I've been working on the Ventana 15 Peaks list off and on for about half a decade. 
One of the more difficult summits on that list is Pinyon Peak, a remote highpoint situated in the deep wilderness a few miles behind Junipero Serra.

Junipero Serra Peak

Junipero Serra itself is a 12 mile outing with a reasonably hefty elevation gain.  From the JSP summit, one then follows an old abandoned roadbed until it gradually dissapears as it decends into Bear Canyon.  The descent into the canyon and subsequent climb to the Pinyon/Bear ridgetop are a brutal chapparal bushwack along the faded remains of an ancient roadbed.  Once the ridge is gained, one must then plow through 2 miles of overgrown trail to reach the Pinyon summit.

2 years (and 1 day) ago, I made my first attempt at the traverse from JPS to Pinyon.  I had no real expectations of making the peak that day, but was planning on scouting out the route and determining the feasibility of a summit bid.  Much to my suprise and by complete coincidence, I ran into another party deep in the wilderness.  This group, led by Dave McMillan, had taken several trips over several seasons to scout, tag, and prune the old route to Pinyon.  I tagged along with them as far as Bear Mountain, but turned back as it was too late for a summit bid.  (Dave and company, who had camped midway, continued onto the peak and were thus the first known party to summit Pinyon since the road was reclaimed by the wilderness)

Now armed with first hand knowledge of the route and taking advantage of this weekend's full moon, I headed out for a second attempt.

Pinyon Peak

This ended up being one of the longest and nist exhausting outings I'd ever undertaken- 24 total miles (12 on established trails, ~8 on forest roads/firebreaks of varying conditions, and probably 3-4 miles of chapparal bushwack), 8500 feet of elevation gain, and 20 total hours on the trail.

Pics and trip report are here

2 more Ventana peaks to go- Kandlebinder and Black Cone.  (I've attempted Kandlebinder twice prior and not yet taken a stab at Black Cone.  Hope to get to both of those this year)

Hard to believe that its been a year since I broke my ankle and its hard to describe how much of a defining moment a serious leg injury is on ones life.

While nowhere near back to 100%, the ankle is more or less back to normal for day to day activities.  On the trail, it will start to ache after about 10 miles and will tend to swell for a couple days after an outing. 

For an anniversary, I went back to Yosemite Valley for the first time since the injury and did the hike that got interrupted when I got hurt.  Here I am sitting on the same rock that I occupied for 2 hours while waiting for the SAR team a year ago.  (Wearing the same shirt even- the pants got cut off prior to the surgery).  I opted to avoid the specific route down the rock that caused the mishap.

It was an absolutely beautiful day to be in Yosemite and good to be back.  The waterfalls were in full flow and my travels today took me past most of them.  I did the basic Nevada Falls loop (Up the Mist trail and down the JMT) with side trips to visit Sierra Point and to summit Liberty Cap.

The full set of pics (took a ton today) are here.

I've been looking around for some new "Spring Training" hikes and decided (almost on a whim) to go finally take a look at Mt Diablo.  Somehow I've lived in the Bay Area for a decade and have never even driven up to the Diablo Summit.

Matthew Holliman had posted a route on summitpost (here) that looked intriguing- a loop hike that tagged Mt Diablo itself and 3 surrounding high points- Eagle Peak, North Peak, and Mt Olympia.  (I opted to skip the class 3 scramble that he included in his route and took the slightly longer and slightly saner trail from North Peak to Mt Olympia)

Here's the elevation profile of the route:

I got the workout I was looking for- This may be the most brutally graded hike I've seen outside of the Sierras.
There's stuff in Henry Coe and the Ventanas that comes close, but you'll not see anything like 7 miles of sustained uphill with this grade.

The weather was near perfect for hiking (though unfortunately whats good for hiking isn't good for visibility) and we are near the peak (of an admittedly miserable) wildflower season.

Pics and trip report are here.

Long, long, long overdue cleaning of my garage this afternoon. 

Simply frightening how many pairs of dirty hiking socks I managed to accumulate. 

As some of you have noticed, the site has been down for the past few days.  I've been tending to the long overdue task of upgrading my home server.  (If you're here looking for my latest backcountry outing, you should probably skip down a post- this is going to get geeky)

The upgrade was more of a strip-and-rebuild, as I only kept my case, DVD drive, and one of the IDE drives from my current system.  The remaining parts are going to be reassembled into a PC for my brother.

Here's the pile 'o parts prior to unpacking everything:

The new stuff included the following:

Asus P5N32-E SLI Motherboard: nVidia 680i chipset.  The tagline on the box touts this product as "Heart Touching", witch seems a bit unlikely
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600:  My first Intel chip this decade.  Nice to see them finally producing something price/performance competitive with AMD
2×500mb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm SATA drives:  Amazing how cheap a terabyte is these days.  Arranged the disks in a RAID mirror, so the 2nd drive is effectivly a backup.  Carried the 250mb IDE drive over from my old server
2×1G Corsair XMS 800mhz DDR26400 RAM:  One of these sticks turned out to be bad and I'm having it replaced
PC Power Silencer 750w Power Supply:  Old supply didn't have the SATA and SLI connectors and was a bit underpowered.
EVGA 8800 GTS Video Card
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 CPU Heatsink
Soundblaster XFi Fatal1ty Soundcard
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (System Builder Edition)
Logitech MX3200 wireless keyboard/mouse

Everything stripped out of the old system (including an alarming amount of dust) and the new power supply and motherboard mounted:

Getting ready to install the CPU and heatsink.  SATA drives now installed. The SATA cables were much easier to run than the IDE connectors.  I would have to remove one of the two IDE drives, as the motherboard only came with a single IDE port.  I went and got a new cable so I could connect both the DVD drive and the remaining IDE drive to the single IDE connection- the standard cable wouldn't reach both at the same time. 

First boot of the new system. Graphics card now installed
(initially forgot to run the SLI power line to the graphics card)

The Vista upgrade took a bit longer than the hardware- much of the software I'm running isn't quite compatible with Vista yet.  (Not terribly impressed with Vista at the moment, and wondering if I should have just stuck with XP) 

Anyhow, things should now be back up…

I was looking for a lengthy conditioning hike to start off 2007 so I decided to revisit one of my favorite routes in the Ventana Wilderness. 

My ankle held up remarkably well. I did this one sans-ankle brace and didn't have any significant pain (other than blisters on my non injured foot)  This was my first 25+ mile outing since my injury.

("La Ventana" as seen from the Ventana Double Cone summit)

Pics and commentary are here.

Looking through the server logs as another year draws to a close:

Highlights:

• fedak.net had 267k user page views in 2006.  This was an 18% increase over 2005.
• Robot page views increased a whopping 58% and now account for half the overall site traffic
• 40k access attempts were blocked from IP addresses of known spammers
• RSS readers now account for 6% of the site traffic
• Google generated 17,000 referrals to the site, Yahoo 1,700 and MSN 277
• June was the busiest month, Mondays the busiest weekday, and noon is the highest traffic hour

Most viewed individual photos:

1. Pico Blanco Map  (frequent comment spambot target)
2. Lake Wilma Trailsign (another spambot target)
3. Half Dome Cables (linked to from the Whitney Portal Store board)
4. My Broken Ankle (sigh)
5. Tents near Guitar Lake (linked from a tarp tent thread on Backpacker.com)
6. Clouds Rest/Half Dome from Clouds Rest 
7. Emigrant Backpack Map
8. Half Dome from Clouds Rest
9. Hetch Hetchy Backpack Map
10. Broken Ankle Splint

Most viewed photo albums:
(Curiously, with the exception of my broken ankle album none of these were from 2006) 

1. Pico Blanco (1709 views)
2. Broken Ankle (1531 views)
3. Clouds Rest & Half Dome (1221 views)
4. Emigrant Wilderness Backpack (968 views)
5. Hetch Hetchy Backpack (804 views)
6. Mount Dana (780 views)
7. Ventana Double Cone (710 views)
8. Hetch Hetchy Waterfalls (703 views)
9. Lost Coast Trail (687 views)
10. Kaiser Peak (679 views)

Top key phrases from search engine referrals:

1. fedak 
2. clouds rest
3. lost coast trail
4. kaiser wilderness
5. john fedak
6. wapama falls
7. junipero serra peak
8. chilnualna falls
9. cloud's rest
10. ventana double cone

The Hundred Peaks Section of the Sierra Club refers to the McKinley/San Rafael/Santa Cruz trio as the "HPS Big 3".  All three can be reached out of the Cachuma Saddle trailhead near Los Olivos, CA.  They are doable as a long (~30+ mile) day hike but usually summited as part of a 2 or 3 day backpack trip.

This was my 5th trip to the area and I've had some unfortunate luck with the weather over the years.  On my 1st trip, trailhead access was blocked by the closure of Happy Canyon Road.  (I found out later that there is a back entrance to the trailhead via Figuroa Mountain Road).  No hiking that day.

My second trip was my only summertime visit and my successful summit of Santa Cruz Peak- the most remote of the 3 peaks.

On my third trip it started raining after about an hour and conditions gradually worsened as the day progressed, getting to the point were I was having a difficult time seeing through the rain.  I ended up turning back about halfway to McKinley Springs. (No pics from that trip, the camera I had at the time got wet and never functioned again).   To top off the miserable day, I returned to the trailhead to find that I had left my car's sunroof wide open.

My most recent attempt was earlier this year when I ran into snow starting near McKinley Spring. 

Yesterday was a bit better than the last two trips.  No snow and it held off raining until the last couple of hours.  Unfortunately, The ridge was once again completely enveloped in clouds and visibility was about 20 feet for most of the day.  Despite the weather I was finally able to summit the remaining two HPS Big 3 peaks.  This turned out to be somewhat of a disappointing accomplishment as both peaks were completely whited out.  I think I used up my luck on my Post Summit trip when the clouds miraculously cleared for the 1/2 hour I was on the peak.

Pics and more commentary: here

Got a packet of photos in the mail today from my brother from last month's Southen California trip.
He apparently had taken a picture every time I stopped to take a leak.

I've been meaning to get around to hiking Mission Peak for half a decade now, so when Tom Mangan proposed a Thanksgiving Day outing (and Dan Mitchell suggested making it a sunrise attempt) I decided to tag along.

I was the first to arrive at the trailhead at about 5am.  It was quite dark and I realized that I had left my headlamp back at home.  Since I had time I headed back down to Mission Blvd and found a Safeway that was open and picked up a flashlight.  (And a bonus- The Safeway had a Starbucks kiosk).  Dan and Tom C were the next to arrive, followed by Tom Mangan a short time later. 

The hike itself was more or less straight uphill through an active cow pasture.  The darkness gradually dissipated and we beat the sun to the peak by about 15 minutes.  Unexpectedly (by me at least) cold and windy at the summit.

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Tom's far more eloquent writeup is here and Dan's much better photos are here.
My pics are here.