Dave & Meredith’s Travel Blog

Better late than never, my gallery of pictures from our trip to the Southwest in October is now up. You can click here to see it or look at the list of galleries on the Photo Galleries page.

- Dave

This would be the place we would have included our view from our window while we stayed with our friends Sharon and Charla in the Bay Area.  Unfortunately, we forgot, again.  Sorry.  I feel like we let down our readers. 

Sharon and Charla moved from Boston to Alameda (an island in the east Bay) about a year and a half ago, and bought a beautiful old house which needed some TLC.  So far, they’ve completed renovation of the kitchen, where Charla whupped us up a mess of vittles every day (she is a great cook!).  Anyway, had we taken the picture, you would have seen their back yard, which features a lemon tree, an orange tree and an apple tree, as well as tomatoes.

We really chilled out while we were there (4 nights!), but we did manage to do a few things:

• Visited Sharon’s horse Red Hot at her stable in Walnut Creek to put metal flashing on the wooden fence so she would stop eating it.
• Went to a wine tasting at Rosenblum Cellars, a winemaker on Alameda that sources grapes from growers throughout California.
• Spent an afternoon in Monterey walking around Cannery Row and eating seafood.
• Visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.  The woman who lived here believed that she needed to perpetually build her home to appease angry spirits (it’s hard to describe this place.  It is a Victorian mansion with 160 rooms, and it’s completely wacky).  The woman who built it was the widow of the Winchester gun guy, and was crazy.  Also, the guy who gave us our tour was like a cross between Barney Frank and Paul Lynde, which made the experience all the more interesting.
• Cleaned and dried out our tent!
• Watched the Pats-Colts game (wah wah wah waah).
• Had a yummy dinner with my high school friend Jenn and watched election night coverage at a party with her friends (Yay Obama, boo California Prop. 8.)

Here are a couple of pictures:

Charla (left) and Sharon sated on Monterey seafood

The four of us doing one of the things we do best

- Meredith

I know "Yosemite" is a funny-sounding word, but with all due respect to Warner Bros., I don’t get the connection.  I’m pretty sure Sam would not have prospered in Yosemite.  There weren’t many people for him to rob or claims to jump.  Although, there were plenty of varmints to shoot, so maybe that’s it.

Sam is a bit different from Yosemite’s other famous men.  Let’s compare:

Exhibit A: Yosemite Sam

Exhibit B: Conservationist John Muir 

Exhibit C: Photographer Ansel Adams

Exhibit D: Grizzly Adams (no relation to aforementioned Ansel)

The first thing we should look at is facial hair.  At first glance, it seems that Yosemite Sam fits in with this crew of famous Yosemite men.  However, upon closer examination, we see that Yosemite Sam simply has a giant mustache, while the others have beards.

But the differences run even deeper than that.  They all wear different types of hats, for starters. 

Now let’s look closer.  We’ll start with John Muir, one of the most influential environmentalists and conservationists in American history.  The only thing Yosemite Sam was interested in protecting was his pride, and he repeatedly failed at that.  How about Ansel Adams, an avid nature lover and an American photography icon?  Yosemite Sam is an American icon too, although mostly on the mud flaps of semi-trucks.

It is Grizzly Adams that Yosemite Sam most closely resembles.  Grizzly Adams spent most of his life in the mountains of California, capturing animals for zoos and circuses.  His claim to fame was making "pets" out of grizzly bears and wrestling them.  Idiot.  I never saw Yosemite Sam wrestle a bear, but he did go after Bugs Bunny quite often, and there was that one episode with the shark ("Down! Ya shark-livered varmint!").

Maybe he fits his name after all.

- Meredith

Here is the view from our tent in Yosemite NP:

We camped at the Upper Pines campground in Yosemite Valley near Curry Village.  It was a beautiful site, despite all the rain.  We didn’t see any bears in our campground, though the rangers say that they are spotted there almost every night.  We put all our food and other items with a scent in our sturdy bear locker, so no issues.  We never once used the $2 bear whistles I bought before the trip. 

- Meredith

She failed us. Our tent valiantly tried to withstand the ravages of a wind and dust storm in Monument Valley and redeemed herself later in the trip from the status of “Stupid Tent.” But she was no match for the heavy rains of Yosemite. She achieved the status of some old thing that wasn’t actually that great and the people involved with it struggled and suffered but much later they look back on it with affection as if they were old friends that shared hard times together. And they refer to it with a folksy nickname. Let me explain.

We pitched our tent in Yosemite like we did at any other park and the rain hitting the fly blurred into a soothing white noise as we drifted off to sleep on our first night. Around 2am, I woke up feeling a few places on the floor and my sleeping bag were wet. I thought it was no big deal until I heard drips falling. I turned on the light and saw that the entire top ridge of the inside of the tent was a tsunami of drips waiting to drop onto us. It wasn’t going to get any better and might get worse. It was chilly that night and I have a down sleeping bag which would be useless if it got wet. We had to make the call so we came to grips, got up, grabbed our sleeping bags, and camped out in the car once again. At least this time there were no fierce winds rocking the car and keeping us awake.

In the morning, we climbed out of the car to inspect the damage. Our first peek into the tent looked like this:

The picture is a bit small but what you should see are a) several pools of water on the tent floor and b) completely saturated tent fabric. I admit my weakness to the public: at this point, if Meredith had hinted that we could spend the remaining two nights in a lodge, I would have encouraged it. But Meredith was hell-bent on embracing the wilderness experience. Sigh – foiled. So we drove over to Curry Village and the mountaineering shop there. We told the helpful guy there what had happened and we agreed that the sensible next step was to try rigging up a tarp over the tent. So we bought a super-duper tarp and 100 feet of cord and drove back to the site. We spent the next hour or so rigging up something that Rube Goldberg would be proud to put his name on. In the middle of the tarp-raising, a ranger came by and said it was “one of the more … interesting … approaches” [pauses are accurate] to putting up a tarp that he had seen. We attached some sides of the tarp to several trees, one side was staked into the ground, there was a picnic table leg involved somewhere, and a large mess of tangled cord (the latter was dense enough to double as my Early Warning Bear System). Here’s the final result:

We left the site at noon and drove around the park, hoping the tent would dry out in time for that night and, when we got back that evening, it had. I was surprised although I reminded myself that I’m an engineer by training and that means I’m a Professional Problem Solver so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised after all. We spent the night in there and no water fell on us. Operative word: Fell. When I woke up in the morning and shifted around, the tent floor under my mat was soaked. Hmmm. We were still dry but I got out of the tent and looked around. It had rained so much and so steadily that the ground was saturated. Our tent was a floating island in a small pond and the water was eager to find any way up through our floor.

We conferred and decided that we’d go eat breakfast in the Village and look at the weather report online. If the rain wasn’t going to stop, we’d leave a day early since we didn’t want to hike in this and we’d seen what could be seen of Yosemite from a car. It turned out that the weather wasn’t going to break so we drove back to our tent and broke it down. It’s no fun packing up a soaked tent.

And thus this post’s title. We struggled a bit with the folksy nickname. Ol’ Soggysides reminds me too much of Old Ironsides (“Huzza! Her sides are made of…soaked nylon!”). Ol’ Soggytop reminds me too much of a famous bluegrass song (“Soggytop, you’ll always be, cold and damp to me. Good ol’ Soggytop. Soggytop Yosemite”). I admit that Soggy Bottom is reminiscent of Foggy Bottom in Washington DC but most people won’t make the connection. So there it is: Good Ol’ Soggy Bottom. She’s like an old friend to us now.

- Dave

We moved south again after our visit with Eddie and Amy to spend three nights in Yosemite National Park. 

We left Lake Tahoe later than we planned, but it turns out our timing was perfect!  As soon as we had reached the floor of Yosemite Valley, just around dusk, we spotted…a bear!  Actually two.  We saw the first bear right by the side of the road.  We stopped the car a short distance away and signaled to the oncoming driver to stop.  We all proceeded to watch the bear cross the road.  We thought it was over after that, but then the bear came back across the road with a cub following her!  The mama and cub hung out at the side of the road together for a minute, and then they ran off into the woods.  What a welcome to Yosemite!

Sorry, no pictures of the bears.  Dave was driving, and it happened so quickly, we couldn’t get the camera out in time.  They were black bears (no more grizzlies left in California, sadly).  We didn’t see other wildlife while at the park (other than birds and squirrels).  Perhaps they were trying to hide under rocks to stay dry. 

I suppose now is a good time to mention that it rained while we were in Yosemite.  A lot.  There were a few moments of light showers when we were able to do a little touring of the park, but most of the time, we experienced steady, heavy rain.  In fact, it was fairly difficult to see the features of Yosemite because the main valley was often filled with clouds.  This did have one positive side-effect: waterfalls.  By fall each year, most of Yosemite’s waterfalls are dry.  However, because of the rain, those falls that had been dry before we arrived were running nicely by the time we left, and those that were at a trickle when we arrived were rushing torrents by the time we left.

So, the photographic opportunities were a bit scant for us in Yosemite.  That’s okay.  It’s not a very photogenic park anyway.  No one ever got famous by taking pictures of this place.*  Here are some shots Dave got when the clouds were somewhat cooperative:

Yosemite Valley including El Capitan (left), Briadalveil Falls (right) and a very faint Half Dome in the distance

Half Dome towers above Mirror Lake and Yosemite Valley

 Half Dome shot from Glacier Point; while it rained on us, it snowed on the peaks in the distance

- Meredith

* With the possible exception of Ansel Adams.

Man, there are a lot of ghost towns out here.  Yesterday, we went to one of the best preserved towns I’ve ever seen.  It’s a town called Bodie, north of Mono Lake near the Nevada border.  The town is a National Historic Landmark and a State Park, so there are serious conservation efforts and even park staff that lives in town (there are 12 residents today!).  It must be a lonely place to live – it’s really in the middle of nowhere.

Back in the day (1880s – 1920s), it was a large town (10,000 residents) and had quite the reputation, complete with frequent murders, gambling, prostitution, opium dens, stagecoach hold-ups, and the “misappropriation” of gold by legitimate mining concerns.  We spent a morning looking at old houses, hotels, shops, mills, a hydro-electric power plant, and mines, all in surprisingly good condition.  Here are some pictures Dave took:

A view of the Standard Mine operations from a distance. Visitors aren’t allowed to go here because it’s unsafe.

This is an old sawmill used to cut firewood. Apparently the winters are what I would call unbearable with 20 feet of snow. It’s a miracle this building is still standing. There are no right angles!

A residence in Bodie

A gas station/general store

One of two churches (not including the Taoist Temple in Chinatown). Based on the town’s reputation, I’m not sure anyone ever paid attention to the sermons.

For more information on Bodie, visit www.bodie.com (but I disavow myself of the egregious misuse of punctuation and spelling errors on this site).

- Meredith

After leaving Death Valley, we traveled north on the eastern side of the Sierras. It’s a beautiful drive. We made a short stop in Bishop mid-day to see the Galen Rowell’s gallery called Mountain Light. Some truly amazing photographs – highly recommended if you’re in the area. That night we set up camp at our site in Lee Vining, CA, the town closest to Mono Lake and the main town on the eastern entrance to Yosemite. We spent the next two sunsets and sunrises at Mono Lake. The Lake is a well known destination for photographers for two reasons: the high salinity of the water gives it a very viscous look that makes for good reflections and the “tufa towers” which are fragile formations caused by freshwater springs entering the lake from below and reacting with the highly salty water.

After setting up our tent, we drove down to the area of the lake with the tufa towers to “scout it out.” I wanted to see what it was like so that I knew where to go for sunrise the next morning. When we showed up, it was just after sunset and twilight was just starting to show a pink cloud from one edge of the sky to the other. I walked down to the lake without my camera because mentally I was in “scouting” mode. After the 10 minute walk down to the shoreline though, the pink cloud was now intensely red. It made the tufa towers and the shore glow pink and also the water was perfectly still like a mirror. I had seen so many pictures of Mono Lake looking like this that I figured it would look like this the whole time we were there so I didn’t go back to the car to get my camera. Big mistake. Several of the shots I thought would be great just didn’t exist for the rest of the time we were there. I think I made the best of it while we were there (and that’s not to say that conditions weren’t pretty good most of the time) but lesson learned: always be prepared to take a shot at the moment. Here are a few shots from various sunrises/sunsets at Mono Lake:

Above: A tufa tower at sunrise

Above: tufa formations and Mono Lake at sunrise

Above: twilight after sunset at Mono Lake with tufa towers in the foreground and the Eastern Sierras behind them.

- Dave

Here is the view from our tent at our campground in Lee Vining, CA, near Mono Lake in the eastern Sierras:

We stayed for two nights – what a pretty region!

- Meredith

There is an area within Death Valley NP called The Racetrack. It’s an old lake bed, long ago dried up, that has large rocks scattered around its surface. A phenomenon occurs there where the rocks slide in various directions around the mud, leaving a groove behind them (no one has ever seen it actually happen – the prevailing theory is that rains wet the dried mud and then strong winds move the rocks). Many people have seen pictures of this area without knowing its name. Click here for a good example by Phil Kember who runs Death Valley Photo (I took a workshop from Phil 4 years ago that was excellent). It’s called the Racetrack as a small joke because sometimes it looks like the rocks are “racing” each other.

I didn’t get a chance to photograph the Racetrack last time I was here because it’s away from the commonly visited part of the park and takes a long time to get to on a really bad road that’s 27 miles long. Meredith and I had originally planned to spend only two nights in Death Valley but we added a third to allow time to be at the Racetrack by sunset one day.

There’s plenty to read about the road to the Racetrack. Horror stories about the rutted, washboarded roads with rocks so sharp they slice the sidewalls of your tires. People getting stranded out there without enough water to last the night and trying to walk back in the heat. Some people have died trying to drive a regular 2-wheel-drive sedan out there. And so on. I decided to take the democratic approach so I stopped into 3 different ranger stations to get their respective opinions on the road conditions and whether I should attempt it in our rental SUV. One said I’d be ok but to be careful and allow 3 hours of driving each way. The second tried to talk me out of it as much as she could. At this point though, I was pretty convinced I was going to attempt it in spite of the warnings. We had tons of provisions and I was comfortable with the driving. I just wasn’t sure if our car was up to it. The third ranger was the most helpful with advice. She said I’d have no problem if I went really slowly but since the odds were good that I might get a flat, I should first make sure that I had a full-size spare – not one of those doughnut spares many cars have. Fair enough. I decided that would be the deciding factor. If we had a doughnut spare, we wouldn’t go.

We drove to the parking lot closest to the start of the road to the Racetrack. As we parked, we noticed a car up on jacks with a wheel missing. There was a guy on a lawn chair sitting in the car’s shadow. I wandered over and asked if everything was ok. He said he was fine and that he was waiting for his friend. Long story short: he and a friend drove back from the Racetrack that morning and he got two flats along the way. His friend was off in another car getting those tires repaired. Hmmm, this did not bode well at all.

I went back to our SUV and looked underneath to see what size spare we had. It was a doughnut spare. We turned around and left. Next time, I’ll rent a Hummer.

The guy in the parking lot waiting for his friend to return. Notice the missing front right tire and the doughnut spare on the right rear.

- Dave