Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board What do you do???

Chief Accounting Officer for a consortium of American owned Columbian and Venezuelan businesses manufacturing brass products for landscape industry and manufacturing and distribution of suspension products for heavy trucks, trailers and buses. Travel to South America once every 4 - 6 weeks for a week at a time, work from home the balance of the time. I set my own schedule.

I retired this year from over 33 years in grocery.
Happy to say that on Aug. 16th. I will be doing a 3 day hike
with a lady that has been there 27 years straight and is 69
years young.
I have really learned an incredible amount of very important
info here and appreciate it a lot!

My job has actually provided me with plenty of opportunity to explore the California mountains. I have been driving UPS trucks, the kind that go 600 mph (normal people think of them as airplanes) since 1989. I always bid the trips that had weekend layovers in places like Reno, Ontario, Sacramento and Burbank, as well as Seattle. Because of the hiking and driving distances, none of the weekend layovers seemed suitable for a Whitney expedition, so I always planned those during time off.

Denbo

It's just transportation from one party to another.

I'm a system engineer working at NASA Ames (Bay Area) for the past 17 years . I work a flex schedule which gives me every other Friday off. I have a 6 year old son who loves hiking and climbing. We get to Yosemite more often than Whitney, but the Eastern Sierras are our favorite!

pupnell

Legal administrative assistant for a senior real estate development/land use/environmental law partner and a utilities paralegal at large downtown Columbus (OH) law firm. Have a little over 5 weeks vacation per year at the moment (up to a max of 6-1/2 weeks within the next 10 years), which I need in order to acclimatize every time I come out there to be in the mountains. Plan to finally touch the top of Whitney this year (came oh so close 2 years ago), and hopefully some other nearby peaks as time allows. By the way, this is an extremely interesting thread.

CaT

I retired from a regular job in 2003. Now I do a little consulting and two volunteer gigs (at a food pantry and a museum). I hike in the mountains once a week, usually in the Angeles or San Bernardino N.F. I try to get to more off-beat places at least once a year. This year, I'm spending 10 days hiking in the Pyrenees. I have a dayhike permit for the MMWT in August and expect to do White Mtn beforehand.

I'm a retired physician in general practice. I continue to be an editor of books and journals, serve on corporate boards, am a sailing instructor, and a volunteer wilderness ranger.

Doug F.,

You're from Palmdale??
I lived in Palmdale (Carolside Ave just No. of Ave Q) from 1962 until I went off to college in 1971, and then in Quartz Hill (only when I was home from college) from 1972 on. Moved to Ohio in late 1982. Despite parents getting divorced while in Palmdale, great memories of that area during those years related to most everything else. During my Palmdale years, I ran around with a kid my age named Chris Forbes. I'm trying to remember his parents' names, which is hard since they were "Mr. and Mrs." to me at my age then. Though Forbes is not an uncommon name, any chance he could be related to you? I remember he had, among other siblings, sisters named Heather and Diane.

Sorry for the brief off-topic.

CaT

Memory Lapse, you wanna hire me and give me 3 weeks summer vacation?

Mono - can you live on $5k a year? Labor is why we manufacture in South America.

IT manager for Johnson & Johnson. Standard M-F 9-5 gig but i get about 4 weeks away each year. I spend 1/2 of my PTO climbing mountains and swimming in exotic seas, the other 1/2 is spent with the other 1/2. I'm also trying to start my own biz so that's going to take some PTO time. But it's an investment to get more PTO : )

-lance

Nursing student (BSN) will graduate 2008.
Worked 11 years as the painter at Ibis Cycles (86-97), during that time I could take chunks of time off to bike tour, ski tour, kaysk tour, backpack etc...but then I "grew up" and forgot for awhile how to sleep on the ground. Now I want to remember.

I'm one of those lucky teachers with the summer off! I teach math in LAUSD and I NEED to go hiking to unwind!!!!

I am a physicist and work at JPL. ("Hello" to my Ames colleague Phil.) I get 22 vacation days per year. My son (age 17) is a fanatic for hiking, biking, etc., so we do a lot of outdoor stuff together. Our speeds are somewhat different, but I waited for him a lot when he was younger, so he figures he has to wait a lot for me now. And I can still make it up Whitney in under 4 hours, so I am not trying his patience all that badly.

For me - 11 holidays (federal holidays), 21 vacation days, 15 sick days, and I only work until noon on Fridays - not too bad but it could be better.

I work to support my habit. So many peaks, so little time....

Hey Alan, what projects are you working on at JPL? I've worked with Ken Hicks at JPL on Health Management for Space vehicles. Are you planning a Whitney trip?

Philmon -- Our group does mostly R&D on superconducting electromagnetic sensors for astrophysical and other applications. I have been working on less reputable things lately, like quantum computing.

Send me a private message if you want to talk more offline.

I do hope to visit Whitney late next week. The trip will not involve spacecraft of any kind.

Associate Pastor at Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside. For those of you who live in So Cal you may see the Greg Laurie Harvest Crusade bumber stickers around. I spend most of my time putting these together accross the states and in New Zealand. The Anaheim Crusade is August 3-5 at Anaheim Stadium and the Central valley crusade is at Cal State Stanislaus August 24-26. Both are free and all are encourageg to attend!

I'm retired after 35 years of state service. I've got a lot of flexibility now in terms of when I can go backpacking, but unfortunately my physical flexibility isn't what it was 35 years ago! It's all a trade-off I guess.