Yosemite, February 20-21, 2010

Years ago, the Curry Company used to light a bonfire at Glacier Point then shove it off the cliff. This was the famed Yosemite Firefall, which my grandmother saw sometime in the 1940s. The practice scarred the face of the cliff and caused the meadow where people gathered to watch the firefall to be trampled, and was thus discontinued in the 1960s. These days, we have only a natural firefall in late February, when the angle of the setting sun lights up Horsetail Falls in gold, silver, and sometimes red. It is gorgeous. You'll have to search google images: it was overcast the weekend we were there. But we still had a great weekend. Saturday morning walk from Yosemite Falls to El Capitan along the Merced River:


El Capitan hiding in the clouds:

Saturday afternoon, a crowd of photographers at Tunnel View:

Saturday afternoon, snowshoeing at Badger Pass with Noah and Tamar:

We stayed at Camp Curry, in a heated tent cabin. The family in the tent next to us totally lacked inside voices and shouted at great length about insipid and vacuous things. This is a risk you take staying at Camp Curry. The good people at the Delaware North Company must have read my post about Sequoia and Kings Canyon, even though I didn't write it until after we returned: they are starting to win me over with free coffee in the morning and free hot chocolate in the afternoon in the registration building at Camp Curry.

Sunday morning we hiked up the Mist Trail. Noam wanted to hike to the top of Nevada Fall but we got turned back by snow below Clark Point.

As we hiked back down the Mist Trail it started snowing, so we high-tailed it out of the park to avoid getting stuck in chain controls.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, February 14-15, 2010

Sunday we arrived in the afternoon and headed straight to the Woolverton snow play area to get some non-driving activity in before the sun set. I tried out my new snowshoes, purchased in New Hampshire with Hannah at the Ocean State Job Lots, one of my new favorite tightwad shopping experiences. My snowshoes were less than 2/3 the price of Noam's cheapest-on-sale-at-REI showshoes (if you don't count the postage required when I couldn't fit them in my luggage and made Hannah mail them to me), AND they included poles AND a bag. They are awesome. They will no doubt fall apart after about a dozen uses, but by the time I reach a dozen uses, I could be 50! Woolverton snow play area is crammed with people and kinda sucks but here are the snowshoes:

We stayed at the Wuksachi Lodge. Though the lodge is pretty basic for how expensive it is, it isn't quite basic/expensive enough to explain my irrational dislike of the Delaware North Company, the concessionaire who runs the lodges and other stuff in Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon parks. I should be a huge fan solely from my experience with Tioga, our mule, the world's greatest mule, a 20+ year Delaware North employee. But I'm not. Something about crass profiteering in the national parks, I guess. One thing I do love is how easy it is to get their employees to bag on them. Sunset at the lodge:

Monday morning we got up pretty early and I snowshoed and Noam skied in the grove where the General Sherman tree is. It was beautiful, the sun was rising and lighting the trees, and we had the entire grove to ourselves. It was pretty icy and Noam fell a couple of times. It must have felt like falling on concrete. Ouch! I have become a big fan of snowshoeing, since they work really well when conditions suck for cross country skiing, which is pretty much always in California. Noam with the General Sherman tree:

We tried again at Big Meadows in the Sequoia National Forest. The cross country skiing there was great because it had gotten warm enough for the ice to soften, plus it was in the national forest so we could bring our guns and our dogs and build giant fires, thank god. Cool clouds viewed from the road out of the park:

Take that Fresno! We got all the sun, you guys can suck it!

Death Valley National Park, February 13-14, 2010

Washington's birthday, baby! Noam and I left early on Friday (shh!) and drove south to lovely Delano, outside lovely Bakersfield. Saturday morning we drove around the bottom of the Sierra and into Death Valley. We could tell it had rained from the standing water left in some low places. The clay soil does not absorb the rain very quickly. The Panamint Valley, where we stopped for lunch:

We hiked into Mosaic Canyon near Stovepipe Wells. Noam lounging in the canyon:

Slick, polished walls:

More Mosaic Canyon:

Golden Canyon, near Furnace Creek:

The spot where I napped while Noam hiked a little longer:

Zabriskie Point, lovely but tour bus hell at sunset:

I love the desert. Not as much as dessert, but still.

Sunday morning we hiked to Darwin falls, near where we camped at Panamint Springs, then headed out of the park toward Sequoia and Kings Canyon National parks. Darwin Falls:

Montana de Oro, January 30-31, 2010

It has been wet this winter. Mentally and emotionally I cannot handle another year of drought, so I am happy to have the rain, but ugh, this time of year I go to the ranch, smell the monkey-pee-drenched-zoo smell, look at the horse up to her knees in sticky mud, and wonder why I didn't take up motorcycles instead. A few of my horse peeps and I headed south to Montana de Oro, to escape the mud and find a little bit of spring, if only for the weekend. Juliet cam on the trail to the beach:

Beautiful ride:

On the beach with Evelyn and Polli:

We stayed at the Sea Pines golf resort, which has a few horse corrals across the street and is walking distance to the park. Go there soon, one of the employees told us a grocery store is planned on the parcel where the corrals are located. Thanks Kerry for these pictures!

New Hampshire with Hannah, January 17-18, 2010

On Martin Luther King Jr. day a few years ago, Noam and I were driving through a redwood forest near Mendocino, CA, listening to the "I have a dream speech" on the radio. Amazing. That speech gets me every time. MLK Jr.: the holiday, however, does not seem to have caught on quite as well, except for in the federal government and my office. Thank goodness Hannah went to work for the federal government, so now I know one other person who also has the day off. We spent the weekend in the Mount Monadnock area of New Hampshire. A nice rock wall and view of wintry New Hampshire:



We stayed at the Birchwood Inn in Temple. Despite the Birchwood being voted "Best British Experience, New Hampshire" by Yankee Magazine's editors, we actually picked it because Henry David Thoreau stayed there. Hannah and I went to Henry David Thoreau elementary school and have remained die-hard HDT fans. Our enthusiasm is undiminished, even after discovering that despite penning the awesome "In wilderness is the preservation of the world" line, HDT completely freaked upon experiencing real wilderness in Maine, and that during his "simple living" experiment at Walden his mother did his laundry. The Birchwood Inn:


It snowed like crazy Sunday night. I applaud the granite staters: by the time we got up at about 7, the roads had already been plowed and "gritted." (Thank goodness I had recently been to Ireland during a cold snap, so I could speak the "winter road conditions" British dialect.) Hannah and her car:

Hannah and I managed to catch the tail end of the "I have a dream speech" on the radio, just in time to hear "So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire." Woot!

Hacked!

I've been hacked! Apparently, when you pay 11 cents per decade for hosting, you get what you pay for. Noam has restored most of it but we lost some content. I was depressed about the whole thing, but resigned to happily reconstruct things on bloggingsaddles.com, until yesterday when I clicked on a link and got a virus. From my own website! That was the last straw, I am now going to blog on blogger like normal people.