Tag Archives: NP

Day 15 – Catching up

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I’m hanging out in Eureka, CA this weekend.  On Friday I drove from Yosemite over to San Francisco and was able to visit Claus and Ingrid and meet their new baby, Markus.  I think this was the first time I had seen them since their move to SF, so it was great to hang out with them again.  After driving through some of the most desolate parts of the country during the last week, the congestion of the bay area (even at non rush hour) was a bit of a shock!

I drove up the coast Saturday morning from Petaluma (just north of San Francisco) and arrived here about 6 in the evening.  It was a nice leisurely (slow and winding) drive up the Shoreline Highway (California 1).

I had woken up to an apparently typical foggy/misty/drizzly morning in the bay area and was not looking forward to breaking camp with everything being wet.  I hung out in my tent for about an hour, watching an episode of SG-1 (portable DVD playerslaptops are awesome!), and by that time things had dried out enough to make it bearable.

By the time I hit the road, about 9 a.m., it was stilly cloudy and not very pleasant.  By about 11, I had gotten far enough north andor the sun was finally able to burn off some of the cloudsfog and it turned into a beautiful day on the coast.  My car is a blast to drive on all of the curvy, steep roads I’ve been on for the last week or so!

It had been pleasantly cool along the coast, around 80, in the bay area, but here in Eureka, it was even cooler – only in the upper 60s but with clear blue skies and down to the upper 40s at night.  It’s fantastic!

This morning, Sunday, I drove up to Redwood National Park which is about 45 minutes north of Eureka.  The trees here are the Coast Redwood, which are related to the Giant Redwood (Sequoia) that I saw in Yosemite.  While the Giant variety is the largest overall (volume) tree, the Coast variety is the tallest, by at least 50 feet, but only about half as big around.  These things are just enormous.  The Coast variety is just as limited in its range as the Giant.  It only grows in an area about 450 miles north to south and about 25 miles wide and below an elevation of 3000 feet.  Also, unlike the Giant variety, the Coast Redwoods were heavily logged.  Of the 2 million acres of Old Growth forest that were present when white folk arrived, only about 100,000 acres have now been preserved in state and national parks.  They are still being logged today, but at least there are now areas where recovery is occurring.

Most of Redwood Park is only accessible via unpaved roads, so my visit there was fairly short.  But, to be honest, once you’ve seen one humongous tree, you’ve kind of seen them all.  It’s definitely something to see though.  So after a quick hike I headed back to the camp to do a load of laundry and just relax.  I’m on vacation but I’ve been going steady for two weeks and realized I need a day to just sort of hang out.  This is a great place for it as the weather is perfect – it’s 68 degrees and sunny with a nice breeze blowing in off the ocean – my campground is just off of Humboldt Bay, which is separated from the ocean by just a narrow strip of land.  I feel for all of you back in the midwest with the near 100 degrees – but you do have AC so it’s not that bad!

I hope to have my website all caught up this evening as that’s how I’m actually relaxing. This is the first chance since I left Yosemite to work on it and the next few days I won’t have internet access in order to do any updates.

Day 12 – Yosemite Day 2

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I spent the morning in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia.  These are the largest organisms on the planet.  There are trees that are taller, and there are trees that have larger trunks, but these have the combination that provides the largest volume.  They are ginormous!

What I thought was going to be a quick jaunt through the forest to look at a couple of trees, turned into an all morning, something like 6 mile hike.  It was worth it though as I made it to Wawona Point overlooking Wawona Valley.  Pretty nice view.

From there I headed over to the Glacier Point drive and stopped off to hike the Sentinal Dome.  That was just a leisurely 2 mile hike to the top of Sentinal Dome, and oh boy, was it ever worth it!  Sentinal Dome is on the south rim of Yosemite valley and gives you a panoramic view of the entire valley and the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains.  This is the place to see it all.  I could have spent all afternoon there, but nature calls, as it were…

I finally made it out to Glacier Point and what do you know, more great views.  From here, the only major feature not visible is El Capitan and since it’s lower down the valley wall then the Sentinal Dome, the surrounding mountains aren’t visible, but spectacular shots of Half Dome are easily had.

By this time, it was 4:30 and time to start the drive back to the campground.  Yosemite is such a huge park, 1.2 million acres, at least  6 separate entrances and seemingly endless possibilities.  This is definitely someplace everyone should see and I’ll definitely be coming back.  I want to hike to the top of Half Dome, but didn’t have the time on this short visit.

Day 11 – Yosemite NP

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I drove from Mammoth Lakes up to the Tioga Pass entrance on the east side of Yosemite.  Along the highway were great views of the mountains on the east side of the park.  That side of the park is at an elevation of about 8000 feet and the peaks are not too much higher and still have some snow cover.

I drove through the park and stopped at Pothole Dome, just a little (compared to some others) lump of granite.  I scrambled up to the top – maybe a couple hundred feet and snapped a few pictures of the meadow below.

From there I headed down to Yosemite Valley which is the center of the park and contains the primary points of interest in the park; El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite and Bridalveil Falls.  It’s simply gorgeous.  I got some good pictures – to be posted soon.<br /><br />By the time I watched the short film about the park at the visitor center, it was time to head to my campground.  As I was unable to reserve a space in the park, I had to stay at a KOA outside the park.  Unfortunately, the most direct route to the campground was closed due to a rockslide.  So I had to take the long route, out the south end of the park and back around.  It was about 2 and half hours from Yosemite Valley.  The west side of the park is about 4000 feet below the east side.  Where the east side was nice and cool yesterday, it was hot on the west side – back in the upper 90s.  It’s cooling down nicely now that the sun has gone down though, so it’s not too bad.

No power, at my campsite, but this campground has a TV room – with AC.  So that’s where I’m sitting and working on my website updates tonight.

Day 9 – Great Basin NP

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I spent the day at Great Basin NP.  This area, known as the Basin and Range, is really quite interesting and the Park is fantastic.

If you’re wondering what the name Great Basin refers to, its a geographic region which encompases nearly all of Nevada and parts of all the surrounding states.  Basically it’s a region comprised of elevated mountains or mountain ranges with desert valleys separating them.  What makes the basin area interesting is that all of the preciptiation that falls here, stays here, because of the mountain ranges.  It doesn’t run ultimately to the ocean like everywhere else.

The elevation differences in Great Basin NP make for some prety dramatic views of the surrounding areas.  There is something like an 8,000 ft difference from the summit of Wheeler Peak to the surrounding deserts.  Pictures don’t do it justice, you really have to see it first hand.

As I was only spending the one day here, I wasn’t able to do the summit hike of Wheeler Peak as that’s an all day thing and you really have to be off the summit before noon in order to avoid the routine afternoon thunderstorm.  Instead, I took the scenic drive up to the campground at 10,000 ft and took the Alpine Lakes hike.  It was about a 3 mile hike which offered lots of great views of Wheeler peak and it’s neighbor, Jeff Davis Peak. Wheeler peak at 13,063 ft is the second highest in Nevada (sorry, but I don’t know the first).  The lakes on this hike were really more like ponds, but it was still worth the effort.

After that, I went back down to the visitor center and took the tour of Lehman Cave.  Lots of really cool cave stuff including the most “shields” of any cave in the world.  Shields are a rare cave formation where water under pressure exits through a crack or weak point in the cave.  Because the water is under pressure, the shields can form at all sorts of angles.

I’ll have to come back here someday and take the Wheeler summit hike, the view has got to be amazing.  I’d stay in the park the next time – I drove through the campground at the trailhead to the summit hike and it’s really nice!

Day 5 – OK, so it can reaallly rain

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I woke up to a cloud filled sky, so I just kind of hung around camp for awhile before I made up my mind to go.  I headed into the park planning to go on a fairly long hike, but as I got closer to the trailhead, the clouds never seemed to clear.

Rather than having to hike in the rain, I decided to drive the Trail Ridge Road up to the Alpine Visitor Center, which is at the midpoint of this road .  This is the same road I’ll be taking tomorrow on the way to Utah, so I figured I would save time by getting some of the photo stops in today.  The Alpine visitor center is situated at 11,796 feet above sea level which makes it the highest visitor center in the entire National Park System.

It was a nice cool morning, so I drove with the top down.  The temperature drops rapidly as you ascend so I had to put a sweatshirt on about halfway up.  I made a few stops along the way and took lots of pictures.  It was cloudy so the lighting wasn’t great, but I still got some good shots.

At the visitor center is a short hike up to a scenic viewpoint at just over 12,000 feet.  I hiked up there only to have the batteries in my camera run out – and wouldn’t you know this was the time I left everything in the car.  Oh well, I went back down to the visitor center, had some lunch, grabbed new batteries and headed back up.

As I was on my way back up, I noticed lots of rain cells over various peaks and one that appeared to be headed my direction.  I hustled up to the top, snapped a few pictures and got back down as fast as I could.  I couldn’t believe I was passing people going up – most with no rain gear whatsoever, and it was only about 55 degrees as well.

I made it into the visitor center just in time to miss the downpour and hail and luckily stayed dry.  I hung out there for about an hour waiting for the rain to let up and then listening to a ranger talk about lightning – very appropriate topic!  He also explained that the afternoon thunderstorms were more or less a daily occurrence during the summer due to the morning heating of the east and south faces of the mountains – now I find this out!

I made it back to my campsite about 3:30 and decided to take in a movie – Pirates of the Caribbean as I didn’t feel like hanging out at the campsite.  The movie was pretty good, I’ll definitely see the next one, just to know how things wrap up.  As I walked out of the movie there was a huge thunderstorm blowing through, so I hung out in the lobby for about a half hour waiting for it to let up – no sense going back to the campsite just yet.  Afterwards, there was a tremendous double rainbow that I snapped a couple of pictures of.  An for about a half hour after the rain stopped, the clouds were making all sorts of spectacular patterns in the sky, got some pictures of those too.

The good news is that through all the rain today, my tent stayed nice and dry – OK there were a few drops that managed to sneak through but they wiped up easily.  I’m looking forward to the next couple of days as I’ll be out on the basin and range area of Colorado, Utah and Nevada which are arid regions.  So I should stay dry at least until I reach Yosemite.