Building a Better Summit Cheeseburger

Let’s go straight to the point – we are upgrading our site by moving to http://summitcheeseburger.com/. It’s not that we’re unhappy with the existing WordPress.com site, but the cause has outgrown it. The new site has been redesigned from the ground up to make it easier to find summit and hiker information, to post cheeseburger summit conquests, and to provide instant updates of lists, maps, and charts. We are in the process of transferring all posts from this, the old site to the new, improved site – please be patient with the slow, methodical progress this effort requires. Remember, this upgrade is about the future – a future of tasty, nutritious cheeseburgers and challenging summits. This new site is designed to inspire even more amazing feats of cheeseburger summiteering.

What does this mean for you?

• You will need to Register on the new site

If you had access to the old site, it’s been discontinued and you’ll have to re-register on the new site at http://summitcheeseburger.com/signin. It’s easy to do. If you didn’t have, or need, access to the old site, please sign in to the new site – you will need this access! Only registered hikers/users will receive credit for cheeseburger summits and only summits conquered by registers hikers/users will be counted towards our goal. In addition, registered users can submit posts directly to the site and are provided with features that are not available to anonymous visitors.

• You will now have access to a much Larger Summit Database

The new summit database is prepopulated with nearly 500,000 named summits from around the world, so there won’t be a shortage of new summits to scale anytime soon. You’ll be able to browse by continent, country, state, or county and search for your summit of interest. Embedded terrain maps are provided for all peaks and tools are provided that allow you to identify nearby summits. If you find that a particular peak is not available in the database, there’s a way to submit it to the Summit Cheeseburger staff of cartographers.

• Vastly Improved Posting

What could be more prestigious than receiving credit for a cheeseburger summit? How about authoring a post? The process for submitting posts has been redesigned to seamlessly, and instantly, update the lists of completed summits and hiker “standings.” Part of the Summit Cheeseburger challenge is submitting the post – a duty – to amuse and educate the reading public. From now on, we’re asking for a separate post for each summit, even if multiple peaks were scaled on a single hike. This will support our ability to update the complete summit and hiker lists. There are instructions on the site to guide you through this process. Once you’ve saved your post, the Summit Cheeseburger database is instantly updated and your contribution will be recognized as part of the collective progress toward consuming a CHEESEBURGER ON EVERY SUMMIT ON EARTH!

• Still Some Construction

The new Summit Cheeseburger site is up and running but a few links may be missing and some features have not yet been released so please “pardon the dust”. And as mentioned before, the old posts from this site have not all been moved over, but this will happen over the coming months. Unfortunately, your witty comments of the past four years will be left behind. If you notice any problems please let us know at summitcheese@yahoo.com. Comments and suggestions are also welcome, but please realize that the number of unfinished tasks is still large, so your request will probably be joining a rather long list.

• Enjoy Cheeseburgers

Sure, waste some quality time looking through the new site, but mostly we hope that the new summitcheeseburger.com encourages you to get out into the hills with a cheeseburger in hand.

Going for Gold!

It’s the most important day of the last 4 years… the gold medal game in ice hockey at the Olympics! The games are on my home ice in Canada…  the contenders are Canada and USA, both countries that I have called home with much affection, but my heart is with Canada on this one. Being in the UK, I had to wait until 8:15pm for the game to start, so I had to distract myself somehow…

… so it’s off to play tourist in my own backyard again. I guarantee that anyone who’s adventurous enough to come visit me in Wales will spend at least a few hours in the nearby town of Conwy (pronounced Conway, but Wales seems to be unable to afford vowels), so I  felt it was time to check out the area for myself and see what exactly Conwy has to offer. I checked my very detailed topo map, made a plan, and off I went.

First stop: McDonalds. “Two double cheeseburgers please.”

Second stop: an access point to the North Wales Path on Conwy Mountain. As with previous hikes in North Wales, I wandered up along paths covered in sheep droppings and was rewarded with views of (yet again) the Great Orme to the north east and Snowdonia to the south west. The hike to the summit was a bit longer than my previous Welsh treks, still relatively easy, but given the wind and cool temperatures, challenging enough to feel I might have burned off most of the calories I was about to consume. Maybe.

This hike was all about clearing my head in anticipation of the big game, so it’s not the hike that I specifically remember, but rather the images that I captured on my camera that show me where I was and what I was doing… Like this shot on the top of Conwy Mountain with Snowdonia in the background:

Smowdonia from Conwy Mountain

From there, I wandered a bit farther along the trail (trail, sheep path, whatever) to the summit of Penmaen-bach, which had a strikingly similar view of Snodonia, not surprising considering the relative proximity of the two summits versus the relative distance of Snodonia:

Snowdonia from Penmaen-bach

Following the hike, I wandered around the town of Conwy for a bit, taking in the 1.2km walk along the castle walls that surround the old town and took this shot of the Conwy Mountain were I had dined mere hours earlier:

Conwy Mountain from the Conwy Castle wall

Finally, I went home, raided the beer fridge (aka brewery) and watched Canada win the only medal in the Olympics that really mattered… GOLD FOR CANADA IN HOCKEY!!!!

btw… who’s keeping track of statistics around here?

Krusty Bunz

Mt Blackmore, Gallatin County, Montana

Overview
A gorgeous day in Bozeman, Montana during a period in which the avalanche report reads like this…

“The snow keeps piling up in the northern ranges and… In the past 48 hours 7 inches of new snow has fallen… This gradual process of adding a few inches here and a few inches there is exactly the kind of loading the snowpack enjoys.

…calls for a gathering of friends to grab their skis and splitboards to enjoy the freedom of the hills. For a select few it also calls for us to throw a couple cheeseburgers into our food sacks for consumption atop our destination peak.

Participants
Cheeseburger consumers this time around were samh and wotboy (known in other posts as MikeMike). Dr. Liz, Roderigo, and Melanie were also along for the skiing but did not have cheeseburgers in hand on this go – perhaps next time though!

Statistics

Length: 9.2 miles

Vertical ascent: 4626 ft

Vertical descent: 4623 ft

More Info
For the full photo set, see:

Mt. Blackmore – Backcountry Splitboarding/Skiing on Flickr.

For GPS track and map view, see:

Mt Blackmore, Bozeman, MT – Backcountry Skiing on EveryTrail.

I ***LOVE*** Summit Cheeseburgers!

Valentines Day weekend. Humbug. With a name like Krusty Bunz, it’s no wonder I’m single, so I figured I may as well spend the weekend playing tourist around my new home and check out more of the local scenery.

My last post was about The Great Orme, an impressive (and somewhat famous) feature on the north shore of Wales. Saturday’s hike took me up the Little Orme (141m, 463ft) which sits south of the Great Orme and forms the southern boundary of a waterfront promenade, which is a feature attraction in the resort town of Llandudno in north Wales. Views of the Great Orme and Little Orme from the promenade:

The Great Orme from the promenade

Little Orme from the promenade

With a mere three miles between the base of each Orme, it would probably be a morning well spent for a visitor to Wales to do a two cheeseburger summit-to-summit walk, with a pint of ale from the Great Orme Brewery to toast one’s accomplishment.

The hike up the Little Orme follows a well marked public footpath that ascends at an easy grade over pastures shared with sheep (which is true of pretty much any hike in Wales it seems). The views from the summit are quite excellent:

View of Great Orme from Little Orme

Looking west along the north shore of Wales from the Little Orme

For Sunday’s hike, I drove a short distance west along the north shore to Penmaenmawr for an ascent of Foel Lûs (362m), which is within the northern boundary of Snowdonia National Park. It’s a relatively easy hike, with several trail options to get you to the summit, but you eventually have to give up trying avoid stepping in sheep droppings if you want to make any progress at all.

At the summit is a ring of stones, which I suppose could provide a bit of shelter in bad weather for small children or badgers, or in my case, a cheeseburger.

Foel Lûs summit

The views from the summit look out at Snowdonia to the south and southwest, the Isle of Anglesey to the northwest, and the Great Orme and Little Orme to the north east.

Great Orme and Little Orme from the summit of Foel Lûs

On my return to the car, I came across a street sign pointing me towards the next town over. Despite standing there reading and photographing the sign, I still have no idea what the name of the town is. On a related note, the Star Trek writers that came up with the Klingon language leaned heavily on the Welsh language as a basis for Klingon. Any guesses on how to pronounce this…?

I'm sorry... were saying the name of a town or coughing up phlegm?

Krusty Bunz

Rounds Mountain, NY

This site seems to be either very quiet or dead, but I’ll post this anyway…

Today, I joined a Taconic Hiking Club outing on the Taconic Crest Trail, along the border between New York and Massachusetts. With 14 people on the trip, and needing to leave cars at either end of the hike, I won’t go into the logistical details. Suffice it to say that it got complicated to the point of being laughable, but everything worked out.

After getting the transportation figured out and dropping cars as needed, we all started north from the trailhead on Madden Road, near Hancock, MA. After some steep climbing, we soon reached the open summit of Rounds Mountain. It was very windy and exposed here, and with temps only around 20F, we didn’t tarry long. It was an extremely clear day, and the views were great to the south, west and north.

I quickly downed a cold, dry White Castle cheeseburger (note the expression), and got going again to get out of the wind.

Back in the woods, there was about 3-4″ of fresh powder on top of 8-10″ of very firm base, so the walking on snowshoes was pretty easy, and the trail was well-marked. We split into many different and varying groups over the course of the day, but all managed to be in the same place for lunch.

Continuing along the Taconic Ridge, and climbing and descending several more minor summits, we arrived at the junction with the Robinson Hollow Access Trail, just recently reopened. From there it was all down hill to the pre-spotted cars after about a 6.3-mile hike.

It’s a summit, it’s a brewery, it’s … The Great Orme!

Happy New Year!!

It’s been just over two months since I moved to North Wales and started my new life as a brewer. The landscape here is beautiful… I look around at the mountains I can see from my new home and think to myself: “cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger….”

But where to begin? The lure of the mountains of Snowdonia National Park, which is practically in my backyard, is strong, but another summit beckons… one whose name has been lovingly adopted by my new favourite (f-you spell checker, I’m in Britain now) brewery… The Great Orme.

The Great Orme Brewery, where I spend my days brewing beer and drinking the profits, isn’t on the Great Orme, but rather has a commanding view of it from the property:

So today, the 3rd day of 2010, I set out with the founder of the Great Orme Brewery to consume my first Welsh Summit Cheeseburger (but not the first), Jonathan’s first ever Summit Cheeseburger, and to share a pint of the brewery’s flagship beer Orme on the summit of the land mass it was named after.

En-route to the Great Orme, we passed a world famous burger joint where we procured two “Big Tasty with Bacon” cheeseburgers. (Which, despite all my previous complaints about this restaurant, was actually quite good… must be the local beef.) The summit beckoned to us from just over yonder…

The Great Orme (elevation 207 m, or 679 ft) is quite the destination during the tourist season (this is for all of you who have threatened promised to visit me), with such features as a tram that will take you close to the summit (for the lazy), a cable car that will take you within 20 vertical feet of the summit (for the really lazy), wild goats (for me), and a year-round ski slope (I’m embarrassed for these people):

It was a perfect day for a hike to the summit… sunny skies, no wind, and crisp temperatures hovering just above the freezing point. The views from the trail and the summit were fantastic, and upon arrival at the stone marking the summit, we feasted.

Jonathan says he now has a taste for Summit Cheeseburgers (and a New Year’s Resolution that has something to do with weight loss… hmm… not sure how well that will work for him), so in honour (again… f-you spell checker) of his local heritage (and because he thought names should be assigned rather than picked by oneself), I now bestow upon him the trail name Welsh Rarebit.

One final view of Wales to share with you, taken on our descent… Goats and rivers and mountains, oh my! (Maybe I should start a side-business publishing postcards?!?)

Looking forward to seeing you in Wales sometime soon!

Cheers,

Krusty Bunz and Welsh Rarebit

Ten Turkeys on Salvation Knoll

It’s been a few weeks now, but I’ve thawed out enough to remember our Thanksgiving weekend camping trip in Cedar Mesa. Located in southeastern Utah, near the Four Corners, Cedar Mesa is known for its concentration of Anasazi ruins. We ventured down for a bit of sightseeing as well as camping, cooking and playing in the desert. The weekend began in earnest only after towing our stuck van out of a pit of soft sand (in the dark – so no photos).

How do you cook a turkey in the desert? We used a ginormous dutch oven, weighing 65 lbs. which we purchased directly at the Maca foundry in Springville, UT. The svelte free-range turkey was nearly lost in the cavernous oven, but it ended up being one of the best turkeys EVER!

One side trip we took was to Moon House, located in McLoyd’s Canyon. It’s a fantastic set of ruins in a fantastic setting.

We also stopped at the Mule Canyon Ruins to see a set of ancient, crumbling towers set up at the head of Mule Canyon. There isn’t much left of these structures.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to House on Fire Ruin located in upper Mule Canyon. It’s no surprise that it’s been well-photographed.

Now we get to the cheeseburger. We selected Salvation Knoll as our destination because of its advantageous location – right next to the road, and its small elevation gain. And as the roadside sign indicates, it has some historic significance.

Despite its small size, Salvation Knoll was a worthy opponent. Steep and crumbly, it took some climbing to get to the summit. Endless views into Arizona and Colorado greeted us, along with a package of tasty burgers.

Success at Salvation Knoll, UT

Hot Springs Mountain – Cheeseburger as high as you can get in San Diego – 11/08/2009

I have been waiting for quite a while to summit Hot Springs Mountain in San Diego County . At 6,533′, it is the county’s highest point. And, for the past 5 years, it has been closed to the public.

It is located within the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation. Apparently, due to the bad behavior of some off road enthusiasts, as well as some within-tribal politics, the tribe closed their campgrounds and trails to all outsiders in 2004. A friend of mine let me know that it has just opened and I jumped at the chance.

After summiting the wrong peak, we climbed back down to the barely-maintained road. Due to the capability of my trusty Tiguan, we were able to make it up to the summit parking lot, which was only .2 miles from the actual summit. So, it wasn’t much of a hike, but it sure was a delicious burger.

Except in an airplane flying over San Diego, it doesn’t get any higher than this.

Derek
100peaks.com

It’s A Dog’s Life

Aprez Halloween, Sunday Morning, November 1, 2009,  in the shank of an Indian Summer to die for,  ’Chases Rabbits’ (or pikas, or marmots, or badgers, or coyotes, or buzzworms, or skunks, or raccoons, or squirrels, or deer, or elk, or moose, or anything that moves) wakes to realize that (in spite of her complete domination of the Canine Division) she has NEVER consumed a CHEESEBURGER upon a SUMMIT in her home state of Utah.

City Ordinance demanded she  be escorted on leash through the megopolis by her low-life guardians (Cold Fusion, Old Bull)   to trailhead 2-miles distant, at which point she was turned loose for a direct assault up the southwest face of Quarry Peak.  Following a brief snack of  the patented “nano lamberghinis,”  a photo op, and some fine views of the valley, beyond and  below, she proceeded to lead the expedition north  into the Red Butte drainage and a casual jaunt back to the homestead.

November 1, 2009

Chases Rabbits, Cold Fusion, Old Bull

Quarry Peak, 5774′, Salt Lake County, Utah, USA

 

Eagle Peak – Among the raptors – 09/10/2009

I was off to a late start on a scorching day in San Diego. It couldn’t be helped. Once again, I drove through downtown Ramona and was presented with several options for cheeseburger satisfaction. This time, I opted for the Cheeseburger Deluxe from Jack-in-the-Crack.

And by crack, I mean box. And by box, I mean there is no box any more. Just a weird red cube that is the new logo. There isn’t any graphic Jack on the logo any more, just the word “Jack.” The clown is only in the commercials and on posters inside. You’d think one would take more advantage of the branding potential of an easily recognizable large-headed spokesperson. Nope, just a red box with a scripted “Jack.”

But I digress…

Regardless of any logo-identity issues, the cheeseburger proved to be worlds better than the forgettable cheeseburger I had on my perilous trip to Mount Gower (See earlier post.) I don’t even remember where I got the other burger. But this one was great. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t have 4 hours of waterless wandering as I did on the previous hike. Or perhaps this burger was just plain better.

I drove past Wynola into the rolling grasslands just southeast of Julian, CA, and nearly drove off the road while enjoying the view. I then passed an overturned car in a field in the Inaja Reservation that showed me how perilous this trip could be if I wasn’t careful.

I will keep my eyes on the road

With temperatures flirting with the mid 90′s, I started up the trail. One part of my mind was on the burger I would eat at the top and the other part of my mind was on the soda that would be waiting for me back in my car at the trailhead. Another part of my mind was on the dusty trail that lead upward through the sun-baked grasslands. Another part of my mind was humming the Hot Dog song from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, then you simply haven’t had children in the past few years.)

Will I eat a cheeseburger on Cuyamaca Peak in the future? Sources say "Yes"

I scooted down the trail, wondering aloud why I chose to hike on a day that I knew would get to 100 degrees when I spied a familiar sight. Once again, I found a mylar balloon tangled into the sage scrub. This one was nowhere near as cute at the hello kitty balloon in my earlier post. I imagined some child weeping for days at the loss of this fading, flaccid balloon. I crumpled it up and stowed it in my pack. As I noticed the pink color staining my hands, part of my mind wondered how long it had been out here. Another part of my mind wondered if the colors would wash out easily, if at all. A third part of my mind was wondering if it was made in China and has lead-based ingredients that were causing serious reproductive harm (Thanks, Wikipedia). The last part of my mind was singing “Wheels on the Bus” (see previous child comment).

Was this balloon killing me softly?

I made it to the peak and was presented with glorious views of Boulder Creek and El Cajon Mountain. It was as if there was a canyon dividing Ramona from the area around Julian. Actually, there is a canyon dividing Ramona from the area around Julian, and I was dangling my legs into it (well really a perpendicular canyon, but close enough). There were many birds taking advantage of the drop off and soaring on the thermals. I am sure they were eying my cheeseburger, ready to swoop down and snatch it from my hungry grasp. Luckily, I swallowed the thing practically whole and managed not to drop it, or myself, into the abyss.

Enjoying cheesy goodness over oblivion

Boulder Creek with El Capitan beyond

Red-tailed hawk over Eagle Peak

I got down safely the way I had some, nourished by the cheeseburger and the thought that I didn’t need to steal water from a garden hose to avoid dying in the backcountry. That’s always a good thing.

Part of my mind was of the journey behind me. Another part of my mind was on the journey ahead. A third part of my mind was singing, “We’re going on a trip in our favorite rocket ship…”

Yes, I have a child.