Interim – Experiments in Physics – Part 1

I understood the basic concepts, but it was never my favourite subject in junior high and high school. It was too abstract and it involved too much math. I never looked forward to Physics.

I remember the high school experiments in class: rolling hot wheels cars down ramps and measuring things with different masses and moving the fulcrum on a lever to change the amount of force required to lift the lever.

Newton’s Laws of Motion made sense to me – e.g. if a book is sitting on a table, the book and table interact with forces of equal magnitude in the opposite direction. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Makes sense.

And I’ve always lived my life by Newton’s first law: an object in motion tends to stay in motion. I’ve never been one to want to sit still or dwell on the past. I’m always moving forward. The moment you get sedentary and comfortable is the moment you start to die. Always, always keep moving. You really cannot deny the laws of physics.

So the trip to America this year ended up being all about physics. I didn’t know this at the start of the trip – but I launched right into the theme unwittingly on the flight over.

First, I watched the movie Oppenheimer while I ate the terrible plane lunch leaving SYD (United’s catering sucked both ways! The plane was ok – not enough toilets but otherwise acceptable. Service was okay – but Air NZ is always better. I’ve done this return trip at least 28 times, so I’ve got my standards, lol).

Then, not even thinking about the physics connection, I decided to watch the biography movie of Stephen Hawking.

If that was not enough, I then watched the Ford v Holden documentary (there is a whole lot of physics in race car driving!). Following this, I watched a doco on refugees competing in the Tokyo Olympics (lots of physics involved in sport!).

And through all of this, we flew through a fair bit of turbulence (more physics – turbulence is caused by friction between slower and faster air associated with jet streams).

Ft Collins, Colorado – 23 July to 29 July

After landing in Denver, I immediately got a shuttle to the CSU campus in Ft Collins and walked over to my vacation rental in 99F heat. Ahh, coming from winter and about 52F, that felt rather warm!

I spent the first five days doing covid isolation, getting over jet lag, acclimating to 5000 ft elevation and catching up with friends. I did HIIT sessions every morning on lush green, irrigated grass on the uni campus.

I walked heaps and heaps and heaps all over town. It was just wonderful to truly be on a holiday after a full-on 12-month work project.

I wandered around the uni campus. I was just weeks away from the 30-year anniversary of moving into the dorm and starting uni in 1994!

Those 3.5 years at uni were an awesome time in my life – I have so many fantastic memories from that time. But I’m not nostalgic about it and I would not want to go back to it. (I’ve never understood anyone wanting to return to the past or ‘make America great again’ – life only moves one direction). I’m just so grateful that I had that time, that course of study, that job, those people and those experiences as part of my life.

The uni campus has changed tremendously since I attended (I most notice how big the trees have grown!). The city has grown enormously (98,000 in 1994; 170,000 in 2024). They’ve both changed as much as I have – I’m not the same person at all that I was when I was 18. I think some aspects of my personality have stayed the same, but who I am and how I relate to the world is very, very different. The uni, the town and my life have all long diverged.

I do get to catch up with one of my uni friends a few times over the first few days. I continue to have such deep respect for what he’s done with his life. I find out he is now at 1730 days in a row of walking 10,000 steps or more every day (he routinely does way more since he trains most days for ultra trail runs and triathlons). That is almost 5 years (!) where he has not missed a single day of putting down 10,000 steps. He says he has had to drag himself back out of bed a few times when he’s realised he needed another 400 steps that day. He has walked when he was ill, when he needed to use hand warmers because it was so cold, and when he was injured. I maintain friendships with people who inspire me – and this guy has done amazing things in the past 18 years. I’ve pinned him down to climb a particular mountain with me next year – let’s hope I can keep up! Here is the link from when I climbed Harney Peak in South Dakota with him and his brother on my 2014 tour: https://rambleoutyonder.org/2018/01/01/2014-south-dakota-harney-peak-hike-a-day-with-old-friends/

I also catch up with my uni boyfriend Evan’s family on this trip. What I most love about his mom and uncle is that they are just so fully engaged with life and community. They don’t bore you with stories from 30 or 50 years ago like many old people – they talk about all the things they are doing now and planning in the next 6 months. They are not living in the past like so many people over 65. And his uncle remains an inspiration – still competing in mountain biking and nordic skiing at 78 (and still beating 60-year-olds!) while living with a rare kidney disease that was supposed to kill him more than 10 years ago. His voice is always in my head when I’m training at the gym (‘if it’s hard, do more of that’ – i.e. use or lose it). If he can train 5 days a week at 78 and stick to a super strict diet, then I can train 5 days and keep to healthy foods. Now, if only I could see Evan himself! (I always visit America in fire season – and I don’t have to tell you how busy USFS fire folks are during summer these days.)

My self-imposed covid isolation goes fine those first five days. I don’t come down with anything, even though COVID is going gang-busters in the US and Oz at the time. I did wear an N-95 mask the entire trip over though – since so many people are irresponsible now and fly when they are sick and don’t bother to mask. My mom has quite a few serious health issues that mean she would not do well with covid, so I wanted to ensure if she gets it, it is not from me!!

Mirror Lake – 30 July to 1 August

I have one night with my folks at the vacation rental before I take off with my old uni roommate, Jenny, on a 3-day hike. We take off in Jen’s ancient Honda Fit that has seen many kms and adventures over its lifetime. It’s tiny but has amazing carrying capacity – just like Jenny!

We drive up the Poudre Canyon through the 2012 and 2020 burn scars. Between the two fires, nearly the entire canyon has burnt. Climate change is going to leave nothing unscathed. The Cameron Peak fire burnt more than 200,000 acres (326 square miles!!), took 5 months to fully contain and is Colorado’s largest ever fire. Knowing the area pretty well from having lived here, the fire perimeter map is pretty mind-blowing.

We drive up through burnt and logged forest on the Long Draw Reservoir road. The landscape is quite stark compared to what it once looked like, but it is always interesting to me to see what has burnt hot and what seems to have been missed entirely.

We’re heading down the trail around 11am with no fears of afternoon storms today. It’s just hot and hazy. (It is in the upper 90s in Ft Collins the entire 10 days I’m there – pretty unheard of 30 years ago). It feels good to be on the trail though, and I know Jenny is reveling in the lack of work and parental responsibilities for a few days.

We hike through burnt forest much of the way, first heading down to cross Corral Creek, and then the Cache La Poudre River. There’s a few unburnt bits to remind you of what it once was like.

We leave those wide, picturesque valleys to climb up a long series of switchbacks up a very burnt ridge. The fire has opened up the views though, and we stop a couple times to figure out which peaks are where and for Jenny to show me which peaks she’s climbed or backpacked near on previous trips with other people.

It is a hot slog up that hill in the full sun and heat, however.

We finally round a corner and get into the Cascade Creek drainage and finally get out of the burn. Our pace has been slow but steady, and we both feel okay. I’ve got all that strength and fitness built from going to the gym so much, and none of my gear is really giving me any issues (though I do get sore traps so need to do some pack fit adjustment).

Jenny’s new boots are breaking her in, rather than the other way around, though, so we’re both pretty happy to see the campsite after six miles.

We drop our packs, set up our tents and have a bite to eat.

Then we head up to check out Mirror Lake and the smaller lake above it.

It’s just about 28 years to the week that we did an overnight hike here together when we worked at the CSU mountain campus in 1996. On that trip, we left the Pingree campus, hiked up to Fall Mountain (12,000+ feet), traversed the Mummy, then climbed Comanche Peak (12,700 ft), then did some crazy drop-in directly down the side of a cirque wall into the upper part of Mirror Lake and then camped above the smaller lake. The next day we hiked down the drainage, up and over Mummy Pass and then back to Pingree. We obviously had more energy and elasticity in our joints then!

Today we clamber through the bushes on the informal trail around Mirror Lake and then climb up a slanted rock face to the smaller, upper lake.

We try to figure out where we camped that time (we camp in the designated sites this time – back in 1996 we saw no one, were the first to hike in that summer, didn’t know where the official sites were coming from off-trail…. but all the sites book out these days and we see heaps of people – yes, times change).

We wander around the uneven rocks and tundra, and Jenny decides she must go for a dip.

There’s no ice on the lake this time, but it is still plenty chilly. I laugh with her (not at her!) as she vocalises re: water temp. I also try to give the guys a float, but it’s too windy and they just keep getting blown back to shore.

We then amble along through the tundra and talus, talking about various things – getting caught up with each other’s lives. We move in and out of the shadows of the massive banded rock walls above us as the sun gets lower in the sky.

It is gorgeous, and Oz just does not have the dramatic vertical cliffs and steep-sided mountains that the glaciated high Rockies do. In Oz, the dramatic views are all ‘down’ – the high points are plateaus and what is so amazing is the hugely complex maze of dissected drainages below and into the horizon. Here in Colorado the dramatic views are all ‘up’ to high peaks and glaciated cirque walls.

We both pick our own paths over the big talus rocks and talk as we go. There is no trail on this side of the lake – so you just find the rocks to step on that match your leg length and stride. Jenny is about 15 or so feet below me closer to the lake, and about 5 or so feet behind me. She is talking about her daughter when I hear this cracking sound above us.

Physics is about to get VERY, VERY real.

I say to Jenny, “Hey, did you hear that?”

She stops talking. We hear another cracking sound that echoes in the cliffs above us. We look up the steep slope.

Cool, I think, we’re going to get to see a hunk of snow come off that small, remaining snow patch.

But, no, I am wrong. It is a couple of large rocks, and several smaller ones, breaking free from a dent in the vertical rock wall at the top of the slope. At first, in the first 15 seconds, it is a pretty cool thing to witness, to see the rocks tumbling down the slope at an angle and picking up speed.

But then, the slope directs the rocks towards us. And now it becomes more concerning. I say to Jenny, “Um, I don’t really know where to go. I don’t think there are really any better options. I don’t know where they are going. I’m going to stay put.”

If Jenny replies, I do not know. Because the shit has just got real.

There are two large rocks tumbling, rolling and bouncing down the slope at ever-increasing and frightening speed. One of the rocks is coming right at us. There are 4 or 5 smaller rocks with the other bigger rock, but they are going to go wide of us to our left (looking upslope).

I don’t know enough about physics to know how much speed and force that big rock coming at us has gained over the distance it’s traveled. Gravity means that the rock would be accelerating at 9.8 metres per second if it were dropped through air vertically with no air resistance. On this slope, however, you’d have to add in friction, angle of slope, something to do with other forms of momentum and/or velocity and who knows what else. Like I said, Physics was never my thing, and there is nothing from my high school classes that I can recall in this instant that will help me!

All I know is that there is not enough friction to be helpful, and the slope is too steep, and the biggest rock, which is somewhere between head and chest size is coming STRAIGHT AT ME.

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!!!!! Really, that’s all I can think.

I’m not quite sure what to do. I’m standing on a rock that is about 2 feet long by 18 inches wide on a steep talus slope. There is no other rock I can easily hop to that would get me out of the way. I’ve got nowhere to go.

What do I do? This is the most scared I am for my life that I can remember in a very long time. Shit, shit, shit! It is rolling and bouncing and tumbling in a straight line at me!!!

Okay, so mass times acceleration equals force. If that thing hits me and I somehow survive its impact with me, its force is going to throw me off this rock and I’m going to land on all the jaggedy big talus below. I am REALLY, REALLY fucked.

So what do I do?

I watch that thing come at me. The guys are in my little backpack with my water bottle, so they do not get to see death coming right at us. I am so, so scared. And so I just stand there. As the rock gets about 20 feet away, I duck, bend my knees a bit and cover my head while standing on my rock.

* As an aside, the guys’ floaties, which I’ve been carrying, remain in my hands above my covered head. It makes me think that they could put on my tombstone, ‘she died with the floaties in her hand’ – as a parody of the 2001 Australian movie “He died with a felafel in his hand”.

If I had to do this over again, with my new-found rockfall experience, I would get down on the rock and curl up the best I could in a foetal position covering my head – if that would be possible to do on a 2 X 1.5 ft rock.*

Fuck – oh my – fuck, this is NOT GOOD!

And then the rock, about 20 feet above me, hits a ramp of tundra, bounces, breaks in two in the air, and flies directly OVER my head. I don’t see the trajectory of one of those rocks, but I do see the one that goes directly over me. HOLY, HOLY SHIT!!!!!!

I’m just in disbelief. I immediately turn to look at Jenny and yell, “Are you OK?”

It’s obvious she is – she’s still standing on her rock down below me. She says she could smell the explosion as the rock cracked apart and that one of the pieces landed in the water of the lake below her. She says she was just mesmerised and was frozen in place. She was, at first, pissed off, thinking that people had sent them down (she’s hiked a lot of peaks, and most people injured by rockfall are hurt from hikers above on a slope). But, no, this was just nature and statistics and physics.

We regroup. Did that really just happen? We recount the experience. Jenny was very, very worried for me (she was in just as much danger, she just happened to be further downslope and a few feet further to the right than me). We talk about what might have happened… and the fact that I left the first aid kit and my PLB back at the campsite. Had I been hit by the rock, she would have had to go back to the campsite and then hike back to me – it would have easily taken 20 or more minutes.

We talk about the probabilities of such an event – what are the chances of that rock letting go at that exact time with us placed in that exact spot on this exact day. Neither of us play lotto; both of us have research backgrounds and a good understanding of stats. The odds… oh, the odds.

I’ve got adrenalin coursing through me which presents itself as shaky leg and shaking hands. Wow – I was so scared for that 90 seconds or so! I tell Jenny I feel like I just played the real life game of Plinko (but she didn’t watch The Price is Right as a kid like my brother and I did, so doesn’t know the reference).

We head back to camp, we cook dinner, we recount the events a couple times and talk about potential outcomes. In a small way, it is funny. I have never had an adventure with Jenny that didn’t have a bit of misadventure in it.

We head to our tents early – Jenny had a late night last night packing, an early start for kid drop-offs, and today has been quite enough physically and mentally!

(It turns out that rocks only slide to start and then either mostly bounce or roll. Free fall occurs on slopes steeper than 76 degrees, bounce on slopes between 45 and 76 degrees and roll on slopes below 45 degrees. Because slopes are usually irregular, a rock often alternates between sliding, bouncing and rolling during downslope movement (we can attest to that). Talus slopes (where we were standing) are the products of uncounted rockfalls over thousands of years. – Encyclopedia.com.)

I wake early the next morning – eastbound jet lag means you wake up at about 4am for your first 10 or so days in America and desperately want to sleep at about 2pm. I get together my gear and take the guys for a float. It’s cool and there is frost in the shadows by the upper lake. But it is perfectly calm and the two lakes really are just like mirrors, reflecting back those dramatic cliffs above in the perfect stillness.

I put the guys out for a float and watch the sun creep down the cliff walls opposite, the sun chasing away the shadows as it rises.

The air is crisp and dry. It is eerie for it to be this warm at 10,000 feet at 6-something AM. It is silent, and the blue sky is a clear dome with little smoke haze yet. The mozzies aren’t out yet either – they were quite bad at camp last night but did respect long sleeves and DEET.

So I just revel in the silence, the solitude and those magnificent banded cliffs reflecting back in the water. The shadow angles on the water shift as the sun rises, and I bear witness to it all.

I shed my clothes and go in for a dip. My feet are still numb from setting the guys out to float, but I’ve always tolerated cold water better than most, so I really do enjoy that numbing feeling and instant skin redness. I love the feeling of submersion – well, everywhere but my toes, those bits are painful. I stay in for a few minutes, then climb out and let the cool air settle on all those water droplets. The getting out, and the warmer air on your cold body, is as good as the getting in.

Eventually, I get redressed and head back down to our campsite. Jenny has just recently emerged from her tent. She has always been a morning person, and I have never been, so mark this morning down as a rarity – Em up before Jen. But how good is it for a mum of two kids under age 10 who works full time and also has a partner, mum, sister and family in town to get a sleep-in?!

We have a leisurely start and then head off on the trail to Comanche Peak. We met two women yesterday that had tried to do this trail but had been frustrated by large amounts of deadfall. They ended up just getting up to where they could get a view and then turning back. They said the trail was impossible to follow.

So we are expecting it to be bad. It is, in one spot in particular, but not for terribly long. There is one section where we have to climb over a whole bunch of downed trees – which is easier for me given my height advantage and all the work I’ve done at the gym. We lose the trail repeatedly, but then find it again. We always both agree on the general direction we need to go though, so it’s not stressful and we make steady progress.

We eventually get above treeline, escape the mozzies and capture the view of 12,000+ foot peaks in every direction. We can look back into the Mirror Lake drainage and ponder just what crazy route we took to get down there back in 1996. We both remember some very steep bits where we temporarily had second thoughts, but we’re not quite sure what route we would have devised. We both agree we don’t think our knees would think much of it now though!

The scale of the Cameron Peak fire is pretty gob-smacking. We talk about the different points in the landscape, the peaks in the distance Jen has climbed, and memories of some peaks and trips we did together. There is no better feeling in the world than to be alpine, and we are truly enjoying every moment.

There is no chance of storms today. We can do whatever we want and don’t have to worry about time, storm development, or getting back below treeline by noon. So we agree we should head up to the next high point.

We wander the tundra, avoid the willow, and loosely follow cairns to the next high bulge. I’ve got longer legs and really good fitness, so I tend to climb a bit faster than Jenny today. Her boots are still giving her hell, and her body has never been one to like high altitudes. I give her my hiking poles, and at the top of the hump, we sit down for some lunch at my request.

Then we agree we really should just keep going and climb Comanche Peak, for old times sake and just because we can. It’s not often you can wander around above treeline for so long in summer and not have to worry about weather. And so we go… picking our way up the tundra bits and through the talus.

Once to the peak, we climb out onto some rocks where we can overlook Lake Emmaline way down below in the cirque. Jenny worked at Pingree for several summers, so she has more adventure memories than I do from the area, but we both enjoy looking out over the landscape, identifying peaks and features and contemplating the scale of the Cameron Peak fire (it’s pretty much burnt everything in every direction). Some of the ridges are still just white and black – how hot and severe was the burn in those places?

On the way back down, I divert us out of the way to check out what looks like a patch of charred rocks in the distance. Geology nerd Em doesn’t think they look like a different rock type and remembers that a light plane crashed near Comanche Peak sometime in the 2000s. We head over to find out that… it really is just a different rock type (turns out the plane crashed in late April 2000, killed two people from Ft Collins onboard, and crashed about 100 feet below Comanche – we did not see any bits left). Geology nerd FAIL!

By the time we make it back to camp, we’re both pretty tired. We’ve done 8-10 miles with close to 3,000 feet elevation gain, climbed over heaps of downed trees and had no trail to even out the surface above treeline.

We cook up dinner… and are then treated to the most excellent after-dinner entertainment. A bull moose, cow and calf come grazing along across the creek. We first see the cow and think, wow, how cool! Then we see the calf a couple minutes later. Even neater! Then, not long after, we see the big bull. So awesome!

We stay still and quiet. Jenny is a wildlife vet with the NPS, so this is such a special treat for her. She gets lots of photos and video. The moose end up being very used to humans and graze quite close to us without any care. They graze all around our campsite in 360 degrees, so we get at least 30 minutes watching them do their thing. Bonus points for today.

We hike back out the next day.

Poor Jenny fights through the pain of her boots and we talk about anything and everything. 30 years is a long time to know someone and a long time to remain friends. Our lives are very, very different, but I deeply appreciate that she would take so much time out of her life to do a 30-year anniversary hike with me. I know she has much closer friendships and people she can relate to much more closely than me, but I love that we can still talk about anything and that we have so much respect for each other and the paths we’ve taken in life. I could not have been any luckier back in 1994 to have been thrown in with her as my random roommate assignment at Newsom Hall.

It’s a Friday, and we meet heaps of people heading in on the trail (probably 10-12 people) as we head out. This trail leads into one of the more remote parts of Rocky Mtn National Park and you get to it from none of the park entrances – it’s crazy to think how many people are wandering about the backcountry these days.

Oh, I love the high mountains and being alpine, but gosh I love being in Oz where I can have whole trails to myself and not see other people for days at a time. It’s always nice to come visit and to catch up with old, good friends, but it’s always nice to go home to my real life, too.

It is HOT and hazy as we descend elevation and get back to town. We get back early, so Jenny has a few more hours of childless freedom – the chance to take a shower and have a few moments of peace and quiet before going to pick up her youngest.

28 years ago, on our overnight trip to Mirror Lake from Pingree Park, we made a toast over a dinner of Lipton Noodles N Sauce. We pledged then to always seek ‘truth, freedom and happiness’.

This year we decided we needed to update the pledge since we live in a ‘post-truth’ world where fictions are considered ‘alternative facts’ and Jenny’s life has joyful constraints instead of lots of freedom. We change the pledge to always seek ‘grace, wisdom and happiness’.

Jenny drops me off at my vacation rental, and then we are both left to work on living out that pledge in our busy, everyday lives.