Valerie in Nature

Yosemite Trails was ostensibly a guide book, but I expect that if I were getting it for that purpose, I'd be rather disappointed. It's rather like the posts on my own blog in that it describes the route that was taken including remarks about the quality of the trail and excellence of a campsite. Sometimes options are mentioned. When an opportunity arises, a little camp etiquette might get thrown in. However, he even spends a week of one trip not knowing for sure where he is. It is actually a story of traveling the trails of Yosemite. The first part contains a couple small stories plus a circumnavigation of the rim. The second part goes further afield in traveling the high country near the park. Published in 1911, he describes a familiar and unfamiliar place. The Tioga road, which I should follow for some fifteen miles, is a rough track built in historic days by the owners of the once famous Tioga mine, which, long since abandoned, lies near the crest of the Sierra about t...

Once upon a time, while having some amazing Zion National Park rocks to look at, I took a moment to observe the flowers. There was one quite pretty penstemon getting pollinated by a bee. Except there was something wrong. The whole of the scene was very very still. The bee hung in front of the flower without so much as a wing flap. Where was physics? The natural laws were not being obeyed. A frozen tableau in Zion. I looked closer and found I wasn't seeing all of the bee. At first I saw something like two fangs and the negative space resolved itself into a large spider. The integrity of physics was restored, but flowers had just become very dangerous places. The things you find when out and about! But it does make a bit of sense. You hear that watering holes are one of the most dangerous places for wandering animals. This would just be the bee equivalent. I then returned home to those nice, safe flowers I'd known. A very familiar blue-dick hosting danger. Sp...

Ah, winter. It is generally more useful to reckon it as the time from the winter solstice to the spring equinox since the weather tends to lag a bit behind the shortening of the days. I put it down to the land and water, a mass that takes a good long time to get charged up with the energy of long summer days, and another while to let it go again when the days grow short. Here, it might be better reckoned by the quarter of the year with the shortest days. Those short days just get worse when going north. The day length changes so quickly when it is perfect and even. It changes slowly when it is long or short, just settling down into it for a long wallow. Short days leave long nights. When I live by the sun, that morning takes a long time to come. I even tend to have blundered into the dark before feeling ready to have the evening supper, but once it is dark, that's what time it is. The day's activities just generally are best with light. So cooking happens. Cleaning happens. (...