Table Of Contents
New month, new notebook!
Mostly normal life (papers, reviews, proposals) for the first week of the month, and then off to Europe, for the second and third trips of mine to Europe since 2019. On the agenda was attempting Seven Summits at Mount Olympus (Greece) as well as the Tour du Mont Blanc and a week outside Montreal (Bromont) in between. Had some more opportunity to do work during the week in Bromont and wrote a surprise last-minute VSTTE submission; we’ll see what happens with that. There was also some travel planning, but not as intense as my AC FA strike experience.
Public Health and health in general
- Australia: A Flunami in July
poops.nz showed slightly but not extremely elevated COVID levels in NZ; higher than anytime since mid 2024 but half that peak; FluTracking numbers also at a plateau.
Vaccine news as usual:
- Absolutely Maybe, June 2025: mentions a mucosal vaccine trial at McMaster and phase 1 results showing mucosal immunity; I’d have liked to participate, but it would have required going to Hamilton every week, i.e. 2 hours of driving.
And, the gut is super important.
Professional
Worked on 11 days. July has 24 work days (!). Still, feels like I got a bunch done.
- SCAM paper accepted
- Vinayak’s thesis, based on the SCAM paper, submitted
- submitted a surprise last-minute VSTTE paper
- hopefully third time’s the charm with NSERC; submitted abstract
Teaching
Nothing here. Really should work on SE465 updates.
Grad students/mentees/collaborators
I talked to my students, collaborators, and mentees on 6 days, though not in person.
Collegiality/Service
Wrote 2 SCAM reviews. Shepherded an Onward! paper (unsuccessfully alas).
Trips
Off to Europe via Canada. Flew from Wellington to Athens on two back-to-back trips (WLG-YVR and then YVR-ATH), then back to Montreal, then again to Geneva.
Trip: Mount Olympus, July 9 – 13
Three days on the mountain. Country highpoint, check. Easy technical climbing with good-enough weather.
Day -2: flew to ATH from WLG through AKL, BNE, YVR, and YYZ, on two back-to-back bookings (splitting at YVR). Stayed overnight at AKL at an airbnb self-described as a “nice Vietnamese family”; and chatted with the guy at the campfire before going to bed to catch my 6am flight to Australia.
Day -1: let’s call this AKL-BNE-YVR-YYZ. No lounge access at AKL on Qantas. Also annoyingly, Qantas charged me for baggage at AKL because Jetstar from WLG doesn’t interline. BNE-YVR is kind of a day flight, leaving late morning and arriving early morning, but it feels like arriving mid-evening for the origin time zone.
Walked to Richmond, photographed rabbits, crows, and black-capped chickadees, and ate curry fish balls (paying was annoying; at least they took Interac eTransfers). I thought it would be a good idea to eUpgrade YYZ-ATH and then YVR-YYZ is almost free (very few, or no, extra eUpgrade credits). Fortunately, that worked, so I managed to get a bit of sleep on the overnight flight.
Day 0: Arrived in ATH (36°C), had a couple of hours with all my stuff, then met up with Nikos and Mario. Nikos drove us to Litochoro, where we stayed in a hotel for the night. Excellent restaurant (Greek, of course) in the village. Views of Olympus.
Day 1: Bluebird skies. Drove on to Prionia, walked to Refuge Apostolidis via Gomarostalos. Forest until reaching the Muses plateau. Picked up dog in Prionia, which followed us until we reached the cables up to the plateau. Probably the dog followed the hiker going the other direction back down. The dog also moved efficiently from shade to shade and waited for us to catch up. No zigzagging. Saw herd of chamois on the plateau. Got a good look at Stefani from the refuge. Looks like Yamnuska in a way. Visited shrine on Profitas Ilias for sunset.
Day 2: Seven Summits Project attempt. Around the refuge, chamois and alpine accentor. Stefani summit by noon. Party of 9 Bulgarians near the summit let us pass, fortunately. One down, 6 to go. Through Natsis Pass (roped, easy fifth class), though Mario banged his knee at some point. Clouded over. Mytikas summit at 4, with an alpine accentor singing to mark our summit. Down and up to Skolio by 6:30. Cleared up. Left Mario to find his own way back, ran over to Agios Antonios (7:00) and back to the refuge, with horses and chamois along the way, arriving just at sunset. There was another hiker with a full pack who was moving pretty fast. We ran into him the next day doing more walking for training purposes. Got pretty crowded in the refuge.
Day 3: Back to Prionia, though with a visit to Toupa in the morning before leaving. Crossed a mule train going to the other refuge, through the Lemos saddle, tagged the Skourta summit, took the ridgeline (via Πετρόστρουγκα/Petrostourga) back to Prionia. Total number of summits: 5. Washed our feet. I had a huge kebap plate. Back to Athens with a flight back to Canada the next day.
Bromont/Montreal, July 14 – 19
Visited MP’s mom. Stayed in the village of Bromont, an 8 minute drive from her place. Managed to also do some work while there. Also visited Magog and did a lake cruise.
Someone got an last-minute new passport after getting their passport wet. Canada is pretty good at next-day passports.
Trip: Tour du Mont Blanc, July 20 – August 1.
Travel Planning
I really did need to buy the ticket back to Wellington, but didn’t manage to do it until I was back in Bromont. I also looked for a WFR recert for October but didn’t manage to find one. I had some futzing with flights and used the thunderstorm warning to change our flight to Geneva from one with a connection in Brussels to the nonstop.
Movement statistics
Two named hikes, so plenty of walking. Way too much driving. Yuck. And, transit in Wellington, Vancouver, Montreal, and Switzerland/France/Italy. More cable cars than usual.
Movement statistics:
- 🚶 Walking: 196km on 26 days
- 🚲 Biking: 40km on 4 days
- 🚗 Driving: 1196km on 11 days (Olympus, Bromont/Montreal)
- 🚗 Taxi: 10km (Auckland)
- ⛴ Boat: 23km (Magog)
- 🚌 Bus: 155km on 7 days (WLG, Montreal, Chamonix, Courmayeur)
- 🚆 Metro: 56km (Athens)
- 🚇 SkyTrain: 7km (YVR)
- 🚠 Gondola: 5km (TMB)
- ✈ Plane: 39609km (WLG-AKL, AKL-BNE-YVR, YVR-YYZ-ATH, ATH-YUL, YUL-GVA)
Transit was 222km, quite similar to June.
Walks
Around and on Mount Olympus, and all but the last day of the Tour du Mont Blanc (or our variants thereof).
Pictures
I was away for a lot of July, but still managed to do a quick turn on the core Olympus photos, as well as Bromont photos. Did a bunch more pictures from 2023 and incremental progress on the Estonia and Seoul trips. I am, however, sure that I took more pictures than I processed, including 41GB of TMB photos.
Picture logs still available. As always, pictures are clickable to go to the full gallery.
- Sets of pictures posted: July=15, June=15
- Total pictures posted: July=845, June=415
- Total pictures in selection pool: July=3354, June=1113
- Accept rate: 25% (min 5%, max 59%)
- Pictures posted on this page: 119
Fauna and flora (mostly birds):
Miscellaneous
Definitely a lot of shopping this month, both in preparation for the trip, and also (in MP’s case) for things that are hard to buy in Wellington (clothes).
Posts
- August 10: Submission in favour of the Devil’s Glen (Ontario Parks) Climbing Management Plan
- August 22: Me and the Air Canada Flight Attendant Strike
- August 24: Tour du Mont Blanc (ok, the post date is fake)
Books
I got around to reading Incredible Insects of Aotearoa, by Simon Pollard and Phil Sirvid. More insect facts that I didn’t know before. We really don’t think about insects that much, and Aotearoa does have many endemic insect species, though it’s also true that they can be hard to see.
Acquisitions
- Exped dry bag, 8L: good for storing stuff and not having it get wet
- Peak XV silk sleeping bag liner: pretty cheap, though actually the cotton one is more comfortable (but 3× heavier)
- Ridgeline 1 sunglasses: I keep on thinking I should have sunglasses and not wearing them
- MEC Tech Trail 9" shorts: super light, great for not wearing
- MEC Nano 3D dry bag: yet another dry bag
- Leukotape P: supposed to be good for blisters, but we didn’t have that problem
- STMgoods Grace laptop sleeve (lilac plum): sure, it works
- 2× Tenba Tools 20" Protective Wrap: if I use two of them I can wrap my 100-400.
- Promaster Hurricane Blower: I dunno, sometimes you can remove dust on the sensor with this? Often I have to brush.
Sports
Only in town for 7 days, hence judo 2× and Faultline 3×. Did make it to bouldering gyms more in August, but not in July. There was some easy 5th class on Olympus.
Food
I’m going to exclude food at refuges/on the Tour du Mont Blanc. I hope I can talk about that in another post.
- Ta Mezedakia: huh, it has 4.8* on Google. Anyway, great taberna food in Litochoro.
- Prionia: also has a highly reviewed (4.7*) restaurant with massive portions, even after 3 days of hiking.
- N Latté Bromont: good sandwich; was looking for this place later and could only find worse places, looking the wrong way on the street.
- Bistro Kòz: fits the bill as a Mediterranean bistro on the shores of Lake Magog; no complaints. But it’s also not actually in Greece.
- Le Gandhi in Les Houches, France: standard Indian food; good change from white people food
Volunteering
Less than usual—in fact, almost none (but August has more than usual). Almost everyone managed to miss July’s OAC Board meeting.
Conclusion
Well, it’s not quite September yet, but August was not that quiet either. We’ll see how September goes! Three back-to-back domestic NZ trips though.