Nancy’s Blog

Relaxed attention

Originally uploaded by NVH

For other Meerkat Manor fans out there — I went to visit the Oakland Zoo’s meerkats.  More on my Flickr site.

ZoneTag Photo Sunday 11:59 am 12/2/07 Berkeley, California

Originally uploaded by NVH

A “onesie” I embroidered for Ansel Chan, Steve and Anya’s iSchool baby.

Billy and Lucy contemplate

Originally uploaded by NVH

Watched part of a dramatic rescue in Yosemite Thursday. Find nothing about it on Yosemite site, Fresno Bee, or blog search.

UPDATE 5/24/07: Here’s a blog post from one of the participants. More serious than we knew: he was bleeding profusely. They lowered 2 rescuers with the litter, and then decided that it would take too long to lower him, so they did use the copter to rescue him. Amazing, given how close to the rock wall the copter would have had to be.

So here’s my understanding of what happened. Some of this I know, some was conjecture among the people watching from the meadow below, one of whom was wearing NPS volunteer cap and had a radio (NPS-V below), and seemed knowledgeable. He said they were keeping radio silence — my guess is, to avoid attracting tourists. Those of us watching had driven past and noticed 3 helicopters and numerous emergency vehicles parked in the area where people stop to watch El Cap climbers.

My pics are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nvh/sets/72157600231353460/. I had my Canon S2IS set at max resolution, on a tripod. Since Flickr shows them in reverse order, best way to follow the story is to look at the set, which I rearranged in chronological order. Reviewing the images now, at large size, I can see a lot more than I could through the viewfinder.

A climber had suffered an “open femur fracture,” i.e. no way he was going up or down on his own. I never figured out which group had the injured climber - there were many climbing groups on the face, as is often the case at this time of year. We heard that they were all asked to stay in place. We did see some movement which we surmised to be some climbers already on the face joining the rescue, but remember that all these ledges are tiny – when climbers sleep overnight on El Cap, they use hammocks hung from the face because there’s no room to stretch out.

A California Highway Patrol helicopter made a reconnaissance run, hovering for some time very close to the climbers. Then came back to the meadow. PS-V said that hovering like that heats up the engine and helicopters can’t do it for long.

The CHP helicopter then went back and hovered close to the wall, and lowered a stretcher and, apparently, an EMT with it. We couldn’t really see the stretcher arrive (remember we’re talking a great height — I didn’t have binoculars, was using the zoom on my camera) but see the image above, clearly a stretcher being lowered with a person. This is amazing – the helicopter had to be right up against the rock, and had to drop the stretcher and person to a tiny ledge that barely stuck out from the rock face.

None of my pictures, unfortunately, show clearly where the stretcher ended up. My guess is the group on the point, but I’m not sure. And I don’t know where the injured person was — it’s possible that the stretcher and EMT were lowered to a more accessible ledge above the injured person.

The CHP helicopter then returned to the meadow, without the injured party.

Another helicopter took off, one NPS-V identified as NPS or US Forest Service. It was a much smaller copter, so it couldn’t have held many people. It disappeared behind El Cap, presumably landing on top. Stayed for quite a while, then left.   We in the meadow surmised that the plan was for rescuers to rappel down from the top of El Cap to help lower the injured climber.   UPDATE: it did take rescuers to the top to rappel down, but the climber was bleeding too badly to wait for that.  It’s possible that the climbers already on the scene would have done this, but they’re not likely to be trained to do this and that wouldn’t explain why the 2nd copter went to the top.

At this point, I left, figuring the rest of the rescue would be a long, slow process.  UPDATE: turns out it wasn’t — they had to get him out of there fast, and rescued him via copter. Amazing flying.

Anno, tearing her hair out

Originally uploaded by NVH.

At the iSchool party at CHI. More pictures on Flickr — click thru from this pic.

UPDATE 5/5/07: I’ve gone back and photoshopped a lot of the images, to improve them.

Mount Hood, from the air

Originally uploaded by NVH.

Bloglines’ new Image Wall:

Bloglines indexes zillions of pages every hour — and just as many images. The Bloglines Image Wall picks up these images as they come in and places them into a constantly updated grid.  You’ll never see the Wall the same way twice - in fact, it changes right before your eyes.

From Patti Bao, who is working on a project studying Flickr with me :

I just stumbled across this site: www.isthisyou.co.uk - where the site owners have been collecting photos from booths and streets and are looking to reunite them with their owners.  Think there’s a Flickr equivalent?  So far I’ve only managed to find this ( http://www-us.flickr.com/groups/foundphotos/) and that (http://www-us.flickr.com/groups/33289933@N00/), but neither of them are quite like Is This You?…

Anybody?

http://nancyv.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/395581287_a4b34b1162.jpg

Lucy’s favorite channel is Animal Planet

Originally uploaded by NVH.

Animal Planet’s counter-Superbowl programming was a day (not just a few hours) of Puppy Bowl III. The hafltime show was the Kitty Show.  Yes, she does watch TV.  Chases things that move on the screen.