Orb Home Site Map Current Week Daynotes Gang [Enter] (for site search)

Orb Designs Field Trips Yosemite in February, 2001

Email Brian Bilbrey

THIS IS PAGE TWO... If you missed it, here's Page One!

.

Above: Day two of our Yosemite adventure dawned crisp and blue. Gorgeous weather and who was to complain. Not us, certainly... though I could hardly walk at the time - my left knee couldn't take very much weight. But dammit, we were there to have fun. So the knee could go the the seventh circle for all I cared - we were going on with our planned schedule.

The first five snaps are of the sights around as we walked (well, Marcia walked, and I hobbled - remember my knee was hosed) the two hundred yards from our abode to the main lodge buildings and breakfast. Yum on the views, and yum on breakfast, with eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, breads, muffins - a whole mess of stuff. Made plenty of impact on me - I was ready for a nap. Instead I took 1200 mg of Ibuprofen and we prepared to head out to Vernal Fall. On the drive over to Curry Village, we stopped and had a look at the Le Conte Memorial Hut.

.

The Le Conte Memorial Lodge (or Hut, as it rather appears) was constructed by the Sierra Club in 1903, in memory of geologist and Sierra Club president Joseph Le Conte. Nice little place, though it seems like it might be a tad drafty and quite cold in the winter. Not shown in these snaps is a bit of a bunny slope that had kids skidding down it on saucers. Marcia went hunting deep snow and found some by the side of the hut. Boot tops quickly filled with snow, and my left leg was definitely unhappy with walking on shifting surfaces. This didn't bode well for the Fall hike we had on next. We pressed on anyways, and parked at the main lot in Curry Village. The ravens were about, and I got one easily seen against a snowbank - other snaps of them up in the trees would have come to nothing.

.

We left Curry Village, headed towards the site known as Happy Isles, where the Merced forks and rejoins several times. Happy Isles is also the trailhead for the routes to Vernal Fall. We walked up about 3/4 of a mile to the bridge across the Merced at Happy Isles, and took some snaps in the woods, and a few of the low waters in the river, including a couple of itinerant ducks hanging out, first separated by the rapids...

.

...then the ducks came together in the pool below the rapids (just upstream of the bridge). Then I took a couple of snaps of the downstream view, then we headed up trail. The valley is closing together at this point, and the trail winds along one wall, 50 to 100 meters above the river at points. The water is out of sight much of the time, but there are other things to see. A rubble field at the base of a sheer granite wall, a large mossy boulder, and yet another collection of moss, snow, rock and dead tree.

.

Above, at a wide spot in the trail, I set the camera down and tried to take a timer shot. The first failed (only in one sense), yielding a nice picture of Marcia and her walking stick. We picked that up for her since I didn't feel comfortable with her leaning on me, my knee being wobbly and all. Then I set the camera correctly, and jumped into the the lense's field of view. Notice the pose that carefully suspends the leg in midair, with no pressure on the left foot. My leg was feeling lots better - clearly it was a bruised something, rather than a splattered sonovial (??) pad or a torn ligament. All the same, the darn thing hurt. We kept going anyway. We ran into an odd little snowman, a couple of downslope river shots, and up from the trail, summer country!

.

Above, another set of shots from the trail up leading up to the foot bridge where the trail divides into the Mist Trail (closed for the season) and Muir Trail (open).

.

Three more shots got us to the foot bridge, where I shot that particularly bad picture of Vernal Falls. The Fall itself, in full sun, is over-exposed, and the shadowed surround is washed out. Sorry. Not much to see anyway, really. There just isn't much water at this time of year, though another week of this weather would have made all the falls in the park considerably more impressive. So I got some more rock, water and snow shots.

.

We started to head up the Muir Trail a bit, towards the top of Vernal Fall, then thought better of the effort. While my knee was feeling ... better, we suspected that we'd both be happier if we didn't head OUT until we felt dead, then have the whole distance to hike back. So we turned around, just a bit after the split between Mist and Muir trails, and I caught two more snowy shots on the way back down. Then the camera got packed while I negotiated the steepish downhill icy bits, much tougher than heading up.

We trudged downhill, and back down the road to Curry Village with an ever increasing pace, bent on catching the 2pm bus tour of the Valley. The remaining four pictures above are from the beginning of that tour.

.

The tour actually starts at the Ahwahnee Hotel, and then picks up most of it's trade at the Yosemite Lodge, including us. In the winter time it's an enclosed tour bus with very comfortable seats, warm, and big windows. Spring, Summer and Fall visitors get topless trams, all the better for picture snapping from. All of these pictures are from various stop, get off, take some pictures and get back on bits of the tour. Early on, we pulled up to a small meadow where we could get a clear view of the main face of El Capitan. In the second picture, there are climbers... Here's a high res excerpt of that particular section!

The climbers themselves are on the ledge above, the two little dots circled in green. The red circle marks most of their gear, affixed to the rock wall below, where they apparently overnighted. Scale is weird here. Like our guide said, that wall is 3600 feet high. You're not looking for people, but for dots of color. Heh. In the normal resolution image you can just make out the gear, the people dots are too small to resolve.

The other images above are of Bridal Veil Fall, I think Sentinal and Cathedral, El Capitan from a distance, and a notch in the valley wall that has a name I can't remember... Ah, frozen waterfall of some kind or another...

.

Above, the five postcard / desktop wallpaper shots I got of the valley, all taken from the pullout just inside Yosemite valley from 4/5 tunnel - a great overlook. My personal second favorite shot of this trip is number two. Then the driver took a nice snap of us together, with Bridal Veil fall over my left shoulder. This is the only picture I edited a bit, to bring Marcia and I out of shadow a bit.

.

Here's more snaps from the bus tour, towards the end of it all, including my single favorite shot, A-Number One best. Again it's found in the number two thumbnail slot - Half Dome close up, and reflected in the water below the trees. Here's the high-resolution (1280x960, 425K), version if you want it. But I like all of these pictures. It was a perfect day.

.

Above, we took two more pictures on the tour, then parked the camera and ourselves. Other than supper at the buffet, we devoted the balance of the day to napping and cards. There's neither TV nor radio in the room. We slept exceedingly well, given that we both suffer from NOB (Not Our Bed) syndrome when travelling. We got up Sunday morning, breakfasted, checked out, and headed over to the Ahwahnee Hotel. Stunning place, a little to high-brow for my taste, but absolutely gorgeous, especially the great room (middle two pictures above). The fire places at each end of the room are HUGE. Although the snaps are blurry (not enough light, and I'd forgot to reset the camera for proper indoor photography, sorry once again), you can get an idea of the scale of these hearths with Marcia in the last one. You could spit and roast a wooly mammoth in one of those, eh?

Then we trundled about the valley for a bit, then headed home, leaving Yosemite a bit after 10 am, and arriving home between 2 and 3 in the afternoon. The truck was grunged enough that it deserved a wash on our way into Sunnyvale, even before we got home.

I hope you enjoyed this little trip with us. Thanks for your patience. If you want a high-res version of any of the shots from this trip, give me a holler, please note the filename of the thumbnail or medium resolution image for reference purposes.