Jacob had mentioned it before, but it wasn't until Trent and Todd started making plans to go snowshoeing and build a snow cave that I really decided that sleeping in a frozen hole sounded like fun. In the end Todd chickened out, and Jacob, Trent, and I set out for Dog Lake in Big Cottonwood Canyon with shovels and snowshoes on a beautiful Saturday morning. I'd never used snowshoes before, but even with a full pack it was pretty easy. The spikes on the bottom make it easy to get traction going uphill on the snow, and the only problem I had was in trying not to step on the other shoe as we traversed some narrow trails along the side of a hill. We were late getting out the door, but the trail was only around 2.5 miles and the slope was a pretty gentle rise. We made it to Dog Lake around 3:00, and hiked over a small rise to a more secluded spot overlooking what Jacob told us was a meadow in summer.

Jacob brought his new four-season tent with him as a backup, and he set it up at the bottom of the hill while Trent and I started to build the snowcave about halfway up the hill. None of us had ever tried building one of these before, so we were a little unsure of what to expect — especially since we had failed at building a snowman a few days before because the snow was too powdery to pack into balls. With that experience fresh in our memories, we were probably a bit over-cautious. We dug a large trench around the future site of the snowcave, piling the snow up to make a larger mound and simultaneously finding out how deep the snow was. It was nearly shoulder-deep, but the top layers seemed pretty powdery. After digging out the trench, Trent got on top of the mound and packed it down with his snowshoes, and we set to digging out the cave. The instructions we'd read for building snowcaves said to wait for a while to let the newly-mounded snow to settle and solidify, but we'd made it there late and didn't have a lot of time before it was dark, so we decided to start digging immediately and just leave the roof extra thick. Trent started the excavation, and made good progress digging the main tunnel. We dug uphill so that our cave would trap the rising warm air once we were inside, which was about all we could do since we were on the side of a hill. After a while I took a turn inside, and at first it was slightly unnerving — we were several feet into the snowbank at that point, and the tunnel was only about shoulder-width wide, so as I chopped out snow and sent it back behind me I often blocked the entrance and had to crawl back down and kick the snow far enough towards the opening for one of the guys to shovel it out. We had decided earlier that one shovel should stay outside the cave in case of a collapse — I wanted someone to be able to dig me out if I brought the roof down on my head.

One of the most surprising things about the snowcave was how effective the snow was at deadening sound. Once I was only a couple of feet inside the tunnel it was impossible to communicate with anyone outside. The snow absorbed all sound, and we often could still see the feet of the person digging but couldn't catch their attention no matter how loud we yelled. Vibrations traveled through the snow pretty well, though, and I could hear Trent walking on top of the snow pile with disturbing clarity at one point while I was digging inside. He was testing the thickness of the ceiling with a hiking pole, and managed to place it with remarkable precision, hitting me right in the chest while I dug inside on his first try. We tried to gauge the thickness, and decided that the snow wasn't going to be thick enough to have sitting space inside. The tunnel was following the slope of the hill, and we really wanted to sleep on a level surface, so from the main uphill shaft we dug three perpendicular person-length side shafts to serve as sleeping quarters.

We dug out an area at the entrance and piled the snow in a semicircular wall as a windbreak. By this time it was getting pretty dark, and we were hungry and cold so we started cooking dinner. We sat on our sleeping pads around my campstove in our makeshift vestibule, but the temperature was dropping and it was an uncomfortably cold dinner. We each made some hot soup — mine was dehydrated and didn't cook all the way, so it was pretty crunchy and disgusting, but it was hot and nourishing so I was happy to have it. Afterwards I was still cold so I made another pot of hot water and we each drank some, too tired and cold to bother making tea or hot chocolate. Trent's clothes were pretty wet, and he was really getting too cold. I had some extra long underwear that I lent him, but the idea of climbing in the cave had lost all appeal to him and he decided to test out the comforts of Jacob's tent. While he hauled his things to the bottom of the hill, Jacob and I worked on setting up our beds inside the cave. Since there was nowhere inside where the roof was more than about two feet high, it was a pretty difficult undertaking. I had two ground pads (I really wanted to be insulated from the snow), a bivy sack (since we figured the roof would be dripping by the time we woke up), and a sleeping bag, and getting it all arranged was a nontrivial task in such confined quarters. Eventually I managed to unroll the two pads, stuff the sleeping bag inside the bivy, and get myself inside. Since Trent wasn't sleeping in the cave, Jacob took the 'top bunk' all the way at the end of the main tunnel, and I took the 'middle bunk', and we used the lowest tunnel to hold our extra gear. We made air holes in each of the sleeping tunnels, and left a hiking pole in each to be able to clear them if they became blocked with snow. We had talked about lighting a candle inside, as we had read it would increase the inside temperature by as much as 20 degrees, but in the end decided that we were warm enough in our bags and didn't need it. We blocked the entrance to the cave with the tarps we had packed with us, and just chilled out and talked.

Once again I was amazed at how much the snow deadened sounds. Jacob's head was only about a foot away from mine, but if we ducked back in our tunnels just far enough not to see each other, we could barely hear if the other person shouted. At about 10:30 we decided to try sleeping. With the lights out in the cave it was absolutely dark. I slept pretty well at first, but eventually woke up because even with two ground pads, the snow I was sleeping on was rock hard. I slept on and off the rest of the night, but was pretty uncomfortable and didn't get that much total sleep. Night in the cave was bizarre — cinched up inside a mummy-style sleeping bag inside a bivy sack inside a tiny little snow tunnel, in the pitch black and dead silence, it was as close to a sensory deprivation tank as anything I'd ever experienced. By the time Jacob's alarm went off at 7:00, my hips and knees were bruised from pressure against the ground and I was ready to get up and move around. It was hard to get myself out of my warm sleeping bag, though, and getting my shoes on and my sleeping gear packed away was a difficult and cold task. I realized again how difficult camping in the snow can be — even the simplest tasks are a chore when you have to do them with numb fingers. My gloves had been wet from the day before, and now they were frozen solid and not providing much warmth. I had to pack a few things and then stick my hands down my pants to warm some feeling back into them, then pack a few more things.

Jacob went down and helped Trent take down the tent. Trent's night had been a little chilly, but he said he had been able to sleep fairly well. He said that there had been a good bit of wind, though, which Jacob and I definitely never heard. Eventually I organized my pack, and Jacob and I demolished the snow cave. Apparently it's illegal to leave a standing snow cave — I'm not sure who that is meant to protect. During the demolition we found that we would have had plenty of room to clear out a space to sit up, the ceiling of the cave was nearly four feet thick. We certainly didn't have to worry about it caving in on us.

It had started snowing on us while we were packing, and we were worried that the canyon road would be closed, trapping us at the jeep for a few hours while they cleared the road. We could hear them doing some avalanche blasting, which made us worry about it a bit more — so once we got our packs together, we hiked out pretty fast. The snowshoes I had (borrowed from Todd) were tearing my feet up — on the downhill slopes, they had a tendency to tighten up and tangle up on my feet, and I had a pressure point on each little toe that was being rubbed raw. In the end, though, the hike back was pretty easy, the road was open, and we booked it into town to get a good greasy diner breakfast.

I've been reading 'The Paradox of Choice', and it has me thinking about choices and happiness. I've often said that I just want someone to dress me. Even though it's true, I've felt that it was a shortcoming of mine--that I wanted to give up some of my autonomy. The more I think about it, though, the more I feel that the number of choices we have now can be overwhelming, and taking the time to make an informed decision on all of them is impractical. It is especially taxing for people who feel they need to make the best choice all the time. I don't think it's any kind of perfectionism that gets to me, though — it has something more to do with the fact that I have a hard time making 'routine' choices. I think it has something to do with the 'perception filters' I've often talked about. While my personal filters block out many items I really should take note of (usually anything involving people), they don't seem to filter out mundane choices. I still feel the need to make basic choices over and over again from scratch instead of just going with what I know.

This idea of choice overload fits in with Gilbert's ideas on happiness in 'Stumbling on Happiness'. We need some level of autonomy to be happy, but we think that more choices will always make us happier, even though this is clearly not the case. It has to be better to make informed choices about the few things we really care about, and just let the rest slide. I think these ideas can be pieced together more coherently, but at the moment I'm tired and I'm going to go to sleep.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable Memorial Day Weekend, though not quite how I had planned on it. I've wanted to go to Seneca Rocks for quite a while, as it's supposed to have some phenomenal rock climbing. I'd looked at some pictures online, and the huge ridge of rock running down the spine of a mountain in West Virginia looks imposing and exciting. Marina finally made Dave and me put a date to it, and we decided the three-day weekend gave us a good opportunity.

As usual, my planning was pretty minimal. We chose the location and reserved a couple of campsites, but until the date was looming close we didn't do much else. We had invited the crew from our area, and the boys from DC, and it looked like we were going to have a pretty good crowd. It sounded for a while like Devin was going to come out, so I'd have a climbing partner, and I ordered some gear online to get ready.

As the date got close, though, people started to cancel — at first we didn't mind, because we were limited by our two campsites to 16 people and a fairly small tent area, but it turned out to only be four of us coming from Hampton (Derek, Dave, Jeremy and me), plus Marina from Richmond and Jared and Beth from Charlottesville. John ended up having a commitment on Saturday, so he said he'd come out on Sunday, and Devin canceled, because it turns out Seneca Rocks is all trad climbing without many good places for bouldering or top roping. In addition, my gear didn't arrive before we left, so climbing was pretty much out. On top of that, I ended up having a late meeting scheduled, so instead of leaving at 3:00 as we had planned, we ended up leaving right at 5:00 in time to catch the Memorial Day Weekend rush hour.

Dave and Derek rode together and picked up Marina, and I picked up Jeremy and headed for West Virginia. As usual I didn't fully plan, and realized I didn't have the directions to the campground. I called Dave, and it turned out we were pretty near each other on the road, so I stopped and waited for him and Jared to catch up with me at a rest stop outside of Staunton. After that we all followed Dave, and after a bit of driving in circles in Harrisonburg, we ended up making our way to 33, which would take us over the mountains and into West Virginia.

We had just snaked our way along the two-lane road over the border of West Virginia when we came to a line of stopped cars. People were already out of their vehicles, so it was pretty obvious we weren't going anywhere any time soon. We waited for a while, and had a beer while we chilled out on the road, but we were told that the line of cars was at least a mile long, and that it was a forest fire blocking the road. After talking it over and consulting the atlas, we decided to try a back road that bypassed 33 for a while. Jared lead the way with Beth navigating, and soon we were on a tiny little two-lane road going through the George Washington National Forrest. After a while, the center line disappeared, and after winding up and around some more, it suddenly turned into a dirt road. Jared stopped, and we got out of our cars. but we realized the paved road continued around a very sharp corner up the mountain, so we kept on going. The road became a true one-lane road with turnouts every mile or so, which we would have had to use if we'd met another vehicle, as there was barely enough room on the road for one car. We went up and up some more, and suddenly the road ended in a large patch of pavement at the top of a bald peak. It was late (it was already after dark when we had turned around on 33), and the view was breathtaking (looking out in all directions over the GW National Forrest), so we decided to camp there for the night. There was a patch of grass and a fire ring, so we broke out the chairs and food, and Jeremy and I took a ride back down the road a ways and filled the trunk of the corolla with firewood, and we had a nice fire going in no time. Marina had made kabobs, so we roasted them and had a scrumptious camp dinner, and drank plenty of beer as we contemplated our good fortune. After a while a pair of locals showed up, who informed us that we were on Reddish Knob, the second-highest point in Virginia. We finished eating, chatting and drinking, and set up our tents and crashed out for the night.

When I woke up the next morning, the first thing everyone said to me was they couldn't believe I'd slept through all the excitement during the night. Apparently a group of local 20 year olds had come up around five in the morning and played their stereo at ground-shaking levels, hootin' and hollerin' and purposefully waking everyone up. Apparently no one got out of their tents to talk to them, but it kept everyone but me awake for quite a while — everyone could tell that I was asleep, though, because my snoring could be heard every time their music died down a bit.

We made breakfast, where Jared and Beth introduced us to 'biscuits on a stick', where Pillsbury instant biscuits are wrapped around a dowel and roasted over the fire. The hole that is made fits a sausage perfectly, and makes a breakfast far above the level of normal camp fare. After breakfasting and admiring the view for a while, Jeremy and I set out for a hike down a path we'd notices while gathering firewood the night before. It lead down the mountain a ways, and across a rock slide where we came across a downed power line and a large rattle snake. We went down far enough to find a branch in the trail where a sign showed that the two options just lead to different roads, presumably offering hiking access up to Reddish Knob. We hiked back up, and everyone was getting ready to leave. We broke camp, and after consulting a more detailed topographical map brought by a couple of early-morning explorers we encountered, decided to backtrack and try 33 again.

On the way down the mountain we met a group of thirty or more cyclists getting ready to go down the path Jeremy and I had hiked — I don't know if the rock slide was new or not, but I don't think it was going to be an easy ride for them. When we got back to the place where we had been stopped the night before on 33, we only found a small burned patch on the road — probably just a car fire, not a forest fire. Oh well, it gave us the opportunity to see Reddish Knob. We stopped in the town outside of Seneca Rocks and got a burger and supplies at a fast food restaurant / gas station, and a few more things at the local grocery store, and went on to the campground.

The campground was certainly nice, but of course a bit anti-climactic after Reddish Knob. The sites were located around the perimeter of a large field, with the center unmowed and filled with waist-deep grasses and plants. Each campsite had a picnic table and a 12'x13' tent pad, which was for some reason filled with compressed gravel. It was certainly level, and probably wasn't going to flood no matter how much it rained, but it was a bit hard to sleep on.

They were selling firewood, and there was some debate on whether or not to buy some, but I staunchly refused to pay for firewood, and over the course of the weekend trampled quite a path through the woods and thorn bushes to haul up logs. By the time we left it had become quite a long path, as I was trying to find logs large enough to burn for a while but which were dry enough to be broken down to fit in the fire ring without an ax, which we had forgotten.

The first afternoon we just hung around the campsite, ate and drank way too much, and went for a swim at a nearby stream (the swim mostly consisted of trying to wade across the fairly swift stream on the quite slick rocks, and falling in several times). We played some frisbee and told stories, and all and all had a nice relaxed day. At some point in the evening I realized I hadn't given John full directions, and none of us had cell phone service, so I went out to use a payphone. After unsuccessfully trying to use the one in the campground, I went to a nearby convenience store, where I had to come up with $2.25 in change to get three minutes of time to talk to John. I managed to get him, though, and he said he'd be out the next day.

After getting the fire started and cooking breakfast the next morning, I got everyone moving for the hike to Seneca Rocks as fast as I could so we could get back by the time John arrived. We had found the path to the rocks the day before while looking for a place to go swimming, and the sign said it was only 1.5 miles to the rocks. I wasn't sure where exactly the path lead, but I wanted to hike it no matter what. Derek came along, and the hike was a bit hard for him, but we all made it to the top, where there was a viewing platform. The view was nice, but I couldn't see the rocks anywhere. I was getting a bit disappointed, when I realized that the path kept going up the mountain. It turned out that we were at the top of the rocks, and we were able to climb out on them and get spectacular views of the area, the rocks, and the climbers climbing up some of the spires not accessible by hiking.

After coming back down everyone wanted to go swimming, but Jared and Beth hadn't brought their swimming clothes, so I rode back with them to the campsite to make sure John hadn't arrived yet, and then we went back and got another swim in. By the time we went back to the campsite John was just arriving, so we hung out with him, played some more frisbee, and ate and drank some more (it was quite a weekend of binging). Everyone was pretty tired, though, so it wasn't a very late night.

The next morning we made another breakfast of fire-roasted biscuits and egg-hotdog-potato mixture, and slowly broke camp. Jeremy and I wanted to see Seneca Caverns, which we had passed signs for on the way out, but everyone else had to get back home. We decided to go anyway, and got to climb around in a nice little cave, and see the 'stratosphere stalagmite', and a frozen hibernating bat.

All in all I guess we didn't do all that much, but it was a really enjoyable trip. Not too hectic (really the antithesis of hectic), fun, and with a tidbit of adventure. I'm going to have to bug Marina and Beth for a copy of the pictures they took — it was definitely a weekend I want to remember.

If religious ideas are taken away, what constitutes a 'good life'? A lot of people seem to think that without the threat of postmortem punishment, we would all be utterly selfish, hedonistic beings. I'm sure there are psychopaths for which this is true, but in the end religion often doesn't keep them in line anyway. For the majority of humanity, religion is just a way to externalize our internal empathetic feelings. We automatically feel for those suffering, and feel good when we are able to help. The issue is that from a non-religious perspective, how much should we help others? Should we only help them when doing so will make us feel better? Is there really a reason to do anything that doesn't maximize our overall happiness?

That last part may be the key. There are many things that I do that don't make me immediately happy. Often I would rather go for a jog than go to work, or watch TV rather than go for a jog. I don't go to work because I believe God wants me to, I do it because I know in the end it will make me happier than the instant gratification of sitting around watching Star Trek reruns.

When someone thinks about living a 'good life', they think of being old and looking back at their lives as a whole. Most people want to be able to say they made the world a better place, achieved some success, but didn't cheat others. I don't know if this is actually how we judge our lives, or if it is even how we should judge our lives(1). If we accept this, though, it makes sense that we would help others even when it doesn't make us happy now, or even in the near future, in order to maximize our overall happiness.

(1) I'm not sure this is the best criteria for maximizing happiness because it may only be what makes us happy towards the end of our lives. Perhaps a blend of increasing current happiness without completely sinking our future prospects for joy is more appropriate. In any case, what we now think will make us happy when we are old may not be correct at all.

Are personalities genetic or learned? Is it possible to alter yourself in any meaningful way, or is it better to learn to accept yourself? Even if you do manage to change, was the ability to do so predestined by your nature? Is there such a thing as 'free will'?

As a society (and beyond American or even Western society, as far as I can tell), we certainly seem to believe that free will exists. It is a founding concept of our laws and ideals — "all men are created equal", personal responsibility, and so on. Even though most studies show that genetics are a far better predictor of success than environment, we refuse to believe that control does not lie within each of us. This may be one of the mental blocks we erect to protect our fragile egos — self-determination is one of the basic prerequisites for happiness, and we will come up with grand delusions to convince ourselves of our 'power to choose' if it is not really there.

Imagine for a second the consequences of a purely deterministic universe — no one is responsible for their actions, be them wonderful or terrible. Murderers aren't responsible, their genetics are. Saints are only good because they were programmed to be so. It certainly seems like society would collapse if this idea were embraced.

Of course, then there are the Calvinists, who believed in predestination (the religious flavor of determinism), and yet were some of the most pious of religious zealots, attempting to show that they were destined for salvation and heaven by displaying outwardly their internal predestined salvation. So perhaps society isn't as fragile as we make it out to be, and perhaps the ideas we hold only affect the outcome by a marginal amount — is that free will, or just noise in the system