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Hope and Willful Ignorance: Why I'm Going to Work This Week
There's road rage. There's rage tweeting. And I guess there is rage blogging. I know this because I'm doing it tonight. I'm filled with rage, and feeling somewhat helpless to do anything about it. And...
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Houston's Horrific Flooding: Thank Goodness It Can't Happen...
What's happening in Houston is beyond belief. And tragically, horrible flooding is happening now in southeast Asia as well, with at least 1,200 people dead. Although the extent of the damage in Houston...
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Time Heals All Wounds. Or Does it Just Hide Them? The Ghosts of Nelder Grove...
According to news reports, the Railroad Fire in the Sierra Nevada has reached the Nelder Grove of Sequoia Trees. It's uncertain what the outcome will be, as the trees are adapted to wildfires, but less...
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The Worst Natural Disaster in U.S. History: It wasn't last week, and it won't...
Source: National Weather ServiceI was doing a quick search for information on the United State's worst ever natural disaster, and found almost immediately that today is the anniversary of that event....
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A Salute to Cassini-Huygens and the Team Who Successfully Explored Saturn for...
Amid the stupidity emanating from Washington D.C. these days, depression can be a real impediment to a happy life. Other events unrelated to politics give me some sense of hope about the future of...
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Liveblogging the Deluge: The First Day of Fall and a River Finally Returns to...
I was mistaken. Nearly two months ago, I suggested in a post that the abnormally high flows on the Tuolumne River were finally subsiding, and that the great flood of 2017 might finally be ending. This...
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Say Hello to California's New State Dinosaur: Augustynolophus morrisi
This one really got past me. I have to admit that the whole business of establishing a California State Dinosaur flew way under my radar. But it happened, Jerry Brown signed the bill, and...
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Fall Colors in the Eastern Sierra Nevada!
We've returned from a field studies expedition to the eastern Sierra Nevada, and I can report that fall has arrived! We've had a very warm summer, and the heat waves continued into September, but then...
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You Just Can't Take Sonora Pass for Granite: Travels Around the Sierra Nevada...
Sonora Pass in the Sierra Nevada is a sort of forgotten step-sister of the more famous Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park. A paved road, State Highway 108, crosses the crest of the Sierra about forty...
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Feeling a Bit Sheepish: A Bit of Glacial Mutton in the Sierra Nevada
Pothole Dome in Tuolumne Meadows at Yosemite National ParkSometimes glacial terms represent some kind of logical relationship to reality. "Horns" that are sharp pointed glacial peaks, "cirques" that...
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28th Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake - It Was a Warning That is...
What a different world... on Oct. 17, 1989, there were no smart phones, the internet barely existed, and we still depended on things like newspapers, television and radio to keep up with the world....
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Can't See the Forest for the Creek; Or is it the Other Way Around?...
The eastern Sierra Nevada is home to one of the strangest forests I know of. It's not the species of tree that is odd; they are mostly Ponderosa, a pretty but unremarkable tree which can also be found...
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How Does a Pristine Cavern Look? Black Chasm Provides a Clue
Some things can only be experienced once. The discovery of a new plant or animal that no one has ever seen, a new mineral, a new planet in space, to see a vista that no one has witnessed before....
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Ghosts of the Empty Lands East of the Sierra Nevada: The Town of Bodie
The Matterhorn Crest of the Sierra Nevada from Bridgeport. Bodie is another twenty miles to the east.Central California is almost literally a "land flowing with milk and honey". The Great Valley...
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Trump Demonstrates the Need for the Antiquities Act: Fighting for the Bear's...
It's not complicated. It's called the Antiquities Act, and the law has but four sections, and no subsections. You can read it in its entirety below. It lays out the process by which the president of...
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You Can Never See This View Again. Ever.
The title isn't as ominous as it sounds, but it is true. This is the panorama seen from Tunnel View at the west end of Yosemite Valley, one of the most famous viewpoints in the world, in 2013. But the...
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El Capitan Rockfall: Alternate Views, and a Realization That This Wasn't the...
El Capitan and the September rockfall from Taft Point on Oct. 29, 2017Yosemite Valley changed geologically on September 27 and 28, and as I noted in my previous post, the valley will never look the...
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Finding Peace in the Nation's Most Crowded Park: A Walk Through Yosemite Valley
If you've read my previous couple of posts, you know I was in Yosemite Valley over the weekend. I was guiding my students on a field trip up the Merced River and into the park on Saturday, and I came...
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Perhaps a Last Look at Some Yosemite High Country (for the Winter, Anyway)
"Half" Dome from Washburn PointI made the trek up the hill to see Yosemite last weekend, with a field trip on the valley floor on Saturday with my students, and a quieter tour in the high country with...
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Looking Down on Yosemite: A Return to Taft Point
I don't know how it happened, but somehow 12 years slipped by since I last made the hike out to Taft Point above the floor of Yosemite Valley. It's not that tough of a hike, only 1.1 miles with just a...
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