The Way it Was Today: Fall (and a bit of Winter) in Yosemite Valley

It always comes back to Yosemite. I travel many places, explore many mountains, see the most incredible geology, but the circle of my life always involves a valley of granite in the Sierra Nevada. I was thinking about why this afternoon during a bit of free time while my students were on a project. I was walking from Yosemite Lodge to Happy Isles, a stroll of three miles or so, and I realized it was this: there are the memorable spots you will visit once or twice in a lifetime to be impressed by, and there are those special places that by circumstance you are allowed to return to time and time again. I live just a two hour drive from Yosemite National Park. I'm guessing I've been there at least 80 times in the last quarter century. I've explored it in every season of the year, in wet years and dry, recently burned and recently flooded. And every time there is something new.

Today I was walking across Cook Meadow near Sentinel Bridge when I heard someone pad up behind me on the boardwalk and then jump off into the meadow. I was about to tell them to stay off the meadow grass when I realized it wasn't a person, it was a coyote, and I was in its way. It trotted around me and back onto the boardwalk and into the forest. We were going the same way so I followed for awhile until it passed some fawns, a doe, and buck in the forest. They ignored me too

The fall colors were stunning (yes easterners, I know that word should only be reserved for New England and such places, but in California any bright colors impress). The Merced River was at the seasonal low point and the surface of the river was a mirror.

We had arrived literally on the heels of the first major storm of the year which overnight had dropped an inch or more of rain in the valley and a foot of snow in the high country. It was still drizzling and the clouds obscured the cliffs, so my attention was mostly on things close at hand.

It wasn't much, but the rain rejuvenated Yosemite Falls for the first time in many months. A trickle is barely visible in the picture above.

The Oaks and Dogwood trees added a splash of yellow, orange and pink to the scenery.

Cottonwood, birch and aspen were also turning.

The clouds started to lift and move on, revealing ghostly cliffs and stony ramparts up above. Sentinel Rock appeared first (above). Snow clung to every tree branch in the forest above.

Finally the skies started to clear over the monarch of the upper valley, Half Dome.

Closer at hand a Raven was watching for any dropped tidbits from the students who were waiting for the tram.

We stopped near Yosemite Falls to talk about hanging valleys, but Half Dome still captured most of the attention. It gains new depth when wreathed in clouds.

We had skipped Tunnel View at the beginning of the day because nothing would have been visible. The situation was different in the late afternoon. We headed up for a look, and it was nothing short of spectacular. I've got only a few (okay, many) hundreds of pictures from this spot and it is never the same. Today was special.

The last rays of the sun were vanishing as we left the valley for home.

And that's the way it was today in Yosemite, my special place. Come and see it when you can!

A Bald Eagle, a Raven, and a Turkey Vulture Were Having Lunch Together...No, Really!

To my birding readers: how is this for an odd scene? It's the strangest bird picture I've ever taken, and the first ever of a bald eagle. I imagine they've been in our area for awhile, but until today I had never seen one south of Lake Tahoe. We were driving up through the Sierra Nevada foothills between the Gold Rush towns of Hornitos and Mariposa, and came across the group of scavenging birds. Mrs. Geotripper saw a pair of eagles in the Don Pedro Reservoir area two weeks ago, so I am wondering if they have moved into the region permanently.

I am also wondering if the coyote was shot (I certainly hope not poisoned) since I'm guessing that coyotes are too big to be attacked by the eagles. The scene was playing out in a large pasture allotment along Hornitos Road at an elevation of about 1,100 feet.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: A day in the canyonlands, Part 2

In the last post, we saw the sun rise over the Canyonlands region of the Colorado Plateau, an area that includes Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dead Horse Point State Park. We saw all three on this one extraordinary day.

We woke up and Devils Garden Campground in Arches, and in the relative cool of the morning we followed the trail out of Devils Garden to see the largest natural span in existence: Landscape Arch. At 290 feet, the span is as long as a football field.

If you haven't ever seen Landscape Arch, you should bump it up to the top of your bucket list, because I don't think it is going to persist much beyond our collective life times. Since 1991, slabs measuring 30, 47 and 70 feet have dropped off the thinnest part of the arch. The trail under the arch was closed years ago for fear of rocks falling on visitors. The folks at Wikipedia think that it might mean there is less weight being supported by the arch, but I think that the math is increasingly working against the continued existence of the sandstone span.

Some of the students who were on the trip might not remember the moon lurking underneath the arch that day. I'm cheating just a little, pulling up my favorite shots from the 2008 trip, since I actually walked a different trail that morning. I was headed to Pine Tree Arch, which is on a short spur trail off the walk to Landscape.

Because of the unique geological circumstances of the Paradox Basin, the park contains the highest concentration of arches on the planet. Most of them occur in the Jurassic Entrada Sandstone, a relatively uniform dune sand that formed in a tropical or equatorial coastal region. The Entrada lies above salt layers that developed in the Paradox basin (a large isolated bay complex that occasionally was cut off from the ocean and dried up) in late Paleozoic time. Salt deforms easily under pressure, and has pushed the overlying rocks into a series of anticlines (upward pointing folds in the rock). When the salt began to interact with groundwater, the salt dissolved and the top of the anticline collapsed inwards, stressing the overlying Entrada, and causing a series of parallel joints to form, like those in the picture above, at the start of the Landscape Arch Trail.

The raven apparently supports an alternate hypothesis of arch formation.

Once the fins develop, precipitation is directed preferentially into the sand-filled joints and fractures, and the constant soaking of the sandstone at the base of the fin causes the solid rock to lose cement at a higher rate than the higher parts of the fin. Eventually a small opening occurs, and slabs of rock fall out, enlarging the arch over time. The arches grow until they collapse, an event that is fairly common, even in human times of reference. Several dozen arches have collapsed since 1971 according to some web sources, but I can't find any original confirmation for the number (that's out of 2,000 arches in the park). It's not that we are running out of arches, though; new ones are forming too.

Pine Tree Arch is an attractive little span with a nice view through the opening. One thing about Landscape Arch is the difficulty of getting a good angle on the sky. There is a cliff behind Landscape, and the closed trail prevents access for views upward. I found Pine Tree far less crowded and more intimate, even though it was only a few hundred feet from the main trail.

We finished our hike and returned to the vans. We headed to the Windows Section of the park, and the heat...well the heat descended on us like a blanket. Just look how the gang fought for the pitiful amount of shade at our lecture stop!

Next, an Indiana Jones adventure! This is a continuing series about what I've called the Abandoned Lands of the Colorado Plateau. It's kind of hard to be describing a very crowded national park as an abandoned place, but it was abandoned already by the Native Americans, the original ranchers, the uranium miners, and when the price of oil becomes prohibitively expensive, I worry it will be abandoned by our society as well. In the meantime, it is a place of beauty and inspiration.