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A few pictures from our Yosemite trip

It is amazing how much junk you can cram in the trunk of a Mazda Miata!

Yosemite and the California Coast are fairly spectacular. Below are just ten photographs taken on our California road trip (30th May - 12th June, 2004) in which we tried to capture some of the sights.

This shows where we hiked on the first Monday of our trip.
It was a national holiday, so we tried to find somewhere where the hordes of people wouldn't be. We started down in the bottom of the valley, then went up off the right of the photo and around to the top of the two waterfalls. Up until this point we only really saw backpackers and Boy Scouts on expeditions. We had lunch at the top.
After lunch, we followed the thin line of trees you can see to the left of the higher waterfall down to the top of to lower waterfall. This is where we met the hordes. We actually saw the northern lights in the sky from here! But mostly, we just saw lots of half-dead people after their annual exercise. From this point down, I doubt that there was ever much more than 10 meters between each person heading upward. Much of the next mile or so was pretty close to the waterfall so there was lots of spray - we got quite wet! There were numerous rainbows in the spray but I didn't find a single pot of gold.
The last portion of our hike had noticeably less wildlife, none of the birds butterflies, chipmunks, squirrels and lizards that were prevalent on the first half of the hike. I wanted to take some pictures of the other "hikers" as we passed them, but Sarah didn't think that was a worthwhile use of her camera.
If you are interested, the waterfalls are called Vernal and Nevada falls.

This photo was taken as we drove into the Yosemite Valley. El Capitan is the granite cliff on the left. Some of Half Dome can be seen in the distance. From this vantage point no climbers can be seen on either of these, but apparently at this time of year we should expect 60 people to be somewhere on El Capitan... and I don't mean sitting at the top!
The waterfall above the trees on the right-hand side of the photograph is Bridal Veil Falls.
If you count the number of clouds in the sky at this point, then that would be quite close to the total number we saw during our entire visit to Yosemite. I like trees.

Just a random view from our rafting expedition (okay, okay, from when we sat in a small rubber dingy and floated down the Merced river).
The small tree of the left hand side is probably nearly 200ft tall.

Sarah and me. That's the Yosemite Falls behind us.
The Yosemite Falls is nearly half of a mile long! Apparently, you can't kayak down that.

A timid deer in the Sequoia Redwood Groves.

As we drove southward from San Francisco, this was a view looking north along the Big Sur coastline.

This is looking south along the Big Sur coastline.

Another view of the coastline, this time with some big thistles in the way.
You can just about make out the road in this photo as it snakes along the mountain edge. Along here the conversation mostly went like this:
Sarah: "You are driving to close to the edge!"
Me: "I'm more than a metre from the edge of the road... and then there's the bollards."
Sarah: "You are driving too fast"
Me: "I'd have to go into reverse to drive any slower"
Sarah: "There's a sharp corner coming up"
Me: "That's why I've slowed down to 15mph and am in 2nd gear." (Actually, I was in second gear so I could accelerate quickly out of the corner, but I didn't say that).
I think Sarah liked that road. Having said that, some people were driving really slowly.

The swimming pool pavilion at Hearst Castle. Or, at the California State Park at San Simeon formally known as Hearst Castle, or whatever it is supposed to be called these days.

The bell towers at a small Spanish monastery near the Mediterranean Coast. Oh no, I mean, another part of Hearst Castle.