It's Snowing in Yosemite

And we're leaving. It only snowed a little bit, but that was enough. Now it's just sprinkling off and on.







To clarify, Yosemite is a place beyond words - a complete wonder. The mountains are spectacular with their presence, shape, and color. Some of them look like a giant bucket of black paint was dumped on top, with these amazing black dripping vertical stripes.. Makes me wonder how they got there. Others have incredible rounded shapes like Half Dome. And the mountains are everywhere you look.

But we're done. It's cold here and Auggie has been sleeping horribly. We haven't showered in more than a week, and although we took a freezing dip in Lake Tenaya on Tuesday, it was just too cold for even that yesterday. Its crowded. We're just ready to move on.

Yesterday we hiked to Half Dome - it was grueling. Although much more so for Dan since he carried Auggie in the kid backpack the whole way. It's a beautiful set of trails on the way up: there are waterfalls, rocky cliffs, and forested areas with the biggest trees outside of Muir Woods I'm sure. It's about 8 miles uphill. And then 8 miles of downhill torture as downhill is so much harder on your feet and knees. Despite taping the crap out of my feet, I still got blisters on the sides of my big toes from downhill. Ouch. Plus an extra two miles to account for back and forth from the parking lot. Whew. It was a day.

And I have to tell you, I didn't make it all the way and neither did Auggie. We really booked it up, so by the time we got to the base of Half Dome I was out of energy and out of oxygen at that elevation. I hiked up one switchback's worth of stairs and went right back down, taking the kid with me. In retrospect, had we rested at the base for 10 minutes I would have been golden, but we didn't. So Dan has an extra half-mile on me.

Dan did go up and encountered an interesting situation on his way back. Apparently a dad and his 13 y/o kid were on their way up when Dan was heading back down. The kid got scared so the dad asked Dan if his kid could head down with Dan. No biggie, right? Um... No. Apparently the kid was so afraid of heights that Dan had to coach him down one step at a time. What should have taken 10 minutes max took them over an hour. Talk about irresponsible! Poor kid! Okay, maybe the dad had no idea his kid was in such bad shape, but still - pawning him off on a stranger?! In my opinion they were extremely lucky that stranger was Dan.

On a different note, we drove through a Georgia O'Keeffe painting the other night. Monday afternoon found us in Utah heading to Great Basin National Park to stay for the night. We passed Salt Lake City during rush hour - uggh - but stopped at a great burger place named JCW's or something like that. Anyway, we continued west from Salt Lake City on Hwy 6 and saw the most spectacular skies we've ever seen. As I said, we drove through a Georgia O'Keeffe painting.

The landscape was desolate with these incredible sloping mountains surrounding us on all sides. The mountains looked like they were giant pieces of pizza dough that God grabbed with His fingers and softly pulled toward the sky. The setting sun cast dramatic shadows on the mountains making finite shapes of dark shadow and bright mountainside. In between us and the mountains were vast acres of desert filled with tumbleweeds and nothing else.

As we drove through different ranges the sky turned from bright blue with a strikingly white moon, to a bleeding watercolor of rose and gray stripes, to a sherbert mix of corals and reds, to a final watercolor of graytones. I'm sure we'll never see anything like it again. Here's my sad attempt at capturing the gray/rose sky:





We are now headed for Los Angeles where we will live in civilization for a day or two with our wonderful friend Tim. I believe there may even be hot showers on the other end of this drive. Talk about motivation :)

[Just north of Bishop, California on US 395 south, odometer read: 4044]

- From My iPhone