I think you had to wait long enough to get the first non-Facebook pictures from my new home, Santa Barbara. So here's a short report from overseas on my first impressions, small and big adventures from my new home located on a narrow strip between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific ocean.
First of all, it is a great place with an unbeatable climate that combines both the mountains and the sea...
... and additionally a small picturesque, colonial, and a little provincial town:
Even though I arrived late in the middle of the night, I was warmly welcome by my landlady/roommate Lynn in my new house. Since Lynn is an artist, everything, even though simple, was very chique, such as the kitchen.
On my first weekend in SB, Karl, Fritz, and Jordan took me out to Gibraltar and showed me the local sandstone walls.
I guess, after this first impression, that I ended up at the right place! Besides the probably best university (in control), SB additionally offers the mountains, the sea, and rocks all at once :)
My very first investment (on my first day) was a mountain bike and so I ended up using the public bus systems exactly once and never ever again.
Of course, the mountain bike paid off immediately, not only when cycling to university and for everyday life. As you may know, SB is renown to be one of the best biking spots all over North America (add year-round perfect weather and at least 1000m of relative altitude gain), and so I started to discover trails
and climbing spots all over town and the surrounding mountains. Among the various boulder opportunities, were artificial rock such as this one including the nurses :),
but also really picturesque, scenic, and high-quality boulder areas, such as
Lizzard's Mouth! To be honest, the rock quality and quantity can by far not mess with Fontainebleau, Ticino, Magic Wood etc., but the view is definitely unbeatable!
And of course, there are also lots of fun problems with tiny crimps
big jugs in steep terrain,
and slopery top-outs.
I quickly made friends with some other climbers I met, such as Mary
and Rob, with whom I have tried this particular problem multiple times.
Besides lots of fun, high, and scary top-out boulders,
Lizzard's Mouth also offers some fun and juggy traverses, of course always with picture-perfect view!
Unfortunately, my finger tips weren't used to such grainy sand stone after my long South America travel. Consequently, I came home as follows, everyday:
But luckily, there's "utterly smooth" and my hands quickly got used to tender rock embracements :D
For those of you less interested in the local bouldering and climbing scene, I attached some pics of Santa Barbara downtown, the most expensive real estate market of North America.
I guess you can understand why people so much like to build their mansions here. Some pics from the SB street life, the touristy main street
a concrete Skateboard park next to the ocean,
and the famous and even more toursity Santa Barbara pier, home of the artists, gourmets and tourists :)
While talking about gourmet food, you know everything in the U.S. comes in little bigger portions, right? So once, Lynn brought me "a piece" of salmon home of the size of my MacBook.. . well somebody's gotta cook and eat it :D
By the way, the main reason why I am here is, of course(!), my PhD at the University of Santa Barbara, within the world's probably best group on
control and dynamical systems. I am here in great group led by
Francesco, which is mostly working on motion coordination, autonomous agent systems, and network control. After little less than two months now, I have a great connection with all the other students and we have a fun time in the lab. By the way, here's my place in the "motion café". Do you recognize the Mate tea, the climbing harness, and the bike?
So that's where I spend most of my time during the day, and afterward I usually go for a short bouldering session into nearby (by bike 45 minutes uphill) Skofield park. Do you see how sweaty my back is from the ride ;)
Whenever, I don't spend my time doing research or climbing, I try to go on road trips. No, you will here now nothing about climbing (all of the climbing trips come in a separate post), but about an excursion to
Death Valley.
With me were Dimi, Giuseppe, and Ruggero, who I knew from the university. We arrived late in the evening and camped high above death valley that night, because our next day brought us up to the high mountains surrounding the valley.
Starting from dry and clear forest, we pleasantly strolled (or hiked) along a ridge
until we encountered the first snow high above the
Death Valley! Yep, zoom a little into the pic below and you will see the salt flats (with zero rain all year long) roughly 3.500m below us. What a spectcular contrast!
Finally, after endlessly traversing ridge, we made it to Telescope Peak. And again, what a fantastic contrast, especially if you consider the enormous elevation difference of the snow covered peak to the bottom of Death Valley!
Here you can see Ruggero fighting up the last steep meters throughthe slushy snow, eventually we all made it ;)
The mandatory picture break took a little longer since Dimi is a hobby photographer as well as a computer vision researcher:
A little bit exhausted, hungry, and sunburned we started our quick descent which brought us from 3.400m in the snow to
-100m in the sand !
Death Valley, located way below sea level and surrounded by mountains that are up to 3.500m high. Can you imagine how hot it is down there? To be honest, it felt really good after the cold and windy hike, even though our heads hurt from the elevation difference.
Mother nature provided us a spectacular sun set at the end of a fun day full of extremes.
The next day I got up and had a sand grain in my eye, which decided to stay there for seven hours. Damn! But I still enjoyed the day, which started with the opposite perspective as the day before - deep down in salt flats of
Death Valley looking up to
Telescope Peak.
Since, I have just been to
Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, this was not really impressive, but alright - once again in a salt flat :)
What else is there to do deep down in the hottest point of North America?
Well, there is some hiking through gorges shaped by yearly floods (seriously, even if you don't believe it),
of course you can take pictures of really colorful contrasts,
look for the few existing wild life in the valley,
and there is some scenic driving - America's favorite sport :)
As you see, this was a rather touristy day and it ended where most road trips in the South West end, in the In&Out in Barstow :) Do you remember, Tom, Andi, and Hansi? Eventually, I got also that sand grain out of my eye that killed my day. A final picture from the closest point to hell, where the ground cracks up to release the incredible heat from within:
Back in Santa Barbara ealy in the morning (just take a look at my hair and you will see). I am once again high up on the mountains and above the morning fog from the ocean.
What I am doing here? Bouldering some laps, correct!
I still didn't tell you why my favourite bouldering area is called
Lizzard's Mouth, right? Well, obviously there are lots of these little climbing mutants, but the main reason is
simply a giant lizzard's mouth, which offers optimal climbing terrain and a picturesque background for photos.
Here I am on the longest undercling traverse ever - the fun Meille traverse low above the ground.
And there's still a lot more to be discovered in pocket wonderland!!!
As you see, studying in Santa Barbara is a little bit like being in an outdoor paradise. There's just one thing disturbing the idyll...
and that is the occasional wildfire looming on the mountains and threatening the town. This picture is taken from the local newspaper. At the beginning the fire was quite smallish and seemed harmless, but the local "sundowner" winds fanned it more'n'more. I thought it was pretty scary, even though most other people did take it as one of the usual summer fires.
That's what it looked like from university:
But luckily, Arnold organized fire trucks from all over the state, and, with the help of the "June gloom" (morning fog), the firefights managed to get the fire under control.
Eventually, they extinguished it sooner or later. However, a good part of Santa Barbara's hiking, climbing, and biking terrain is burned now and we have to see how long it takes mother nature to regrow it again.
Let's change the topic. One weekend, we went to L.A. to the Dogers baseball game:
Honestly, if there is no home run, then baseball is a pretty boring game, especially, if it takes 12 innings. So we left a little earlier from the stadium, enjoyed the view of downtown L.A.,
and went to Sandra's favorite Libanese restaurant in Santa Monica. Mmmm, yummy!
What else do we do here in Santa Barbara besides studying (in fact that is 90% of the time) and rock climbing? As you may well know, my university here got voted "hottest university of the U.S." by some well-known billboard magazine. So there are college parties going on all the time and everywhere! Occasionally there are also grad student parties, such as the one here:
So honestly, what is better than a keg'n'pool party in sunny Southern California?
Nothing, right? And people just went crazy. At a later time point, some people even jumped off naked(!) of the roof.
Too bad, I don't remember all the details from the evening... but it was kind of fun, for sure! I also discovered my brother's all time favorite game here, Bing ;)
Looks like lot of fun, right? And somebody even gives all these guys a doctor title :)
As promised (a long time ago), Hansi showed up to visit me, or rather, he picked me up to work with him in Magic Mountain, Santa Clarita.
What did we do there? Well driving around the Batmobile in Sixflags...
and setting up a pipe and some other structures for a summer show there.
It was fun to meet Hansi again, and to do some physical work again (no, not the same as exercise). I mean, somebody gave me a diploma in Mechanical Engineering ;)
Finally the pipe was all set (pay attention to the roller coaster in the background)!
And so I and Hansi got our well-deserved Hofbräu beer after work :)
Speaking of German beer, I found a little Bavarian island between Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez. Right behind the bouldering areas, there's the cold springs tavern,
which feels a little bit like being home in a Bavarian hut!
Well, a little bit ;)
So after you saw now many climbing, partying, hiking, and travelling pictures, you may ask yourself: "Isn't this guy living at the ocean?" Yes, indeed I am, but so far I always avoided the ocean, except for running at the beach. But when Oliver offered me a little cruise with his Catamaran, I could not resist but join him. So that was my first contact with the sea...
Other than that, I rather stick to research, climbing, and cycling in my little academic paradise!
So, I hope this short blog gave you a fairly good impression of what I am doing here. The next post will be about some climbing excursions to the local Californian rocks!
So stay tuned!
