Chicago Trip Log #4
Downtown Chicago - Wed, 13 Aug 2025, 7am

Just like I figured was going to happen after I stayed up too late carousing with colleagues on my first night in Chicago, Day 1 of training on Tuesday was a long slog. It started at 7:15am with breakfast in the meeting rooms, the training proper running from 8 to 5, and then a small team meeting until 5:45pm. 10.5 hours of being "on"— after me getting only about 4 hours of sleep. Ouch.

I kept a game face on for most of the day. Late in the afternoon, though, I kind of lost it. Around 4pm the person who was speaking was not that engaging, and I nodded off a few times. I don't know if I actually fell asleep for a moment at a time, but I definitely did blank out a few times. I got lost in my own thoughts and suddenly realized that I'd stopped seeing or hearing what the speaker was talking about. Fortunately the next speaker was stronger. And the small team meeting at the end of the day was no problem since that was just 3 of us so I was actively engaged. It's much easier to stay focused when the content of the meeting is actively engaging rather than when I'm passively consuming it.

Those 4pm nap attacks, though, told me that I needed to take it easy last night instead of staying up late carousing with colleagues again. Thus I sent my regrets to our regional sales leader that I wouldn't be able to attend his dinner. I figured I'd instead eat on my own and get back early.

As I was considering where to get dinner solo I saw on Slack that one of my colleagues hadn't been invited to any group dinners and was looking for company. I invited him to join me. We agreed on a Chicago pizza chain (Giordanos, for those keeping score) with a restaurant location a few blocks away and walked over there. We split a pizza and an appetizer and enjoyed a couple beers each while chatting amiably about mostly not-work things. It was a right-sized dinner, both in terms of food, drink, and energy levels.

On the walk back from dinner I spotted a few of my colleagues in the hotel bar. I resisted the mild temptation to join them. I knew that "Hey, come have a drink with us!" would easily turn into 2-3 drinks and likely another evening of staying up too late. Instead I retired to my room for a quiet evening. I was in bed not long after 11pm.

This morning I'm feeling a lot more ready for a full day of training than I was yesterday morning. The difference is today I've got 7.5 hours of sleep behind me rather than just 4. That means tonight I should in good shape for the next group dinner / late evening of carousing with colleagues.
Update: over dinner last night I mentioned to my colleague that I'd been upgraded to a nice corner room with a wrap-around balcony at the hotel. "I'm in one of those, too," he said. 

Kaiser Pass travelog #3
Kaiser Pass · Sat, 9 Aug 2025, 12:15pm

The obvious place to go on a trip I've dubbed Kaiser Pass would be the actual Kaiser Pass, right? So that's where we went first on Saturday. Well, first after multiple morning stops for breakfast and gas in Clovis, then snacks at Shaver Lake, and a quick vista at Tamarack Ridge. We drove to Huntington Lake and the end of highway 168 at the foot of Kaiser Peak, the continued up toward Kaiser Pass along forest road 80. From the pass at elev. 9,180' we turned onto Kaiser Pass Trail, aka White Bark Road.

I knew from the trail research I did on Thursday evening that this wasn't really a trail but a 4x4 road, and a not-particularly hard one at that. Our Nissan Xterra laughed at it.



The trail/road traverses a mile up to the top of the ridge then parallels along it a bit to a nice vista point. The first thing that struck us up here, with this far-ranging vista to the east across the John Muir Wilderness, is how smoky it is. 😷 I've cleaned it up a bit in the photo above, but it's frankly kind of distressing up here in real life.

The next photo shows how the mountains in the distance loom like ghosts in the mist.



Those mountains are the eastern crest of the Sierra Nevada. The peaks top out at 12,000' to 13,000'+.

The big lake off in the distance is Lake Thomas A. Edison. I'm not sure if it's named in honor of the inventor or is named for the power company that bears his name in Southern California. Edison, Inc. owns a lot of land up here, and a lot of dammed lakes, for power generation.



We spent a while up here at White Bark Vista climbing around on the rocks. Up here at elev. 9,700' the air is thin. It's no so much catching me out of breath today as it is making me feel dizzy. I've been wobbly on my feet— a bit alarming when I'm scrambling on rocks with a sheer dropoff hundreds of feet to the valley below!

After exploring around the vista for a bit we hopped back in the SUV and explored further out the ridge road. Just past this vista point are signs for the start of the Dusy-Ershim Trail. That name probably means nothing to you, but it was spoken with almost holy reverence by the club of hard-core 4x4ers I belonged to years ago.



I decided to start driving this almost legendary road to see if we could get to the shoulder of Mt. Givens (the one in the distance in the third photo, above). I navigated the first few obstacles on the trail reasonably well. Our stock Xterra made them not-hard with its svelte dimensions. Full-size pickup trucks would face a lot more difficulty. BTW, no I'm not talking about the rocks you can see in the photo above. Those are difficult 1 or 2 on a 1-10 scale. The obstacles I'm talking about are at least 6s.

Before I got very far along Dusy-Ershim I realized I'm not enjoying this very much. I used to enjoy 4x4 driving. The challenge of man plus machine against nature. The beautiful and isolated things I could only see that way— or by backpacking for days, but why do that when I can drive there with air conditioning and a kickin' stereo system? 🤣 But now... I don't know whether it's a getting-older thing, or the smoke in the area that dulls these magnificent vistas, or the lack of camaraderie. Being up here by ourselves and enjoy the solitude is nice, but some things, like 4x4ing, are best enjoyed with others.

We turned back from Dusy-Ershim and headed down to the paved road. There'd be no more 4x4ing today. Besides, we have plenty more stuff on our agenda already!
Coming next: Mono Hot Springs!

Kaiser Pass travelog #2
Tamarack Ridge · Sat, 9 Aug 2025, 11am

It was almost 9am when we left our hotel in Clovis this morning. I felt a bit frustrated about the late start, but that's why we stopped here on our Friday Night Halfway— to get a head start on today so we could enjoy the day more. We even got in early enough last night to use the pool and hot tub... but we didn't. We were tired enough that we enjoyed just stretching out in the room.

This morning I flirted with the idea of a morning hot tub dip. I chose instead to fritter around in the room, giving myself an easy start to the day. Then once Hawk was up (she'd slept poorly) we decided it was time to get going. So we left the pool and hot tub at this hotel untouched. That's a shame because they looked nice, and the availability of the pool and hot tub were part of the reason I picked this hotel.

Speaking of which, why Clovis?



Aside from the fact that it bills itself as "GATEWAY to the SIERRAS"— which I suppose is better than its real-life role of "DOORSTEP to FRESNO"— well, it is kind of a gateway to the Sierras. That's what we're using it as, anyway.

And as if rolling from the hotel at almost 9am wasn't bad enough, we made two stops almost right away. First we gassed up at a Costco nearby, then we stopped for breakfast at Del Taco.



The nearby-ness of this Del Taco is another part of why we picked the hotel we did for last night. 🤣 Yeah, we kind of have a thing for Del Taco. We've even made a pilgrimage to the site of the original Del Taco.

From Clovis we headed northeast up into the Sierra Nevada mountains following highway 168. As soon as we turned onto the highway with open views to the east we could see that we were headed into smoke. Actually I could smell it the moment I stepped outside the hotel this morning. But seeing it blanketing the entire horizon east of us, obscuring the Sierra Nevadas, was another thing.

Would we get out of the smoke as we drove further east? Would we climb above it in the mountains as we passed above 7,000', 8,'000', or more? Alas the answer seems to be No.


We stopped again in the town of Shaver Lake, elev. 5,600'. There's a general store we like for snacks. Plus, we needed a bathroom stop. The wildfire smoke continued through here.

Now we're just over the Tamarack Ridge, elev. 7,582', and it's still smoky up here. From here we can see across the next valley to Huntington Lake, with Kaiser Peak, elev. 10,235' rising behind it. Kaiser Peak and all of the mountains loom like ghosts in the smoky distance. Not that it necessarily would've changed out minds this time, but I think we need to start checking the fire report in addition to the weather report when planning our mountain trips. 😰