Sunny California

I had the pleasure of going to Sacramento, California for a business trip. Sometimes, you can mix business with pleasure. The business part was well executed and only took two days to complete. I ate good Mexican food (currently unavailable in Maine), and spent a night under the stars in Yosemite. It felt great to soak up some warm weather while I was there. The winters in Maine are long.

 An 18" burrito called "Gigante". No, I didn't polish this whole thing off. I did eat about 14 inches of it though. I was pretty impressed!

 Pete, my old coworker at Lawrence Livermore, drove up to the Hodgdon Meadow campground off the 120 to spend the night. We drove around for a few minutes trying to locate an ideal camp site, and thought we found one. We got out of the car to scope it out and saw a couple of eyes glowing behind some trees about 50 yards away. It was a bear! We decided to let the bear have that campsite, and we would move onto another. We slept under the stars and woke up early to watch the sunrise give light to Yosemite Valley from the Tunnel View. 

 Yosemite Falls. The fact that it was flowing with this drought was encouraging, but it won't last much longer. It wasn't too long ago Mal, Madie and I hiked to the top of that. So many memories here. 

The icon: Half Dome.

 We made our way to the back of the valley past Mirror Lake. We found this boulder field right below Half Dome that looked like a graveyard. These trees were getting blown in half regularly...

 Looking up at Half Dome from the boulder field. Yup, I can see how these trees would be chopped down. 

A sampling of some of the boulders that fall into the valley which created a tunnel. 

After hiking up the Snowcrest trail, we headed to the bottom of El Cap to look for climbers. I found this sleeper vans that a climber lives out of. True dirt bags. 

El Cap!

Great trip and needed therapy in the mountains.