CheeseInTheDark

So, back to Yellowstone.  Originally, we were going to come to Yellowstone the night before and camp, leaving the whole next day to look at things.  As it worked out though, we didn't get to Yellowstone until about three o'clock in the afternoon, so we had to take the hurry-up-and-look tour of the park.  Normally, at every previous park, we'd show up there, grab a map, and have some time to plan out our trails for the day beforehand.  This time we got to the park gate, got the map, and had to lay out our plans for the remainder of the day while we were driving into the park, so we had to decide what to look at pretty quickly also.

In the end, we went around the central loop in the park to see Gibbon Falls, Yellowstone Canyon, the lake, and finally Old Faithful and the surrounding area.

In the meantime, I got some pictures while we were driving into the park.


There were huge areas with short trees like this, I think due to the 1988 wildfires.  I think there may have also been some more large fires after that in the mid-nineties.  It's funny how densely packed they are when they're still small, a lot of them will die simply because certain trees gain some sort of edge over their neighbors and there's not enough room or resources for all of them.



The first place we stopped was Gibbon Falls.  It was right off the side of the road, so it didn't take much time to find a good view of it.



Moving on down the road, we stopped at the Artist's Paintpots next.  It was about half of a mile to the loop around the paintpots, so we made our way along the path at a brisk walk through the short pines.  As we got closer to the loop, we started seeing these colorful little rivulets running through the dirt, and these tiny bubbling or steaming holes in the ground.  I'd read about Yellowstone before and how it had geysers and hotsprings, but I didn't realize just how little the ground covered the stuff going on underneath until I got there.  In some places, there were large areas where the ground was only very thin - walking off the plank path wasn't a good idea.

Another weird thing is that not all the hydrothermal features are consistent in how they work.  Some of them make bubbles, some of them steam, some them are fountains, some of them are just springs where water rises to the surface, some of them are mostly water, and still more of them are mostly mud.

One thing they all did well is smell bad.  Sulphur tends to eminate from the ground here along with the water, and it stinks something awful when you get a good whiff of it.


This is a good view of most of the area enclosed by the loop.  Looking over everything, my dad said that from his trips a long time ago, he remembered it being it more active.  We were wondering if maybe more went on after heavy rains, but either way it was cool to hear him talk about changes in the park over time.  It's always funny to think that what seem like permanent things in nature are changing all the time.


View from the top of the loop.


This thing sat there and made bubbles.  Bubbles!


Ees so tiny!  These little guys were ubiquitous.


This thing was hilarious.  It just keeps shooting blobs of mud out of itself, building up mounds of the stuff.

The paintpots were cool, and they gave me a good idea of how this place worked.  Somewhere under me was magma, which was heating up water, which was also somewhere under me, all of which was probably not that far away if I could walk to it.  All of that was underground, and I could see the end result of some of what was going on down there at the surface.  Cool stuff.

It was about 5 PM by the time we got to our next destination, the Yellowstone Grand Canyon.  Fortunately, what with it being the middle of June, the sun wouldn't be going down for quite some time.  There was no hiking here, instead we pulled off at parking lots and went to see the different views of the canyon and the falls in it.


This is the Upper Falls.


Next to this thing, the Upper Falls looks pretty small!

Here we have some more pictures of the canyon downstream.








As far downstream as we could go.

The last place we stopped in this area was nearer to the Upper Falls.


Still not a fantastic photo, but it was certainly better than the first one I got.

After that, we drove a little further south, and made a brief stop at the Sulphur Cauldron to take a quick look at the stuff there.  There was a tiny part of the parking lot that was closed because a bubbling spring had come up through the pavement there!


I think this was called the Dragon's Cave, which got its name from the steam that the cave continously belched out.  The sulphur smell here was particulary strong.


A mudpot nearby.

Finally, we started driving toward Yellowstone Lake and our campsite.  We would stop there and check in first before continuing on to see Old Faithful.

My dad was really excited to show me the lodge there.  I had no idea what to expect.  We went into one of the buildings, and it was pretty cool inside.  There was a gift shop, places to buy food, a dining area, and a place where we got some excellent milkshakes.  My dad kept saying it wasn't the place he remembered though, so he asked around for where the "lodge" was.  Apparently, we were in the lodge.  Eventually he found out that what he was looking for was the Old Faithful Inn, and they pointed us in the right direction.  From a distance, it was just a tall triangular building with some flags on it.  It didn't look that interesting from where I was standing, pretty cool perhaps, but nothing completely amazing.

We decided to go look at it.  On the way out, we saw the times listed for when Old Faithful was supposed to go off.  If I remember correctly, it was supposed to erupt around 8:10, give or take 10 minutes.  It was 7:40 then, so we had a while to look at the inn.

So we walk over to the inn, and I noted that the front of the building looked much more impressive up close.  Whoever designed it had certainly done a good job.  So then, I walked inside.  The outside had been impressive.  The inside of the lobby, on the other hand, filled me with awe.  It was incredible.  I'd seen a lot of "mountain lodge" style buildings before, and I always really liked them, but after seeing this one, those all looked like cheap knock-offs.  This thing is a real piece of art.  There were multiple stories of balconies around the center of the lobby, and above those were stairs to catwalks and crows nests above the whole thing.  All of the wood in the place was unfinished lumber - literally branches of trees and tree trunks that were nailed in place almost as they were found.  The only thing they'd done to them was strip the bark and cut them to size.  There was a huge stone chimney in one corner housing a large fireplace also.  It was an amazing place, and we spent a lot of time just looking around in it.

I have pictures of the inn, but I'm not going to post them here.  They don't do it justice, and it's better if you've never seen pictures of it before going in anyway.


Finally wandering back outside, we made our way to a good place to look at Old Faithful.


After standing around for a while, we got to see it erupt!  From where we were standing, we mostly saw steam, but it kept erupting for a good minute or so, and the water reached fairly high in the air.

Nearby, there were a lot of other geysers and pools to go look at.  For our last adventure of the day, we went to go look at those.













We didn't get to see any of the other geysers go off, but that whole area was interesting to look at.  It was 9 PM when we left and headed back to the campsite.  Unfortunately, this meant we had to pitch our tent in darkness and try to cook dinner.

We also tried to put my sister's lantern back in working order.  We'd actually managed to find a replacement pump earlier, but our attempt ended in a dismal failure.  Dinner however, was good.  At this point, I don't remember what that dinner was, but, I do remember it being tasty.

When it came time to go to bed, we did not sleep well.  We had to believe that there were a bunch of moles that had lived under our campsite, because the ground was terribly bumpy.  Definitely not the most comfortable place to sleep.

The next day, we got up and skedaddled out of there.

So, Yellowstone, it's awesome.  I've added to my list of future plans to a trip to Yellowstone and just Yellowstone, I could probably spend a week in the inn there (although, boy is it expensive).  It's a big place, and there's plenty to look at.  Despite that, I still got to see a lot of excellent stuff given the amount of time we had to go look at it.  I love all of the hydrothermal stuff in the park, in fact  the coolest thing about the whole area is it's volcanic activity.

It's a geothermal hotspot, and it has been for millions of years.  Driving into the park, we could see that the landscape was mostly old volcanic tuff, cracked up like thick layers of asphalt.  There have been multiple, huge volcanic eruptions in the park, some of them a thousand times more powerful than Mt. Saint Helen's eruption.  You can see the remnants of these eruptions in the ash fields they spewed across the entire continent, as well as the caldera lakes they left behind.  Take Yellowstone Lake, and replace it with a volcano - that's a pretty big volcano.  And of course, the geyers are all a result of the same volcanic activity, as the magma still trapped underground heats the water.  Plumes of steam still rise off of the edge of Yellowstone Lake.  There are a few ways I've decided I wouldn't mind dying, and I've added to my list that, when I'm old, I would be okay with getting to see the next eruption happen if I were actually at the park.  Otherwise, that would be no fun at all.

There are a few more noteworthy things that happened on this trip.  For one, we got to see Mt. Rushmore.  I was originally planning to camp there, but the weather was miserable, so we drove on up to Wall and got a hotel room, which was apparently the home of the famous Wall Drugstore.  This place is insane.  It gained notoriety for offering free ice water in the middle of nowhere a long time ago.  Since then it's turned into some kind of shrine to insane tourist business ventures.  It's quite a strange place, certainly worth a look.

The next day, we got up and decided to make a quick detour through the southern Badlands.  Looks like we'd be adding one more park to the trip.  The Badlands had a lot more grass in them than I was expecting, and my dad said he definitely hadn't remembered them being that green.  I tried to search the internet for information on increases in grass in the area, but I couldn't find anything.  One of the interesting things there was the highly visible erosion of the loose soil - there were old fence posts and drain pipes installed decades ago that had been undermined by two feet or more.

Anyway, here's a slew of pictures from there.











After the Badlands, we came back to the freeway and started off east toward my sister's place again.  We played several games of twenty questions (aka coffeepot) on the way.

My sister wasn't actually home, but her husband was.  When we got there, it was dark, and my dad told me to throw something away.  So I went to the side of the house and tossed the thing in the trash can, when I got an idea.  I went around the back of their house and just stood there at the back door.  When my sister's husband came to the back door to let the dog out, he saw me just standing there and he was a bit startled xD.  It was awesome.

Shortly after we got there, we went to sleep.  Tomorrow was the last day of the trip.  For whatever reason, I decided I wanted to drive the entire leg, and then finally, right around dinner time, we were back in Ohio on home dirt.

It was a fantastic trip.  I am so glad I took the advice I was given, moving my start date back was definitely the right thing to do.  There are so many things to look at and so much dirt to walk around on out there, and there's a lot of stuff to learn about it all too.  In the future, I'd like to take a similar trip with Liebatron once he graduates.  In the meantime, I've started my new job, and it's been good.  I will certainly embark on more adventures in the future though.

For all of you who got this far, thanks for reading!  Writing these has been fun.

After driving up a large chunk of the western coast of the continental United States, I'd made it to Portland and royally passed out in a comfy hotel room.  The next day, I didn't do too much.  We rode the train into town, and we ate at a Buffalo Wild Wings.  Then we got ourselves some ice cream, and rode the train back to the hotel.

Back there, I showed my mom the pictures I'd taken throughout the trip.  Afterwards, we all piled into my car to go check out another Bridal Veil Falls, this one local to Oregon.



I was hoping we could turn this into a longer hike, as there were some falls above this one, but the sun was already on its way down by the time we got there.  We got a decent ways up the path at any rate.


There's a nice view from up here.  Along the riverbanks, there are some tracks tucked away behind the trees on either side.

As luck would have it, a storm cloud rolled in over us on our way up and dumped a ton of rain on us right after I got yon picture above.  The path turned into a nice channel for the water to flow down, navigating that was fun.  After we made our way down to the bottom, we hid out in the gift shop at the bottom for a bit, until we mustered the courage (or decided being wet wasn't really that bad) to go back out to the car.


Obligatory.  There was really no good place for her to sit, so my mom just held her up like that.

Despite getting drenched and having to turn back after a relatively short hike, I enjoyed climbing up the switchbacks, and the falls was neat.  Driving back however, was a nightmare.  I couldn't really see anything on the freeway thanks to the combination of the water covering the road and the sun reflecting off of it.  I didn't die though, which was great.  I like not dying.  Instead of dying, I made it back to the hotel, where all of us chilled out.

The next day, we planned to go see the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.  Science!  Industry!  Museum!  Excellent!

So we get to this place, and...There's a line out the door?  Really?  On a weekday?  No kidding, sheesh.  Also there are mostly kids there.  Seems like this place is largely aimed toward them.  That could either be great or it could be bad, depends on how many interactive exhibits there are inside.

After waiting in line for a while, we got in the museum.  There wasn't anything super interesting until we got to, yes, something involving water.  In fact, I found something so captivating I could have easily stayed there and played with it the entire afternoon.  It was just a box with two streams fed by pumps.  They flowed over a plastic landscape made up of two valleys that joined together to form a large basin, all of which was covered with sand and rocks.  Simple, yes, but with unlimited possibilities!

After two weeks of walking around in all sorts of places and doing a lot of driving, it was finally time to go to San Francisco.  Well, Mountain View anyway.  Close enough.

It was only a four hour drive, and after the half-day trips we'd been making, it seemed short.  On the way in, I learned two things of note.  First, the freeways get strange as you near San Francisco.  Second, the landscape gets strange as well.  The terrain features rolling hills covered with tall yellow grasses.  These contrasted in a bizarre way with the green leaves on the sparse clusters of trees scattered about.


Unfortunately, the pictures for this journal are few, and the ones I do have are not very good.

Finally, we arrived at my friend's house.  There was much rejoicing.  After travelling 2000 miles we'd made it, and I finally had a chance to see my friend in her new abode.  We unpacked (and I managed to stumble into a neighbor's house in the process) and then went to the Apple cafe.  When I got there, I was still somewhat bewildered by what we'd just done and where I was now, and now I had tons of food options to choose from.  I stood around for a bit being indecisive and overwhelmed.  Then, I finally decided, there was pizza, I like pizza, therefore, get pizza.  It was good, and so was the gelato we got for desert.

If I had to quickly sum up what I did while we were all hanging out together, I would say that we ate, ate again, then ate some more.  Mine most gracious host was so kind as to foot the bill for all these repasts, and everywhere we ate was delicious.

After stopping at a liquor store and a local convenience store, we went back to base, chilled out for a while, and then departed for our next meal.  We went to a Mexican place for dinner, and I got myself some fork-and-knife burritos with chicken, rice, and  cheese, and it was fantastic.  There was a lot of it though, and I was pretty full.  That was the first time I'd realized that transitioning from lean mode to lots of food would basically mean I'd be full more or less all the time.  The rest of the night was spent watching Cabin in the Woods.  It was a good Friday.

The next morning, we ate at a diner-type place which had some great chicken tenders, and then we headed to the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.  There was a lot of cool stuff there, although some of the interactive exhibits were broken.  We got shooed out when the museum closed, just after I'd found the water.  Darn it, water's the cool part.  If there's ever an interactive museum exhibit involving water, it's almost always the best thing in the museum.

Leaving the museum, we went to a cool place called Single Barrel, a bar themed like a speak-easy where they mix you a drink based on what you tell them you like in a drink.  The only thing I ever drink is wine, so I wasn't entirely sure what to tell them, but they asked me some questions based on that, and they gave me something good to drink.  Actually, they made drinks for all of us.

For dinner, we ate sushi.  I'd never had sushi before, but to my surprise it was absolutely fantastic, I'm happy to say I can add it to my reportoire of foods I'll willingly eat.  Also, the place had great names for their menu items.  They basically took all the names of major tech companies and used them for dish names, for instance, they had Google rolls xD.

In the evening, we went out to play foosball.  There, we met some random guy from Poland who really enjoyed his gigantic mug of beer.  After playing a number of games, we went on a quest to find karaoke.  We went to one bar, but, it was ridiculously loud.  I never really understood the appeal of going to a place where even shouting across the table doesn't communicate your message.  We got out of there and decided to go to a dive bar, but, to our surprise we found it'd been shuttered.  Instead, we just went home and played Beatles Rock Band with one microphone.  There were three of us, but that didn't matter, whoever didn't have the mic just sang along anyway.

Finally, we had our last day in Mountain View.  My roommate left that evening, taking a plane back to Ohio.  Before that though, we ate brunch at an Italian place.  I ordered myself some pizza, and it was good, but I couldn't finish it.  Later, it would become sopping-wet leftovers which I consumed having nothing else to eat.

Today was the day to look at San Francisco for real.  Our first stop was Haight Street.  Haight Street is apparently the place for hippies to go, or, whoever else wants to be there.  There are a lot of interesting shops there.  Some of them have neat stuff.  Some of them have strange stuff.  A couple of them, well, I'm not even sure what the point of some of the shops were.  While we were there, we ate some crepes, and I picked up a Doors LP from a record shop.  I had to get at least one souvenir on this trip, and of all the ones I could've gotten that one was the best choice.

After Haight Street, we made our way to an awesome antique arcade museum on the bay, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.  This place was amazing.  To see the stuff people paid money to play or see way back when was cool, and most of the machines were in working condition.  There were elaborate mechanical execution scenes.  Pay a quarter and you'd see someone in a castle get hanged, or perhaps guillotined in a courtyard.  There was an old shooting gallery game which used a marble-shooting pistol, the first incarnations of pinball machines, and so on.  There were all sorts of interesting machines there, I can't begin to describe them all.  We spent a lot of time in that place.

For our last bit of time in San Francisco, before heading to the airport, we checked out Alcatraz across the water.



Then we walked over to see the Golden Gate Bridge.  Sadly, my camera decided that would be another good time to refuse to turn on.  Oh well.  Little did I know, I would get another chance to see it the next day.

Fighting traffic, we made our way to the airport in time, then I spent my last night in Mountain View.  I had a ton of fun that weekend, and I'm sure I'll be back that way some day.  Monday, at any rate, was not a day I was looking forward to.  I had a twelve hour drive lined up, taking me all the way to Portland, Oregon.  Waking up in the morning, I packed up my things and started toward Portland.

It was a long, long drive.  What didn't help is that I messed up the directions a few times south of San Francisco.  In particular, I crossed the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge by mistake when I should have gotten on 580.  When I saw there was no opportunity to turn around before the bridge, I was discouraged.  Great, I'm going to get lost in San Francisco now.  My knowledge of the local geography was fuzzy at best, so I tried to keep on major roadways travelling in what I thought was a northern direction.  I followed Market Street, and then Portola Drive until I hit route 1 going north.  Frustrating as it was to be stuck in traffic with no idea where I was headed, it was some consolation that I managed to hit the Golden Gate Bridge.  I feel sort of dumb now, I wasn't sure I would cross it, but I should have known I would based on where I was.


Well, okay, this works I guess.  Nevermind that it added about 2 hours to my drive time.  At least you're a really neat bridge.

Finally on track to get to the Redwood Highway, I was still seething internally about lost time and confusing freeways, but I eventually settled down.  Following that was driving.  Lots and lots of driving.  More driving than I'd done before at any point in my life, and this time I was alone.  I had a tape with The Flim Flam Song, which became my best friend.  On the plus side, I did eventually get to see redwood trees.  These things are ridiculous.  Driving through a forest of them fading away in the dense fog is incredible.  I regretted that there was nowhere to stop and take a picture of a lot of such scenes.

One place I did stop to take pictures was here:





The tree was pretty neat.  But, I was a bit disappointed by the fact that there had been a perfectly good tree, awesome in its own right, and it was turned into a tourist attraction.  Apparently, there are two trees like this, the other one is called Tour-thru Tree.

I did get a chance to stop and take pictures of trees on the road, but, none of them came out very well.





The drive may have been long, but these trees, and the constant winding of the road, did a good job of keeping me focused.  Coming into Oregon, I discovered the interesting state law that self-service at gas stations was not allowed.  Strange.  Oh well.

It was late at night when I made it to Portland.  I was about ready to fall over and pass out for a good night's sleep.  Before going to bed though, I had to eat something - I hadn't eaten the whole day.  So I thought, there's that great leftover pizza.  So I looked in the cooler.  Then I realized, yeah, putting the styrofoam leftover box in the cooler with all the water from the melted ice was a horrible idea.  My pizza was sopping wet.  I microwaved it and ate it anyway, and it was good enough.

So after a long, exhausting drive, I had made it to a nice bed in a dark room where I could sleep in as long as I wanted the next day, and it was glorious.  I would spend the next day and a half with my mom and stepdad, who happened to be in Portland at the same time I was on my trip.  I'll write more about that next time...

After Zion was our drive out to Yosemite.

We drove along the highways west of Zion into Nevada.  There was hardly anything to see.  There were some sketchy-looking casinos about, but, mostly there was just empty desert.  Usually, the buildings we did see were abandoned.  It seemed like the gas stations were all 100 miles apart or more, and I wondered where the occupants of the few maintained houses went for gas.  The only significant settlement we ran across in the middle of it all was Tonopah, a small mining town with its own share of dead buildings.

Coming into California, we reached some more rolling terrain.  After climbing up for a while, we came into Yosemite from the east.  We picked up some firewood, and then we wound around the curving roads shaded by pines and arrived at our campground.  Luckily for us, we found there was a gas station and convenience store only seven miles from our camp.

At other campgrounds, there had been warnings about bears and rules for properly storing food and scented items.  Mostly we just got pamphlets and lists of camp regulations that talked about them.  At this place though, the person at the registration booth talked to us for five minutes straight about nothing but the bears, including scare-stories about cars mangled by hungry bears.  Okay, so don't mess around when it comes to the bears around here.  Got it.

Our campsite was good - very good.  I'd call it the best site of the whole trip.  It didn't quite have the scenery we had at Rocky Mountain or the seclusion, but it was certainly the most comfortable, and we were still surrounded by tall pines.  The ground was soft and covered in pine needles.  Perhaps my only complaint was the slight slope, but that was a tiny problem.  For dinner, I decided to try a new cooking method to avoid encrusting our skillet in black char.  I put some barbecue sauce on the chicken, wrapped it up with aluminum foil, put it in the pan, let the fire burn low, spread the logs to form a ring around the pan, and covered it.  It took a while, but my attempt to make an oven worked.  The chicken was cooked well, but it lacked much flavor despite the barbecue sauce.  I would have a chance to try again tomorrow.  I didn't finish the chicken, so I put the leftovers in the cooler.

That night I slept far better than I had in Zion.  Sure, it was cold, but with comfortable ground, no roaches, and no wind, I slept through the night.  In the morning, the sun didn't catch the tent on fire, thanks to the pines, so I could even sleep in a little.

In the morning, we started out for Yosemite Valley.  We had no real idea where we were going to hike, but we ended up deciding to stop at Bridal Veil Falls first.  The falls in this place are crazy.  There are these cliffs hundreds of feet high, and off the tops of them these streams of water plummet into the valley.  Some of them disintegrate into mist before even making it to the bottom.

Bridal Veil falls seemed like it was mostly mist drifting back and forth in front of the cliff face.  Coming up to the falls, there were a bunch of rocks in the stream - I was reminded of the streams I'd climbed up in the Appalachians on earlier trips.  We scrambled up the boulders to a lower fall.  The rocks were slick, dry or not, so I moved slowly.  Finding a path up was fairly challenging.  On the way back down, I actually used some of the rocks as slides.


This gives an idea of just how much mist came off of the falls.  Unfortunately it was difficult to get good pictures that day, the sun was never in the right place.


And here you can see the actual water.


After reaching this pool, we couldn't climb any further.

Heading further into the valley, we stopped at a meadow where there was a good view of Yosemite Falls.  To get a decent picture of it, I had to traverse logs and shallow stones to get to a sandbar.


The falls, or at least the upper part of it.


This meadow was apparently maintained long long ago by repeated burnings.

Out on the sandbar, I saw people coming down the river on rafts.  This made me kind of excited - maybe they'd have kayaks!  If they did, I was ready to pitch the whole hiking idea and take to the river.  Moving further into the valley, I found, to my disappointment, no kayaks.  Oh well.

Instead, we moved on to park near a trail to Vernal and Nevada Falls.  After walking along the road, we got to the trailhead.  It was 1.5 miles along and 1000 feet up to Vernal Falls.  Remembering Colorado, and not too far from the same elevation, we were a bit worried, but went up the trail.  As expected, it was pretty steep, but the work we'd done going up and down and around all sorts of trails was paying off.  The hike wasn't too bad.  It also helped that the trail was paved.

Along the way, we passed several impressive rapids as the stream below wound its way up the valley with us.  Apparently, someone had been swept over Nevada Falls earlier.  There were posters declaring him missing.  If he'd been swept into the rapids I was looking at, I could only conclude he was dead.

In addition to rapids, we caught distant glimpses of Yosemite Falls, and this unnamed falls in the right-hand fork of the valley.



We made it to a bridge across the stream we'd been hiking next to.  It was a good place to grab some pictures, and restock on water, as there was a nice set of faucets and spigots on the opposite bank.


Some of the rapids upstream.


...And some rapids downstream.

Leaving the bridge, we kept moving up...



Finally, the falls, and a large series of stairs, came into view.  The falls was really cool, and there were a bunch of rainbows about, although they were hard to photograph.


The falls!


The falls, again!


Apple Bloom's kind of tippy here.  There was really no good place for her to sit and be level.


The one good picture I managed to take of one of the rainbows.

After a short discussion on whether we should move on, we started up the stairs.  They sort of reminded me of the black stairs from the Lord of the Rings.  I felt pretty good before climbing them all, but they did a pretty good job wearing me down once I'd made it to the top.  There were tons of people on these stairs, and we stopped to wait on people often.  The last stretch of stairs was a bit worrisome.  It was perched on a slab of rock running up the same cliff face that the falls came crashing over, and it was only wide enough for one person in most places.  What's more, there were fence posts stuck in the rock.  What better way to try and pry your staircase off its foundation than to stick levers in it at three-foot intervals?

Of course, most of that was me worrying over nothing.  We got to the top, made our way down some slippery rocks, and had a nice view of the falls from the top.


The rapids below the falls.


The falls!  Yet again!

Going back down the stairs was kind of fun, and the rest of the trail was downhill.  The only difficulty I encountered was actually the canteen.  One strap holding up the whole canteen wasn't working too well, it was starting to pull away from the casing.  I had to figure out some way to reconnect the other side of the strap, so as we were walking I used my key ring to fasten the strap's end to where a plastic buckle used to loop through, and that worked.


I also took this shot of Yosemite Falls on the way down.

This trail had one last surprise in store for us on the way back to the car.



That trail over there is the one we were walking on, on the opposite side of the road, before we ran into this dude.  This was the only picture I had time to get.  After all these warnings about bears at all these parks, I'd finally seen one.  Running into it was strange - "Oh, a bear.  Yup, that's a bear, walking along the path toward us.  Anyway, crossing the road now..."

Back in the car, we decided to see the Visitor's Center.  Somehow, that turned into seeing the grocery store which sits next to it.  There I was able to pick up some stuff to give my chicken a bit more flavor.

Our last hike of the day, if you can call it a hike, was a short walk back to Yosemite Falls.  It was an awesome falls, but difficult to get a good picture of.  It didn't help that my camera was deciding not to turn on half the time by this point.



Once again, near the falls there was a pile of boulders lying in and around the stream.  We climbed up them, and, not climbing over water this time, I went up the rocks a little more quickly.  This was where I developed the "direct rock method."  There were rocks in front of me.  They were tall.  The only solution was to show the rock who's boss and just climb straight up it.  Yeah.  That's right rock.  What are you gonna do about it?  Really though, I like the direct rock method mostly because is goes nicely with Liebatron's direct fish method.  So, at the top of the rock pile, I pulled out my camera to take a picture, and it wouldn't turn on for nothing.

I at least got this on the way up.


You can only see the lower falls from here.

After climbing back down, we made our way past some beautiful scenery, as well as an old mill run, although I couldn't see where it had been.

It had been a good day of hiking, and after a stop for some firewood, we made our way back to camp.  The leftovers, having had some time to sit in the barbecue sauce, and with some good-tasting new stuff on them as well, were delicious.  The one problem we had that night was the new wood, it was extremely dense and reluctant to burn.

The next day, we packed up quickly and left the park.  Yosemite is an awesome place, definitely among my favorites now.  I had never been here before, so this was a new experience for me.  There are still tons of hikes I could do here.  Oddly, the park reminded me of more familiar places, like Hocking Hills.  The trees were different perhaps, but the dirt and some of the terrain features (the large cliffs notwithstanding) looked similar.  The pine trees were incredible though, they were probably the largest I've ever seen, a taste of the redwoods I would see further north.

My next destination would be a friend's place near San Francisco for the weekend, where I would take some time before heading back east along a more northerly route.

Onward to Zion.

After a few days of not driving for hundreds of miles, it was time to go on another lengthy trip.  After picking up some fresh ice, wood, and Wendy's, we were on our way.  Driving back north out of Utah, back past the tracks and what was Valley City, we made it back to I-70 and turned west.  For some reason, the tapes were sounding better that day, and we were driving past a lot of really nice scenery.  I decided I was okay to just drive the whole leg.

On the way, I stopped at a gas station to buy myself a state map.  A guy from the adjoining shop flagged me down on my way back out to the car and told me my tires needed replaced.  My initial reaction was that this might just be someone looking to make a sale, but I knew the tires weren't in great shape.  Looking at them, they were even worse than I'd thought.  Replacing them would only take twenty minutes, and driving on them further was really a bad idea, so I went ahead and had the rear tires replaced.  I'm glad the guy caught it - I'd imagine a flat on the road ruins your day pretty quickly.  As an added bonus, the car stopped vibrating so much on the freeway.

For our visit to Zion, I'd booked us a site about forty-five minutes out from the park in a place called Quail Creek State Park.  All the sites in Zion were full.  The campground was near a lake under the shadow of a big cliff, with no trees about.  When we got there, there were white caps on the water.  Great, just what I wanted, a gale.  Pulling up to the campsite, I was further disappointed.  The site had no place for a tent.  It was gravel.  No dirt anywhere.  

So I've got this windy, rocky campsite for two nights.  Unacceptable.  I decided to find an alternative.  I called Liebatron to see if he couldn't find any available sites in Zion that I missed.  There weren't any.  Rather than stay at Quail Creek, we headed into Zion to see if any of the first-come first-serve sites were still open.  This was a long shot, to say the least, but we figured we could stay at a hotel if it didn't work out.  That's exactly what we ended up doing.  We found a brand new hotel, and the price was reasonable, so we took it.

Instead of a terrible place to camp, we had a nice hotel room for the night.  On top of that, I found one campsite in Zion that wasn't reserved for the next night, and I booked it.  It was the last one in the place.  I had my first sandwich in quite some time.  I had to fashion a "knife" out of the cracker box to make it, but it was delicious.  I also finished reading Monte Cristo, which was annoying.  I like that book.

The next day we went into Zion.  The first thing we did was go grab our campsite and pitch the tent.  The water was good, and the tent area seemed decent.  Excellent.  That stuff taken care of, we went to the Visitor's Center.  The cool thing about this park's Visitor's Center was that it had individual descriptions of all the trails we could take, as well as how difficult they were.  After looking at the trails, we decided we would try Emerald Pools and Hidden Canyon.

Zion is a big canyon with one road along the bottom.  The last time I was here, my dad drove wherever.  In the summer months, shuttle buses are the only vehicles allowed into the canyon, so we hopped on one.  Our first stop was the Hidden Canyon trail.  I thought I might've tried that before, but I wasn't sure.  I did know that it was going to be the toughest hike in the park.  It was only one mile, but it rose 850 feet, and featured death cliffs.  Getting off the bus, I recognized the trail.  I'd been here before, but we turned back when we got to the death cliffs.


This is basically what you see right at the bottom of the trail.


This is a picture of most of the climb up.  The trail forks about halfway up the bowl.  After that, there are stairs and tighter switchbacks that climb up to the right.

So we started up.  And up.  And up.  And we did that for a while.  It was tiring, but all things considered I felt pretty good.  All the hiking we'd done before was paying off, and my legs felt okay.  We clambered up the switchbacks and the steps, until we got to the place I'd turned back before.  Here are some pictures from the way up.


This is looking out from the bowl, north into the canyon.


Somehow the trail follows the pine trees into the nook on the left...


I think this was on the final part of the climb before the death cliffs, looking north again.

Now, when I say death cliffs, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about:



The last time we got here, we turned back because there was snow on the trail.  There are chains in the wall to help most of the way, and no snow this time, but I was still a little unsure, especially because my fear of heights can occasionally throw me off balance.

For whatever reason, I was able to stay calm, and we got past the cliffs without incident.


I don't really remember where this is.  From the slope of it I'm not sure I want to remember.

Finally, once we doubled back around two cliffs, we got to the trail's namesake canyon.  We hiked for a long time in what was clearly a streambed on occasion.  We did some minor scrambling over rocks and walked through a lot of sand.  After a while, I started to wonder what this trail would culminate in.  It turns out it wasn't much.  It made for a good photo, but basically the end of the trail can be summed up this way:


This is the end of the trail.


And this is what it actually looks like.

I was okay with the random ending to the trail though, the canyon was nice and cool, and it was fun to walk in.  On the way out, there was a sign that said "end of maintained trail" at the canyon's entrance.  We missed that earlier.  Oops.  From there, we scrambled up onto a cliff that gave us the best views of the larger canyon that you could ask for.






There's the road down there.  Yup.





We wound back along the death cliffs, and once again we were successful in not dying.  Back at the bottom, there was another trail up to Weeping Rock.  It was a puny hike compared to what we'd just done, so we went to look at it.  This turned out to be a great idea.  The water dripping from the rock was nice and cold, so we let it fall on our heads for a bit.  It was tempting to drink the stuff, but we didn't.


This is where the name comes from.


Looking out from under the rock.

Moving on, we caught a shuttle to the end of the canyon, sampled the water there, declared it adequate, and went to get lunch at the lodge.  Finally, we lined up our last hike of the day, Emerald Pools.  The trail wasn't too exciting, except that the trees kept us cool.  I did get some pictures though.




Tiny waterfalls trickled over this cliff.


Looking south out of the canyon on the bridge to the trail.

After finishing our hiking for the day, we went back to the campsite.  The sun was still out in full force though, so we sat around in the Visitor's Center for a while before deciding to go grab some ice cream back at the lodge.  We saw they had mango smoothies, and decided to get those instead.  It was good, but ice cream would've been better, the sweetness was a bit overwhelming.


I defeated the smoothie.


Artistic condiments.  Or something.  Sure.


Big rock looking over our campsite.

Back at camp, we went to the group fire pit, made ourselves some sausages and played Advance Wars as night fell.  It had been a good day.

Right up until we noticed there were roaches all over the place.  They crept up on us as it got dark.  The stupid things were everywhere, the only thing to do was to retreat to the tent.  We finished our Advance Wars game and went to sleep.

Well, tried to go to sleep.  The wind, which had hitherto been basically dead, started to kick up.  The air cooled down quite a bit, but the constant ruffling of the tent didn't allow us much sleep.  I was afraid the stakes would come up.  I tried to just stop worrying about it and go to sleep, but that didn't work out.  The song Battle of Evermore kept playing in my head...

Eventually, after lots of broken half-sleep, morning came, and we got the heck out of there.  It had been an interesting two days in Zion.  This is yet another place I could easily come back to.  There are two things I'd like to do here some day.  For one, the canyon gets really narrow after the end of the road, and I'd like to hike back there.  Second, I'd like to take the trail that branches off the Hidden Canyon trail.  It's a lot longer, but the views at the end of it are supposedly fantastic.

My next stop would be in Yosemite, which I'll write about next time.