With a husband starting work as an Interp Ranger, it’s easier than ever to geek out on Yosemite nature trivia. Our latest adventure in obscure (?) Yosemite flora, was a trip out to visit some knobcone pines, combined with a trip to the old sugar pines in the Rockefeller grove.

 

Bear distraction

On the way through Yosemite Valley to look for them, we stopped to watch a young bear exploring a bear trap. If the door hadn’t been locked closed, I’m sure NPS would have itself a trapped bear, because this bear was trying as hard as it could to find a way in. It sniffed at all the openings, tugged on the door, swiped several times at the padlock in the back, and climbed all around and under that trap. Bears are so cool.

As usual, whenever there is a bear close to the road, a huge crowd gathers, and it was disconcerting how comfortable this bear seemed to be in spite of all the people around. Unfortunately, it’s precisely this bear’s comfort with people that is likely to get it in trouble. A little bit of fear, judiciously placed, can keep bears out of the wrong situations. Hopefully, it won’t end up as a sad bear story over on JeffreyTrust.com.

It’s always a treat to see an untagged bear – even if it is probably on its way to earning a tag.

Knobcone Pines

Still, the highlight of the trip was the visit to the knobcone pines. We learned that there was a bunch of them growing along the road down into Foresta from Hwy 120, and since they’re relatively rare, decided that it was worth a trip to see if we could find them.

There are plenty of great animals that don’t get their proper attention because of how common they are – like robins, which are really great birds – but there is something special about going to a place to see something that you can’t just see anywhere. Plus, these trees have some really cool and interesting biology.

Instead of dangling its cones out on the ends of a branch like most pines, the knobcone pine shelters them in around the stem and trunk in small clusters, and is reluctant to give them up. Sometimes the trees hold onto the pine cones for so long that the tree actually grows around the cones, swallowing the still viable cones into the growing trunk. Did you catch that? So if you cut down one of these trees and found one of these cones embedded in the wood like an insect in amber, you could still extract the seeds, plant them, and watch them grow. Nature is amazing.

Like the giant sequoias, the knobcone pines are dependent on fire to reproduce. The heat from a fire triggers the cones to open up and release the seeds onto the ground where the fire has also prepared the soil to give them the best chance at growing. Because of the Big Meadow Fire in 2009, many of the knobcone pines in the Foresta area released their seeds and the young saplings are off and growing. With the needles gone, it’s easy to spot the previous generation of knobcone pines, with the open, blackened cones still hanging off the trunks like some strange growth. What’s interesting is that you can see how high the fire reached on each tree by looking at which cones opened and which did not. Many of the burnt knobcone pines still have what look like perfectly viable cones high on their branches. Maybe they’re waiting for another fire?

Now that we know what to look for, maybe we’ll start seeing knobcones all over the park. According to Yosemite Naturalist extraordinaire, Pete Devine, there are some in the Rockefeller Grove, and the Sierra Nevada Tree Identifier says there are supposed to be some on Hwy 140 above the Arch Rock Entrance Station. But the ones that we saw were on the Foresta Road, right after the first sharp right turn as you head down from Hwy 120. The burnt out tree skeletons give you the first sign that you should stop the car, climb out and start looking around.

Rockefeller Grove

We also finally got around to exploring the Rockefeller Grove. This area is supposed to be known for the old sugar pines that were saved from logging back in 1939 when the Rockefeller Foundation matched contributions to set it aside as part of the park. We didn’t notice the knobcone pines there, but we didn’t know what to look for yet.

Sugar pines have a special place in our hearts. There are two ~80 year old sugar pines on our small chunk of land in Yosemite West. The fact that they drip pine sap and occasionally pine cone bombs onto everything we own, is offset by the fact that they seem to attract Chickarees to our property, and I love watching those little squirrels. Plus, sugar pines are Pinus lambertiana, aka the Lambert pine, so really, they are like family. Having seen an enormous but unheralded sugar pine on the ski from the transfer station to the Mariposa Grove, I had visions in my mind of similar-sized trees clustered in huge numbers at the Rockefeller Grove. Not so.

There are some good-sized sugar and ponderosa/jeffrey pines along the way. It’s a beautiful walk through the forest, and would be an even better XC ski, with a gentle grade especially good for beginners, but ultimately not much different than the forests closer to our house. I hear there are some amazing sugar pines closer to Hodgdon…

It’s finally official – NPS announced a new interim program to require permits to hike Half Dome all week long while the cables are up in 2011. Permits will be available online through Recreation.gov only March 1, for May and June dates, and then April 1 for July etc. One more time – you can ONLY get these permits online about 3 months before you want to come up and hike the dome. There are no first-come first-served options. Plan ahead.

I can’t say that I’m particularly surprised at the decision. After the report detailing the effects of limiting Half Dome access during weekends and holidays last summer came out (you can get the pdf of the report here along with other information on Half Dome trail use and management), this seemed like a logical extension of the permit policy. Limiting access during the weekends simply transferred traffic to other days, and the new restrictions address those concerns.

However, I can’t help gritting my teeth in anticipation of all the disappointed people that will arrive this summer after training for nine months to get in shape for the iconic hike, only to find out that the permits have been sold out for months… and I’m not even one of the people who will bear the brunt of that reaction on a full time basis. Please help spread the word. You need a Permit to Hike Half Dome now. All. The. Time.

I know, everyone else starts this game in January, but now it’s May, which is really a time of beginning things, and I can’t even remember if I made New Year resolutions, much less what they might be, so I’m starting again with a couple of goals for myself.
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… and breathe…

Between a Sisyphusean marketing workload with DNC, a conversion optimization class that operates heavily on the you’ll-get-out-what-you-put-in principle, volunteer activities at the Valley Visitor Center for a full day once every other week, a frozen shoulder that seems to be adamant about remaining stuck, and house construction (Tom’s been going nuts, and we now have flooring down in most of the house, and appliances waiting for installation, it’s very exciting), it’s been a long couple of months between the last post and this one.

Fortunately, the light at the end of the tunnel seems to be getting closer. Two weeks ago, Tom and I met up with our friend Shauna, and skied out to the Nelder Grove of Giant Sequoias. Neither Tom nor I had ever been there before but it’s close to Shauna’s new house, and it was a perfect day and a great chance to explore. Last week, I got out for a quick walk on the Hites Cove trail to look at the wildflowers. And with those two activities as the sum total of my exercise for the last month, today Tom and I hiked up the Snow Creek trail to Mt Watkins and back. Our agreed-upon turn-around time left me a few hundred yards short of the summit, but I have Tom’s pictures from the top as inspiration for the next trip.

The skiing was brilliant and beautiful, the weather perfect, and it just feels fantastic to really get out and DO something for a whole day that doesn’t involve my computer.

It was about 11 miles round trip, with nearly 4500 feet of elevation gain, and I am bone tired and fully expect to be hobbling and sore tomorrow, but I am ever so happy. I’ll try to post some pictures soon.

There was a lot of adventure in our household the week of 9/9/09. We moved our stuff out of the crawlspace so that our new contractors would have some room to work on finishing out the downstairs unit in our house Saturday and Sunday. Tom climbed the Nose in a Day with Hans on Monday, and then we drove across to the East Side and hiked Mt. Whitney in a day on Wednesday, returning tired but happy to our little place in the Valley Thursday night.
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I promised myself that this is the very week that I would (finally) put something on this blog about the vacation that Tom and I took the week of Aug. 10th for our 11th wedding anniversary. We’d tossed around some other ideas, and we may have even gone to Hawaii if we’d planned ahead a little further (for people that know us, the beach vacation is a radical departure from our typical vacation mindset). It turned out that a shorter vacation to the East Side of the Sierra was absolutely perfect. Our trip had three parts. We had time to finish up some projects ahead of time so that they weren’t hanging over hour heads for the vacation, and then hiked to the top of Mt. Tyndall, wandered slowly through the Bristlecone Pine Forrest, and climbed in Clark Canyon.
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What do you see if you walk the 6-ish miles into Glen Aulin, and then instead of taking the popular trail down toward Water Wheel and the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, you turn right along the PCT and walk in that direction for a while? The Yosemite scenery is beautiful, but it’s the lure of exploration and new places that draws me in. Tom was also excited about the peaks at the far end.

About 13 miles along the PCT, passing Glen Aulin along the way, we turned right and headed up to McCabe Lakes and hiked to the top of Sheep Peak, a mostly indescript, not quite 12K ft peak (11842 ft.), that nevertheless was a grand adventure, with a spectacular view. We took many pictures with Mt Conness in the background, and tried some panoramas with our small point and shoot. It’s hard to capture sweeping 360 views in a single frame.
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We took a somewhat abbreviated backpacking trip out past Ostrander Lake June 25-27 to try out some of our new gear. The short version? We love it, and we had a great time. I also learned and re-learned a lot of stuff about backpacking. For a first trip, it was just right.

We left Thursday night around 9pm after getting off work and cooking up a yummy dinner the comfort of our own home, and hiked out to Horizon Ridge before setting up camp. In some ways I like hiking in the dark – it’s usually very quiet and peaceful. Plus, this was an out and back trip, so we got to see the scenery, and the flowers that we walked past in the dark on our way out.

In the morning we finished our somewhat circuitous route to Ostrander Lake, and circled around to walk along Horse Ridge. It was a lazy day, filled with many stops and a bit of napping. We had plenty of water so we camped high with a bit of a breeze and fewer mosquitoes, filling up when we hiked down in the morning.

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Tom and I have just gotten back from our weekend adventures, put the groceries in the pantry and refrigerator, and wolfed a bit of the fancy artesian bread we can’t get here with extra cheese and olives. It’s been a long and very full weekend.

I took the day off on Friday for my birthday (Saturday), and Tom and I left Thursday night after work for a quick backpacking trip. We saw many things, had great adventures, and hiked out Saturday morning.

Saturday afternoon we drove into the Bay Area for a friend’s memorial service on Sunday. We talked about goal-setting, and listened to the first bit of Unaccustomed Earth on the drive. That evening, our friends who graciously opened their house to us, treated me/us to a birthday dinner at Plearn, a local Thai restaurant. Really delicious non-European food and the good company of friends is such a treat.

The service on Sunday was beautiful, and touching. The stories celebrating such a remarkable man went on and on. I’m still processing – and just remembering.

Afterwards, we picked up a bed frame at Ikea that we had been eyeing for some time, and then drove to San Jose to meet up with Tom’s family, pick up the car we’d lent, and eat some pizza at a place nearby, Amicis, that serves gluten-free, and vegan options.

Monday morning, we had brunch with yet another friend before making the long drive back to Yosemite, pausing for a bear jam along the way.

I’m back on a frequent-post kick, so expect to hear more detailed stories unfold over the next few days. I’ve had a lot to think about.

I’ve been thinking about backpacking lately. A lot. And I’ve been spending inordinate amounts of money on it too – or preparing to spend inordinate amounts of money anyway.

As it turns out, it has been a embarrassingly long time since I’ve gone backpacking, and I’ve just realized how much I miss it. It isn’t that we haven’t been getting out at all. Last summer we were pretty excited about getting into some longer runs, and we started getting a little more serious about collecting pictures, but as activities that take only part of a day, we were getting pretty comfortable returning home to the miracle of modern appliances, hot showers and a comfortable bed. No longer.
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