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Last year for a mini-vacation around this time we drove up to Carmel and had an awesome time coming down Highway 1. For this year’s edition of an extended Labor Day excursion we’re leaving our zoo in the very capable hands of DogGone Walkin’ pet sitters, hopping in our new Ford Escape this morning and going to Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Park for the first time.

Serious tree-hugging to follow.

Hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend.

In honor of Bastille Day I resubmit a photo of the Seine and Notre Dame Cathedral taken from our wonderful room at the Hotel le Notre Dame on Quay Saint Michel  in the Latin Quarter along the left bank of the river during our visit in May 2007.

From an otherwise awesome 20-mile early Saturday morning bike ride while in San Diego last week, I was reminded for the 26,235th time that there are right and wrong ways to pass a bicyclist.

In this case, both of the following examples of good and evil occured near the end of my ride on 6th Avenue heading up from downtown to Balboa Park for my first look-see at that amazing place.

The white truck in the following photo — bless its driver’s considerate heart — does things the right way in moving by me on my bike.

You can tell the vehicle has moved left enough to semi-straddle the broken white line of the lane divider in order to increase the space between us and thus pass me more safely.

But then there’s the driver of the blue SUV in the following quick video clip, who blasts past me with at most two feet between us and none of the spatial awareness or consideration demonstrated by the driver of the white pick-up:

It is infuriating — moreso because that driver is not the only passtard, I am too. Conditioned from all my years of urban cycling I unconsciously slot myself firmly in the door zone in an effort to minimize any inconvenience I might be to the vehicles coming up behind me. Try as I might to change that ingrained behavior by taking more of the lane, I inevitably end up pulled almost gravitationally back along the doors in the lane, which basically allows such clueless drivers to go by me so dangerously rather than go around me.

Now here’s the thing about my predilection for riding in the door zone — for which I’ve taken some criticism in the past: First and foremost, I don’t do it lazily. Instead, I always aim to substantially minimize the risk of getting doored by being hyper-aware of the parked vehicles ahead of me. Sure it’s a risky place because of those motorists that pass me so poorly on my left and the doors that might get flung open into my path from the right, but I literally clear parked cars that I’m approaching of any driver’s side occupants. If I see anything resembling a person’s silhouette, I move to the left, sound my bell, or both.

Whether motorists pass me this way on purpose or accidentally I’ve gotten better at remembering my contribution to the encounter and excusing those who buzz by me. When this blue SUV did it, sure… I entertained visions of catching up with the vehicle at the next red light and putting my fist against one of its windows, but then I realized we’re both to blame.

As I regularly do when I’m out in Death Valley, I’ll usually set up the digital SLR on a tripod after the campfire dies down and just before turning in, point it at the night sky and leave the shutter open for  however long it takes me to get bored on top of cold, which is usually less than 15 minutes.

This time I took a risk in losing the entire rig sometime during the night to go for a longer time span. So  I planted the tripod outside the northwest corner of our tent around 9 p.m., opened the shutter and went to bed, figuring I’d get an exposure either for as long as the battery lasted or when I got up for my usual pre-dawn trip to pee.

Sure enough, my bladder woke me up around 5 a.m. and when I checked the camera I found it powered down, its battery having lasted an unknown amount less than that eight hours.

The result looks a little something like this (click it for the bigger picture):

There is some light leakage along the right edge of the frame, but it’s decidedly less faint and more understandable than the dramatic eruption up into the center, of which I have no explanation. There were no campfires going on the ground out from our tent in this direction and even if there were, the camera was pointed up into the sky at a pretty wide angle to the ground, at least 30 degrees. My guess is it’s light from vehicles coming down the two-mileroad to get to the campground.

If you click to go to the bigger version of the image you’ll see it’s not a very clean image — she’s an old camera whose been many dirty places and snapped many shots — and there are a lot of damaged pixels, but then again some of the red points of light could be satellites and such. But still… look beyond the marring and the star tracks and you’ll see a ridiculous number of weeeeeee points of light waaaaaaaaay out there. They can’t all be dirty bits.

This next vista below  greeted us on our way home as we emerged from a surreal scene encountered while traveling along the back side of Owens Lake on our way to Lone Pine. Serious winds were blowing a major amount of the dry lake bed in a northeastern direction and after passing through the massive dust storm and understanding why Los Angeles is or should be hated by everyone in the Owens Valley, I’d been hoping everything would open up and my cousin Nathan would get a dramatic view of the very dramatic Eastern Sierras. Instead we found them looking veiled and encapsulated in a dome rimmed by an exploding aurora that was pretty dramatic in its own right (click for the bigger picture):

What an incredible journey. We crammed so much into two nights and three days I don’t even know where to begin and so I won’t other than to say There Will Be Pictures and that it was a supreme joy for Susan and me to be able to show off one of our favorite place on earth  to my cousin Nathan.

On the bed of the Racetrack Playa, from left: Moving Rock (left of center),
Grandstand (about two miles behind us), Nathan, Susan and some guy.

I’ve been to my fair share of places around the world, and it surprises me when I say Death Valley is my favorite place on earth. Since my first visit in the winter of 2002, I’ve been back at least once a year — sometimes twice.

If you’re so inclined you can download a PDF file of “Sunny Delight,” an October 2002 Orange Coast magazine article I wrote about Furnace Creek after a July visit that year where daytime temps reached 120 and at night it never dropped below 100 degrees.

For all I’ve explored, I’ve seen but a fraction of what the park has to offer… and that’s part of its allure. For all its vast nothingness there’s always someplace else to go and do. Even if that someplace is a hike into the broad flat of a desolate saltpan.

I can’t nutshell what the place means to me other than to say if you’ve never been, it should be somewhere on your life’s to-do list to go get some of its magnificent fulfillment for yourself.

Susan and I are going back for more this weekend, our sixth visit. I’m thrilled to be able to share it with my cousin Nathan who’s flying out from Tennessee on a mini-vacation to come with us. We’ll be driving out early Friday morning, coming in the back way through the Panamint Valley and after a stop at the Charcoal kilns at Wildrose we’ll be dropping down into the valley proper and hitting a lot of the sights up and down the park’s main roads: Stovepipe dunes, Furnace Creek, Badwater, Zabriskie Point, Salt Creek, Rhyolite, Titus Canyon. We’ll camp that night at Mesquite Springs. On top of all that, I’ve never been during the early spring so I’m looking forward to what’s expected to be a pretty glorious wildflower bloom along the way, fed by above average rains this past winter.

Come Saturday morning is The Main Event: my long-delayed/canceled/ruminated-about mountain bike trek from Ubehebe Crater to Racetrack Playa. Word is  that parts of the 26-miles of bad washboarded road between the two landmarks have been graded for the first time in a long time, so it might be not-so-bad road. We’ll see. The plan is Susan and Nathan will see me off early and after a couple/three hour headstart will catch up with me and we’ll end up pitching tents at the south end of the dry lake bed, which might still be covered  with a few inches of run off from the rains, as it was when Susan and I went out there last in 2005.

Sunday morning we’ll come back out and go out the way we came in except we’ll go over the 190 across the Panamint Valley to end up around the backside of Owens Lake backdropped by the Easter Sierras for a stop at Manzanar before heading home.

Lacking content for an actual post, I’ll occasionally dive into the photo libraries and dredge up an image from the past, such as this captivating if otherwise unknown species of flying — presumably sting-capable — insect who was pretty protective of its sandy spot midway up Eureka Dunes in Death Valley, during the first time Susan and I visited there in November of 2005.

We’ll be in Death Valley next month, and while Eureka Dunes isn’t on the itinerary this time around, we’re looking forward to a demonstration of the park’s wildflower prowess, thanks to some above-average rainfall this winter.

Begrudgingly canceled due to cold and wet weather that dropped in uninvited during our visit last Thanksgiving, I am excited to announce that Susan and I will be returning to Death Valley in early April not only so I can finally fulfill the 9-years-old dream of biking the 28 miles of bad-ass road from Ubehebe Crater to Racetrack Playa (inspired originally back in 2001 by this brief article, clickably pictured at right, that I found in Outdoor magazine), but also to check out any hot wildflower action that might be blooming out and about in them there vast solitudinous expanses.

Special bonus: we’ll be accompanied by family in the form of my cousin Margaret’s 18-year-old son Nathan (I think that makes him my first cousin, once removed), who’ll be coming out to California to spend a short vacation with us.

On the off chance any of you camping/adventuring types reading this wanna caravan out and join us, holler at me and I’ll send you the dates and details.

On Christmas Day, heading back across the darkening Yosemite Valley to the Awahnee to get ready for the Bracebridge Dinner later that evening, through the mist I spied a pair of coyotes looking for supper about 400-yards out and on the move across a snow-covered meadow:

Let me strive to  forget my disappointments with the trivialities of man — poorly appointed hotel rooms and pompously pretentious dinners — and instead remember and revel in these privileged and priceless moments witnessing the magnificence of nature.

Happy New Year!

So here’s how things went down. After breakfast Christmas Eve morning in the amazing Awahnee dining room followed by a visit to the Yosemite Village store to pick up some hairspray for mom (which she’d forgot to pack), it was decided she would hang out at the hotel while Susan and I did some sightseeing.

So off we went and checked out Yosemite Falls, returning from which we found mom in the lobby of the Awahnee, whereupon she regaled us with her close encounter with the predatory king of the area’s food chain.

After getting back to her room with the hairspray she also discovered that she had somehow managed to forget all her makeup, and so donning her mink coat and foregoing the shuttle service, she set out from the hotel for the approximate 10 minute walk to the store.

But instead of striding along the paved pedestrian path on the hotel-side of the road, she opted for the more natural route that wound through the trees and big boulders between the north side of the road and the granite walls of the canyon.

There she is strolling serenely along still within the boundaries of the hotel’s grounds trying to figure out how she could have been such a doof and left her makeup at home, when she heard a voice from across the road, calling urgently and firmly to her: “Ma’am!”

My mom turned and found a uniformed person leading a small group of people on some sort of tour (probably of the hotel).

“Yes?” she answered.

“I need you to listen to me carefully and do exactly as I say.”

“Okay…”

” I want you to walk directly to me. Do it slowly. Now. Don’t turn around. Don’t run. Just walk. To me.”

Despite my mother’s tendency neither to listen very carefully nor to do exactly as she’s told. She followed orders and in a few moments she was across the road and standing before the uniformed person who asked her if she’d like to see why he asked her to do what she did.

“Of course,” she said.

Grabbing her by her fur-clad shoulders he rotated her around until she was looking back where she had been. Perched on the tall boulder she had been passing on her left was a mountain lion.

“Not a very big one,” she told us.

But big enough for her jaw to drop open as she watched it looking from her where she was standing to down directly below it where she had stopped, the lion’s long tail whipping back and forth a few times before it leapt behind the rock and out of sight.

“It was stalking you,” the man told her. “Best to stay on this side of the road.”

Again, she did as she was told. And it wasn’t until later that she realized the impact of the encounter and what might have happened had that tour guide not been there to get her safely away from it. It haunted the rest of her stay.

Postscript: The closest we came to a mountain lion were these tracks we found while tromping off-trail on Christmas Day near the base of El Capitan: