Just like the night before, Buster slept in my bed and poor Coco slept on the floor. She was pretty worn out, barely able to walk. She exerted herself too much on the hike yesterday.
I woke up around 6am and checked the file transfer. It was still going so I went back to sleep. I got up about thirty minutes later and checked the ftp again. This time it was done. Cool, now I’ll have my photos from yesterday waiting for me when I get home.
I took a shower, dressed, and met Larry as he came upstairs. Today we were planning on going up to the eastern-side of Yosemite. We headed out for breakfast to ‘The Stove’ again. Today I had ‘the regular’ which consisted of two eggs, bacon, spiced potatoes, and toast. It was delicious – especially the potatoes.
After breakfast we went back to the house. Larry said that the road into Yosemite may be closed due to snow. I suggested we look it up online to make sure. As I was getting ready, Larry checked online. Unfortunately the road was closed. We had to decide on something else. Larry looked in his trail book and decided that we should go on a trail called ‘Lower Rock Creek‘. It’s about twenty-five miles south of Mammoth and goes along a creek in a deep valley. It’s supposed to yield nice fall foliage later than usual.
We headed out to the trailhead and got there about thirty-minutes later. Because of the colder weather today I dressed a bit warmer. I wore my long-johns (top and bottom), blue-jeans, two shirts, my ski jacket, gloves, and a hat. Larry took along his large tripod this time.
The trail follows the narrow creek at the bottom of a deep valley with steep cliffs on each side. The road we came in on (Lower Rock Creek Road) follows along at the top of the valley.
We stopped a lot along the short trail. Larry went crazy with his tripod and the 100mm macro lens. He had a great time photographing the little waterfalls in the creek. Using a high aperture to achieve slow shutter speeds, he was able to get the ‘flowing water’ effect in many of his photographs. There were a couple of nice areas with icicles along the creek as well.
Most of the deciduous trees were still showing their orange fall colors. Along the side of the canyon were several shells of old cars. We counted at least five or six cars. Looking up along the canyon wall we could see the road way above. The rusted-out shells of the cars must be all that remains of accidents long ago. It was pretty eerie to see all of those cars along the canyon wall.
We left the trail around noon and headed back into town. Off in the distance we could see that Mammoth was under heavy clouds. It looked like there could be snow. Once we got into town, we were in a snowstorm. It was pretty cool.
Before getting lunch we decided to head up to the Minaret Summit overlook above the Mammoth Mountain ski resort. As we drove up the mountain, the snow got thicker and thicker. Once we reached the resort, the road continuing up the rest of the mountain was now closed until next summer. We headed back down the mountain but before getting all the way down, we pulled off at once of the ski lift areas so I could snap some photos. We also had some fun in the snow doing doughnuts in the Yukon. It was great fun!
(Yesterday there wasn’t a single flake of snow around)
Like yesterday we decided to go to Roberto’s again for lunch. We both had the same thing as before: a carne asada burrito. Larry brought his camera with him and we looked through some of his photos.
After lunch we stopped by a place called the Mammoth photo gallery featuring photographs by a guy named Brad Dawber. Larry saw his gallery in Kauai earlier this year and it turns out that the guy does landscape photographs in both Kauai and Mammoth, two beautiful areas. I think Larry said that he shoots in medium format. We looked through some of his works and I was pretty inspired.
We went back to the house and I changed. We took Buster and Coco out to the golf course (which is now covered in snow) so they could run around. After a little while we decided to get pizza for dinner. This whole time it was still snowing. On our way out, Larry decided to go driving around a little. We went to an area where a sign indicated that the snow-covered road was closed. We decided to go on the road anyway as the Mammoth rock trailhead was a bit up the road.
We parked at the trailhead and walked about seventy yards down the thick snow-covered trail. The light was fading but we managed to snap some photos of the snow-covered trail as well as the massive Mammoth rock overhanging above.
When we pulled into the shopping center with the pizza place (Giovanni’s), we had to maneuver past the workers on strike in front of the Vons grocery store. Larry had lasagna and I had a small pepperoni & bacon pizza. I think I like the pizza from the other place better.
After dinner we walked over to the video store to rent a movie. I suggested that we rent ‘28 Days Later‘. Unfortunately all copies of that movie was rented out (it is Halloween today, after all). Instead we rented ‘Hulk‘. We went to a bookstore next-door to the video place because Larry wanted to look for some hiking books.
Back home we watched ‘Hulk’ and I baked some slice-n-bake chocolate chip cookies. I liked the movie but I didn’t understand the ending very well. The cinematography was very comic-bookish.
I also attempted to load Larry’s photos into iPhoto but for some reason iPhoto wouldn’t load. It is almost as if it was uninstalled, but we were using it yesterday and didn’t do anything with it since. I downloaded a fresh copy of iPhoto and reinstalled it. I also dumped all of my photos from today to the iBook as well.
After the movie, Larry went to bed and I initiated an ftp of all my photos to my home PC again to run throughout the night.
-thumb.jpg)
