Yosemite on the horizon!

So having mentioned it was time for vacation a couple of weeks ago, I’ve actually done something about it. I was able to grab three nights at the Lodge on the valley floor, so I’m taking the week of March 1 off and heading off to Yosemite in about a week to get away from email and everything else, and just unplug and unwind and focus on recharging the batteries and taking some photos.

It’s still a ways out, but the ten day forecast for that period (3/1-3/4) is encouraging: maybe some overnight snow but temperatures above freezing during the day, and it looks like a storm will roll through during the trip, which I’m hoping for. Nothing scary in the forecast, and encouraging for landscape potential. So we’ll see.

What’s not settled is what to do around those days. I sat down and wrote up all of the things I might want to do and then started pruning out stuff that didn’t seem to make the cut from a time/energy/interest level:

  • Grand Canyon (too much driving, too little time actually there)
  • Bryce/Zion (ditt0)
  • Vegas for birding and hiking in Red Rock (intriguin, but.. not this trip)
  • Disneyland (I don’t want to “go urban”)
  • San Diego Zoo (ditto)
  • Salton Sea and wandering the deserts for wildflowers (tempting on any number of levels; ultimately more driving than I wanted to do)
  • Carrizo Plain wildflowers and then SLO/Santa Barbara/Morro Bay (too early for Carrizo by a couple of weeks, and a bit of been-there-done-that on the central coast. It’s been where I’ve gone to hide a lot the last couple of years, so time to do something different…)
  • Out to Tahoe/Reno, then down the 395 to Morro lake and Bishop and out the other side (ultimately, it’s too early in the season for some things I want to do in the Eastern Sierra like Bodie, and just way too much driving, much as I’d like some winter time with Mono Lake; Devil’s Postpile is also buried right now…)

As it turns out, I got invited to go birding with a group down in Monterey on the 7th, so that was encouragment to stay a bit more local. Much as I’ve wanted to get down to Salton Sea to bird for a while (it was the trip that got canceled by my dad’s final hospital visit), I find myself interested in driving less and “doing” more. I’m not making final decisions about what I’ll do until I leave Yosemite, but I’ve got a few informal plans I’ve framed out depending on what I feel like and what the weather dictates.

  • Plan A: overnight near Galt so I can spend more time with the cranes and geese at Woodbridge and some of the northern Sacramento flyway stops and do some birding photography and try to observe one or two fly-ins and a dawn up there, then home.
  • Plan B: go home (but don’t tell anyone), and daytrip. Lots of things I want to do, from the SF Zoo and the aquarium to exploring the marin headlands and presidio or even play tourist from Pier 39 to Ghirardelli… tempting.
  • Plan C: change my mind and head down to Morro Bay (because ultimately I really love it down there…)
  • Plan D: who knows? I’m open to suggestions…

In any event, I’m really ready and looking forward to this. Definitely planning a busy week, just a week doing stuff I want to do… Blogging may continue to be light as I get things prepped at work and here at home for the trip; then again, maybe I’ll just start a cube sabbatical and get my blogging caught up…

You might also want to read:

  1. Wednesdays in Review: Spectacular Yosemite So this week was my birthday, I’m now officially a year older than I was a year ago. More importantly, I officially declned to fo...
  2. A “spring” visit to Yosemite One of the realities of nature photography is that you can only control nature so much — all the planning in the universe won’t prevent...
  3. Wednesdays in Review – thinking of Yosemite I have scheduled, at least tentatively, that second week off that I planned on taking, and I’ve set a motel reservation for a few days...
  4. Yosemite Blog » NPS Officials Want to Cut Down Trees so Tourists Can See Better Yosemite Blog » NPS Officials Want to Cut Down Trees so Tourists Can See Better: The National Park Service has released their plan for overhauling...
  5. Yosemite Blog » Blog Archive » Late Night Rockfall Rattles Curry Village Yosemite Blog » Blog Archive » Late Night Rockfall Rattles Curry Village: “A small rockfall occurred at 2:53 am on Saturday, June 9 behind Curry...