I guess the "main event" for this impromptu CA vacation was Yosemite, which has been on my "list" for as long as I can remember. I'll be honest, I was a little nervous about going. I've seen photos of this place, drooled over them... I really hoped it would live up to my expectations. I also prayed that the weather would cooperate. As it turned out, I was safe on both counts. Yosemite, quite simply, is jaw dropping.

My first afternoon in the park, I just wandered around the valley, following wherever I felt drawn to. It was a spell binding introduction.

Disclaimer: There will be a lot of "waterfall" photos from Yosemite. That would be because they were totally out of control. I was told repeatedly by those in the know that I was very very lucky to see these falls in such force.






One of the "hard to miss" features of the Yosemite Valley is "El Capitan," which is one huge monolith:



LIke a redwood tree, I can't really tell you how big it is, but trust me, it is HUGE. So you can imagine my surprise when I realized that there were people rock climbing it. It can take them days to do this. So they "sleep" hanging from the rock face. I'm not sure exactly how you relax enough to sleep dangling 40 stories up in the air. Here is a picture of two climbers getting ready to "settle in" for the evening. If you have trouble finding them, so did I. They are on the right side of the photo, to black dots, on above the other.



Ansel Adams has famous photos of "Half Dome," another very distinctive monolith in the valley. I couldn't wait to see this place. I knew there was a lake in front of Half Dome that he used often in his photos, so I hightailed it over there my first afternoon. The lake in question is called, "Mirror Lake" because, as the name suggests, it provides a "mirror" for Half Dome. When I realized that light was fading faster than I was walking, I started to RUN.

You can imagine my surprise when I got there to find not a lake, but a POND... if not a "puddle." Apparently, even when the water levels in the park in general were very high, Mirror Lake is a lot lower than it has been in the past. Turns out, back in Ansel's day, water was dammed into that lake so that it would provide the full mirror image... and a very pretty place to swim. This practice was stopped when it was determined to not be "natural." So, given my limitations, this was the best i could do to imitate my idol. Definitely NOT the same picture.