The Rest of the Story

Seeing as how I either didn’t have internet access or I was too tired to take advantage of internet access for the remainder of my trip I will now finish the picture story of my trip out west. It was absolutely amazing, by the way – in case I don’t say that another 18 times.

Part 1 – Not Your Normal Meeting

The entire reason for me going to California was for the Reserve System annual meeting. One of the cool things about working for the reserves is you get to travel to amazingly beautiful places when you have system meetings. This one was particularly impressive. Asilomar Conference Center was incredible and our reception was in the Monterey Bay Aquarium where we had the run of the place for an entire night. On a separate day we went to the reserve for some sessions and then had dinner there with entertainment by a cowboy singer. Yes, I also didn’t know what cowboy singing was, but it was pretty cool. The reserve is set in very agricultural surroundings – not at all what I think about when I think of the California coast, but as I figured out the next week I really knew very little about the California coast! The sunsets were also pretty hard to beat when you are sitting right on the beach!

the Monterey Bay Aquarium:

Elkhorn Slough:

sunset back at the beach:

Part 2 – Rocks and Dirt

Our meeting ended on Friday at noon, and during the week Sasha, Tina and I had discovered that we wanted to all go to the same places, and were all going to be doing it alone since our husbands were all back east – SO, we joined forces and headed off in the rental car. First up – Yosemite. Our drive from the coast to the Sierra Nevadas was absolutely crazy! If you have not done it I highly recommend it. I think the biggest thing I will remember from this trip is the fact that California is the weirdest mix of landscapes ever – and they are all beside each other! You drive from sand dunes to orchards to rolling hills to mountains to completely flat agricultural fields to pine forests to clay cliffs to rocky mountains. It’s wild! It seems like around every bend you get a new landscape – be it the types of trees, the soil, the terrain – it’s truly amazing. We all decided that we wish we knew more about geology and soil science because we think it would be super interesting to know why certain areas are certain ways. The last part of the drive was after it was dark, but our way back down on Sunday showed us what we were missing and it was more of the same – crazy changes around every bend.

Part 3 – Yosemite

I don’t think I have words for Yosemite. It is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been. We arrived at night on Friday and settled into our little cabin in the mountains. The lodge we were staying at is really cool because it’s set up with a restaurant and recreation center in the center where people can hang out, and there are little cabins all through the woods. They also have a general store, which was very handy when needing a bagel for breakfast or a Luna bar for your hike.

Saturday morning Tina and I woke up bring and early and decided to head down to Yosemite Valley. Sasha was waiting for our friend Meg to show up (she was going to drive from Reno that day to see Sasha, but in the end wasn’t able to come), so we packed up and headed out. The store wasn’t open yet so we figured we could find something to eat at Yosemite Valley. (this getting places before they open will become a trend – apparently no one else valued the glory of not having 1000 tourits around all the time, I personally do!). The drive down to the valley was beautiful and the mist and clouds were just lifting when we got down there. We did in fact find a store, but that also was not yet open – we only needed to wait 10 minutes so we hung out and looked at the maps on the building since we had gotten to the entrance gate before the park rangers were there to staff it and so didn’t get a map of our own. We bought ourselves some snacks for the hike, and then after a few incorrect turns found out way to the visitor center AND a place where we could get a breakfast sandwich, a hot chocolate and sit by the fire while we ate. It was a good way to warm up on the chilly morning (I at this point had 4 layers on). After we checked out the Ansel Adams gallery and the visitor center we decided to head out on our hike. We hiked up Mist Trail to Vernal Falls and then joined up with the John Muir trail to go to the top of Nevada Falls. It was a beautiful hike – very much straight up a mountain, but beautiful none the less. From the top of Nevada Falls you can then hike over to Half Dome, but that being another 7.5 miles and we having only gone 4 miles up to that point with snow in the forecast decided it would be best to head back down. We hiked down on the opposite side of the falls, which was a totally different type of trail (should we have been surprised?) – much more tree cover and beautiful huge trees everywhere. About three quarters of the way down it started to rain and so Tina and I tucked ourselves up in a little outcropping in the rocks to wait it out (since we remembered everything that morning except our rain coats). It was a good thing we did because low and behold, down the trail walked Sasha! Meg hadn’t been able to make the trip because of the some roads that were closed from snow, and so she found a ride from the cabins to the valley and amazingly enough we found each other on the John Muir trail! Great minds think alike! After we finished the hike back to the valley, we headed back to the cabins and had a delicious meal at the restaurant (we loved this restaurant) and headed to bed for a very well deserved night sleep. The rain/snow did in fact come that night, but we were already well off the trails so no worries for us.

if you zoom in on this picture you can see the bobcat we saw when we were walking up the trail - he was walking around in relatively close view so we watched him for a while - interestingly enough bobcats do not have long cat tails, but they do wag their short tail when they are looking at something, it's pretty funny

The next morning we got up to an overcast sky, and after checking out and grabbing a bagel we headed to the northern part of the park – Hetch Hetchy. Tina and I were rather obsessed with this name after I called it Hetchy Hetch the first night. Our cabins were on the road that led to this portion of the park, which I don’t know that I ever would have gone to if we weren’t up that way. We slept in a bit that morning since the gate for that area didn’t open until 8 (they didn’t have the pay when you leave option like the valley), and as it seemed every morning the clouds were burning off around the time we showed up. Hetch Hetchy is where San Francisco gets their water. At some point it was determined that the state should flood a valley in Yosemite similar to Yosemite Valley and collect the water for people living in San Francisco. That bodes well for the taste of water in the city, but I doubt it bodes well for the valley that is not underwater. Regardless, it was a beautiful walk. There is a trail that goes around the edge of the reservoir – after the hiking from the day before we were happy with a relatively flat hike Sunday morning.




The last hike we did before leaving the park was back down on the main road, but not all the way to the valley. The road out to the meadows and the road up to Glacier Point were closed and since we had done what we thought was a pretty spectacular hike the day before we decided not to go back down to the valley. Instead we did a short 3 mile hike to one of the sequoia groves. I saw redwoods back when my family flew out to the west coast and did a driving tour of nearly all the parks, and while I remember how huge they were it’s still pretty amazing when you see the things up close. We had our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sitting below trees that probably started growing when our grandparents were born and then headed back to the car for a drive back to the coast. All in all it was a wonderful trip. I would love to go back and do some of the long hikes through the back country there – I can only imagine how amazing they would be after seeing what you can see from the relatively short hikes!




Part 4: Cue the Wildlife

We dropped Tina off in San Francisco and headed to the coast. After staying the night in a cool hostel by the ocean we headed off for a fun filled day. We didn’t realize quite yet just how much we would see that day but to name a few we saw elephant seals, coyote, harbor seals, otter, anemones, starfish, and sea lions. Pretty incredible for a few miles of coast! We started at Ano Nuevo park which is one of the three places along the coast that elephant seals haul out on the beach. The real viewing season is in December when the big males come back to claim their turf and breed, and the females come back to have their pups. We were 1) early for the season and 2) early in the day, which made for a beach of elephant seals and a park volunteer with more knowledge of them than I have of any given animal in the world, all to ourselves! It was awesome. They juveniles (which I would have never known were juveniles unless he told us because of how huge they were) were mock fighting at the water’s edge. You could hear them trying out their elephant seal noise (we were a big thrown off by it when we first heard it and the beach was still quite far away), and they were laying literally all over the place in the sun. It was a sight to behold.

if you click on this picture and zoom into the center you can see the coyote standing on the top of the bluff

Onward down the coast we headed, stopping at spots to take in the scenery and taste the local flavor. We loved a cute little vegetable and fruit stand where you paid 'on honor' into the open and unmanned cash register after picking out what you wanted. We were amazed by how much of the coast was agricultural lands - definitely not what I expected when I think of the California coast!





Next up was Point Lobos – another CA state park, and another gorgeous mini-hike. We had heard of the glories of Point Lobos, but after seeing Ano Nuevo we weren’t really sure if it could measure up. We decided afterwards that it was pretty darn impressive, but nothing compared to your own showing by the elephant seals J My favorite things about Point Lobos was the tide pools. You walked down on some of the rocks (making sure not to slip with all the algae and kelp that covered them) and could see beauty in every crack. It was awesome. We then hiked over to a point where you could see the sea lions (although you could hear them from a mile away), and on the way passed a few harbor seals hanging out sunning themselves, and an otter cracking abalone and swimming around. He was a highlight of the CA coast overall!

you can see harbor seals on the left tip of the island

if you click on this picture to get it big and zoom into the center you can see the otter

Part 5: Big Sur
Big Sur is in fact big! It is pretty incredible really. We left Point Lobos around 3:30 and wanted to get to a restaurant about halfway down by dinner. We succeeded and watched the sunset from our own little treehouse on a cliff (it seriously felt like that because of the tree branches around it).





Our one concession for sipping a California Riesling and having a long dinner while watching the sunset was we needed to finish up our drive to our hotel in the dark. This was no small feat when you are driving along a road that is so much on the side of a cliff that it has signs every 10 feet about rock slides. We also determined that people from that area drive WAY too fast considering we had to pull off and let people pass us, and the waitress told us it would take us 45 minutes to get somewhere that took us an hour and a half! In the end it was worth the drive because our view the next morning was pretty amazing.
After a nice morning of sitting outside and listening to the waves and then sitting inside and warming up by the fire we headed out again to go 5 miles south to another elephant seal beach (we were totally enamored by them at this point) and then head back north to go on home. You could get closer to the seals on this beach, but it was much more advertised (and hence more people) so in the end we decided we liked Ano Nuevo better.



On the way back it was very obvious where the fires came through this summer. At one point we thought that the hills were just really colorful, but once we got up close could see that it was because some trees were burned, while others weren’t, and you could see the rocks and soil at different places, all of which was different colors. It was pretty humbling to see the power and hugeness of a forest fire!

Before stopping for a bite to eat and browsing through some galleries we took a stroll down to a little river the book pointed out as an ‘often overlooked’ spot. It was quite worth the nearly straight up hike back to the car J In the cove you could see all the way to the bottom and the green of the kelp against the blue of the water was phenomenal!

Our last stop in Big Sur was at the first state park along the route when headed south. In our attempt to get to the restaurant on time we didn’t want to stop on the way down, so we saved hiking around the cliffs for the way back. As it turned out it was a great day for it. The sky and water were blue, the plants were red and orange, and the air was cool and breezy! It was the last of our people free days since within 5 minutes of leaving that spot we were back into Carmel and onto life as we know it.

Part 6: A Foggy Morning Stroll

After dropping Sasha off in Monterey (she flew out of that airport), I headed onto San Francisco. I had one thing that I really wanted to do in the city before leaving, which was to either walk or bike the bridge. So, mom and dad put me up in a hotel close to Fisherman’s Wharf and I got up right after the sun did this morning to take to the streets. The walk was a bit longer than I expected, but in the end I did make it to the bridge and walked out to the first span before needing to head back so I could get to my car in time to make it to the airport. It was a nice end to a beautiful 2 weeks!

the bridge in the distance (this was after 30 minutes of walking when I realized the book was totally lying about it being 4 miles to and across the bridge!)a few shots while walking through the city:

getting closer!finally there...