A few days ago I found this cool library, which makes it very easy to make images like the one below. I fiddled with other areas and colours and gradients, but it’s hard to beat Cape Town and plain black and white-ish. I submitted some code to make the maps from different viewpoints, which the author obligingly accepted; unfortunately no one else seems to think that upside-down (or tilted 90°) maps are very useful. The creators of the AuthaGraph World Map would disagree, I’m sure.
In the meantime, my blog post about our work with gridfinder finally got published on the World Bank blogs website: see here. I’m currently working with some very smart people from inside and outside the World Bank on extending this work to more countries and more uses. Hope to share an update here before too long.
Outside, there are a couple of trips I’ve taken in the last ~2 years that I feel I should document here; I’ve made enough mistakes that I’m sure it’ll be useful to someone. In August 2017 I spent a few weeks climbing around the US Pacific Northwest and the Canadian rockies. Last year I spent two weeks in California’s High Sierra (around Mt Whitney, contiguous US highpoint), learning what a late-season snow dump can do to your high route scrambling plans. Later last year I was in Kyrgyzstan to climb Khan Tengri; I didn’t ultimately climb it but got in some great alpinism anyway. And so far this year I’ve done a fun spring climb of Aneto (highest in the Pyrenees) and a very rainy, slushy time trying to skitour in Arctic Norway. I’m going to try to get to these one by one so keep your eyes peeled.
In the meantime, sailing plans are slowly advancing. After completing my RYA Day Skipper certificate in 2018, plans for “boatitrage” (an attempt to take advantage of sailing boat price differences between the US and Australia) are very slowly taking shape. We’re keeping our eyes glued to the creweing websites and will soon have two week-long stints as captain under our belts. Let’s see if we can make it happen!