in Seattle for the summer, curing cancer. Another friend, Alexya, also came with us to the festival. The four of us left for the gorge, arriving a few hours later after a minor holdup due to some rocks being blasted off the side of a mountain into the road. Apparently that's a common occurrence there. We set up camp and went to explore the campground.

Since the festival hadn't started yet, the only thing to do that night was party in the campground, so naturally there was a lot going on. Some people had driven a school-bus-turned-party-bus, which attracted a large crowd both on the roof and around the bus. We wandered past the bus to find more music coming from every direction and thousands of people walking from campsite to campsite. We had a friendly encounter with some old hippies who caught us admiring the flag on their camper and we hung out with them for a bit. The campground atmosphere was amazing, everybody was there to have a good time and all douchbaggery had been forgotten and left behind.

The next morning we got baked out of our tent before 8am as the sun heated up the desert. Luckily the people next to us had come prepared for the sun and pulled a giant tarp out of their uhaul (yeah, they brought a uhaul to the festival with about 8 people and a couch in the back of it). Their tarp was too big for just their campsite, so we tied it to Tyler's jeep and it covered most of our campsite too. We made some bacon and eggs on their grill and chased it down with some 9am beers.

The festival started at 2 and we went in soon after. Nobody had heard of any of the early artists but they were good. We wandered around the 3 different stages and the rides and eventually found ourselves getting sucked into the main stage crowd, having landed ourselves front and center.

The gorge

For the next 8 hours or so we barely moved. We danced and we jumped but we stayed right up front until the end of the festival that night. Tommy Trash was surprisingly good, throwing down some dirty drops but adding the perfect amount of catchy tunes to his music. Morgan Page was also good, but as Markus Schulz came on and the darkness of night set in, the Gorge began to transcend into the digital world of morphing lights, psychedelic sounds, and mind-bending pyrotechnics. The night continued for what seemed like a magical eternity, with Zeds Dead twisting hip hop into dubstep and Porter Robinson sending chills down my spine with the arena-filling riffs of "Language" and "Unison". Last up was Tiesto, the god of electronic music, with a two-hour set. As the stage rose up and Tiesto came forward, I wasn't sure if I was seeing a DJ or if I was legitimately staring into the eyes of God. His stage presence was incredible and the deep thump of his music penetrated the air as one song evolved into the next.

hard to get a steady photo so this'll have to do

His songs were so fluid, perfectly timed with fireworks exploding, lights flashing, and mermaids dancing. Acrobats lined the stage, doing backflips 50 feet in the air and hanging upside down from ropes with only one foot. Lasers crossed the entire amphitheater and the stars shined down from above. As Tiesto finished his set, I remember questioning whether what I had just witnessed was actually real life. I never found an answer to that question, but I did eat some of the best donuts of my life on the way back to the campground that night.

The next morning we woke up seeming to have deja vu from the day before. Baked out of the tent as the sun came up, bacon and eggs for breakfast, beers before lunch, and hanging out half asleep in the campground for the rest of the morning. We went into the festival quite a bit later that day, tired from being on our feet for so long the night before.

gorge was still gorgeous the next day

As we walked in, we saw Darude playing on one of the smaller stages. That's the guy who made "Sandstorm", which is the song that everybody started a mosh pit to at high school dances and then the principal would get all pissed off. Turns out Darude is actually amazing and has a ton of other really good songs. He really set the ball rolling for the rest of the night, so to speak. After dancing and laughing and crying and having a really really really good time at Darude, and randomly running into some CMC friends, we wandered around the festival a bit more. We saw part of Borgore and Nervo at the main stage, who were both pretty good, and then Madeon who blows my mind every time I see him. I'm a big fan of his song "Pop Culture", so it was really cool to see him play it live. It's so fucking catchy! 

After Madeon, we went to the Digital Oasis stage to see Gramatik. I had never heard of them but Tyler was a big fan, and it turned out to be really cool. There was a dude DJing and a dude playing guitar. Although it wasn't quite the atmosphere I was looking for at that point in the night, his laid back guitar-electronic music was really appealing. I wished he had played the night before when I would have been more in the mood for that type of trippy slower music. They were really good though and the guitarist had a couple of moments where everyone in the crowd was staring at him, mouths agape, wondering how in the world he could make his guitar sound that good. I kept finding myself chewing my gum along with the beat as I became entranced by the music. I made a mental note to tell my friend Matt about it, who plays guitar and I think he would like making music like that. 

Next up was Eric Prydz, who I honestly don't remember much about. I'm sure he was good but I didn't know many of his songs and he didn't do anything too memorable. After Prydz finished, Kaskade came on to headline the final night of the festival. Kaskade was amazing. His two hour set included several Swedish House Mafia remixes, among many others. I'm writing about this three weeks later, and Kaskade's set is kind of a blur in my memory by now, but I know I thoroughly enjoyed it the entire time. He had the lights, fireworks, and acrobatics that Tiesto had the night before, but this time with more mellow house music and less of Tiesto's progressive bassy beats. 

----

After Kaskade's set ended, the excitement was pretty much over for the weekend. We went back to Seattle the next day and then Ev and I went to her house on Bainbridge Island for the night. The next day, Monday, was Canada Day so we didn't have to go to work. It's kind of like Canada's 4th of July, but we were too tired from Paradiso to participate in much of the festivities. We stayed on Bainbridge for most of the day and headed back to Canada that evening. Turns out the Canadian border cops really don't like us. They made us pull over at the border, go inside a building, and questioned us separately and together about why we were going to Canada. It seemed that they really didn't want us there. They searched the car too, but found nothing as we weren't doing anything wrong. It was weird because usually Canadians are so nice and overly polite, but I think they might just send all of the assholes to the border so that the rest of Canada is filled with nice friendly people. 

Overall an excellent weekend with excellent people.