After a unseasonally warm November and December, it got colder in January and the Juras finally got a good snowfall. We even got a light dusting of snow at our house in Geneva. So the next day, the boys and I threw our skis in the car and headed up to Crozet, less than 30 minute drive.
On the chairlift heading up to the top
I started practicing Zen with the Canberra Zen Group in 1992 following my separation from my first wife. I had become interested in Zen practice as part of my jujutsu training at black belt level. My jujutsu teacher had been exploring some of the inner (mind, spirit) aspects of budo with his yudansha students, and from around 1989 I had started to sit zazen fairly regularly at home.
The Canberra Zen Group met for zazen several times a week at a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in the north of Canberra, and were also affiliated with the Sydney Zen Group who have a zendo in Annandale, where I used to live, and also have a retreat centre at Gorricks Run, a remote valley in the Northern Blue Mountains.
In 1993 I attended my first sesshin (7 day silent retreat) at Gorricks Run where the teacher was John Tarrant Roshi, the first Australian to be authorized to teach Zen. Tarrant Roshi had been a long-time student of Robert Aitken Roshi, one of the most influential figures in the transmission of Zen to the West.
Update: November 2014. Astronomers have captured the best image ever of planet formation around an infant star, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array’s (ALMA) new high-resolution capabilities. The image reveals in astonishing detail the planet-forming disk surrounding HL Tau, a Sun-like star located approximately 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.
My second Alpine trip this summer was a short but intense day near the Aiguille du Midi in the Mont Blanc region. The cable car from Chamonix remains the highest vertical ascent cable car in the world, from 1,035 m to 3842 m, an altitude gain of over 2,800 m in 20 minutes. The Aiguille du Midi is the starting point for the ski trip down the Vallée Blanche which I did some years ago, 17 km and over 2,000 m descent. It is also the starting point for various climbs nearby and for access to the Cosmiques Hut, at the beginning of the Three Mont Blancs route to the summit of Mont Blanc.
Exiting the top cable car station to descend the snow ridge leading off Aiguille du Midi.
In July 2010, a friend and I set out to climb Gran Paradiso as a training climb before attempting Mont Blanc. Gran Paradiso is the only 4,000 metre peak that is entirely within Italian territory. The Italian-French border runs along the Alps and over the Mont Blanc summit, so there are a number of higher mountains “in Italy”. Unfortunately, my friend had some altitude sickness at around 3,700 metres and, on the advice of our guide, we turned and headed back down. So in the summer of 2014, I decided to complete the climb. Here is a photo, taken from the internet, of the summit ridge of Gran Paradiso (4,061m) in fine weather.
Gran Paradiso summit ridge (4061m)
On the summit of Weissmeis, my first 4000 m peak in the Swiss Alps.
After many years since I had last been climbing on high mountains (Mt Kenya long ago, plus some easy peaks in Britain, Norway and Italy), I decided in 2007 I should do an alpine trip seeing as I was living here in Switzerland. So I contacted a guide and he suggested we climb Weissmies. At 4023 m, Weissmeis is the western-most 4000m peak of its range near Saas Fe (not far from Zermatt).
As a teenager I was fascinated by astronomy and cosmology and read voraciously as well as spending many hours outside at night with my telescope and Norton’s Star Atlas. During my brief years as a physicist in the 1970s, I kept up with the literature and was aware that some astronomers were attempting to detect planets around other stars by detecting the gravitational jiggling of the star around which the planet was orbiting. But these movements were slightly beyond detection by the technology of the day.
Headlines with messages like “First Planet Found Outside Our Solar System” appeared in newspapers dozens of times, at least twice in the New York Times, and once on the front page. But all these announcements were subsequently found to be wrong. And in one notorious incident, it was later found that the astronomer had detected not movements in stars, but movements in the telescope itself. So I was stunned to discover on reading the book “The Stardust Revolution” that new detection methods combined with space-based telescopes had resulted in the proven discovery of nearly 2000 exoplanets.
Genealogy is partly about the transfer of information embedded in our DNS. But what is the origin of DNA? The next step back takes us to the stars. Through extreme genealogy, we have come to understand our origins in the stars.
Sunset over the Juras 24 May 2014
East Mathers, West Mathers and Milton of Mathers are villages just north of St Cyrus and the Kaim of Mathers (see previous post https://mountainsrivers.com/2014/05/11/a-visit-to-the-mathers-ancestral-castle-in-scotland/). St Cyrus is about 60 km north east of Dundee in Angus and about 50 km south of Aberdeen. St Cyrus lies between the mouths of the South and North Esk Rivers, and developed at a natural harbour that traded in skins, hides and cured salmon in medieval times. It is about 50 km south of Aberdeen. The cliffs and dunes provide a nationally important habitat for flowering plants and insects, and a breeding ground for tern and have been declared a National Nature Reserve.
"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" -- William Blake
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