SDS 310: Trial by Fire

Kirill: Welcome back to SuperDataScience podcast ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show. And today I am with my dear friend and assistant Mitja. Mitja, how you going?

Mitja: Hi Kirill, it’s awesome to be here.

Kirill: Where are we?

Mitja: We are at the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite, watching the sunrise.

Kirill: Yeah, we got here early morning, so we left at like five o’clock, started a hike and two hours later we’re at the top of Glacier Point. How long was it?

Mitja: So it was five miles and it took us like two, two and a half hours. So we’re pretty good.

Kirill: And about kilometer elevation.

Mitja: Oh yeah, a kilometer elevation.

Kirill: Yeah. And funny enough it’s five miles, but it’s called the four miles trek.

Mitja: Yeah, it used to be four miles and then they made it longer, but it’s still the four mile. Which, it feels a bit like we’re cheating. I don’t know. 

Kirill: Yeah. Okay. So today’s episode is called trial by fire. Why is that?

Mitja: So before coming to Yosemite we were actually at Sequoia national park and we saw a bunch of huge Sequoia trees. 

Kirill: They’re massive. They’re like, some of them we saw over 2000 years old, like the biggest one by volume in the world is a Sequoia tree, which is 2200 years old. And like you say, [inaudible 00:01:40] here during the Roman Empire. And they are like hundred, no, not a hundred. How tall were they?

Mitja: They’re very tall. Like they’re too big to fit in the photo, right? We were trying to take a photo with our phones and it doesn’t fit. You have to make a panorama to catch the whole thing. It’s awesome.

Kirill: It was like a 21 story building right? So it’s about like 60 something meters or 65 meters at that tree. And they’re even, some of them are even taller.

Kirill: Anyway, so what I found really interesting was that in those excerpts that you’ve see when you come up to one of these trees, sometimes it’s like a little description and for one of them it explained how these sequoias actually grow. And I found it really fascinating. So what they do is they have these pine cones with seeds and they just wait until a fire passes by and then the fire will burn down all the other trees and all this undergrowth and make some set base, make some room, and it will also dry up the cone. So the seeds will start falling out. And that’s when, so they basically wait for a fire to go through in order to start spreading their seeds. They don’t think, just randomly spread their seeds, they wait for the fire. So they use the fire. How crazy is that?

Mitja: Yeah. And it’s not like they wait like three months. There’s a few fires per century that are big enough for these trees. So it’s a long wait.

Kirill: Yeah. And the other thing is that, like you said, some of these trees actually die.

Mitja: Yeah. A lot of the trees die in like pretty much every sequoia we saw had burn marks. Some of them like scarred over some of them still fresh and yeah, some of them just die. But the strong ones survive.

Kirill: Yeah. So that’s why we call this episode trial by fire. Like you never know. You might die, you might not. But that’s the way it is.

Mitja: Yeah. And you know, it’s a trial that is also an opportunity. You can’t just look at something as an obstacle. I mean, if something happens, it’s not just an obstacle, it can also be an opportunity. So we really spent a lot of time talking about that and thinking about it.

Kirill: Yeah. Like what do we do in our lives as humans where we not just like wait for, like a trial just happens randomly and then we have to survive it. But we actually look for these trials and challenges, right? So we look in order to grow for these trials. Like this hike even itself, right? It’s quite a trial.

Mitja: It’s quite a trial. And we talked to some rangers, like people die and maybe not on this particular hike, but people die in Yosemite all the time. But, the danger brings, maybe brings out like the best in us.

Kirill: Yeah. And it also tests your endurance, like this hike is what 12… I keeps saying it’s 12 hours long, Mitja says…

Mitja: I don’t know, I think it’s going to be like nine hours. We’re going pretty fast. I’m pretty proud of our pase, but yeah, if it’s 12 hours then wow. Yeah.

Kirill: Even more so.

Mitja: Even more so, yeah.

Kirill: Yeah. So we intentionally, knowingly put ourselves through this hike knowing there’s going to be like nine hours of hard-core, not just like walking around. We’re carrying on a good 10 liters of water because we can fill up somewhere here in the middle. But still we’re carrying food, water, clothes. The weather’s changing. We started in, it was night, it was dark, we’re going to return around nightfall.

Kirill: And so the question is how do you put yourself through trials? How do you trial yourself by fire on purpose, not just by accident. When you know, sometimes things go wrong in life, that’s fine. And like we all have to survive through that. We all have situation like that. But what do you do on purpose to put yourself through trials where the physical, mental, I don’t know, emotional, even psychological. What are some other ways that you put yourself through trials? I think that’s an important thing to think about. What do you reckon?

Mitja: Yeah, it’s important. Because a lot of the times I think it feels like you could achieve the same result with less effort. Like we were just sitting there, watching the sunrise and there are couples here taking wedding photos and they obviously didn’t hike up. You know, you can drive up here and you know, just take your photos and see the sunrise. And even though the end result might seem the same, the fact that we went through this effort changes it dramatically, I think.

Kirill: Yeah. Makes you grow.

Mitja: Makes us grow, yeah.

Kirill: So there we go, that’s our personal aspiration, this hike, which we’re going to continue just now. And hopefully, maybe an inspiration for you to think about what trials do put yourself through on purpose.

Kirill: Thank you very much. Have a great weekend, everybody.

Mitja: Have a great weekend, everyone.

Kirill: And until next time, happy analyzing.

Mitja: Happy analyzing.