OlinPatterson.com

Its been forever since I have blogged, but I have stayed busy doing as much adventuring as possible.

A few weeks ago a good friend of mine and myself ventured out into the great Southwest Desert to hunt down this turn of the century abandoned mine and small one bedroom abode. We left early in the morning after sleeping on the side of the interstate and basically bouldered our way to a coordinate point I had in my GPS. After several hours and lots of cactus pricks, we came upon this amazing piece of history. A perfectly perserved home built into a partial cave with brick and mortar pieced to protect the shelter from the elements. The inside still had firewood prepped for the space heater that rest near the bed and mason jars on the shelves. About a quarter mile from the home we came across the incredibly eerie mine. I can’t imagine a life of solitude of living in such a place, let alone with working in the confines and danger of a desert mine.

We enjoyed a nice lunch in the solitude and headed back down to the interstate by sunset. It was an incredible hike!

In a few short years, the International Surf Lifesaving Association went from a small idea we spent a summer working on in the confines of my sailboat, to a dynamic organization that has ongoing relationships across the United States and in five countries around the world. We hope to continue to grow and be a dynamic force in providing medical supplies and a world class volunteer force of lifeguards to areas of the world in need.

In the past couple months our teams have been in Ecuador and Nicaragua and have returned from enormously successful trips. As the busy season for lifeguarding comes to Southern California, ISLA will be focusing it’s resources on providing community service to those in need in our own community.

This month is Pay it Forward month and in an effort to be able to continue to supply resources to programs within our own community, ISLA has put together a short video in hopes of winning $7000 dollars by ABC’s Pay it Forward Contest to continue their efforts of serving Southern California.

Take a look at ISLA’s Pay it Forward Video for ABC 7 Eyewitness News and learn more about the ABC 7 Eyewitness News Pay It Forward Contest.

check out more at visualade.com

I had my eye on Visualade for the past couple years and always have been in love with the work they do and the incredible designs they continuously produce. It had always been a dream to work at a firm like visualade and something I had in the back of my mind for many months.

After a few great referrals from a dear friend of mine, a couple months of getting together with some of the people at the firm, and finally being able to meet the entire team through some interviews – I got a letter one day offering me a position… I was ecstatic, thrilled and very nervous about the opening, but accepted the opportunity as a dream come true.

I’m three weeks into my tenure at visualade, and so far its going great. I am constantly blown away at their grasp of web and the interactive technology that’s hidden behind their award-winning design. I am constantly on my feet learning so many new things, and the best part is that it is only a ten minute walk down beautiful Broadway Avenue in downtown Long Beach to get to work.

I look forward to many great things at the company and towards the relationships I am building with this amazing group of people. I see some big opportunities in the very near future… Now I just hope they like me enough to keep me!

Check out visualade and be ready for great things ahead.

A nice walk to work.

Oh Yeah, and stay in the loop by joining Visualade on Facebook and Twitter… or by following them on LinkedIn.

Tim Cully on the Mt. Baldy summit.

Above the tree line – felt like the moon.

Devil’s Backbone.

I decided to make an attempt to hike the 10,064 ft summit of Mt. Baldy (formally known as Mount San Antonio) at about 9 pm the previous evening. I made a phone call to my good friend Tim Cully to send out an invite and by 11 pm, I had a confirmed party of 2, my bag packed and a 5am wake up call all set for the Mt Baldy ascension.

It rained on the way to the trail head the following morning. Fortunately, at an elevation of about 5000 feet on the mountain road, we burst through the clouds into a gorgeous Spring day. It was as though this perfect day was awaiting us all along and my worries and anticipations lost themselves in that bed of clouds behind us. I knew nothing would deter us in our quest for the summit.

We started our hike from the Monker Flats campground. There, we took an old road up to the lodge of a now seasonally deserted Mt. Baldy Ski Resort before finally reaching the trail at Devil’s Backbone. By this point we were about 8500 feet high and the remaining Spring snow was becoming more and more of a concern as we hiked along ridge lines – one slip would surely be fatal. At one point the ice build up was too much of a risk and we had to find our own way along the backbone to avoid the northern facing ice that perched mercilessly over 1000 foot canyons.

By early afternoon, and a huge ice detour later, we were scrambling up the moon-scape dome of Mt Baldy and making our final steps to the 10,064 foot summit. From on top of the Mountain you can see the entire range of the San Gabriels, San Jacinto (elevation 10,834 ft) and San Gregonio (elevation 11,505 ft) – which both along with Mt Baldy make up the three highest peaks in Southern California.

We made a make shift day camp in one of the several man made rock barricades that exist on the summit to protect ourselves from the relentless wind and enjoyed a lunch of cheese, crackers and beef jerky… before heading back down the mountain.

In all, the 13 mile hike took us about 7 hours to complete with an elevation gain of 4300 ft to a summit of 10,064. It was an incredible experience and one I would recommend to anyone who has some time to enjoy this grand structure so close to home. While up on the summit, Tim and myself decided to make an attempt to climb Mount San Jacinto and Mount San Gregonio in the coming months as well.

For great information on the hike check out the Mt Baldy local hikes page and Dan’s Hiking Page for Mt Baldy for some great resources on the hike! And be sure to pick up a $5 Adventure Pass to park your car.

the base of San Antonio Falls.

This is an excerpt I took from Timothy Ferris’s book The Four Hour Work Week. I love this book and have consulted it often. I am sharing this page verbatim, but think it is an awesome opinion to service, and encourage anyone to check out the book:

Service for the Right Reasons: To save the whales, or kill them and feed the children?

“One would expect me to mention service in this chapter, and here it is. Like all before it, the twist is a bit different.

Service to me is simple: doing something that improves life besides your own. This is not the same as philanthropy. Philanthropy is the altruistic concern for the well-being of mankind – human life. Human life has long been focused on the exclusion of the environment and the rest of the food chain, hence our current race to imminent extinction. Serves us right. The world does not exist solely for the betterment and multiplication of mankind.

Before I start chaining myself to trees and saving the dart frogs, though, I shall take my own advice: Do not become a cause snob. How can you help starving children in Africa when there are starving children in Los Angeles? How can you save whales when homeless people are freezing to death? How does doing volunteer research on coral destruction help those people who need help now?

Everything out there needs help, so don’t get baited into ‘my cause can beat up your cause’ arguments with no right answer. There are no qualitative or quantitative comparisons that make sense. The truth is this: Those thousands of lives you save could contribute to a famine that kills millions, or that one bush in Bolivia you protect could hold the cure for cancer. The down-stream effects are unknown. Do your best and hope for the best. If you are improving the world – however you define that – consider your job well done.

Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment either. It can also improve your life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the faces of others, view that as service. If you are a mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has been improved. Improving the quality of life in the world is no fashion inferior to adding more lives.

Service is an attitude. Find the cause or vehicle that interests you most and make not apologies.”

-Tim Ferriss

Salvation Mountain

Inside Salvation Mountain

Leonard and Mike

Hitchhiking.

Since the 2007 movie Into the Wild, I had been meaning to make a trip out to Salvation Mountain in hopes of seeing the strange wonder and meeting Leonard Knight. I decided to take a day off this week to spend sometime in the California desert with a nice morning hike and climb in Joshua Tree National Park. I had thought about going as far as the Salton Sea… and when I had completed my hike I decided there was enough daylight to get down there in hopes of finally making my Pilgrimage to Salvation Mountain.

My phone was dead by the time I reached the town of Niland, CA. I was alone, and a bit nervous as the sun begin to hang low in the desert sky while I drove through an intensely dilapidating and an extreme poverty stricken area. I drove up and down the main street of Niland thinking somehow that Salvation Mountain was just going to jump out at me… After my second pass on an almost deserted road, I saw a hitchiker who was waving me down for a ride. I slowed to a stop and asked him where he wanted to go, and he replied ‘the slabs.’ I immediately remembered from the movie that ‘the slabs’ was also where Salvation Mountain existed and he jumped on board and we were off.

A couple miles further up the road I got my first site of this somewhat mythical mountain. I dropped off my new friend and immediately turned around and parked at Salvation Mountain. I got out of my car and begin walking towards a group of about 5 people. There were all sitting in the back of a station wagon and I immediately felt like I was on the scene of a movie. I got a bit closer and introduced myself to this vagabond crowd and immediately recognized Leonard Knight right in the middle.

After a couple minutes of small talk I excused myself to head into Salvation Mountain alone and spent some time reveling at the sheer intricate magnitude of this eclectic but eroding structure. I was awe-struck, spooked out, inspired and fortunately left alone inside the mountain as the sun blasted through 50 year old car doors cemented to a spider web of telephone polls and pastel paints. It was amazing.

After I had time to snap a couple pictures, I walked out of the mountain and went back to sit with Leonard. Most of the others had left by this point except Mike, who was serving as his care taker. We started talking about the mountain, life, travels, the expansive greatness of the United States (Mike had done a cross country bicycle tour and had spent time on the road as well so we immediately connected). After about 30 minutes of enjoying the company of otherwise complete strangers and witnessing Leonard in his old age, I was offered a couple gifts of parting (a dvd, magnets, and a cold dr. pepper.. which is a luxury out there) and left ways.

What I took most from my day was exactly what happened in that final hour. I picked up a complete stranger whose poverty and transience might have made me (and many others I know) look the opposite direction and quickly be on my way, and through him I was able to make a special pilgrimage to Salvation Mountain and to meet Leonard and Mike… who, total strangers as well, ended up having a very neat and very real connection with me. I greatly enjoyed their company.

It is funny how easily I shut down when people look or act differently to myself out of fear, laziness, whatever… I do it all the time. But from the people I met in the slabs, in Niland, Mecca and Joshua Tree I realized that people are so often just looking for a friend or someone to talk to.. just like me.

I took off shortly after that for the long drive home. It was cleansing, inspiring, and rejuvenating. I am thankful for things like Salvation Mountain that exists as a fragile entity in the midst of a relentless and harsh desert climate- as it reminds me of how pure and tireless one must be to achieve what they love.