Once a month a group of us get together and paddle Newport Harbor after work. We launch from the beach next to the Newport Aquatic Center and paddle over to Pizza Nova in the main harbor in a combination of kayaks and SUPs. There we dock our boats, partake in feast of pizza and beer, and then paddling back to the cars. We do this all year round and in pretty much all conditions. Light, dark, rain, and the dead of SoCal winter where you're tempted to put a sweater on with your flip flops.

You can find writeups of other pizza paddles here.

It's been really hectic lately with all the trips, classes, and other events and so Halloween turned out to be the date that worked best in October.  So we did the logical thing and declared a pirate theme.

October 31st, 2017

[Pics] [Map]

Past the break is a very long quasi chronological sequence of photos following the 2017 Wilderness Travel Course in Orange County with most being specific to Kaweah Group led by myself and Paul Warren along with a staff of extremely hard working volunteers.

For more information on what WTC is and how to take the course see the official site here. More posts on WTC by me can be found here.

This was the sixth year since we launched Kaweah Group as the third group in the Orange County section of the Wilderness Travel Course.  After having such a strong group in 2016 this year's had a lot to live up to.   Fortunately we ended up with an amazing group of people who blew us away the very first night with how much fun we were having and followed that up with one of the most active years on record.

This was also the end of an era as it was the last year volunteering for a good number of the staff including long time Whitney Group leaders Edd Ruskowitz and John Cyran and Kaweah staffers and personal friends Paul Warren and Laurent Hoffman.

Due to this 2018 will see Modjeska Group and Whitney Group being retired and the launch of two brand new ones named Olancha and Ritter.  And of course the concentrated awesomeness that is Kaweah will continue.

The Sierra Club Advanced Mountaineering Program or AMP was started in 2009 by Dan Richter and Pat McKusky to teach basic and advanced mountaineering skills with the goal of promoting safe climbing and train a new generation of club leadership. While it's primarily targeted to Wilderness Travel Course graduates and Sierra Club outings leaders anyone is welcome. It's run twice a year in the spring and fall and staffed by an array of hard working volunteers many of whom are also WTC instructors and group leaders.

This was the Fall 2017 AMP class which is timed so that the Joshua Tree weekend happens at the same time the Wilderness Travel Course has it's graduation out there.  We also moved the Wednesday night class to a slightly more central location in Fullerton for the first time after historically having it on the north end of LA and we generally lucked out on weather.

The following covers the 4 official class outings plus the Rock Checkoff weekend which many AMP students attend to have what they learned during the course assessed.