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On Tenaya Lake

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The vanity never stops. This is me out on Tenaya Lake in Yosemite the week before last. My nephew Max snapped the picture and titled it “The Ice Whisperer.” What I was after was the sound–a lot like the sound of whale calls–emanating from the lake as the ice expanded and reacted to the strollers and skaters on the surface. You can get a vague idea of the sound, in between passages of me crunching around on the ice, from the audio clip below. Note: I was the only one in shorts out there, prompting one person to say, “I hate you. But thank you, because I think that’s going to make it snow.” The lake is under a couple of feet of snow right now after a series of storms that started last Thursday.

Tenayalake.mp3 by Dan Brekke

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Journal of Self-Promotion: ‘Roof of California’

I have a sense of when I’ve stayed on one topic too long, and this is one of those times. But bear with my carrying on about Tioga Pass just a few minutes longer. As mentioned (and pictured) earlier (and then mentioned again, elsewhere), I drove up across the pass last week on a blitz-style Yosemite tour with my nephew Max. I also brought a sound recorder along and wound up talking to people we met along the way, and that led to a radio story that aired Thursday morning on KQED’s “The California Report.”. Oddly, because of a problem with the The California Report site, the link to our airing of the story is still acting weird for me. story. But the piece also aired on KPCC in Los Angeles, and here’s the link to the story as it played there:

Clear skies in the Sierra Nevada open up access to Yosemite.

OK–that is it for now. Until I get the picture that Max shot of me walking around wearing shorts on the frozen lake.

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High Country, Out of Character

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That’s Mount Dana, elevation 13,057 feet above sea level, just south of Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park. The picture was shot from a ridge above the Gaylor Lakes just north of the pass, elevation about 10,500.

My nephew Max and I drove across the Tioga road on Wednesday, and it’s a trip that will leave an impression for some time. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is country that’s normally far beyond the reach of the casual winter traveler. The Sierra this high up is usually buried in snow. Beyond that, it can be cold and harsh in a way that’s utterly foreign to us Northern California lowlanders. The day we were up there, it felt like the temperature was in the high 40s, at least, and warmer in the sunlight. There was no wind. I was wearing shorts, though that was pushing it a little. Plenty of others have journeyed up to this strangely accessible alpine world. A local outdoors writer did a blog post last week about a couple guys who had driven up to hike Mount Dana–yeah, that peak pictured above–in running shoes.

All the weather forecasts show that this midwinter idyll, made possible by a long, long dry spell accompanied by unusually mild daytime temperatures, is coming to an end. The forecast for the end of the week is blizzardy: snow, then more snow, with high winds. And already, the weather has changed. Today’s high is for a high of about 30, with 50 mph winds gusting to 80 mph. Tonight’s forecast: a low of 10, with a westerly wind of 60-65 mph gusting to 105 mph. I have a picture in my head of being blown clear off this ridge.

More on this later. For a rather short trip–we were only on the road across the high country for a few hours–it filled my head with impressions.

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A Midwesterner Visits: Yosemite

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We’ve been giving my nephew Max, a University of Iowa freshman who until this week had never been west of Des Moines, a crash winter tour of our slice of central/northern California. (A little bit of deja vu here: He’s making his first trip west about a month before his 19th birthday; I was about two and a half months shy of 19 when I made my first visit out here in 1973, starting out on a Chicago-to-Oakland ride on Amtrak).

What’s the one place you’d take a new visitor to this part of the state (I mean after you got done with Fisherman’s Wharf)? For me, it’s Yosemite, a part of the state I have visited only infrequently but which I think leaves an unforgettable impression. Also, I confess I wanted to get up there because of the historically dry weather we’re having–so little snow so far that the Tioga Pass road, which rises to nearly 10,000 feet, is still open (more on that later).

As always happens with me and my trips, we were a little on the late side getting out the door on Tuesday. But we had plenty of light, and stopped frequently along the way to check out the sights and take pictures. We checked in to our little cabin just outside the park entrance, then headed for Yosemite Valley, a little more than 25 miles away (the reasonably priced lodging down there was all booked, and I didn’t see springing for the Ahwahnee Hotel for one night). We got down to the valley floor just as the sun was crawling up the granite faces hanging above–notably El Capitan and in the distance, Half Dome. We parked near a bridge over the very serene-looking Merced River and snapped away as the sun faded and night came on. Then, finally feeling the cold (I was wearing shorts, of course), we went to dinner and headed back to our cabin.

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Muni Blog: Ocean Beach

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We went with our nephew Max for a little no-fixed-plan exploration of the city. So we wound up walking from the Ferry Building down to Phone Company Park (Max is a Cubs fan), then got on the N-Judah Muni metro car and decided to stay on all the way through downtown and out to Ocean Beach. It was beautiful out there in a way that’s so typical of this dry winter I’m almost but not quite taking it for granted. Lots of walkers on the beach. Plenty of surfers in their full wetsuits (we heard a couple of them later talking about the rip currents they encountered). Plenty of interesting stuff in the sand, like sand dollars. We walked over and had a sort of late lunch/early dinner at a restaurant with a perfect view of the beach. Someone on the beach apparently launched a couple of fire lanterns we saw gliding above the sand after sunset.

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Bolinas Ridge Bovine Encounter

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Today’s outing: To the Bolinas Ridge Trail in West Marin. We got out there to the north end of the trail, at Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, probably an hour, an hour and a half before the sank behind Inverness Ridge, to the west. We found a sort of rocky natural platform overlooking a ravine and the trail we had walked in on, and just stayed there as the sun went down. Soon, the moon rose, and we walked back to the car. This lad (or lass–my non-farm eye didn’t see evidence one way or the other) was one of the many bovines along the trail. Nice place to be a cow, or a bull, or whatever.

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Another One of Those Days

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Another one of those days, meaning: clear, warm, bright, and dry. How dry? So dry that today there’s a red flag warning for high fire danger in parts of the Sierra Nevada because of high winds and low humidity and the utter lack of snow. I’ve been in California for 35 years, and that’s the first time I can remember this happening.

Down here in Berkeley, fall color continues and, on a breezy Saturday morning, leaves that ordinarily would have been brought down by storms a little earlier in the season are still falling.

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Quadrantids 2012

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Kate and I got up at 3:26 a.m. — that’s what the clock said — to see if we could get an eyeful of the Quadrantid meteor shower last night. (Why so late/early? It was after moonset here, and meteor visibility would be better.) We each saw one pretty good streak before crawling back into bed. Of course, I stayed out for half an hour hoping to get one on camera–and in fact the one I saw flashed by while the lens was open, but it was outside the frame. In any case I got a couple of OK star shots, including this one of the Big Dipper, which was virtually overhead; Polaris, the North Star, is just above and to the right of the tree on the left.

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Quadrantids 2012

dipper010412.jpg

Kate and I got up at 3:26 a.m. — that’s what the clock said — to see if we could get an eyeful of the Quadrantid meteor shower last night. (Why so late/early? It was after moonset here, and meteor visibility would be better.) We each saw one pretty good streak before crawling back into bed. Of course, I stayed out for half an hour hoping to get one on camera–and in fact the one I saw flashed by while the lens was open, but it was outside the frame. In any case I got a couple of OK star shots, including this one of the Big Dipper, which was virtually overhead; Polaris, the North Star, is just above and to the right of the tree on the left.

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A Semi-Blue Post-Christmas

Forgive me a moment of post-holiday wistfulness as I stare into the glare of our sunny, dry January.

Has anyone come up with a word for this “it’s all over” feeling I experience as the page turns on New Year’s Day? It’s not quite sadness. It’s not quite regret. It’s not quite a pining for the holidays, with all their promise and hope, both material and immaterial, to continue. Yet it’s somehow all of these, hardened by the knowledge “Well, that’s that. We won’t be back here again.”

The lights are still hanging on our house and will for a week or two longer (we have to leave them up at the very least so our nephew Max can see them, right?). They’ll come down, though, and I’ll have a pang. Not for the lights themselves, but maybe for what they might represent: a wish to project something joyous and hopeful (and cool) to all our neighbors and all the passers-by. I have one neighbor, up the street and around the corner for us, who seems to deal with the post-holiday mourning period by maintaining one light display after another throughout the whole year. At the very least, he’ll give us Valentine’s, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving light displays.

Resolution, for the season to come: Find some other small way to project that holiday light to others. And now back to January.

as i stare down the last hour of our extended holiday and watch the lights, lights no longer shining in anticipation of a celebration to come, no longer carrying a promise of something anticipated but still surprising in the deepest shadows of our short days, lights shining out now maybe with a little insistence that the season isn’t, should not be over, lights maybe a little bittersweet because they may shine in place of other hopes and disappointments of the season adn the longer year juste passed.