January 25, 2004
Yosemite Day 4
(10:00am) Got up at a bit before 7 again and for the second time was the first person to show up for breakfast. I don't know if nobody is eating it or what. The parking lot had just as many cars as when I got back last night from dinner (8:30pm), so I'm guessing the crowd is just late to rise. Surprising, I would have figured they'd all be up at first light to charge into the park. Shortly after I sat down another guy wandered in and started making chit-chat about Carey Stayner, the multiple murderer/handyman from the Cedar Lodge. I waited to see what would come of it, and sure enough, the guy working the kitchen not only new Stayner, but when he was a little kid Stayner had watched him!
After breakfast I drove into the park and stopped at Bridalveil Falls, which proved to be worth the short hike over ice and snow to get to a good viewing point. From there I continued up 41S towards Badger Pass. At the turnoff for Badger I saw a sign for "Yosemite West -- Private Development" in the usual national park white lettering on brown background. I took the turnoff to see what it was about. I'm not really sure what to make of it -- it is a collection of private vacation homes and condominiums. Since it is ostensibly part of the park, what is up with that? How could the park value selling off part of itself? Maybe they are only leased and the park service is the landlord?
I doubled back and headed up to Badger Pass, where I'm writing this. Badger Pass looks to be a nice ski area. Hardly any massive operation, but then again the crowd is very small as well. There aren't queues of people at the chairlifts, etc. On the drive up a ranger was stopping all traffic to advise people there was an accident a half mile up the road. I was told to proceed at 15mph and not slow down when I passed the accident unless necessary. So I was dreading a horrific "Blood on the Highway" type affair with severed torsoes lying pell mell in the road. When I finally got to the accident it was a white SUV turned 90 degrees to the road and perched on its undercarriage on top of the 3 foot high snow berm created by plowing! I didn't slow down and gawk, but I can't imagine how it got in that position. It looks likie it would require a "Dukes of Hazzard" jump ramp to launch itself up there, which case Rosco and Enos should be sitting there looking flummoxed. There was somebody sitting in the car and a ranger parked there talking to somebody outside of the car. I assume everything was okay, but then again I probably wouldn't have stayed in that car unless I was injured and was told it would be better not to move.
So now I'm up at Badger Pass, typing this, and trying to decide what to do next. I'm not feeling that enthused for stomping around in the snow and ice. I fired up MapSource and examined the waypoints and so forth I had put down yesterday afternoon when I was photographing the river traverses. The bridge was at the "town" (1 house makes a town?) of Briceburg, and it turns out those two places I photographed have names as well! The first is "Ned Gulch" and the second is "Miller Gulch". MapSource doesn't make them look any more accessible, although it does think the unmaintained (and unpassable) road/cut along the river is a proper road, not even just a trail.
Looks like it's about 6 miles from the bridge at Briceburg back to Miller Gulch along the river road, so that could be a fun thing to explore.
I went back to Hotel Hate, grabbed a quick bite for lunch, and headed off to Briceburg to explore the trail back to Miller Gulch. I examined a park map posted at Briceburg and it claimed that the path along the river back to Millers Gulch was in fact a public trail, and the distance would in fact be 6 miles one way. I gathered my GPS and camera and headed off.
Almost immediately I passed the remains of a bridge. The concrete footings had dates impressed in them, so apparently the bridge was built back around 1940. I can't imagine what happened between then and now. I would think that a bridge would last 60 or so years, at least in some kind of shape. As I went further down the trail I passed more bridges which had been constructed at about the same time, and also dismantled and removed at some point in time.
Initially I was speculating that there had been a road on that side of the river at some point, and eventually it got taken out. However, there was no evidence of a road at all, save the bridge. There was evidence of very old tire tracks, but they were completely overgrown at this point, and the trail was almost never wide enough for one car to pass another. Nothing like asphalt or concrete was to be found anywhere except in the remains of the bridges. I considered that maybe it was a ripped out rail line (there used to be a railway to take people into Yosemite), but the construction date was way too late for the bridges, and there was no evidence of railroad ties, railroad stakes, etc.
As I got further down the trail towards Millers Gulch the trail got significantly worse. The hillside above the trail had washed out at many different times and covered the trail, huge rocks had fallen, trees of various ages and sizes were down, etc. Further along I encountered the remains of another bridge, and this one included a USGS Survey Marker from 1943. Of course that doesn't say the bridge isn't much older than that, but these footers were marked as November 1940, about the same time as the previous bridges.
Perhaps all this was the tail end of the New Deal? Lots of otherwise unemployed men building massive bridges down a park trail, only so that they can be removed a few decades later? That's my best guess anyway.
Unfortunately I pooped out before I could reach the end of the trail. The further I progressed the rougher the trail got, and I was making much slower progress than I had estimated. I was expecting to average over 2 miles an hour, including stopping for pictures and stuff, and seemed to be doing more like 1.5mph at best. Looking at the GPS track later it looks like I made it about 4 miles in (and 4 miles back out), so the marginal 2 miles to make it all the way to Miller Gulch would have added 50% to my trip time, which would have been painful.
January 24, 2004
Yosemite Day 3
After I showered in the morning I wandered over and got more towels from the morning staff. They too were a dingy gray (the towels, not the staff). I asked if they had any white towels (politely not asking if they had any clean towels) and the very pleasant woman working the desk said they are all that color, and it's because they were off-white to begin with. Now, I've never heard of a hotel using non-white towels, although I'm sure if you're spending enough per night they'll give you any color towel you want. Regardless, the towels looked filthy, which is as good (or, rather, bad) as being filthy. She said the white towels were in the maid's closet, and she can't find anybody with a key. Happily when I returned that night my room had been made up, complete with clean white towels.
I went out Highway 120N in the morning, with the goal of exploring the closed-for-the-season Tioga Pass Road. When I got there I found a big sign across the road declaring it closed to all traffic, but the road beyond the sign was plowed and mostly free of ice. So I pulled into the parking area and readied my mountain bike, with the intent of riding off down the road. Almost immediately I relearned a lesson that I seem to unable to recall without a painful reminder -- when I haven't been riding a bike fairly regularly my ass feels like it's bruised when I get on a bike the day after a ride. On a positive note, I soon discovered that the road was in fact only plowed as far as the Yosemite Institute, and thereafter was covered with a couple feet of snow.
I rode back to the car, almost wiping out once on the little ice that was available, and reprepped to go walking on the closed portion of the Tioga Pass Road. Somewhat foolishly I hadn't hopped off my bike and stomped around on the snow to see if it was walkable or not. Off I went, and this time fate was with me -- the snow was pretty densely packed, or at least had a hard crust on the surface which would often support my weight. On the occassions when I punched through it I rarely sank more than an inch or two into the snow. Thus walking down the road was somewhere between completely normal and the tiring crush-crush gate of walking down a soft sand beach. I got a mile or two out and was starting to appreciate how tiring walking on the stuff was, as well as regretting not having pursued a snowshoe rental of some sort. As I gathered my thoughts I was passed by an elderly couple on cross country skis. Since I was standing no more than 20 feet away from them in a neon yellow windbreaker I would have expected some look of recognition, but they just skied on by. I've never cross country skied, but it seems to me it must be awfully tiring. Is there some trick to the gait so that your legs are doing most of the work? Or are you doing a great deal of it with your arms?
When I returned to the car I had some coffee I had brewed that morning at Hotel Hate. I had only made half a pot, assuming that might make the coffee (from their pre-measured filter pack) halfway tolerable. Wrong, still weak as dishwater. Next time I'll try a quarter pot.
From there I drove down to the valley floor with no particular agenda. I parked with the intention of hiking around a bit, and ultimately ended up walking around for far longer than I really wanted to, between taking one detour and another, and then finding myself much futher away from where I had parked than I really intended.
I left the park pretty early and was back at the hotel at 3pm for a shower. I was kind of disappointed to not have done more with the day, but that was soon to be made up for.
I headed out 14oW to go to the quite satisfactory Charles Street Dinner House for dinner again. It was early, and my plan was to find detours along the way to explore. The first stop was a mammoth complex in El Portal that looked from the road like a prison or perhaps a government research lab, except there wasn't enough visible security. Turned out to be an administrative building of some sort for Yosemite. The real find was Foresta Road, which is the same road I was on yesterday, except the other end of it!
First I turned left down the road and followed along the river bank for quite a while, paralleling 140W. The road was a little over a car width wide, and whenever two cars met there was a minor production of making space for each other. I was surprised to pass two cars going the other way on such a dinky road. I went through the dismal town of Cranberry Gulch and eventually the road ended at a closed gate marked "Authorized Vehicles Only". The road beyond the gate was no longer paved, but it had a thick and fresh appearing bed of gravel on it, so I assume it gets used by someone for something.
I then doubled back and turned right where I had turned left before. This rapidly put me on the actual Foresta Road, which was even narrower than the road I had just been on. I followed it for quite a while (well, a comparatively short distance, but it was hair raising because it was densely populated, full of hairpin turns, etc.) and reached another sign just like yesterday -- road is unmaintained, not safe for travel, extremely steep grade, the bridge is out, there's no gas available, etc. etc. etc. It looked passable enough, but I knew from yesterday that it would get much worse, and it would ultimately end at a closed and locked gate, so I'd just have to turn around and come back out.
I drove back out to 140 and continued West. The whole time I was driving I had one eye on the other side of the river, and I could see the gravel road (the one behind the "Authorized Vehicles Only" gate) continuing on. Eventually the gravel gave out, and it was just a grassy cut into the side of the hill, but it still looked quite passable. Then I started noticing further problems with the road -- trees down across it, major washouts, etc. So now the gravel road is a mystery -- what does it provide access to?
All this is going through my head when I simultaneously notice a guy wire of some sort stretched across the river, along with a house on the opposite bank, and a Subaru wagon parked at the near end of the wire. I made a U-turn and doubled back to park at a geological point-of-interest marker. I returned on foot to the Subaru with my camera and GPS in tow. To my immense surprise there was a 3/4" steel cable strung taught across the river, and at the far side of the river I could see a platform suspended from the cable. A tow rope completed the river traverse. There was a deck on the other side of the stone guard rail on the near side of the river where you could embark and disembark from the shuttle. Presumably the owner of the Subaru parks it there and the traverses the river to get to his home! Around the house I could see probably a half dozen pick up trucks and vans parked here and there. They could have driven down on the opposite side of the river, but from what I had seen thus far it looked like a tough row to hoe, so I was guessing they drove up from downstream somewhere.
As I stood and crouched at the side of the river three dogs appeared on the opposite bank and started making a terrific racket. I don't know if they just caught sight of me and got excited, or if their owner caught sight of me and sent them out to dissuade me from the trespassing I was considering.
I went back to the car and continued on 140W, keeping a very keen eye on the road along opposite bank of the river. If anything the road was in much worse shape the further downstream I went. It was clearly impassable, as the small bridges that had once crossed gullies had been almost totally removed, leaving only their footings. I don't know what's going on there -- it's almost like that house has purposely isolated itself -- it has an enormous grade behind it, two access roads which are probably only passable on foot, and the Merced River as an impressive moat in front of it!
I carried on further down 140 and encountered another river crossing! This one had the shuttle parked on the near side of the river (indicating the owner wasn't at home I suppose?) and rather pointedly locked up. A U-lock through each pulley insured that the carriage would have to be dragged to get it across, and a further cable fastened it firmly to the bank. Interestingly, the moorings for each end of the steel cable were clearly footings from a bridge that used to cross the river at that point. I'm not sure where all these bridges have gone. I can imagine that a bridge might become old and unsafe and the county/state/whoever might decide it wasn't worth maintaining, but wouldn't they just put a gate across it? I can't imagine them going to all the effort of physically removing the entire bridge, save the footings. Very strange.
There was a house at the far side of this crossing as well, albeit even more decrepit than the previous. Moreover, the access road on each side of the house was clearly impassable! Unless there is a secret tunnel through the mountain or the FedEx man is a dedicated mountaineer, I don't see anyway that anybody is getting goods or services in or out of that house without using the traverse. Must be interesting to get a major appliance or furniture delivered. Perhaps they contract the Marines to come with a helicopter?
Went yet further down the road, watching the trail on the opposite side of the river deteriorate further and further until, lo and behold, I found a bridge that crossed the river. Of course it was much too far for the bridge to be of any use to the "traverse" homes, but it did give me a way to get back to the access road. The bridge features an admonishment to drive no faster than 5mph and that only 1 car should be on the bridge at a time. With that to look forward to I parked on the near side and walked over the bridge, which I could feel gently bobbing up, down and around to whatever was perturbing it. On the far side I saw that the access road along the river had a gate across it, although this time without any indication of the "authorizated vehicles" requirement.
Rather than walking down the access road I headed up the dirt road which seemed to be winding up the mountain for no particular reason. I kept expecting to come around a corner and be face to face with Skeeter's Moonshine Factory or Waingro's Meth Lab, but every turn of the road just brought more road. Eventually I had to call it quits so that I'd get back to the car with some semblance of daylight remaining. Consulting my Garmin Vista I was surprised to discover that it not only knew of the road, but actually was willing to admit its name! Because I bought the "Topographic" version of MapSource I get almost no road names at all -- I get the roads, just no names. So this road being named is tantaamount to being an interstate!
It would be passable in my car I think, although perhaps foolhardy. Once again I found myself wishing I had a Jeep. I left thinking about returning to it the next day and walking it much further, although I guess the mystery was gone once I knew it wass a proper road, etc.
From there I got back on the highway and finally got to the Charles Street Dinner House for another very nice dinner. While I waited for my food I read the introduction to "The Continental Op", a very interesting essay about Dashell Hammet by Steven Marcus. Assuming the guy isn't full of it, he confirms my longstanding suspicion: when I read a book I may enjoy the story and what-not, but I'm generally missing the point. Or rather, I'm reading at a comparatively superficial level.
Then again, to extract the sort of detail and meaning that Steven Marcus was extracting would seem to require a great deal of study, and I can't imagine laboriously poring over a novel like that. Probably one of the many differences between Steve and I.
It's now after dinner, and I'm typing this back at Hotel Hate. The drive to Mariposa is 30 miles or so, which is an unpleasantly long distance to begin with, and is made doubly so by the twisty mountain road those miles follow. Then again, as I remarked to the hostess when she asked "Oh, back again?" -- "I've eaten at the Cedar Lodge, and I don't care to repeat it."
January 23, 2004
Yosemite Day 2
A pretty good day. Travel-wise I'm at 2 out of 3 for the day: good travel experiences and good food (at least one passable meal). What's missing? Decent hotel service.
I got back to the room at 4:30 or so this afternoon, tired and gross and filthy. I want to take a shower, and I have two options: I can either go get more towels from the desk now, or I can just reuse a towel from yesterday. Because, you see, somehow the room hasn't been made up. I opt for the latter, on the off chance that if I went and made a stink pre-shower they'd have the maid in my room cleaning it while I'm still there.
I was cleaned up by 5pm or so, and prepared to gamble on driving the 30 miles back to Mariposa and actually finding a good meal when I got there.
Last night I had asked the guy at the front desk, who had seemed friendly enough, what he does for food around here. I guess I was being more conversational than strictly necessary. I could have given him a stacatto "What restaurant would you recommend I have dinner at?" query, but I figured he'd read between the lines. His answer: "I eat at home." Oh. Okay. Since I don't want to be your dinner guest, do you have any other suggestions? "Well, there's the Cedar Lodge 7 miles west on 140." "No, I don't want that." "We've got pizza here." Uh, okay.
Tonight I was already pissed that the room hadn't been made up, and it helped me remember his turd answer last night quite vividly. Nevertheless, I wanted a good meal, and had few sources of information save this jerk. So I asked the guy, very specifically, "Where would you recommend I eat in Mariposa? I'm looking for chicken and potatoes, or that sort of thing." Without missing a fucking beat he replies that there's the Cedar Lodge, 7 miles up 140. I bite my tongue and don't explain to him that I ate at the Cedar Lodge multiple times 3 years ago and it was fucking terrible, each and every time. He then suggests that I can drive 14 miles into the park and have dinner at the Ahwahnee, for $75 a head. I considered grabbing the nearest available telephone handset and wrapping the cord around his neck while I repeated my question: "Where would you recommend I eat in Mariposa?" but I restrained myself and walked off.
I went back to the room and pulled out the guest information advertising book. A few places in Mariposa looked good, so I went off on speculation with no useful advice. When I got there my first choice had unwed teenage mothers screaming at each other in the parking lot, so I figured that didn't bode well for the meal. I ended up at my second choice, the Charles Street Dinner House, and had a very nicely prepared New York Strip steak and a potato, vegetables, etc. The drive was about 35 or 40 minutes in each direction, but it certainly was worth it to eat reasonably at least once for the day.
When I got back from dinner I grabbed a few more things from the car to drop off in the room. Of course the room hadn't been made up -- I hadn't complained to the desk, and the maid presumably isn't still working at 7pm. So I walked down to the desk to get some more towels. From the look on this turd's face I've quite clearly worn out my welcome. I'm not sure why or how, but I certainly don't care. I tell him I want another set of towels because my room never got made up. His immediate response? "Did you have the 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door?" What the *hell* kind of a response is that? Does he consider that catering to the guests? Asshole.
He rummaged around in the back somewhere for a minute or two and emerges with a single set of towels (1 washcloth, 1 hand towel, 1 bath towel). Okay, his decision to minimally fill my request is annoying, but that's fine. However, it is immediately evident why he was gone so long. He must have specifically chosen the most filthy and revolting of each of the towels that were available. I have never seen a grayer set of towels, literarlly ever.
So now I have to decide how to handle this. I think the attack is obvious:
1. I go down to the desk tomorrow morning, pre-shower (yuck) and demand more towels, and specify they have to be clean this time. If the manager has an ounce of sense he or she will listen to my complaints.
2. Regardless of (1), this little article gets published to web for any and all to see when they are looking for informationa about "Yosemite View Lodge"
Truth be told I think the place could be fine -- they just need to fire the night manager.
What else is wrong with the place? They have a proper restaurant, but it is closed. This is just a function of the season -- the place is quite empty. The bathroom lacks an exhaust fan -- I'm not sure if that is mortal sin or a venial sin. The ice machine outside my room sounds like it is grinding down alluvial ice from a glacier. What else? The room suffers the usual hotel curse of insufficient lighting -- it's perhaps lit adequately for a quiet restaurant.
So, that was the shit part of the day. What was the good part?
I got up pretty early, after sleeping surprisingly poorly (the room has the mandatory uncalibrated-thermostat HVAC unit in the wall, and I ended up way too hot). Got the gross but functional hotel breakfast. That was kind of a weird affair. They've taken a guest room and converted it into a breakfast bar plus seating area. So the walls still have the rails that the headboards for the beds would be hung on, there's a full bath down a little hallway, etc. In place of the beds they've set up 3 folding tables, each with 3 plastic patio chairs on each side. A pretty cramped affair, but okay. Presumably when the restaurant is open they don't do it this way. The usual assortment of gross waffle pieces, pancakes, sausages and mystery gravies were available, eternally cooking on their little Sterno stoves.
I got out of there, gassed up, and headed for the park. I went to Curry Village at the far Eastern end of the valley and picked up a pair of Yax Traxx for snow/ice walking. I then headed off to take the Mist Trail to Nevada Falls and Vernal Falls. Along the way I passed a few coyotes about 50 yards off on my left howling up a storm. It was rather unnerving. After watching a pair torment a deer that they would eventually eat, I had all sorts of mental pictures of getting run down by a group of frenzied pack animals and left for dead along the access road to the hike. Of course that didn't transpire.
I arrived at the trailhead only to discover it was closed due to the danger of rock falls. Unfortunate and annoying, and even more galling because I'm pretty sure the ranger had told me that when I arrived the day before and I hadn't paid enough attention. I had already consulted the crude map you get with admission, and figured that I'd just go do the full loop around Mirror Lake that I had bailed on yesterday. Turned out to be a very nice hike. Between where I parked and everything I think the whole hike was about 8 miles. I put on the Yax Traxx and they worked very well, or at least that was my perception. I didn't take them on and off repeatedly to do A/B tests, but my footing seemed much more certain. The Yax Traxx are just two diamonds of springs wrapped around heavy rubber bands. The whole assembly fits around your boot like a rubber.
I got back to the car and Curry Village just behind an enormous pack of students, who all streamed into the restaurant/diner/whatever there. Rather than deal with the crowd I just went to the little grocery store and bought some junk and left it at that. Hardly wonderful, but good enough.
At that point I was kind of whipped from hiking, so I figured exploring 120N, which forks off 140 just inside the park, would be fun. Highway 120 heads up to Tioga Pass Road, which is closed all winter, so I figured that boded well for snow excitement. About a third off the way to Tioga Pass Road I passed a turnoff for "Foresta", and after a little debate I turned around and took the turnoff. The road wandered along and shortly turned into an unpaved gravel affair. Foresta turned out to be a little town of scattered clumps of houses and a solitary volunteer fire house. I'm not sure exactly what it's about -- it is inside the park boundaries, which doesn't make sense to me. A lot of the houses, while small, were clearly new construction, so I don't think it's a matter of the homes being grandfathered in from when the park was created. Anyway, an interesting curiosity.
After a short detour down a road that led to a destroyed bridge and somebody's front yard, I found myself at the end of the road. The road looked passable enough, but I decided against tempting fate. I had already been kicking myself for bringing my mountain bike when it was so apparent there was no good place to ride it (riding on ice would surely suck), but now I had a perfect opportunity to use it. After a very tedious unpacking of the bike, changing into bike clothes, etc. etc. I headed off down the road. The road was certainly passable, overwrought warnings aside. I can imagine you could get into trouble in a 2WD car, and there was one point I'd have to move a big rock out of the way, but I definitely could have done it in my car.
As I rode I was half aware of a lot of water noise, but the road was steep enough that most of concentration was focused on staying the course. Eventually I reached this big surprise, which was certainly a nice reward for having gone to all the effort to get there, including a lot of frustration with a camera bag that kept swinging around my neck and ending up in front of me.
I rode on further past the falls, and eventually reached the park boundary. The road was really closed here (as opposed to just being posted), and the condition of it quite clearly deteriorated on the other side of the gate. I road around the gate and went a bit further and was rewarded with a great view of the Merced River valley. I had an idea where I was and checked the GPS -- sure enough, my (soon to become hated) hotel was only .65 miles away! The hotel might have only been 3000 horizontal feet away, but it looked to also be 3000 vertical feet. The road was actually part of the Garmin database in my Vista, and looked to wander off all over the place. I decided to turn around at that point, rather than losing a great deal of elevation which I would later have to repay.
On the way back, which was a long trip uphill, I found another waterfall that I had passed without even realizing in my haste on the way down. Not as grand as the first surprise waterfall, but still quite nice. While taking pictures for some reason I finally noticed some more of the markings on the digital camera I was using. I had always been turning the mode knob to X, but the next mode, Y, would let me set the F-stop, answering my previous complaint! I screwed around with that some, and was able to quite clearly see the difference in clarity of the waterfall pictures. I'm sure a fair portion of the blame for the picture quality rests in the horrible tripod my wobbly arms provided, but still interesting.
From there I returned to the car and had a quick drive out of the park, whereupon I returned to "Hotel Hate", aka the "Yosemite View Lodge."
January 22, 2004
Yosemite Day 1
It's 11:30am and I'm sitting in the "Happy Burger Diner" on Highway 140 in Mariposa, West of Yosemite. The diner offers all the usual stuff: the 1984 classic "RoadBlasters" video game, the "Skill Crane" grab-a-prize game, and free WiFi.
Ah, I take it back. Not free. I tried to connect to my favorite random site, http://www.sgi.com, and got redirected to the STI Hot Spot Login screen. It's a very professional website full of low resolution GIFs and documentation hidden in PDFs, so I'm sure I'd be happy with the service, I'm just disinclined to bother. Oh well. I needed an opportunity to download the Yosemite map area to my GPS anyway. At least it's a comparatively small area (3MB of data) so the download is comparatively fast (7 minutes).
... later that day ...
I got to Yosemite at around 12:30 or 1pm. The Yosemite View Lodge, where I made reservations and am typing this right now, is literally just outside the West entrance of the park. On some maps Highway 140 enter the park briefly, exits the park, passes the hotel, and then continues back into the park.
I didn't have any particular agenda for what to do today. I thumbed through the park "newspaper" I got at the gate and saw there were a number of different ranger-led activities, but my natural inclinations meant I wasn't too interested.
I drove through park until I reached the far end by Curry Village and the North Pines campground. I decided to start by hiking out to Mirror Lake, which is a hike I had done a few years ago when visiting with my family.
I headed down the path and almost immediately there was a couple traipsing along 50 feet behind me jabbering at each other about banalities. The male explained that his boots have a Vibram sole, which is a particular kind of pattern, and that means they have very good traction. The female wanted to know if it was called Mirror Lake because it was like a mirror, and if so would they get to see their reflections in it. I don't know, maybe they both got the day off from their usual work as Wal-Mart greeters. Fortunately my worst fears, that they'd tail behind me for the next 3 hours and never shutup, weren't realized. They veered off at the first fork in the trail, and I was left, if not alone, at least with relative quiet.
While they were jabbering at each other about the very few things occupying their respective brains, I was trying to be quiet to avoid startling off the coyote that was standing off the side of the road. For better or worse the animal was clearly quite accustomed to humans, and was completely unfazed by all the racket. He'd get quite close to people -- after taking a few pictures , I looked down to fiddle with my brother's inscrutable digital camera only to look up and watch the coyote silently walk past me, not 5 feet away. I got a few more pictures, and that was that.
On the subject of pictures: I have little idea how to operate the digital camera I'm borrowing. It has a reasonable, if sometimes cumbersome, menu system that lets you fuss with many parameters. One of the more interesting is what ISO film the camera pretends to be. You can choose 100, 200 or 400 speed film, or "auto", in which case the camera presumably decides what's best. I was using the camera in auto mode, and the little LCD on the back would give me telemetry about the shot it was taking. It would say interesting things like "F2.8 1/500", which I assume means F2.8, and a 1/500th of a second exposure time. Which is great for eliminating motion blur, but horrible for having any sort of depth of field. Why not go up to F11 1/60, or whatever would be correct exposure setting? I could find no way to adjust this parameter of the camera.On the plus side, this is my first real use of a digital camera, and the freedom to just wildly click away with there being zero resulting cost is quite alluring. Beyond just documenting the trip for my own benefit, I'm also trying to generate a good (well, realistic) set of GPS waypoint/track data that can be correllated with the exif metadata on each picture, resulting in some sort of travel blog. Of course, what I just described isn't my idea, it's Slater's business . Hopefully this will give him a good data set for him to test his application against. It will certainly be a realistic data set -- the GPS is continually losing the satellites, a waypoint is entered and I don't take any pictures, I take pictures and neglect to take a waypoint, etc. etc. etc. At least the clock on the camera is set, although it isn't precisely aligned with the GPS. And when the batteries die (the 4AA cells in the camera have a shockingly short life) the clock will certainly have to be reset.
I continued hiking out towards Mirror Lake, having a nice old time. I encountered the coyote again a little further up the road, and this time he was the subject of somebody else's photo-op. A little further up I bumped into multiple gaggles of what I assume were high school students. I guess a benefit of going to school out here is you can have a Yosemite field trip. The big trip at my high school was to Gettysburg, PA, and as I recall the trip was cancelled my year. I think there wasn't enough student participation.
At some point further down the trail I stopped to fiddle with the camera. I took half a glance behind me, and lo and behold, there was the coyote again. I kept half an eye open from them on and kept catching sight of him. He wasn't exactly hounding me -- he was maybe 50 feet back, and often much further back than that -- but he was certainly following me. If I stood still long enough he'd grow impatient and pass me, always taking a detour off the trail to avoid getting too close to me.
Eventually I'd been hiking for a couple hours, and I hadn't hit the turnaround point. I'd been screwing around a fair bit with the camera, and my pace over the hard pack snow and ice had been slow, so maybe I only walked 3 miles in the 2 hours. But Mirror Lake was supposed to be 1.6 miles one-way from where I had parked. Hmmmm. I stopped on a bridge along the trail to get the GPS reacquired and figure out what I'd done, and who should show up? All of a sudden the coyote is standing at one end of the bridge staring at me, clearly wishing I'd continue to crossing the bridge so that he could use it without worrying himself about me.
I turned around at this point, convinced I must have walked past the mostly dry lake and not realized what I was looking at. Sure enough, I passed cut-out metal signs on the way back telling me I had another 1.5 miles to go in the return direction to get to Mirror Lake. So I had somehow just completely missed it. Interestingly there were two sets of signs. The set in my return direction said 2.4 miles to the stables (there is a horse rental available during the right season) and the set in my outbound direction said 3.9 miles to the stables. I considered taking the obvious loop around the lake, but decided that at my crappy pace, the sure to be rapid sunset in the valley, etc. it didn't make sense to push my luck.
I didn't see the coyote on the way back, so I'm guessing he lost interest in me and continued in the direction he was already heading when I turned around to come back.
One thing I regret not bringing with me is some sort of crampon or traction device for my boots. My boots don't have a particularly aggressive tread design, but they stick like glue on dry material. However, when I get on the ice they might as well be skates. I would guess that's true for most if not all boots -- you're standing on ice with a thing layer of water on top of it, so friction is essentially zero. I went to the "Mountain Outfitters" store (or something like that) in Curry Village to see what they might have. The first option was a vicious 4-prong steel thing that you strap to the heel of your boot. The prongs were each probably half an inch long, so I'm sure they'd do great things for traction. But they looked like they might make everything else miserable. The other thing they carried was "Yaks Tracks" or something like that -- probably had a cute spelling. Kind of like cable chains for a car. In this case there were springs wrapped around a web of heavy round rubber bands, which in turn snap around the boot. The guy working the counter managed to convince me there was some chance I'd cut the rubber bands to ribbons in normal use and just be irritated, so I skipped them. Given how irritated I was the one time I did fall on the ice, a $20 Yax Traxx experiment probably still would have made sense.
On my way out of the park I saw a couple of coyotes "playing" with a deer at the side of the road. I stopped to see what was going on and take some pictures. It was immediately obvious that the "play" was the coyotes exhausting the deer they had already badly wounded, and it was just a matter of time until they made a meal of it. Some nitwit in an F150 was barrelling along behind me and stopped 50 feet further down the road. I figured somebody would hop out and start taking pictures. Nope, the driver started laying on the horn, and then started backing up to be closer to the action, furiously honking all the way. I guess the driver figured he'd scare off the coyotes and then he could call 911 and get the deer life-flighted to the ER at Animal Mercy General. Either that or he was offended that I had stopped to watch the slaughter. Either way he's a boob.
Got to the hotel -- the Yosemite View Lodge -- and was relieved to see that the advice I received was quite good. Not an amazing place or anything, but nice, clean, and more upscale than a Days Inn or equivalent shit-box.
On the downside, the hotel was basically deserted. There were only a handful of people in the park, which I'm sure hits all the hotels. However, there's apparently a reasonable ski area at Badger Pass and I would think there'd be business from that, but there isn't a single in-use ski-rack in the parking lot. Getting to Badger Pass from the West Entrance, where the Yosemite View Lodge is located, is supposed to only be about an hour's drive, but perhaps anybody skiing at Badger Pass stays at Oakhurst, assuming Rt 41 is open.
Well, that's it I guess. There's a long and detailed missive from the hotel advising that long distance charges here are horrifically expensive and you'd really probably be best off just buying one of their calling cards. Of course, I already have a calling card, the question is if I can use it to get a data service or not, and if I have the stamina to figure out how to make it work. All signs point to "no."
BURGER
BURGER is located at 37.48979/-119.97039
It was set at 11:52:50 on Jan 22 2004