The Sentinel Hotel was located right on the bank of the Merced River and used to release its sewage directly into the river. Ew!

One of the things I learned that was that the Sentinel Hotel used to be located right at the edge of the Merced River and dumped its sewage directly into the water. According to Sue Beatty, this is why the campers all moved upstream of the hotel, and ultimately one of the reasons that so many of the current campgrounds are located at the west end of the valley.

Devils Elbow - pre and post restoration

One of the more striking before and after images, for me, was of Devil’s Elbow in 1993 vs 1995. You wouldn’t think that two years could make such a dramatic difference, but restoration crews and planners managed to turn a tired, trampled picnic area back into a place of natural beauty. It’s almost hard to believe that this is the same location until you notice the boulder in the river in both pictures. Now, I’m told that willows, a sign of healthy riparian ecosystems have also returned to the area. Hoorah! We can make a difference.

A rare orchid was seen growing next to a boardwalk in a once trampled meadow.

Akinori Ito from the Blest Corporation has figured out a way to turn plastics back into oil, using a tabletop machine that allows you to feed plastics from the trash into one end and get burnable fuel out the other. At one point in the video, Akinori Ito is holding a bag of what looks to me like plastic recycling, and tells us that he doesn’t see garbage, he sees treasure.

It got me wondering if suddenly the North Pacific Gyre (aka Great Pacific Garbage Patch) is suddenly the new Saudi Arabia. And if the people and organizations trying to clean up that mess are buying up these machines left and right. (Did you know that you could take a working cruise to see and help clean up the North Pacific Gyre with Algalita?)

And if, like me, you wondered if this was too good to be true, Steve Machan, mentions in his blog and in an article for Technorati, a second machine that does the same thing – the Environ Oil Generator.

Is there hope for us (and our environment) yet?

The road to our house, Hwy 41, has been under construction for most of the summer. They are doing a major re-grading and re-paving project along the entire section of road from the entrance station to Yosemite Valley, and has meant that for the entire summer, we’ve been subject to 30-60 minute construction delays (sometimes more than 60 min. although that is supposed to be the outside limit, and when we’re lucky, no stopping at all). Fortunately, that’s given us time to perfect our construction delay technique.

Construction delays are nothing like traffic jams. In traffic jams, you’re stuck inside your vehicle continuously inching along with everyone else. In our construction delays, there’s a guy with a big stop sign, and a long line of cars that are absolutely stopped until the pilot car returns with the string of cars going in the opposite direction. That means, that when you hit the construction, you can turn off your engine and hop outside and start looking around, and only jump back in when cars start passing in the other lane. Not every place along the road is as scenic as others, but there is usually something interesting to look at – wildflowers by the side of the road, if you don’t have a beautiful mountain overlook.

Tonight, they stopped us right at the juction with South Side Drive before you make the right turn to Bridalveil Falls parking. As usual, we popped out of the car and started looking around. I found a couple of interesting flowers near the culvert and started busily sketching. Tom uprooted an evil, invasive Wooly Mullein, and then set about making friends. First I heard him explaining to one guy that if he really needed to use a restroom, he could walk up to the Bridalveil parking and catch his friends as they went by there. Then, like a natural-born interpreter, I hear him making hiking trail recommendations and explaining about fire management in the park and how it helps to keep the forrests healthy. A crowd is gathering. He and his new friends are pulling out maps when the pilot car appears, and everyone has to get back to their cars.

As Tom is heading back toward the car, the man says, “Thank goodness we got caught in construction traffic! That was worth it!”

Over on Two-Heel Drive, Tom Mangan has summarized a list of Bay Area State Parks that are under threat. (Ano Nuevo? Mount Diablo State Park? Angel Island? Really?!?). You can find a more complete listing of which parks will remain open, and those which are being “moved to caretaker status” which means that they will still be protected, Government-owned land, but will not be open to the public.

Visit the California State Park Foundation to find out what you can do about it.

The process of finding good, workable alternatives to plastic disposables has taken a long time and a lot of research and effort on the part of our environmental manager, his team, and operations managers, and they are still working on it. Right now, there are only two exceptions to the order block. Managers can still order plastic utensils, and trash liners. We’ve found some excellent and sturdy biodegradable utensils, but they come in packets that include knife fork and spoon. What if you only need a fork? Individually dispensed utensils are still plastic – for now. We’re working to find solutions for that too. I also remember hearing about tests being done with trash liners – but the Green options just weren’t robust enough and were creating other issues, so we’re still looking.

Maybe it isn’t a perfect system yet, but it’s exciting to be moving in the right direction.

Water Bottles (taken by shrff14 on Flickr)

The most recent meeting was last Wednesday and I left feeling proud of the progress that we’ve made. Sure, we’re part of a big company, and that means that sometimes (read usually) we run into the red tape and delays that comes with any big company, but there were lots of new things going on that I think we can be proud of.

One of them is that we’re getting rid of imported bottled water in our stores. I mean, really. We have some of the cleanest, sweetest, most pure water coming straight out of our taps, why in the world do we need to ship gallons of water from France?

Of course, no change is immediate, so we’re conducting a short trial first to see if European visitors will balk at having to buy domestic bottled water instead of Evian. But why would they? Tom has even heard a French woman scold her sons for picking Evian up because even though it was a brand that was familiar to them, it isn’t environmentally friendly to be drinking it here.

Assuming there is no mass uprising caused by the absence of French water, we’ll settle nicely into our perfectly adequate selection of American water and call it good.

In some ways, that may not seem like a big change. We aren’t installing solar panels in a multi-million dollar project, or going off the grid. Maybe it won’t make the front page of the newspaper, but I’m really proud of the movement that lies behind it. It’s a change in awareness, a quiet, simple re-evaluation of what we do on a day-to-day basis that says that we’re committed to being earth-friendly, not because it will get us press or give us a reason to toot our own horns, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Yosemite Fall Color at the 120/140 junction

The largest, most impressive display we saw were the oaks right at the 120/140 junction. There are splashes of color along the road as well – a couple of red Dogwoods, and some aspen groves, mostly below about 7000 feet.

Close-up of the red ground cover by lakes behind Pothole Dome

Red ground cover near the Tuolumne River

Driving up to Tuolumne a week ago, my neighbor noticed some nice golden color around Tenaya Lake, but by this weekend, it had gone mostly brown, or blown away. We did find some nice reddish ground cover around the small lakes/ponds behind Pothole Dome, which were beautiful in their own right, but I’m betting it was more impressive a week or two ago. Of course, Tuolumne is always beautiful in its own right, and every time I’m up there, I wonder why I don’t visit more often.

While we were at the composting facility, a load of garbage from the NPS dumpsters was deposited in the composting facility. In this pile of trash, in addition to the many garbage bags of trash, we could easily see 2 sleeping bags, 2 tents, and a foam mattress, some looking like they were in pretty good shape. The staff told us that it would be easy for us to go camping with the things they find in the trash in a single day. We speculated that long-distance travelers are simply unburdening themselves of things that they purchase for their Yosemite camping trip, but no longer want to be encumbered with. My co-worker frowns and points out that any homeless shelter would have been happy for donations like that.

In spite of the many recycling bins located throughout Yosemite, we also found plenty of recyclables in the trash. They do the best they can to remove these items prior to composting, but are understaffed, and unfortunately, most of it goes to the landfill instead of the recycling center.
Plastic is everywhere. Composting seems to reduce the volume of the trash by as much as 40 – 50% (based on eye-balling the composting vault that was nearly finished composting), and even after the pre-sort, there is so much plastic remaining in the compost that it goes through a second filtration step and STILL has scraps of plastic, plastic spoons etc. mingled in with what you would think of as compost.

The compost isn’t clean enough to sell, but it is clean enough to be used to cover the landfill – they are required to cover all new garbage with at least 6-inches of material (or a tarp) at the end of the day. Using manure from the Yosemite stables, as well as this plastic-y compost mixed with dirt both reduces their cost in purchasing dirt, and also puts this “waste” material to good use reducing odor and deterring wildlife.

I’ve been proud about our move to biodegradable/compostable materials in the “disposable” items that we have in our F&B units, but visiting the composting facility really made me see how that fits into the trash cycle, and just how much better off we are replacing plastic utensils, cups, packaging etc. with their compostable counterparts.