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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:

Susan’s still working on her collection, but got her awesome pix up here, and I managed to cull some 185 snaps from the more than 400 I shot during our three days in Yosemite — such as this one, taken by a kind gentleman who offered to snap Susan and me backdropped by Half Dome beside a snowman in a meadow we didn’t build so much as stand back up and add a misshapen noggin after I’d discovered it tipped over and headless.

PS. My mom was stalked by a mountain lion, but I’ll save that strange tale for another post.

We’re back and blown away. Yosemite these past three days was just soul-charging, and truly so unique an environment was a wondrous one within which to spend Christmas.

Oddly enough I did not come back from my first-ever visit to that miraculous place with 1,256 pictures as I would usually from an excursion of such length to someplace so new and picture-perfect. Instead I return with a comparative fraction, having just triggered my shutter little more than 400 times. Below is one of them, of the boughs and branches of a snow-laden tree beside the Pohono Bridge over the Merced River on the valley floor.

It’s always a treat to look out our north-facing windows after a storm such as the one earlier this week and see the distant San Gabriels dusted with snow. Not counting this past Thanksgiving weekend in Death Valley with its various blanketed mountain ranges, nor my trudge through the slush at the summit of the park’s 11,049-foot Telescope Peak the day before my 42nd birthday, the quick-melting vistas framed by our windows are literally as close as I’ve regularly come to the stuff since a weird winter trip in the mid-80s to Lake Arrowhead when some friends and I drove all freaking day pretty much to throw a snowball and play some video games and then drive home.

For my only white Christmas celebrated I have to hop in the wayback machine to the magical one spent with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when I was seven.

So foreign is the substance to me that I can remember an episode in my pre-teens, coming home from a cold morning’s deliveries of my Hancock Park-adjacent-adjacent Herald Examiner paper route and rushing in to urge my mom to come see the patch of snow I’d passed that must’ve fallen overnight a couple doors down from us in the alley behind the duplex we were living in a couple blocks south of Melrose. Reluctantly she followed me outside, took one look at the pile of slush on the ground and promptly schooled me on what in reality was the dumped remains of a neighbor’s freezer frost before heading back inside shaking her head wondering what kind of urban idiot she’d raised.

Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to replace all those variousdistant and weak and lame encounters with a mind-blowing one of literal snow-overload in less than two weeks when mom, Susan and I head to the winter-fied wonderland of  Yosemite National Park not only to experience its magnificence for the first time courtesy my mom, but also to enjoy the Awahnee Hotel’s famed Bracebridge Dinner, an extravagant tradition since the historic place opened back in 1927.

The once-in-a-lifetime event has long been on my mom’s list of things to do, but tickets for the dinner are on a first-served basis and historically sell out quickly. This was evidenced at the end of 2007 when in the week after that year’s Christmas I called and found it already sold out for the next one. Somewhat skeptically, in May of this far more troubled economic year, I visited the website and found space still available. So I called my mom and she said let’s do it, and reservations were done for what I expect will be our most amazing Christmas ever.

On the morning of November 28, Susan and I drove through a pretty steady drizzle from Mesquite Springs campground to Ubehebe Crater, which is next to the road to Racetrack Playa, with long-wanted plans for me to bike its 26-plus miles of washboarded badness while Susan drove it.

Arriving at the crater we were confronted by cold and wind and the reality that the storm that had done not much more than sprinkle us on its outskirts was pretty much parked over the valley the racetrack road traversed, leaving the bracketing mountainsides nicely blanketed with snow, and me realizing the long and the cold and wet haul getting from the crater potentially above the snow line and down to the playa would be seriously lacking in The Fun.

So I climbed along the lip of the crater, grim and gruff and bummed that the challenge that initially drew me to this wonderful place back in the winter of 2002 would go postponed once more… to be done either next spring or fall under what I hope will be less meteorologically challenging conditions and thus more with The Fun.

Turning around to head back down to the camper, the sun peeked out from a break in the clouds, and in a heartbeat my camera was out to capture what I expected to be a brief illumination. It lingered a little longer than expected and I was able to end up with a rough three frames that allowed me to show you the whole 2,000-year-old hole:

(You’ll wanna click it for the bigger picture)

Ubehebe Crater is 600 feet deep and half a mile across. Known as a maar volcano, the crater is estimated to be between 2,000 to 7,000 years old, and was created by steam and gas explosions when hot magma rose up from the depths until it reached ground water. The intense heat flashed the water into steam which expanded until the pressure was released as a tremendous hydrovolcanic eruption.

With the pitch darkness of the Death Valley Junction Saturday night pushed back only slightly by our lakeside campfire,  I adjourned from both its warmth and Susan for the camper to shed the sweats I was wearing and put on some clothes more presentable for dinner at the Amargosa Cafe followed by a film presentation at the Amargosa Opera House. Nothing fancy, just cleaner.

Emerging  a few minutes later Susan quickly pointed out that she’d heard something moving out there to the east and thought it was either a horse or a zombie, and as I urged my eyes to adjust quickly to the inky blackness from the interior lights of the van , indeed I eventually made out the large bulk of a dark horse facing us that seemed to be moving tentatively closer. My first thought was it was being ridden by someone, perhaps a ranger or a resident. But as I stared on the verge of hailing the rider I saw this was not so. My next thought was who in their right mind lets their steed wander around near an open highway, and almost immediately thereafter I recalled the bin I saw inside the lobby of the hotel with the sign requesting donations to help feed the wild horses in the area.

Then that single steed never took its eyes from us and stopped about 100 yards awa, becoming two as a lighter one who’d been positioned behind it, suddenly broke right asnd galloped up a berm and behind some trees to the lake. Retrieving our flashlights, Susan and I made our way to the water’s edge, but the beams  weren’t strong enough to do more than barely highlight what was either two or three other horses chuffing and taking drinks.

And then they were gone back into the night somewhere out on the vast plain that I’d biked out into near dusk. Where had they been, I wondered? And where do they go?

The latter question was answered after breakfast at the cafe and a stop in the lobby to add a few dollars to the donation bin the following morning. Wandering the grounds one last time, we peered through a gate leading to the back of the hotel and there they were.

(click for the bigger picture)

That dark one on the right was the one who stood point scouting us the night before as the others quenched their thirsts. Again, it never took its gaze from us as we stood there in amazement at the encounter.

Let me introduce you to this adorable little chiropteran fella:

(You’ll wanna click it for the bigger picture)

Don’t fret. It’s sleeping, not dead. It may look like it’s flat on the ground, but its clinging vertically to a beam under an eave next to the Amargosa Opera House. Susan and I found two others nearby. Just hangin’. In perfect position for me to get my camera all up in its tiny little grill and snap some macros. Either it was a sound sleeper or I was pretty good in not disturbing it.

And I do mean tiny. Its body wasn’t more then two fingers wide and maybe as long as my index finger from tip to tail. A search on The Google for “bats of the southwest” eventually showed me that we’d gleefully encountered representatives of the species California myotis, sometimes called the California bat even though they can be found throughout western north America from southern Alaska down to Guatemala, and they are the most abundant bat in desert scrub habitats, which is what Death Valley Junction is.

And I do mean gleefully. Bats to me are one of the planets most amazing and fascinating animals, and the fact that for the first time in my life I was able to be this close to one was a dream come true.

Plus it was so damn cute I wanted to pull it off its perch and put it in my pocket. But I didn’t.

Later on, I’ll introduce you to the wild horses who came close to where we were camping to check out who us humans were encroaching on their watering hole.

UPDATE (12/01): Courtesy of Susan, here’s a look behind the scenes at how I got this post’s shot that puts things in proportion. The rest of her great photos are here on Flickr.