I have never been a Princess Diana fetishist so I find the whole thing a little strange, OK, a lot strange. But – if you are a fetishist – here is some underwear you might want. The caption – in Chinese – says  Feel The Romance Of British Royalty and nothing, of course, says romance like the cello.

When we first started out trip, it was all possibility. Everybody we talked to, who had been there had a suggestion on where to go, and they all sounded great. I talked to a guy at Vermilion Resort and he said Laural Canyon is great. A guy at the Rock Creek Pack Station said Hopkins was gorgeous. We can't miss Second Recess, almost nobody goes there because it is in the middle but it is supposed to be spectacular. In the end, we missed them all.

On Thursday morning, we calculated that we had somewhere between twelve and fourteen miles to get out and three days to do it. Over breakfast, we made a plan to hike about half way out on Thursday , explore on Friday, and hike out the remainder on Saturday. Our only fixed point was to catch a ferry across Lake Thomas A Edison at 4:45 on Saturday. It seemed pretty easy. Even when we put our packs on, for the first time in three days, it seemed easy.

 But we got a late start, the trial was rougher and more interesting than we had expected, and we found lots of reasons to stop and photograph. It was starting to get dark when we made camp.

That night, we revised our plans. Getting into the Second Recess or Laural Canyon seemed like more work than we wanted to do: Second Recess required crossing Mono Creek which had become quite large and Laural required a steep 500 plus foot climb before we would start hiking it. And it had become painfully obvious that we were not going to be making any early starts.

We revised our plan to making two very easy days with lots of stops and a late start rather than two ball-buster days with a chance of missing the ferry on Saturday. So, the next morning, we got got right to lazing around with lots of grooming time.

We got to the John Muir Trail, a virtual highway at rush hour, in time to watch the sunset of Mono Creek. We were only three and a half miles from the ferry. The next morning, we got up, wandered around taking pictures, and then eased our way into the traffic towards Lake Thomas A Edison. Even with a couple of long stops, it came up much quicker than we expected. We were back in civilization, or – at least – what passes for civilization at 8,000 feet.

We even found somebody to take our picture.

We were – mostly – happy campers.

The National Geographic has an article on dinosaurs from Transylvania in which they say Islands are wonderful natural laboratories for the study of
evolutionary change and for that reason have long attracted the
attention of biologists. Large animals often become smaller on islands and small ones become larger. This phenomenon is known as the "island rule."

Those sentences remind of sitting around a campfire in the Sierras with a friend – maybe 45 years ago. As I was staring at the fire, I noticed that the fire didn't actually touch the logs. It seemed to start just a little above the wood being consumed. I asked my friend, who was  somewhat of an amateur scientist, Why doesn't the fire touch the wood? 

My friend watched the fire for a few minutes as he thought over the question. Finally, he said, It's the fire principal. A relative of the Island Rule, I guess.

It struck me this week after having some discussions with some Wash
DC inner beltway types, someone at the IEA, and someone at the Fed, that ….they don't know what to do. from an an interesting short article over at the The Oil Drum. Not an article really, just a couple of lines, a comment, about the current economic situation and how to get out of it.  

It seems to me that there is no solution. We had an economy based on an unsustainable source of money: the constant increase in the worth of our homes and other assets. The well being of our country – our culture – has been based on spending more money than we made – than we had.

I think that the ramifications of this run deeper and stronger than we are willing to admit. Buying shit has become our major entertainment.

What we don't know what to do is how to do is how to bring the economy back without spending more money than we make  – again. The government can do that short term but there is a lot of resistance to doing it long term. We are already upside down because of our wars, among other things.

But even if we decided to continue to rack up the National Debt, I don't think we can do it enough and long enough to make a permanent difference.

Even if our massive unemployment – and it is much bigger than the official figures show – ended – let's say by magic – and everybody started spending money; we would still not be spending what we need  to be to bring the economy back to where it was before it crashed.

I suspect that this is the new normal and we had better get used to it.