Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

If this post is a bit disjointed, it’s because the past week or so has been a bit busy and we’ve bounced around from one thing to another like a pinball, inside a pinball machine, inside another giant pinball machine.

Last weekend was to be our big trip to Yosemite. We were planning on camping out with some of my coworkers and then doing some mild hiking around the valley while most of them attempted to scale Half Dome. This was going to be Athena’s first camping trip, so Ann spent the week preparing and packing and I spent the week convincing Ann that it wasn’t a crazy idea and that Curry Village is actually quite nice.

This was all planned out when we learned that Todd would be in San Francisco the same weekend. We worked out a plan to drive up to Sonoma on Thursday to meet up with him, then leave for Yosemite Friday right after work.

Then some of the corporate communications people at work told me some news outlets might be interested in doing a story on all the scams using Google’s name and logo… and by the way, Good Morning America will be here on Friday :)

Then Yosemite caught fire.

So on Thursday, we did go up to Sonoma to see Todd and meet Liz. Todd was actually having a bad reaction to some sunburn so we didn’t go on on wine tours, but Athena was her normal charming self and we had a nice visit.

I had to go in to work early that morning for practice interviews and give the correspondent some background over the phone during lunch, but that was okay.

On Friday I did the interview – it was about a half hour of taping but in the end they only used a few seconds. You can see the clip and read the news story and read more about the experience on my blog.

Later that day we found out that wild fires near Yosemite had closed the road to the west entrance and filled the valley with smoke. We had to cancel the trip, but Reid pulled together a last-minute day trip to Angel Island, just north east of San Francisco in the bay.

We carried Athena around with the baby carrier and stowed about a thousand pounds of baby stuff in another backpack. It pays to be prepared, though – Ann had bought a new thermos for the camping trip and it kept us supplied with hot water for milk all day, no problem.

We split off from the main group to avoid the steep trail and walked over to the Angel Island Immigration Station, where many Asian American immigrants were detained. It was a nice walk, though uncharacteristically hot.

The walls of the building have poetry carved in Chinese:

Athena absolutely loved taking the ferry to and from the island. Judging from her reaction, it was the greatest thing she had ever experienced in her 9 months on this earth.

Our fellow hikers included Mike, Beah, Dan, Nelson, Merry, Charlene, Reid, Kolina, Naoko from the Tokyo office, and Andrew from Seoul.

Few people know this but Nelson and Mike are professional catalog models:

The ferry back from Angel Island is amazingly inconvenient. We had to go to Tiburon, then Fishermans Wharf, and then finally back to the Ferry Building where we started our trip.

And here’s one last photo, Athena has learned how to drive:

Ann and I are somewhat exhausted.

By Jason

First off, thanks for all the baby name votes – follow this link to my blog to see some of the results.  Second, a disclaimer – this is yet another photo-heavy travelog post from Jason.  I know that it seems like all Ann and I do is take trips, but the fact is we only write about the interesting stuff.  It’s hard to create awhole post about running errands and catching up on laundry.

We had some folks in town from the Dublin office and they wanted to see Yosemite, so we took a quick trip last weekend to do some hiking and camping.  Ann promised not to have the baby that weekend and told me to go, she’s basically the best wife ever.

Because of bad Bay Area traffic we didn’t get out to the park until after dark.  We stayed the first night at Housekeeping Camp, which is somewhere between tent camping and staying in cabins.  We ended up stuffing eight people into one “cabin” (really three concrete walls and a tent roof) that should really only fit five.  But we did take a quick night hike down to a footbridge over the Merced River, where I was able to play with my new camera’s long exposures:

The first stop was Vernal Falls.  In the spring this waterfall overflows and causes mist to drift down the valley, but in the late summer it’s a lot more reserved.  You can see a bit of the rainbow at the bottom in the picture below.

Here we are at the top of Vernal Falls.  Since we got a bit of a later start, this was a good point to stop for lunch.  We introduced Alvar, Iban and Juliane to two great American traditional foods: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and beef jerky.

Right above the falls is a broad area where the water flows over the bare granite, creating a natural waterslide.  In the spring it’s pretty dangerous but the river was so dry that it was only an inch or so deep.

Here is the view of Nevada Falls on the way up the trail.  This was a pretty nice hike, I would recommend it to anyone is decent shape (except Ann, at least not for a month or so yet).  There’s a lot of uphill hiking and switchbacks, but it’s not so relentless as the hike up to Yosemite Falls.

Here’s the view from the top of Nevada Falls – it’s really spectacular, definitely worth the walk.  This is about the halfway point for the trail to climb Half Dome.  I think next year we’ll get some people together and do the whole thing.

Here’s Mark, the new guy at work, taking a look down to the valley floor.

We decided to take the John Muir trail back, along the other side of the valley.  You can just barely see Nevada Falls on the right.

Here’s a view of Liberty Cap and Mt. Broderick with Nevada Falls at the bottom right.

We stayed the second night at Curry Village, which I would recommend to just about anyone.  It’s not as posh as the yurts we stayed in on my first trip, but the tent-cabins are really nice and the bathrooms are clean with private shower stalls.  The only drawback is that you can’t have a campfire – the cabins are way too close together.

The next day we took a drive up to Glacier Point, which provides a panoramic view of the Yosemite Valley and mountains.  Here I am with Half Dome in the background.  I made sure to arrange the camera angle to make myself look like some kind of crazy daredevil, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as it looks.

Here’s a more straightforward pose at the top of Glacier point:

That’s it for now.  I have a truly ridiculous number of photos in Flickr, with lots of landscapes and nature shots if you’re into that sort of thing.  I’ve also made some large-scale panoramic photos that I’ll put up soon too.

Edit:  Reid brought along his GPS so he could generate a trip report.  Here’s a graph of our hike, you can see the full data at Motionbased.

In the last post, I talked about a hike up the Yosemite Falls trail.  Yosemite is a very large park so it’s impossible to see the whole thing in one weekend.  We decided to drive through the park, take a couple of stops on the way, and make a quick visit to Mono Lake on the other side.

Our first stop past the village  was at Olmstead Point.  This boulder is glacial till – a stone deposited when the glacier that polished these granite mountains retreated.

This small tree seems to grow right out of the surface of the rock.  The granite here has fracture joints that are wide enough for roots to take hold.  In the distance you can see the other side of Half Dome.

The next stop was a Tenaya Lake.  The water here was amazingly blue and clear – the lake is over 8000 feet above sea level and is fed by snowmelt from the surrounding mountains.

Here I am on the shore.  You can see there’s still some snow patches in the mountains behind me.

Our next stop (after lunch) was at Mono Lake.  It’s a salt lake on the other side of the Sierras in the dry Mono Basin.  This is the closest I’ve ever been to a real desert.  You can see the Sierras in the distance in this photo.

The strange limestone rock formation you see here is called tufa.  Mono Lake is famous for the bizarre landscape created by the tufa.

Tufa on the edge of the lake.  They formed when fresh groundwater seeped up through the salty, alkaline lake.  Minerals in the freshwater reacted with the salt water to form calcium carbonate.  These rocks grew from the bottom up.

Mono Lake is really amazing – the tufa form really improbable, Suessian shapes.

You can see a male egret in this photo (click to see larger versions).  There are no fish in Mono Lake, but it’s a great place to keep a nest away from predators.  This egret flies miles each day to catch fish and bring them back.

Here we are in a famous spot where a photo from one of Pink Floyd’s albums was shot.

A little ways down the beach is another spot with sand tufa.  These are formed the same way as the other tufa but in sandier areas of the lake.

They aren’t as tall, but the sand tufa form these cathedral-like shapes on the shore.

You can see the cannels where the freshwater traveled up, forming the tufa.  These are extremely fragile and will be inundated as the lake level beings to rise.

There are many more photos of tufa in the photoset on Flickr.

By Jason

One of the many cool things about my job is working with folks from all over the world.  Periodically we’ll have people in town from Dublin, Beijing, Hyderabad, and other places.  When Robin (from Beijing) and Tilek (from Kyrgyzstan by way of Dublin) mentioned they wanted to see Yosemite before they left the U.S., I planned a weekend trip to see the national park.  Robin’s friend Lu Lu, also from Beijing, came along as well.

It turns out that it’s pretty hard to find a place to stay in or near the park on a few days’ notice at the height of tourist season.  I looked about 15-20 places and only found two with vacancies.  I decided to go with the Yosemite Lakes campground, just a few miles outside the park, which had a yurt open.  What’s a yurt?  You can see in the picture below.  It’s basically a big round tent, common in Central Asia (including Kyrgyzstan).  The yurts at this campground were pretty nice, with bathrooms, showers, kitchenettes, and even satellite TV.  So we weren’t really roughing it.  It was so convenient that I’m thinking this might be a good place for our baby’s first camping experience some time next year.

We drove in to Yosemite in the morning.  This photo is from the Valley Portal, a scenic spot at the side of the road before you get into Yosemite Valley.  That’s the Merced River below and from this point you can see a couple of waterfalls in the distance.  As always, click on the photos if you want to see larger versions.

We stopped at Bridal Veil Falls and had something to eat at the village in the valley before starting our hike.  We didn’t really get an early enough start to do the famous hike up Half Dome so we decided to hike up the Yosemite Falls trail instead.  The first stop was the bottom of the lower falls.

Here I’m retrieving my hat after it the wind blew it off.  Lucky it landed on rocks and not in the creek.  The hat is from the DVD release of the movie WarGames – Google had a panel discussion with the movie’s writers and it was one of the giveaways.

This is about as close as I got to the bottom of the Lower Yosemite Falls.  There were some people climbing the rocks closer but it was already pretty wet at this point – I don’t think my camera would have survived any more of a soaking.

Next we started the long climb up.  The trail goes back and forth with a series of switchbacks.  It seems like you’re going back and forth for hours.

The trail winds in and out of tree cover.  Every few hundred feet you get another incredible view.  The trail is very well-maintained and we passed people climbing down on a pretty regular basis.  Still, it was a lot less crowded than the trails along the valley floor.

This bright blue bird is, as far as I can tell, a steller’s jay.  They’re related to our common blue jay’s in Ohio and always show up when I’m hiking in all the beautiful parks in the area.  They stay in the shade and don’t like to sit still so this is about the best picture I’ve been able to get.

Here’s a photo from Columbia Rock.  Behind the guard rail is a drop straight down to the valley floor, maybe a thousand feet or so.

Soon after we were able to see the Upper Yosmeite Falls, the tallest waterfall in North America.

The trail took us pretty close to the falls but we decided to so some easy boulder hopping to get a better view.  You can get an idea how far the water is falling in this picture:

This is the spot where we sat for abit to watch the water.  you can see Half Dome in the distance.  We noticed someone climbing the boulders down the slope, much closer to the spot where the waterfall lands, so we decided to make our way down.  It wasn’t too difficult of a climb, just lots of boulders.

We stopped when the rocks started to get wet a slippery.  You can see our reward- a great view of the falls, a rainbow, and Half Dome and the other peaks in the distance.

Here I am above the rainbow.  You can make out the double rainbow in the photo.

And here’s the upper Yosemite Falls from below.

The wind can blow the water around a considerable distance, which we found out the hard way.  Right as we started to head back, the waterfall blew sideways a bit and landed around us, really soaking Tilek.

Our way back up to the trail was a bit more difficult than we planned.  In the tumble of rocks and random tufts of tree cover, we couldn’t spot the exact route we had taken to get down.  We weren’t really lost, since if we went to high on the hill we would hit the granite mountainside, and if we went to low, we would stop at the cliff.  But we needed to get back to the exact same spot because that’s where we had left Lu Lu – he was too tired to make the climb.  We spent about 45 minutes climbing up a bit, getting stuck, then climbing down a bit, then going back up, yelling for him to let us know where he was.  Finally we saw the precariously perched rock from the photo above and turned a corner – only to find Lu Lu listening to his headphones.  He didn’t have a clue we were shouting for him.

We walked back down the trail and had dinner at the food court near the lodge.  We were all pretty exhausted, but when we got back to camp I introduced everyone to the great American delicacy of smores.

You can see a lot more photos, including more landscapes and pictures of the waterfall, at Flickr.

Next up: another day at Yosemite and a visit to Mono Lake.