Date: 2009-08-10
From: Logan Brook Lean-to

To: West Branch Pleasant River 
Miles today: 13.7
Weather: light rain

III. Report: It rained hard most of the night; but, the morning started out very clear. TNT and I started out early and began the 1100 ft climb up White Cap Mountain. TNT quickly passed out of sight and I thought I would catch up with him on the summit. However, as I approached the summit, it appeared that a weather front was racing in as well. Not wanting to be caught at the top of a mountain in a storm, I quickly passed over the summit. The rest of the day was fairly nice. In the afternoon, I came across a number of backpacks just off the trail, with a note that they had a medical emergency. Later, I learned this was a youth group and one of the girls had a bee sting. They had a ¢sting needle¢ however, it was totally ineffective. They ended up calling in EMT help and carrying her out 3.5 miles on a litter. The trail along the Hermitage was very nice, and protected from camping and fires for a restoration project. I met Half Full and Chomp, the only SOBOers I had seen in a couple of days. Towards the end of the day, I came to a fording of the West Branch Pleasant River. There, I met up with Half Full and Chomp again and they forded just before me. I successfully forded after them; this was a distance of about 30 yards, thigh deep water and relatively fast current. We continued SOBO a short distance and found a nice place near the river to camp for the evening. I fixed dinner and then retired early. It was a long day and hike. I was feeling reasonably well, although my chest was still hurting a bit. During the day, I tried to brace my back against a tree when I had to cough. This made it only uncomfortable, otherwise it hurt a lot. And a sneeze would bring out stars in Technicolor. V. POD: One of my objectives at NASA HQ, was to work a transfer to JSC at Houston Texas. There were many reasons for this transfer (return to home and God¢s country, closer to family, real Mexican food and BBQ, program office job, etc) and this happened in 1997. My JSC career was spent entirely in the ISS Program Office, where I worked with external review groups, management integration office and later the external integration office.POD: Dragon. Dragon was a retired Marine fighter pilot and one of the early ISS program managers. He was truly given a challenging task: a JSC ¢outsider¢ given a major program, working with the Russians, as well as other international partners, a restructured contractor team with essentially a sole source provider, a flat fixed budget significantly less than requirements, over two dozen committees ¢reviewing¢ the program (don¢t recall that many kudo¢s were recognized; but, there sure were a lot of faults identified on how to do his job better), etc. Dragon was typically up at all hours and seemed to do his best work very early in the morning. And if you wanted to have a successful meeting with him, you soon learned to try to schedule these just after his ¢mandatory¢ afternoon gym workout. One fond memory was his reaction to a particularly critical program review. Dragon was up at oh dark thirty and had composed the perfect response on his computer. Unfortunately, Dragon was not the most computer literate PM, couldn¢t transmit the ¢answer¢, couldn¢t save, nor print it. He ended up taping the answer on his new VCR, then having his secretary transcribe it, which she was able to do after getting the photo lab to make a hard copy of the VCR images. My job was then to translate the Marine language into program manager language for the appropriate NASA response.