My friend Kevin and his wife Sandy visited, staying three days. One day we explored Yosemite Valley. That was right after Hurricane Hilary passed close to the Park, which made for some wonderful time-lapse opportunities. Day two involved a visit to one of my now favorite places in Yosemite - Glacier Point. On that trip we also took in the Giant Sequoia trees in the Wawona Grove. Abraham Lincoln created this as a protected park during the Civil War! Making it one of the first, if not the first, Federal Parks in the USA.
Later in the week Blake and I did an overnight trip through McGurk Meadow and camped near Dewey Point in Yosemite. This was a pleasant surprise as the weather was perfect and almost no mosquitoes. Walking through a large meadow a month ago would have been trying due to those biting insects. The weather conditions were perfect for time-lapse video, so I spend several hours recording while I meditated and enjoyed the views.
Blake and I did one more backpacking trip this week. It was to the place we got turned back due to rain and not having a waterproof jacket. The area is popular with day hikers and we found it almost impossible to find a camp site that was legal. After hiking 10 miles, when we thought it would be an easy day, we finally found two places to setup camp. The next morning we hiked to another area where we hoped to spend the day but again could not find camping locations. Some experience hikers told us, probably what was happening is the sites that usually are used for camping were filled with water or snow, because of the huge amount of snow they got this year. We did have about a dozen snow fields we had to carefully cross.
We ended our trip early, which was fortunate, as we had to spend a full day packing our gear and cleaning the apartment we rented.
If all goes to plan I will have been dropped off at an airport and am headed back to Birken Monastery and Blake is on his way to start teaching school.
It was a wonderful summer. More difficult than I was expecting, but more beautiful too. I hope to produce at least two more videos, one showing the beauty of our last hike, and maybe a summery and sharing of some of the lessons I learned on this adventure.
Thanks for joining us on the hikes and following our adventure.
31 авг 2023
