Yosemite

Mirror Lake Click to see this photo's flickr page

I realize that I’m almost a year behind in posting notes about our trips. Oh well. I'll work in real-time and catch up with older posts as I go along.

With the end of the school year, we (J in particular) start to get wanderlust, our feed itching to get out and onto the trails.

J’s camera stopped working last spring during out Yosemite trip. He was very disappointed and bought another one immediately after we returned home. Our trip this month was his first back to Yosemite with the new camera. After looking over the photos from last summer, he’s taking more time in setting up shots and taking photos at even more multiple settings, to better his chances of capturing the landscapes optimally. This means he takes a little longer at each photo stop, which means I finally have enough time to settle in and do very quick sketches and take notes as well. Our overall pace is slower, but the hikes are far more enjoyable.

With our stops and the spectacle of J’s humongous tripod, we struck up more conversations with other hikers. J, he likes to enjoy people, truth be told. Me, I tend to prefer to be left alone. We chatted with a couple from Europe, on a three-week stay in the US. They were intent on settling in at each place, enough to soak in everything, rather than rushing through to see a list of highlights in a tour book. We agreed that we liked this approach and traded notes on where we’d all visited. J commented that the man’s English (he was German, she was from Italy) was quite good; the man commented that J’s English was quite good, as well! Ha! The woman and I both rolled our eyes: This off-the-wall sense of humor is universal too!

We ran into a geology buff that was quite knowledgeable about the formations of all the features of the park. Lots of history. Me, on the other hand, I’m thinking, “Oh, look at the textures in that big slab of granite!”

The best line I overheard was while we were packing up to head downhill from Vernal Falls. Several groups of hikers had converged and had stopped to checked their respective maps to plan where they were heading next. One jovial group heaved their backpacks back on and headed off. As they were trotting away, I heard, “Oh man, I can’t reach it. Shoot. Can you reach in and grab my banana?” He stopped his hungry train of thought and all we could hear was the crunching of the path as they continued walking. “Oh. Geez. That didn’t sound so good”.

Photos and sketches from Yosemite, here.