15,000 Pizza Boxes

Having recovered from a night celebrating the Packer's victory, we spent today hiking in the desert. The group split into two units, one for a 9 mile hike and another group which hiked the lower trails. As the microbes causing my illness continue to taunt me with their infuriating resiliance, I volunteered for the lower trails. The fact that I havn't worked out in 2 years has absolutely nothing to do with it. At all.

After the teams split up, the lower trail team was faced with the task of fitting 6 people into a car which seats 5. Ruling out cramming people onto the back seat, we came up with the genious solution of putting one of our small people across the laps of the people in the back seat. This person turned out to be Nick. All was well, with a few minor problems. In no particular order:

1) Melissa can't drive
2) Jenny can't navigate
3) The road was full of turns
4) Many of the turns were sharp
5) The top of Nick's head was pushed right up against the door

With the guys in the back seat, we somehow missed BOTH turns to get to our drop-off point. This resulted in unneccessary U-turns and a Y-turn in addition to the twists in the road. This would not be a problem except for the last point, as each sharp twist slammed the top of Nick's head into the door again. After a considerable amount of discomfort for Nick, we arrived at the drop off point. We promptly started on the hike, which was very fun. Not long into the hike, however, the trail took us across a washout. Despite a clear trail on the other side of the washout and a sign marking the trail, we hadn't counted on the effects of letting Jenny lead. After discovering footprints in the sand in the washout, we started following the washout. Figuring that she was investigating something as the trail marking was rather clear, the group followed her. About 150 yards later we hit a fence, the road... and our navigator's surprise that the trail had abruptly ended.

After getting back on the trail, we suffered no more mishaps on the hike. We saw a hawk (possibly Harris, although it was too far to view clearly) which then landed on a telephone pole. It made me flash back to the Desert Museum's explanation that the biggest killer of hawks in the region was electrocution. This hawk avoided that fate, which left us free to enjoy the multitude of birds (and lizard) that we encountered along the hike.

The trip back saw some changing of the seating arrangements. Being the short one, I had the dubious honor of lap duty. With the advantage of positioning myself better than Nick had, I found the trip back rather relaxing as I got to strech out. Zach had the honor of the center seat, and with it supporting my posterior. This wouldn't have been so bad, except for his knee problems. I tried keeping my weight off his leg to limited success - hopefully it won't act up tomorrow.

The rest of the day passed rather quickly as we rejoined the long hikers, swapped stories, and came back to the hotel. Ryan, Eric, Jenny and I decided to skip the sushi trip and picked up a pizza which we split in the La Quinta courtyard. What happened next I can only defend as "it seemed like a good idea at the time."

First, we debated the elevation change of the long hike (settled by Jenny's computer at 2500 feet). After that, we estimated the height of the pizza box (2 inches). Between these figures, we concluded that the group on the long hike changed elevations by a height equal to a stack of 15,000 pizza boxes. Congratulations.

Unfortunately, our nerdliness didn't end there, as we had Ryan pace 12 feet to determine his stride length. Having done that, we used some basic trigonometry to determine that the average incline of the long hike was 9.5%. We then checked our pace-and-pizza-box estimation against trig using the elevation change and trail length (resulting in a 6% grade.) As we only had a 50% error, our estimate turned out to be well within the window of estimation for astrophysics.