A busy few days in the Sierra...

I had a busy few days. Friday I hiked out of S. Lake up past Green Lake and on up to some point overlooking Chocolate Peak among other things.

looking down over Chocolate Peak among other things

Saturday I went backcountry over Piute Pass to the Humphreys Basin and camped by Desolation Lake (still mostly ice covered) with Laura and Matt. Matt's altitudinal woes had us hiking back Sunday instead of an early morning trip out to Four Gables and hiking out. I got a little headlamp bouldering in at the Happys that night with Julie.

happy hour fun

Mt Humphreys as the sun sets

camp below Mt Humphreys

Milky Way over the Glacier Divide

bird nest that Laura spotted hiking across the alpine tundra

Yosemite Toad - Laura's friend

Laura drops in on a big snow wave

Monday I hiked the lakes loop out of Glacier Lodge up the N Fork of Big Pine Creek with Julie - spectacular views. Monday night I bouldered at bro-night.

Julie in front of Second Lake and Temple Crag

Tuesday I rested - except for a little more late evening bouldering.


I'll post more pics and a proper trip report eventually - unless the summer gets crazy busy in which case maybe not.

cold weather

It got cold here, with the low supposed to be -11 F and the high the next day of 10 F. [SARCASM] This is proof we don't have to worry about global warming anymore [/SARCASM]. I went out with my camera in the morning and took this image of some water dripping out of the aqueduct drain over a little creek.

 Aqueduct drain

Then I headed overland to Longfellow Pond. The snow was cold enough to squeek. Someone had cleared the snow off of an area to skate, but the ice was pretty atrocious (bumpy and the surface was hardened partially melted and frozen snow). I took a panoramic image to try to turn into a little planet. I need to work on how I fill out the middle a bit more, but as a proof of concept shot I think it worked out ok. This is from approximately the center of the cleared ice in the middle of the pond. Processing it did bring my computer to its knees though, maybe 4 GB of memory isn't enough after all.

Planet Longfellow

Sledding fun

A winter storm blew through a few nights ago with enough snow to cancel school for 2 days. The snow started out wet and heavy and weighed down and broke many branches. The second day the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and we went sledding over on the aqueduct. First we had to get all bundled up and walk there trading off carrying the sled.

Then P and T headed down the hill. 

But what goes down must walk back up.

Just heading down the hill became a bit boring. Someone had built a kicker at the bottom so of course the goal was to jump off of that. Unfortunately steering was not so easy with these sleds.

EEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!!!

Liftoff

Houston, we have a negative on that orbit, brace for impact.

OOF!

In addition to sledding people slid and tumbled down a shorter steeper hill. A good time was had by all (at least some of the time). As far as we know no children were permanently harmed in the making of this blog post.