The 395 and Owens Valley-Eastern Sierra Region

I think that was it.

 

So, to bypass the 395 mess - continue on the 15 North to D street - then get off and turn left on Airbase road ( go under the FWY and on turn at the signal) and go past the federal prison continue to 395 and turn right to go north. It turns at 395 at the ARCO in Adelanto.
Wham Bam on the way north!

 

https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/injured-hiker-california-second-highest-peak-20761363.php: "A woman who sustained a severe leg injury while climbing Mount Williamson alone was rescued last week in a dramatic two-day effort involving five helicopters, multiple state and federal agencies and several search and rescue personnel members, according to Inyo County Search and Rescue."

 

I do that route sometimes, but on the way home, the 15 is usually jammed thru Victorville so sticking to 395 is faster. Hell, sometimes going across Pearblossom and down Angeles Forest is faster than the 15 on a Sunday night!

Anyway... I was wondering, do you know the history of the massive abandoned housing development north of the prison / east of the airport? I assume is was gov't housing of some type. It shows open on street view but it was pretty thoroughly walled off last weekend. (I am trying to find some affordable housing.)

 

Crazy, always good to hear no further injury took place. I haven't done that trail but from what I've heard its pretty rugged, got to take a buddy for something like that.

 

Read about this. She's pretty lucky given she was nearly at the lift limits of the available resource.

Crazy is right!

 

The approach to Williamson is brutally long but is relatively an easy climb ….the only exception is the down-climb at the chute/chimney where it appears she fell. From what I researched it’s a blind down-climb (can’t see the foot holds). I planned a solo hike in the area a few years ago and decided then that a solo of Wiliamson was not doable because of that chute. Tyndall is the reasonable solo hike.
Glad to hear all ended well for the young girl …she sounds like a tough dood. Hope she can get back out there soon.

 

I often had my inreach in, or attached to, my pack. It noted she lost her pack.
Surprised they did not already know the elevation restrictions for the aircraft.

 

Sounds like in one instance, they did not have enough line to safely hover on one heli and altitude restrictions on the other. I'm not sure about altitude but it isn't just a fixed number. Density Altitude affects the heli's ability to lift and to maintain altitude (engine performance). Meaning a helicopter might be able to fly to 12,000 feet but if the air density is lower, it won't be able to generate the power required to climb to 12,000' and the blades will have less air to bite to hover/lift. Hope that helps.

In the motorcycle community, there's always been debate over where a beacon should be carried. I'm an "on my person" carrier.

 

Thanks that makes sense.

 

According to Wikipedia it was the base housing and since closing has been used in a handful of film productions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Air_Force_Base#Recent_history

Also the whole place is a superfund site, so maybe budget for bottled water when figuring out what monthly mortgage payment you can afford.

 

In 2007 The Darpa Grand Urban Challenge was held at George Airbase in the housing area. Me and my buddies got to drive the "traffic" cars around while the autonomous cars did their thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

 

Co-worker participated in one of the first. Pretty interesting.

 

Ah, DARPA, that precocious little toddler "helping" in the kitchen under the benevolent eye of a grandparent while the meal actually gets prepared by the rest of the adults in the household.

 

Dude, the grand challenge was fun times. I was too busy with an early career to participate, but I spent a few days with the UCLA team as they tuned their code at the Rose Bowl, preparing for the OG (off road) challenge. That Ram hauled ass -- and would have won, if not a pesky memory leak. If I recall, the final call to malloc() occurred with the wheel turned slightly left and the accelerator floored. Wish I still had a copy of the video!

 

They get involved in some pretty cool shit. We had a contract to develop cloaking cells for chips.

 

They do for sure, and I'm always hesitant to criticize anything that attempts to direct at least some military-industrial-complex funding towards smaller entities, but I've worked around DARPA (and IARPA) for a long time and there are a lot of well justified running jokes about them. They are basically their own mini-military-industrial-complex these days with a whole bunch of fairly inefficient small companies (usually run by ex-academics) that operate in an old-boys-network with the (typically) washed up academics that run the various DARPA/IARPA programs sending money to their old friends who now run said small companies. It is very incestuous and these smaller organizations are largely SBIR farming without producing anything that ever goes anywhere.

A number of businesses outside this network often try to crack into DARPA/IARPA funding but soon grow weary of it. Little flare-ups of sensibility periodically appear in DARPA/IARPA and you'll occasionally find an RFP that actually half way makes sense and wouldn't just be a waste of your time and your people. Since DARPA is very personality based usually more than one of these will center around a particular person at DARPA that's acting different from the typical DARPA management. But there are a few problems even then. One, usually that person doesn't last very long so the sensibility soon disappears with them. Two, often the insider SBIR farms saturate the RFP and naturally have a lot more practice at it even if they don't actually have the relevant technical experience. Three, a lot of first time DARPA proposers (i.e. outsiders) are conned into partnering with one of the SBIR farms to increase their odds of getting awarded an SBIR and this then dilutes whatever impact the outsider might have brought to the whole self-licking ice cream cone.

Now, the argument is often that we should assume that early cutting edge research is likely to not go anywhere, it is a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff by experimentation and prototype. Potentially true enough. The problem with DARPA/IARPA is that the majority of their programs are a priori failures. Even some of their broad focuses are a priori failures. There is no need to spend the money on many of these programs, they are known to fail or known to be utterly misdirected right from the start. (For example, the inane "biologically inspired" crap from a couple of decades ago that was all the rage at DARPA. Anyone with half a brain knew from the start that such a motivation was ridiculously misdirected, but the SBIR farms also knew that all they needed to do was hold their noses and write proposals around that topic and harvest the dollars with zero risk of accountability. Current vogue is a bunch AI/ML stuff that from the start we know will dramatically underperform classical solutions no matter how much money you throw at them.)

The fact that this has been true for at least the three decades I've operated around them screams that DARPA/IARPA has largely been failing in their mission for a long time. From what I've seen, and this is of course just my opinion from my experience, though also bolstered by a lot of people I've worked with observing the same thing, the root cause is probably the academic old boy network at the center of it. There is some extreme "not invented here" aspects to everything DARPA/IARPA. They wrap this in mindless aphorisms like "we are looking for revolutionary and not evolutionary" but the end result is an enormous amount of unnecessary waste largely lining the pockets of small businesses spun out of academia or disgruntled MIC employees. It's frustrating to watch and even more frustrating if you are forced to participate in it.

 

Sounds like you've done OK working around them. The work we started was funded for a little bit (like long enough to see inside the Kimono). DARPA has funded some pretty successful stuff. UAV's, micro machines, the Internet, GPS, and I'm sure a lot of other stuff I'm forgetting. Oh, Astrolube! Just kidding but that was something "discovered" in that whole MIC jungle. DARPA is more like an incubator--fund something for a short period and try and move it along. If it doesn't, oh well, maybe I'd argue it's more about high risk/reward. Take some money and spend it in places that might have a better chance. I don't doubt some would view it as waste and maybe it is but you can't deny much good has come from the process.

Speaking about MIC, I think consumers have benefited greatly from the ups and downs. Aftermarket parts--a lot of those guys came about when aerospace took a dump. Or GPS and other satellite/terrestrial based services. Cell phones and Satellite TV come to mind. DARPA funds medical imaging in ways that relate to battlefield diagnosis especially as it relates to TBI and that directly benefits patients as these technologies come to market.