Sunol Regional Park is one of those great parks that make you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere while only being a short drive from the middle of Silicon Valley. We took a short hike through the park today and I’ve posted a few photos here: Sunol Regional Wilderness
Tags: dayhike, east bay, geocaching, sunol
I love autumn in the mountains - the crisp air and fall colors along with the relatively light crowds always make for a wonderful experience. Paige had the lovely idea of heading to Yosemite Valley in early November and a few of us jumped in on the party. It turns out it was big weekend in the valley as celebrations of the 50th anniverary of the first ascent of the Nose of El Cap were happening. Combined with a bit of rain, it turned out to be a bit different than expected, but a fun weekend nevertheless.
Tags: Car Camping, clark range, Fall Colors, half dome, rain, waterfall, Yosemite
I’m having a hard time processing the results of this election. On the one hand: I love how excited and passionate our country feels right now, and I’m really happy to be a part of this historic event. It feels kind of like the Ewok party after the Death Star blew up. On the other hand: Prop 8. Oh California, I’m so disappointed. Shame on you. Our country took one giant step forward in equality, while you decided to stomp on it as best you could by passing Prop 8.
So, what does one do when in this state of mind? Head to the mountains, of course. Come to think of it, that’s my solution for everything. Clears the head, you know. I’ll be escaping to Yosemite Valley tomorrow to celebrate my birthday with friends, hang out around the campfire, do some hiking, and experiment with my new Nikon D90. It’s also the celebration of the 50th anniversary of El Capitan’s first ascent and there are various talks and activities going on in the Valley.
See you next week…
I’m not normally a vocal political person, but I just wanted to temporarily get off-topic here for a moment thanks to Google. Don’t worry, political rants are not exactly my thing, so this won’t be a regular feature.
Google’s adsense has been feeding ‘yes on prop 8′ ads through many blogs, including mine. I have requested a block on these ads and am waiting for it to take effect. My reponse is to paste a bigger ‘No on 8′ button front and center and remove my sidebar ads until after the election. So nyah nyah!
If Prop 8 passes it will remove rights from our state constitution that have recently been affirmed by our State Supreme Court. It will undo years of work that has been done to further equal rights, maintain separation of church and state, and remove government intrusion into our private lives.
So, go out and vote tomorrow. If you’re in California, please check off ‘No’ next to Prop 8 so that we can live in a state that doesn’t write intolerance, discrimination, and religious beliefs into its Constitution.
Update: TwoHeelDrive and ModernHiker report the same problem. Get out of our hiking blogs!
Tags: politics
Back in August I had a really fun long weekend playing in the Eastern Sierra with the GBA (Geocachers of the Bay Area) 4×4 group. There is a lot more to do over there than we could fit into the three days we had at the time, so last week we drove out for a follow up trip. Our targets were Laurel Lakes (which we did in August, but couldn’t resist a second run), the crash site of Flight 802 in the mountains just east of Bishop, the Champion Mine/Black Eagle camp on the flanks of White Mountain, Reward Mine, and the Whitney Arch in the Alabama Hills.
Tags: 4x4, arch, gba, geocaching, hot spring, mines, Photography, plane crash, ruins, whitney
Welcome to my shiny new photoblog! There’s still a lot of work to do, but I’m already in love with the potential. I’ve ditched the annoying old Gallery software for the much simpler and cleaner Zenphoto, integrated with Wordpress. I still have several things on my todo list, but the site is quite usable and functional now.
Now I have to catch up with posting photos from my latest outings… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: gallery2, movable type, website, wordpress, zenphoto
I’ve been going through a website midlife crisis lately. What started as a small site to store my photos to share with friends and family (because back then, Webshots was the only online option and it…well…it really, really sucked…) has grown, and I’ve done my best to keep up with it. I’ve tried different solutions for storing photos (Coppermine and Gallery2), and different blogging platforms to go along with them. I even used my own hacked together php before blogging software was around!
A few weeks ago I posted about some issues I had to deal with (comment
spam, broken contact form, etc), and in a comment, Kate C pointed me to
Zenphoto. And then it was down the rabbit hole…
Tags: gallery2, movable type, website, wordpress, zenphoto
I love to squeeze in a couple of weekend trips at the end of summer. After Labor Day the crowds disappear and the air takes on a nice fall chill. This weekend we headed up to Yosemite for a nice easy hike along Lyell Canyon where we met Paige, T, Deon, Sarah, Barbara, and Kit at camp, which was situated right across from one of my favorite Sierra rest stops. Here the Tuolumne River flows over smooth granite into small pools and waterfalls - a perfect stop for a foot soak on a longer hike through the canyon, but this weekend it was our destination.
Tags: fishing, lyell canyon, Yosemite
Over Labor Day weekend we once again headed into the Sierra for a backpacking trip. This trip was built around my desire to see Benson Lake (the picture in this entry) with its giant sandy beach and trout fishing. We started off from Twin Lakes (out of Bridgeport), headed through Hoover Wilderness, down Matterhorn Canyon, by Smedberg and Benson Lakes, and back up Kerrick canyon. It took us 3.5 days to cover the ~50 miles, with a long, 20 mile final day when we decided to forgo our last campsite and hike all the way out.
Tags: backpacking, beach, benson, fishing, hiking, lakes, matterhorn, sand, Yosemite
I’m leaving on (another!) backpacking trip tomorrow and have a few administrative tasks I need to do upon my return:
1. The contact page is borked. Somehow I managed to delete part of it so emails won’t send. I’ll restore it/rewrite it soon. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment here if you need to get in touch with me, or go via the ‘contact’ link in the Gallery.
2. I’ve disabled comments in the Gallery for now. I upgraded the software recently and the spam handling is, nicely put, less than optimal. I wrote a short script to kill off the spam comments, but I still have
to run it several times a day to keep up with the spambots, and that’s just not fun. Until I have time to get in there and make my own improvements I am disabling the comments. Old comments are still visible, it’s only new ones that can’t be added.
3. A couple of people have asked me where the header photo was taken. It’s the Mount Whitney ridgeline as seen from Guitar Lake (to the west of the peak). The full image is here.
Okay, enough of this computer mumbo-jumbo. I’m ready to hit the trail.
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