[pct-l] Half-Plank-length maps and waypoints

[greg mushial]

> Message: 15
> Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:42:42 -0800
> From: Scott Williams <baidarker at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [pct-l] Half-Plank-length maps and waypoints
> To: David Thibault <dthibaul07 at gmail.com>
> Cc: pct-l at backcountry.net
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTikc2owWB15tOe=Z6yxJjqD3aJc+8r7UhykvbBhA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Talk about geeks, the trail is full of them.  Two lovely elderly ladies 
> who
> follow the trail and are angels part of the year, were giving us a ride 
> from
> Idyllwild in a big van full of dirty thru hikers last year.  They had just
> read an article that claimed that the average education level of a PCT 
> thru
> hiker was a masters degree.  I asked the 6 hikers in the van what their
> education was and we had a lawyer, a doctorate degree, 2 masters and 2 
> BA's.
> So yah, your going to be hiking with some very geeky people.  The trail is
> crawling with them!  Well, they crawl when they've got giardia, no matter
> what their degree.  Underneath all that geek they're just dirty hiker 
> trash!
>
> Shroomer

They're the ones that make enough, hence able to save enough to take 6 
months off; they're the ones for whom hiking 2650 miles is an appropriate 
contrast to their daily pointy-headedness; and they're likely the ones that 
aren't working nominal 40 hrs weeks, ie, while one is taking data during an 
experiment one is working 100 hr weeks, but btwn experiments or while the 
generated data is being crunched (15 petabytes, and a year later), they can 
escape "unnoticed" for multiple months. One also sees this effect in big mtn 
climbing - on Sagarmatha in '86 we had 14 PhDs out of 18 members - Econ to 
IT to physics to microbiology - dinner conversations in spite of the 
altitude and the desire to simply stare at one's food, this many years later 
are still as memerable as the actual climbing.
TheDuck