EXOTERIC - Information Worth Sharing: ex·o·ter·ic
-adj
1. Not confined to an inner circle of disciples or initiates.
2. Comprehensible to or suited to the public; popular.
3. Of or relating to the outside; external.

We managed get on the trail early. Things were starting to dry out again. Our hike today was going to be our longest yet. We hiked out of Apache Springs and over past where we did our conservation project. We took the new trail there and it went up and over and up and over a couple of ridges past Bear Canyon and Buck Creek. Our first destination was the Phillips Junction Commissary where we needed to pick up food for our final days on the trail.

We got to the commissary around 11:30am. Thomas got all of the food for our crew, and we ate our lunches. The commissary also had a small store where you could buy various supplies. I bought a long sleeve T-shirt, and we also topped off our fuel supply.

It was starting to rain as we left Phillips Junction, but it was short lived. The skies continued to look threatening as we hiked further up the Rayado Creek.

We made it to our campsite just as the skies really opened up. First was hail and then hard rain. We stood around and waited out the rain and then decided we at least needed to set up the dining fly. I was only wearing a sweat soaked T-shirt under my rain jacket and I started getting the shivers. Hypothermia is not something you want to mess around with, so I changed shirts, put on fleece and my down vest under the rain jacket. After that I was fine. We got camp set up and made an early dinner.

The rain was short lived. We started a camp fire to help dry everything out. Comanche camp was on a sloped hillside up and away from the creek. My tent ended up being pitched on an area that was less than level. All night I kept gradually sliding down my air mattress.

Photo album for the entire trip is here (click on the arrows at the top of each page to navigate).

We took a bit longer to pack up camp after all of the rain, but we managed to hit the trail by 8:30am. Packing up soaking wet tents is not very fun. We headed up and over Webster Pass on our way to Fish Camp.

Fish Camp is a nice log cabin where the Phillips' would spend time fishing out of the Rayado River. It is at the junction of the Agua Fria and Rayado Creeks. We arrived there about 10:30 and got a tour of the cabin. The program activities there were fly tying and fishing. We did the fly tying, but didn't have enough time to hang out and fish. The fishing was catch and release around the cabin and you needed to be farther away if you wanted to keep the fish. You also needed to purchase a fishing license in order to fish. For the scouts it was only $2.50, but a one day license for adults was $17.50!

We had lunch at Fish Camp and it started to rain. Thankfully, it was a very light rain and we were able to continue our hike to Apache Springs. The hike up the Agua Fria Creek was spectacular with all sorts of wild flowers in bloom. The farther into Philmont we hiked, the better and better the scenery got.

Apache Springs is a staffed camp, and we were going to have a layover day there. The program activities there were Apache Indian Life, archery, sweat lodge, and we were also able to do our conservation project there.

We had our first food pickup there, and we were able to score some real tortillas and make chicken, rice and bean burritos for dinner. That night we got hit again by rain showers. We are actually getting used to being soaked every day.

The next morning we got up and walked about half a mile to where the conservation project area was. We did 3 hours of trail work. There was a new trail built recently and we were decommissioning the old trail by burying logs across it to stop erosion and allow plants to fill in over top.

After lunch we did some laundry at the staff cabin wash basin, and then did the sweat lodge. Sweat lodge was interesting. There is a big bonfire where the staff heats up buckets of rocks. You fill up several buckets of water and take them over to a small hut which is covered in canvas. We had 5 scouts in one hut, and 4 adults in the other. It was very wet, muddy and cramped. Then in comes the bucket of hot rocks and a bucket of water. The door is covered up and it gets very dark inside. You sprinkle the water on the hot rocks and get an instant sauna. The temperature inside was soon up to 150F and we were all just pouring out the sweat. We stayed in the hut for about 20 minutes and were just about ready to pass out from the intense heat. When you come out of the hut, you douse your whole body with a bucket of cold water. This closes up your pores and cools you off nicely. It was the best shower we had on the whole trip! I felt amazingly clean after this, even though we didn't use any soap.

Things in camp were just starting to dry out completely when we had another huge afternoon thundershower hit us. This unfortunately forced the cancellation of the archery activity that afternoon. It was nice having a day off of hiking, now we just need a day off of rain.

Photo album for the entire trip is here (click on the arrows at the top of each page to navigate).

This day started out with us heading back up to the rock climbing area. Clear skies had us soon getting our climbing gear on. There were two climbing lines set up on a very large rock face on the mountain. Hard and harder, take your pick.

The scouts had a good time and everyone made it up one or both of the lines. I decided to also give it a try and had no problem getting up the rock face. The rappeling back down was very fun. That was the first time for me.

We got back to the staff cabin, picked up our packs and headed to our next stop, Crater Lake. Crater Lake is a staffed camp and home to the Continental Tie and Lumber Co. The activity there was spar pole climbing and lumberjacking. We got there at 11:30am and were told that the next opportunity for spar pole climbing would be at 1pm. We sat down in the shade and ate our lunches. By noon, the skies were threatening. Thirty minutes later we were in a full scale thundershower and getting drenched. We ended up hanging out in one of the out buildings for about 2 hours waiting for the storm to quiet down. We were unable to do the spar pole climbing due to the rain.

Eventually the rain quieted down a bit and we decided to hit the trail to our camp for the night, Lower Bonito. We hiked up and over Fowler Pass and then got on the wrong trail. It turns out that we followed a bit of a short cut down to the meadow at Lower Bonito. It started off looking like a trail, but it just disappeared when it hit the meadow (which was full of cows and lots of cow pies). Our crew leader, Thomas, did some expert map reading and got everyone pointed in the right direction, even though my GPS was leading us in the opposite direction to what must have been an older waypoint for the campsite. The map was way more current than the waypoints in the GPS database. The GPS confirmed exactly where we were on the map.

We found a campsite and were just getting everything set up when the skies really opened up. We got totally soaked and the heavy rain lasted for several hours. The temperatures started dropping and we were lucky to get a roaring fire started. Once the fire was going we at least had some heat. A lot of our clothing was already wet from doing laundry at Miner's Park. My tent's rain fly was just saturated and I ended up getting a bit wet inside the tent. Drip, drip, drip all night inside the tent. Needless to say, I didn't sleep well.

This was probably our most challenging day yet, but we were able to manage to deal with the tremendous rain. This was our least favorite camp site on the whole trek. Cow pies everywhere, and everything got completely soaked and muddy from the rain. Everyone was looking forward to drying conditions in the night, but we ended up getting more heavy showers.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

We got packed up early again and had our breakfast. We headed over to the Toothache Springs water tank to fill up our water bottles. The mucky water started to clog up our filtration equipment, but we managed to fill everyone up with clean water. We hiked over to Stonewall Pass, which was a nice shaded hike. When we got to the pass we came across a flock of wild turkeys. From the pass we headed down a trail to a large meadow and Lover's Leap campground. From there we headed back up hill towards our final destination of the day, the staffed camp of Miner's Park.

At Miner's Park they have rockclimbing and rappeling. After we got the standard briefing, and ate lunch, we headed up to the rock climbing area. The rock climbing location was about 1.25 miles up from the staff cabin and it took us 30 minutes to get there. We were scheduled to climb at 1:00pm, but after waiting around at the site for over an hour we started to wonder what was going on. The scouts were busy playing cards and talking with another troop that was also waiting. The adults were just relaxing and talking, so there was no problem waiting.

Finally the climbing staff came over and said that they couldn't have any climbing while there was thunder. The thunder we could barely hear was miles and miles away, but rules are rules. We bailed out and headed back to set up our camp sites. We rescheduled the climbing activity for 8am the next day, which would be well before any lightning and thunder started.

We headed to our campsite and missed the spur trail to the campground we were assigned. It took a few minutes but we backtracked and found our site. We learned that the staff is supposed to take us to our camp site. Good to know for next time!

That evening after our dinner the staff opened the artificial climbing walls near the staff cabin and there were competitions to see who could get around the wall via various routes high and low. Winners would get pudding, donuts or quesadillas. We had a couple of scouts get pudding, but getting the donuts was really hard. The advisors got to sit on the porch of the staff cabin and have hot drinks and cookies.

That night we got some more brief rain showers, and our camp site was visited by lots of very tame deer.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

We were up early and I slept really well for the first time on the trip. We had some sprinkles of rain in the night but everything was dry by the time we got up. We had our breakfast snacks and were on the trail by 7am. Our next campsite destination was Toothache Springs, which was about 4 miles away. We continued up the Rayado River and then turned and headed up an old and rutted jeep trail near the Zastrow trailhead. The jeep trail was our first really steep climb, but we only had a 1000 foot elevation gain. My pack was still heavy at just over 50 pounds.

We got settled in at our new campsite well before lunch time. Less than 2 miles away was a staffed camp called Urraca. Our crew decided to spend our free afternoon hiking up and over Urraca Mesa on a very steep trail to the other camp to do some activities there. Urraca camp has a COPE course. COPE stands for Challenging Outdoor Personal Experience, and it is basically team building games and activities. It was a great way to get this crew working as a real team. We did a number of crazy games and activities. Our best moment was tackling the 13'2" wall and getting all of our crew up and over in record time.

Ranger Brian was suitably impressed with our crew's initiative to hike over to Urraca and not just hang out in camp. That night we had our usual "Thorns, Roses, and Buds" discussion and we talked about why we were at Philmont and what we hoped to gain from this experience. The thorns are the bad, roses are the good, and buds are what we hope for in the future. It is a good way to let everyone take a turn voicing their feelings about the day (with hopefully more roses than thorns). This night was our last with our Ranger, then we would be on our own for the rest of the trek.

We had a dry day with no rain, and our only real challenges were the steep trail, filtering water out of the algae laden and bug infested tank at the spring (thank god for filters), and the ridiculously long distance from our campsite to the one set of bear lines.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

We got up early and had breakfast at the Dining Hall at 6:30am. We cleaned up and got checked out of our trailbound tents, then did some final packing for the big trek. At 10:30am we got on a bus that took us to our trailhead.

We started our trek at Rayado, which is in the southeast corner of Philmont. The Kit Carson Museum is at Rayado. We got a tour of the Museum, which is a reproduction of the adobe hacienda he lived in that was along the Santa Fe Trail.

At 1:15pm we officially hit the trail to our first campsite, Olympia. This was our shortest hiking day. It was only 2.5 miles to our campsite and it was mostly flat. We crossed over the Rayado River a couple of times and briefly got lost trying to find a crossing. We had to backtrack a bit and ended up staying on a different road to get to our campsite. We learned that there can be more than one route to take on our trek to get to our destination. It was a good learning experience, even though we only had to backtrack less than a tenth of a mile.

At our campsite, Ranger Brian got us familiar with the process of getting camp set up. All of the food goes into bear bags and they get hung up out of the way. All of the pots, pans and kitchen stuff goes over by the sump. The sump is just a pipe in the ground with screen over it. It is used to dump the dishwater.

Each campsite has a fire ring, sump and bear line. These 3 points define what is called the Bear-muda Triangle, and our tents needed to be set up at least 50 feet away from it. We cooked a dinner of mac & cheese and were rained on briefly by an afternoon thundershower.

Our dinner meals were your basic dehydrated foods that only required the addition of boiling water. Breakfast and lunch were just snack foods like beef jerky, granola bars, cookies and gorp. Several days into the trek the food was already monotonous. Squeeze cheese and crackers aren't much of a lunch! The meals were just enough to keep us from starving. I lost over 5 pounds during the trip (not a bad thing, IMHO). We managed to supplement our meager food supplies along the way at various staff camps that had a "swap box". You could put unwanted items in the swap box and take what you wanted. The scouts did a lot of swapping of food. The other adults, Bill and David, brought some of their own food supplies along to supplement the meals and they were glad they did. I never was terribly hungry, but I got real tired of just eating junky snack foods for breakfast and lunch.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

We got to sleep in this morning. We only had a 30 minute drive from the campground to Philmont Scout Ranch, and we didn't need to be there until 10am. We got to the Welcome Center and met up with our Ranger, Brian.

This day was very busy. We had to check in with Logistics and get the official run down of our itinerary. Our Crew Leader, Thomas, marked up our maps with all of our planned camps and activity locations. His copy of the itinerary is called "his Xbox". It was the answer to the question, "what most of all would you hate to lose?" The Crew Leader has to present the paperwork at each staff camp and get it signed off. This is for Philmont to be able to keep track of where each crew has been over the course of their trek. It is very important to not lose the official itinerary.

From there we had our final health checks, ate lunch and got our crew equipment and food supplies for the first 4 days. We pulled all of our gear out of our packs and figured out what we needed to take and what stuff we could leave behind. Just after we got all of our equipment sorted out, a huge thundershower drenched the entire camp with hail and rain. After this, a couple of the scouts decided that they really should get some better rain gear (pack covers and jackets). The trading post at Philmont has everything you need. I bought a couple of shirts, pins, and the traditional Philmont tooled leather belt.

After dinner there were Crew Leader and Advisor meetings to attend, and some of the scouts attended church services.

That evening we attended the opening campfire, which told the story of Waite Phillips and the history of Philmont.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

We got up early and hit the road to New Mexico. We made good time across Arizona. It was nice having a speed limit of 75mph once you get out of California. We stopped for a bathroom break at an Indian trading post, then made our way into Gallup, NM for a lunch stop and gas fill up. We decided to stop in Albuquerque to get groceries for dinner and breakfast. We ended up making a few detours in town, but we finally found a store.

From Albuquerque, we headed north to beautiful Santa Fe. We took the low road along the Rio Grande from Santa Fe to Taos. There was some afternoon traffic, but nothing major. When we reached Taos we headed east into the mountains. Our campground for the night was in Cimarron Canyon State Park at the Maverick campground. We had 2 spots on a small lake. Temperatures were nice and we didn't have any rain. Bill cooked another dutch oven dinner (Chicken a la King with mushrooms over noodles) and we went to bed early.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

We met at 6am to get on our way to Philmont. The other driver, Bill, had been at Camp Whitsett with his son all week, so he wasn't completely packed and ready. We ended up making a side trip on the way out of town back to his house to pick up some last minute items. He also had to fill up his gas tank. We were actually on our way by 7am.

We made good time to Yuma, AZ. Just outside of Yuma I-8 starts winding its way through a pass. As we came out of the pass Bill was no longer on my tail. After slowing way down for over 15 minutes waiting for him to catch up with me it was clear that he wasn't behind me anymore. I called his cellphone and got his voicemail. A few minutes later I got a phone call from another adult in our troop informing me that he had had a flat tire and was headed back to Yuma to get it fixed. We continued on to Gila Bend where we filled up with gas and had lunch. They caught up to us there an hour later.

We continued on to Phoenix, where it was very hot (115F) and Bill filled up with gas. The last leg for the day was to drive up I-17 to Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon where we had a campground reservation for the night.

The temperature at the campground was a much more tolerable 80F. Bill cooked a nice dutch oven stew with biscuits for dinner. That night we got just a sprinkling of rain.

Photo album for the entire trip is here.

I will be leaving tomorrow for the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. My son's Boy Scout Troop is going to be doing a 10 day backpacking trek in the Rocky Mountains. We will be doing a "Challenging" trek, which will cover 59 miles in 10 days. A map of our itinerary is here. Each day we hike to a different camp. Some nights we will be camped on the trail by ourselves. Some camps are staffed and have fun activities for the scouts to participate in, such as fishing, rock climbing, rifle shooting, homesteading and Indian Life.

We have been very busy this year (and last year) getting ready for this ultimate Scouting adventure. Our troop will be driving out to New Mexico, so it will take us 2 days to get there. Our first night on the trip out will be camping in Oak Creek Canyon near Flagstaff, Arizona. The second night will be at a campground near Philmont in New Mexico. We arrive at Philmont on Sunday and start our trek on Monday.

I'm really looking forward to this adventure. I'll be off the grid for the next 2 weeks. This will be our last real scouting event, since Alex starts college 2 weeks after we return. Hopefully, when I return I won't be too totally swamped with work to post some blog entries and photos about our experience.

Here's a fun diversion for the day. Take this short quiz to find out which kind of sports car type you are.

I'm a Corvette type. What are you?

Currently our Solaris 8 and 9 software build environments are being run on much older Sun server systems. If and when these systems fail, we will either have to find replacement parts, or find other available old servers that can run on the old versions of the Solaris OS. All of our current generation of server systems require Solaris 10 as the minimum supported OS.

We have been experimenting with using Solaris Containers in order to duplicate a Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 build server environment on the latest Sun server systems. Solaris Containers technology was previously known as Project Etude.

The idea is to set up a Solaris Container on today's faster, cheaper, multithreaded servers that can run an older version of the Solaris operating system. Then you can run your legacy applications in this virtualized container. In our case the legacy application was performing old software patch builds that require a Solaris 8 or 9 build environment (header files and libraries).

We have now put up a Wiki page on the BigAdmin site that walks you through the process of setting up the Solaris 8 and 9 containers. Credits go to Vaishak Suvarna for putting together this wiki page and doing the proof of concept work for our build server environments. Now we can eliminate multiple, large legacy Sun server systems in our production labs and replace them with a single, more efficient CoolThreads server.

My flight from Prague ended up leaving over 6 hours late. By the time I got to JFK airport my rerouted connection to LAX (instead of SAN) was long gone.

I quickly cleared immigration and customs, then I headed over to the Delta Terminal to see what they could do to get me home. The local time was about 10pm, so there wasn't much hope of finding a flight leaving that night, so I was instead rebooked on the direct flight to San Diego for the following day at 5pm.

Next I had to find a place to stay. Delta wouldn't provide me a hotel room. They blamed the delay on Czech Airlines (a code share partner), and there was no one around from Czech Airlines to talk to, since their one flight the next day didn't leave until 4pm. I ended up calling the AMEX Corporate travel emergency hot line and they quickly found me a room at the Best Western near JFK.

I took the Terminal Train out to where the hotel shuttles pick up and was soon on my way to the hotel.

I got a good nights sleep. Amazing what being up for 24 hours can do for your ability to fall soundly asleep. I got up in the morning and figured since I had at least 6 hours before I needed to be back at the airport, I would head into Manhattan.

The hotel had a free shuttle to the subway station at 9am, so off I went. The subway from Jamaica Station goes all the way down to the World Trade Center, so that was my first stop. I figured I would just work my way back via the subway and try to see as much as I could before I had to be back at the airport.

The World Trade Center area has been cleared up and fenced off. It is just a big pit that is now undergoing more construction. It was very sad to see. The last time I was in Manhattan was 1986, and we toured the Twin Towers.

Ground Zero, the WTC site.

From there I walked down past St. Paul's Chapel and the Trinity Church to Wall Street. I walked around the heavily fortified NYSE building and then took another subway train up to Times Square.

I got out of the subway at 42nd St. and was all turned around. It took me a block or two to realize I was headed in the wrong direction. Time Square is now ablaze with neon and immense video screens on all of the buildings. Quite different from 22 years ago.

From Times Square I walked over to Rockefeller Center. The NBC Studio store had a huge line to get in, so I skipped that, but I did see the Today Show studio from outside the windows. The Ice Rink area was being made into a basketball court and there were several other construction projects happening in the plaza.

The NBC Today show studios.

The plaza at Rockefeller Center.

The weather here was very hot and humid and I was toting along my carry-on luggage during all of this sight seeing. I was hoping that I would have time to hit Central Park, but I ran out of time and energy. I was completely drenched in sweat by the time I hit the subway station to get back to JFK. Thankfully the subway cars are air conditioned. I definitely would like to come back to NYC and play tourist again.

The flight back was another torture test. It boarded on time, but then just as we pushed back from the gate it started to rain heavily. We were about 30th in line for take off and then a huge thunderstorm descended on the airport. We couldn't take off during the storm and then the wind direction changed and they had to change active runways. We ended up taxiing around JFK airport for 2 hours before we finally took off for San Diego. I finally arrived at home after 11pm.

I was in Prague, Czech Republic, this week on business. I flew out Monday morning from San Diego to Atlanta on Delta. This was my first time in the state of Georgia. Thirty nine states down, eleven to go! The Delta hub at the Atlanta airport is impressively large. I landed at Terminal A and had to catch my flight to Prague at Terminal E, which is a long subway ride away. On the flight to Prague I had the middle 3 seats to myself, so after they served dinner I attempted to lie across the seats and try and sleep. I managed to get a few hours of sleep and I arrived around 11:30am Tuesday. No line at the passport control, and not even a glance at my bags by customs and I was on my way out of the airport. First stop was to find an ATM machine to get some Czech crowns for bus fare. The only ATM's were all side by side at the far end of the other Terminal building. I took the bus from the airport into the terminus of the subway, which is near my hotel. I walked from there to the hotel.

After I settled in and unpacked I went back down to the subway station and headed into the Old Town area to do some sightseeing. I started at the Powder Gate and climbed to the top to take some photos of the surrounding area. From there I went by the Old Town Hall and saw the Astronomical Clock.

There were hordes of tourists waiting for the top of the hour. I headed from there over to the Charles Bridge and toured the Bridge Tower.

The next stop was Prague Castle and the St. Vitus Cathedral.

By this time I was getting very hungry so I found a restaurant and had dinner and a couple of beers. Beer is very big here and it is delicious! I made it back to the hotel after another quick ride on the subway. I fell asleep watching TV, but it was more of a nap. I was wide awake between 1 and 3 am. I finally got a few more hours of sleep and then got up and went to work. The Sun facility here is in a big business park along with Sony, IBM, DHL and Dell to name just a few of the companies here. The business park is just next door to a subway station, so getting here was easy.

Yesterday afternoon I walked around the Petrin Park area, rode the Funicular Railway up the hill and climbed to the top of the Observation Tower. The Observation Tower is a minature replica of the Eiffel and is 200 feet tall. The views of the city from up there were magnificent.

View of the Prague Castle and St. Vitus's Cathedral from the Observation Tower.

Now I'm back at the Prague airport waiting out a 6 hour flight delay to NY/JFK and the from there hopefully LAX and finally back to San Diego.

This weekend we took the RV up to Santa Maria for the 2008 Rodriguez Family Reunion. We left Ramona around 10:30am and made the drive north through the LA area. The drive up there will invariably involve some sort of traffic delays, so I always listen to KNX 1070AM for their traffic reports every 10 minutes. We ended up taking the 405 to the 710 to avoid traffic on the 5. We were making good time when we got to the city of Bell and the 710 freeway just stopped for about 20 minutes due to a downed power line on the freeway. Eventually we got through and made it into the San Fernando Valley, where the temperatures were hitting 110F. There were record high temperatures all over California.

We spent the first night at El Capitan State Beach. We set up camp, grilled some hamburgers and enjoyed the unusually warm temperatures. Around 8pm we were sitting outside and the cool breeze off the ocean changed to the north and we were blasted with a hot dry wind from inland. It was 95F at 9pm when we were told by the park ranger to turn off our generator that was running the air conditioning. It was a bit warm to sleep very well.

The next morning we started on our way to Santa Maria by way of Lompoc where we did some wine tasting. At 11am in Lompoc it was 106F! We ended up in Santa Maria where it was a blistering 110F, so we decided to beat the heat and see a movie. We ended up watching the new Get Smart movie, which was pretty entertaining. From there we drove over to Christine's cousin Teresa's house and we ended up relaxing in their pool. Nobody in Santa Maria has air conditioning. It never gets very warm there along the Central Coast.

That night there was a cocktail party and we hung out and had hot dogs and hamburgers and lots of cold beer. There was a family golf game that afternoon which I thankfully did not participate in.

Saturday was the big party at the Ranch. We went over there early to help set up and it was again even hotter than the day before. We drank a lot of water and hung out on the grass under a big shade tree. The party got started at 2pm and we had the usual mariachi music and barbeque. After the sun went down it got bearable and the real partying got started. We ended up leaving around 11pm and thankfully the evening and next day were much cooler.

The drive back was going great until we got to San Juan Capistrano. Another SigAlert and another 30 minute standstill. We ended up driving over 600 miles in the RV and gas cost us over $400! Roadtrips are expensive, but it was still cheaper than staying in hotels for 3 nights.