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My digital camera gave up the ghost over the weekend. Picking a digital camera is a dreadful slog through a zillion options, none of which all reside on the camera you want at the price you’d prefer to pay. So here’s what I did: I ordered one most similar to the one I already have, because the latest model does everything my old one did at half the price.

Even though my last Canon had a manufacturing defect that caused its early demise, I still have no gripe with Canon gear. Mine took pretty good pictures, saved me tons and tons on film, processing and printing, and worked fine, till it didn’t.

Having no pictures to post also offers me a perfect excuse to avoid writing about what I did over the weekend, which mostly amounted to hiking 10 miles uphill, camping out, waking up the next morning, stowing all my gear and walking 10 miles downhill where I started. I might decide to write about it later in the week, but maybe not. I was never more than eight miles from home (as the crow flies) the whole time, so the scenery is very familiar.

Next weekend I’m going to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival for the third year in a row, so I’ll have lots o’ fun pictures of Bluegrassy stuff, assuming my new camera gets here in time.

OK, last week I promised more about Yosemite. Here goes:

Day 1 (Tuesday):

Arrival at the Bed & Breakfast. We track down the owner of the B&B, a retired federal judge who has a small ponytail and walks with a strange waddle/shuffle that suggests too much time on horseback or the need for hip-replacement surgery; perhaps both. (The judge, a purposefully crusty character, was responsible for dispensing justice within the national park’s borders; I sense litterbugs ending up in Leavenworth)

He shows us around. Reminds us to close the doors to keep the bears out.

We unpack, then retire to the back yard, where a large double hammock has been assigned to tenants of our room (called the Alpenglow, which describes that yellow-orangeish glow mountains get from the day’s last rays of sunlight). I lie down in the hammock, beer in hand, and briefly consider spending my entire vacation there. Temptation is strong, yet I resist.

Day 2 (Wednesday):

Having resolved not to spend vacation in the double hammock, I’m obliged to find a place to go hiking. Yosemite has hundreds of miles of trails, so settling on one is no small task. I fantasize that one day I might hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts in Mexico and ends in Canada. The trail goes through Yosemite, and has one stretch near the main road at Tuolumne Meadows, going to a place
called Glen Aulin. People who hike the whole trail are called "thruhikers" and I ponder the odds of meeting one. Given that only a few hundred attempt the whole trail every year, and that only a tiny fraction finish, and that the trail’s 2,000 miles long, and that it takes six to nine months to hike it, I see these odds at less than zero.

So I park my car at the Glen Aulin trailhead, and as I’m getting out, I see a bearded guy with a backpack headed my way. He’s wearing shorts and I notice his legs have a deep-brown tan you’d normally associate with beach lifeguards. I ask him if he’s a thruhiker and sure enough, he says "yeah" and asks me if I know where the grocery store is. I tell him it’s probably around here somewhere. He tells me he started out in Mexico, hiked to the southern Sierra, then caught a ride to the Canadian border and hiked south from there.

He seems to be in a hurry, which means he probably ran out of food yesterday because he knew he could resupply at the grocery store, assuming he can find it. We chat for another minute or so, then he’s off down the road in search
of the store.

About a mile down the trail, I see a backpack on the ground and an hiker soaking his feet in the Tuolumne River. "Are you thruhiking?" I ask him? "No, I’m just resting here," he says.

The Glen Aulin trail is a fairly easy hike, hillwise, though it’s a 12-mile round-trip rather than the 9.5 jaunt that my guidebook promises. I stop for lunch near a pedestrian bridge that crosses the river at the beginning of a
cascade. It’s another three miles to Glen Aulin and back from here, and I figure this is as good a turn-back point as any other. When I get back to the room and dig out my guidebook, I learn that three lovely waterfalls are just down the trail from where I gave up. At least I have an excuse to go back.

Day 3 (Thursday):

Another hike day. I choose the Panorama Trail, which starts out at Glacier Point and goes five miles, mostly downhill, to Nevada Falls, passing the little-known Illilouette Falls along the way. The trail forms a ragged semicircle with the Half Dome in the center. Along the way my eyes are always drawn to that strange hunk of ruck. Maybe the rock is so big that it has its own gravity, which just
naturally attracts objects with lesser mass. Or maybe the curved surface seems like a cathedral’s roof, giving it a divine aura.

Whatever the rock’s strange magic, it’s shrouded in morning mist when I arrive, adding to its mystique. It’s just layers of granite, I try to tell myself.

As for the hike: four miles of down and about a mile up; the opposite on the way back. Not too bad till about mile nine, when, scenery or no scenery, I’m getting sick to death of this trail.

Melissa and I have a real meal in the Mountain Room at the Yosemite Lodge (really expensive, too, but hey, we’re on vacation, right?).

Day 4 (Friday)

My feet beg for a day off, so Melissa and I set out in the car for a High Sierra road trip. We take Highway 120 out of the park at Tioga Pass and head south to an area called Mammoth Lakes, which is a major ski area in the winter but seems listless and devoid of purpose at summer’s end.

We have lunch at a little diner called Tom’s Place. Because we have to. Mostly, I stop and take pictures of the scenic splendor, which is abundant. After you’ve hiked up and down some of these hillsides, they seem much nicer from a distance. We stop at a place called Convict Lake, which is achingly gorgeous and surrounded by terrible gray peaks that seem to promise a bleak outcomes to any who dare to go there. The lake got its name from a famous jailbreak of the 1870s, when a band of desperadoes went on the lam, got involved in at least a couple shoot-outs with posses and had a showdown near this lake. A lawman was killed and some of criminals disappeared into the mountains, never to be caught. My hunch is they became coyote food after a couple days up there.

Day 5 (Saturday)

Tossing common sense to the wind, I decide to spend a weekend day in Yosemite Valley, which is mobbed with humanity. Mostly I’m wandering around looking for interesting things to take pictures of.

At one point I’m parked off the road and I see this young couple taking pictures of each other on this rock next to the Merced River. I offer to take their picture; the guy hands me his camera, I look through the viewfinder and the guy says, "hey, you’ve got it backwards." Sure enough, I’m looking through the wrong end of the camera. Yeah, so now that guy (he sounded French to me) thinks all American tourists are morons, but hey, hey probably already knew that, right?

The amazing thing about spending the day surrounded by masses of tourists is that the valley’s scenery trumps humanity. Every time I look up at the canyon walls I see an amazing rock formation that I hadn’t noticed before. Happens over a dozen times.

That night we went to dinner at the Wawona
Hotel and had another of those amazing meals more often associated with dining in San Francisco. After dinner we stopped by this little salon area where this buddy of Krustee the Innkeeper was playing piano and singing show tunes. A buddy of his takes over the piano for a moment and relates a tale of how he was performing at the famed Ahwahnee Hotel one night, when a woman in the audience requested that he play "Forever Young" to celebrate the woman’s mother’s 85th birthday.. You may remember Forever Young was recorded by Bob Dylan, who was once married to Joan Baez, who also recorded the song. Well, it was Joan Baez requesting that song for her mom that night.

The regular piano player guy comes back with a slideshow about the history of Yosemite. He tells us about the strange tradition of the firefall,
in which a huge bonfire was ignited at the top of Glacier Point, then shoved off the cliff for the amusement of campers down in the valley. The park service stopped the practice in the late 1960s — not because shoving an inferno off a three-thousand-foot cliff posed a forest fire danger, but because the park had become so popular that thousands of people would gather in the valley’s meadows to watch the firefall every night, trampling all the meadows’ tender grasses, flowers and other flora. Ah, tourism.

Well, those are the highlights. Sorry, no new pictures this week, I got lazy over the weekend and the camera never left the shelf.

I’ll write more about Yosemite when I’ve got more time, but for now, here are
a few pix to whet your appetite.

Wednesday morning along the Tuolomne River on the Glen Aulin Trail, a segment
of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Thursday morning on the Panorama Trail, overlooking the Half Dome.

Friday morning near Tioga Pass in the Yosemite High Country.

Friday afternoon at Tunnel View.

Saturday afternoon near the base of El Capitan.

Lots more pics and a bit of commentary at my
Flickr photo-sharing page.

I’m trying something different this week: posting most of my pictures at flickr.com,
a photo sharing site, and putting a few highlights here on the main page.

To get started, check out my Yosemite
2005 photo album.

When we were leaving for Lassen last week, one of the last news items I noticed
was that the levees keeping water out of New Orleans were starting to give way.
While we were camping the city of New Orleans filled up with water, turning something
nasty but containable into a certified national disaster the likes of which the
country has never seen, not even on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

As the Led Zeppelin song went, “when the levee breaks, got noplace to stay.”

Or hide, in the case of the Bush administration, which is looking like the
gang that couldn’t shoot straight. But you know what? The Bush gang did a fine
job of cleaning up Florida — you know, that key state full of swing voters
– in an election year when three hurricanes struck in a single summer.

But no levees gave way, leaving, say, Miami or Tampa under water.

Since Bush is the boss of the whole country, he’s got to take his lumps on
this one. Disaster happens on your watch, the response is a national shame,
you have to face up.

Truth is, though, that the your everyday cynical political calculation is the
real culprit here. What happened last week was that Bush & Co. knew from the
get-go that they had few friends in a 60-percent-black city like New Orleans.
They were in no hurry to help because they had no votes to gain, and they gambled
that Katrina would be a three-day story that disappeared once the waters began
to recede.

Only the waters didn’t recede after three days. They kept rising. Once the
Bush gang knew they had a genuine 9/11-style catastrophe on their hands, they
had to do something about it. But by then the city and all its infrastructure
was ruined. So it took a few more days to get military boots on the ground to
restore order and usher in relief supplies. Add it up and you’ve got thousands
of people suffering for a week with no electricity, no fresh water and only
whatever food they could scrounge or steal.

The Bush people made a similar calculation during the California energy crisis
of a few years ago. Nothing was done to intervene when canny energy speculators
were manipulating the state’s energy market and costing its taxpayers billions
of dollars and forcing rolling blackouts during the hottest days of the summer.

Why didn’t Bush act? Because he had nothing to gain in helping a state that
didn’t help him get elected. If the California equivalent of the levees giving
way — a devastating earthquake — had happened during the electricity crisis,
Bush would’ve been in the same jam he’s in today. He and his people rolled the
dice and lucked out. And guess what: California voted for a Democrat in the
next election, just as his people predicted.

You hate to think of politicians making these “what’s-in-it-for-me” calculations
when thousands of lives are at stake, when a jewel of a city has been turned
into a steaming toilet bowl. You hate to see people pointing fingers when they
oughta be lending a hand.

But this is how the world works and, I suspect, always has.

And with that thought, I’m leaving for Yosemite National Park, to walk in the
woods and gawk at big trees and amazing rocks, which always seem to avoid getting
themselves into these predicaments.

This is my last post describing our trip to far northern California last week.
(Our camping trip here;
my Lassen Peak hike here.)

On Friday morning we left Lassen
Volcanic National Park via the northwest exit and headed to Redding to check
out the way-cool Sundial
Bridge, which was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and
opened to the public on July 4, 2004. I saw a documentary about the bridge’s
building earlier this year and knew I had to see the thing up close.

Here’s one look at most of the bridge, commissioned by the McConnell Foundation, which apparently wanted to build something
unforgettable and opened its wallet wide. Final cost: $23 million, of which the foundation supplied more than half. As much as
I hate to quote the Mastercard commercial, here’s one case where the result
is truly priceless.

The bridge has only one job: giving pedestrians and bicyclists a quick way
to cross the Sacramento River. You can’t see it from this angle, but the supporting
spire rises at the same angle as the riverbank, making it seem integral to its
surroundings.

The spire practically begs a photographer to capture it from numerous angles.
They’re all pretty cool.

Note the sun’s rays seeming like more cables from the bridge. I can’t imagine
the architect had this effect planned out, but the guy is a genius so
one never knows.

I’m especially fond of the solar-eclipse effect.

One more angle from the nearby shore.

Salmon spawn nearby, so the the bridge was designed to span the river without
touching its waters.

A sculpture by the architect is beneath one end of the bridge.

The Sacramento River glimmers in the morning sun.

OK, one last look from the opposite bank.

This one little project in a small city 200 miles from the nearest metro area
seemed to define why humans have had this perpetual urge to create wonderful
public art. The art is never exactly necessary but once finished it seems absolutely
essential.

It reminds me of the Sistine Chapel, whose ceiling would’ve required some kind
of a paint job. Any old painter could’ve put a nice, comforting tint up there.
But one pope decided he wanted something special up there, so he hired one of
the best artists of his time — Michaelangelo — to paint biblical scenes on
the ceiling.

I’m not saying the Sundial Bridge is in the same league as God’s finger touching
Adam’s, but the idea is similar: taking something that is merely useful and
making something amazing. Not all the motives were the noblest: just as the
city of Redding enjoys the tourism dollars spent by folks coming to see the
bridge, it’s a fair guess that the pope who hired Michaelangelo was flattering
his own ego and hoping to create an attraction that would fatten the Vatican’s
receivables. But if greatness happens, all is forgiven.

The documentary about the bridge’s construction featured interviews with befuddled
people of Redding who didn’t quite know what to make of the bridge, particularly
during the mess and tumult of its construction. Even after it was done, they
couldn’t figure out what the fuss was about; some thought it was an eyesore.

I practically shouted at my TV: People, one of the world’s greatest architects
is building something remarkable that he’ll get no use out of but you’ll get
to use as you please for years to come. It’s not costing you much. Try to
show some appreciation.

People usually get what they deserve, but the magic happens in those rare instances
when they get something better.

(If you’re curious: a blogger from southern Oregon has a pair of interesting posts about the bridge here and here. The San Francisco Chronicle also has a review of the bridge.)

The idea of a camping trip started with a reservation made a few weeks ago. This town
called Mineral is just down the road from Lassen
Volcanic National Park, where I’d been itching to visit and climb
Lassen Peak. Mineral is home to fewer than a hundred souls, a few of whom
run the Mineral Lodge and Volcano Country Campground. I found out about this
place online and reserved a tent-camping site. It never occurred to me that
there would be any issues with a campsite that’s inside the city limits, considering
these limits are so, well, limited.

Well, we got to the campground, paid our nonrefundable $36 for two nights,
and checked out the campsite. We had an unobstructed view of the next-door neighbor’s
back yard, and were serenaded by the lovely chatter of a chainsaw. "This
is it?" Melissa asked, with some skepticism.

I looked around. Well, there were a few pine trees but it’s not the
kind of campsite you’d want to hang out at, unless you were pals with the neighbors
or talent-scouting for chainsaw jugglers. Melissa suggested checking out the
campgrounds in the national park, so we bailed on the Mineral campground. It
looks like a fine place to park your RV, but if you’re looking to pitch a tent
in a somewhat wilder setting, the park’s a better bet.

Lassen Volcanic has a nice walk-in campground at the park’s southwest entrance.
We picked this choice location not far from the bathrooms, which had running
water and flush toilets. All in all, a nice clean place, and a steal at 14 bucks
a night.

The setting sun warms the sides of our tent, while the fire burns down to coals
for dinner.

Another great thing about this campground: We had most of it to ourselves.

There were almost no bugs, except for these bees, which showed up every time
we had a meal. They dodged our swinging arms pretty well and didn’t sting in
retaliation.

Night falls. It’s dark at 8 p.m., which is when we bunked for the night. That
meant we were up before dawn, which gave me a bright idea: let’s drive down
the road a ways and watch the sunrise.

My timing was uncanny — this is just minutes before the sun rose over a ridge.

A red sky reflects on our shadows across the road.

There it is, just as it has been for lo these billions of years.

Rising and setting suns always light up the sides of mountains. That’s Brokeoff
Mountain looming behind Lake Helen.

This is a little pond called Emerald Lake. In the morning its water is still
as a mirror.

Nothing like a lake that sits still to have its picture taken, eh?

The required big-dead-tree pic.

Back at the campsite, it’s time for breakfast.

A scrub jay stands guard over the anti-bear box. Supposedly there are black
bears in the park but we never heard so much as a growl, though Melissa is pretty
sure she might’ve seen a mountain lion on the next hill over.

Before lunch I did my
Lassen Peak climb; after lunch I scouted out some of the park’s geothermal
features. The volcanos are inactive, but there’s still lots of hot lava beneath
the ground throughout the park. In a few spots, the lava is close enough to
the surface that it sends plumes of steam up between cracks in the ground. In
other places it melts clay and emits a rotten-egg smell that comes from a sulfur-based
chemical reaction. This picture is part of the Sulfur Works, which stinks to
high heaven but is pretty cool otherwise.

Steam rises from a vent in the ground.

Deep down in this hole, a pressure builds below a bunch of molten clay — it
makes this remarkable glub-glub-glub that echoes off the sides of the hole,
creating a racket that sounds almost exactly like a bear tearing up somebody’s
garage.

Bumpass Hell is another geologic area named for a guy named Kendall Bumpass,
who explored this area in the 1860s. The "hell" part is what it smells
like after you hike a mile and a half to see the area.

The hike isn’t too tough, with this trail here. It rises about 500 feet from
the trailhead, then falls another 400 into Bumpass Hell. Because, you know,
you must descend into hell. Somehow Mr. Bumpass got back there with no
trail, no rubber-cleated hiking boots, no hydration kit. Americans were a lot
tougher back in those days.

A guide post explains how there used to be a gigantic volcano that would’ve
filled this entire picture. The volcano collapsed in on itself, leaving Brokeoff
Mountain at the left and the two craggy peaks on the right.

At long last: Hell. The ground here is hard and brittle, and a wrong step can
send a foot down through the crust into boiling water warmed by the lava below.
Mr. Bumpass suffered precisely this fate, which scalded one leg so badly that
it had to be amputated. Bumpass Hell, indeed.

Water, soft clay and God knows how many obnoxious chemicals.

A giant steam vent makes a rushing sound audible at our campground a couple
miles away.

Another of those holes with the burbling mud deep down inside. This one reminded
me of the giant creature in the third Star Wars movie that Jabba the Hut ordered
Luke and the gang thrown into. Come to think of it, it sounds vaguely like Jabba
gasping for breath because a scantily clad princess has a chain wrapped around
his throat.

Mud dries in the sun.

Chemicals bleach the hillsides. The stench is dreadful, but at least the wind
blows it away somewhat.

A bit of standing water appears to be crystal-clear. Just keep in mind that
sulfuric acid is see-through too.

I fled Bumpass Hell as soon as I could. It’s interesting from a scientific
standpoint, but it’d be nice if there was a park ranger handing out gas masks.

The next morning I took one last picture of Lassen Peak reflected in Lake Helen.

I slept so soundly that I missed the arrival at our campground of a small family
who showed up at approximately 2:30 a.m. with screaming toddler in tow; pitched
their tent not 50 feet from ours; and managed to set off their car alarm –
all this was related to me by Melissa, who was awakened by these people’s racket
and didn’t get back to sleep for several hours. The only thing that amazed her
more than these people’s boundless lack of quiet-hours etiquette was my ability
to sleep through it all.

The Peak and Bumpass Hell are the two must-see (and smell) locales at Lassen
Volcanic National Park, and you can do both in the same day if you’re feeling
energetic. The rest of the park has miles and miles of trails and enough lakes,
crags and extinct volcanoes to keep you busy for a week or two. Just keep in
mind that the park’s buried in snow most of the year. Don’t come out in April
thinking you’ll experience Springtime in the Cascade Range. Most years the snow
is piled high on the peak through mid-June. Late August and early September
are the best times, because the days are not too hot and the nights are not
too cold.

Come during the week after school’s back in session and you’ll have the place
pretty much to yourself. It’s very much worth having.

Rule No. 1 for hiking up hills might well be: If you can hear your heartbeat,
it’s time to slow down.

When I do training hikes, huffing it up steep trails, I know I’m not really
pushing myself until my heartbeat becomes so intense that my auditory nerves
start noticing the internal vibrations. If I’m feeling ambitious I’ll keep up
that pace for a few minutes, till my legs start to complain or exhaustion starts
to set in, then I slow down till the pumping noise subsides.

I do reasonably strenuous training hikes a couple times a week, so I’m used
to the sound of my own heartbeat. I’ve trudged up most of the steepest trails
in the Bay Area in the past year, but all along I’ve known that if I ever wanted
to hike on the really cool trails that go up the sides of really cool mountains,
I’d be in for something radically different.

I learned about that difference last week at Lassen
Peak (summit: 10,462 feet), the centerpiece of Lassen
Volcanic National Park, where Melissa and I camped out for a couple nights.
In the high country, it takes about 30 seconds for the heart to start hollering
"slow down!"

Highlights of my hike:

Here’s the sun warming the east face of Lassen Peak just after dawn of the
morning I climbed it.

I was the first arrival at the Lassen Peak trailhead. It’s best to arrive early
to a) beat the crowds; and b) avoid afternoon storms, which are fairly common
in the summer. I couldn’t have been on the trail for more than five minutes
when I noticed the audible-heartbeat thing. Walking at my usual pace, my legs
weren’t feeling tired, my lungs weren’t gasping for air, but my heart was pumping
like a machine gun. Amazing how the body knows to adjust to new surroundings.
Lungs and large muscle groups are shouting "we need more oxygen down here,
dammit," and the heart does its duty.

The only way to slow my heart was to slow my feet. I mean, yeah, I could’ve
kept up my usual pace and my ticker might’ve held out all the way, but
I’d be all sweaty, tired and unlikely to enjoy the scenery, which is utterly
spectacular. The heart-pounding hikes can resume after my vacation’s
over.

A turn in the trail during the first half-mile, right about the time when I
decided to slow down and enjoy the sights. The distance and elevation change
at Lassen Peak — 2000 feet over 2.5 miles — are about the same as the route
I take at Mission Peak. At my comfortable high-altitude pace it would take me
just about twice as long to cover the same distance/elevation at Lassen.

A bit of history, before we continue the climb: Before Mount
St. Helens famously blew its top in 1980, Lassen Peak was the most celebrated
volcano in the United States. It erupted in such spectacular fashion in 1914-15
that Lassen Volcanic National Park was
created in its honor in 1916. By 1920 the peak had returned to its slumber.
It’s not extinct — it’s just resting from the labors of blasting millions of
tons of rock into its surroundings. With no sexy volcanic explosions to amaze
the masses, the park draws small crowds these days, which makes it an excellent
place to get away from people and their attendant noises (which will seem fairly
faint once the volcano reawakens).

A twisted tree, with Brokeoff Mountain in the background.

An amazing chunk of rock juts out of the hillside. And an amazing shrub grows
out of the rock.

This is about how steep the hillside would be if you were loony enough to go
straight up. That rocky backbone up there is called a talus.

A long, smooth hillside, looking up toward the summit. Every winter this face
is covered with ice and snow that daring skiers ride to the bottom.

Around here I started getting a bit of a headache. I assumed the altitude was
to blame, so from here on up I made it a point to take a couple extra swallows
of water every time I felt thirsty. Worked like a charm. Breathing isn’t the
only way to get oxygen into the body, just the most obvious.

Pinnacles jut up from the rocky landscape.

Is that a cool rock, or what?

The trail nears the talus. It seems to tower above the trail, till the trail
towers above it within less than a mile.

These yellow flowers look like alpine dandelions.

Two summits lie at the volcano’s rim. This is the first, about 50 feet up the
trail.

A chunk of the volcano’s rim. Mount Shasta is faintly visible in the distance.
It’s faint only because of the limits of my camera; it’s obvious to the naked
eye.

A small ice field must be crossed to reach the second summit.

The ice is still pretty deep, compared to the height of my hiking poles.

Getting to the second summit requires a fairly tricky rock scramble. I wouldn’t
say it’s dangerous, just difficult in places.

Speaking of difficulty, this little plant overcame some to grow up through
a crack in the volcano at over 10,400 feet.

My scramble almost ended here, between a couple big chunks of rock. I knew
there was noplace to go over to the right side of the rock, so I doubled back
and found another way.

There’s this wacky-looking weather station at the second summit.

This rock is about as high as the volcano goes. I’m sure some brave souls have
climbed up there; more power to ‘em. I tend to be afraid of heights and I’m
up as high as I need to be, thank you.

Self-portrait, which results from being the first and only person at the summit
at the moment.

Another look out over the crater, whose rim is barely discernible because the
volcano blew with so much violence.

OK, back down the mountain. There’s always stuff to see that you missed –
but your mom would’ve seen because she’s got eyes in the back of her head.

A twisted old tree, as required. Brokeoff Mountain, in the background, used
to be part of a massive
volcano that towered over Lassen Peak but collapsed in on itself hundreds
of thousands of years ago.

Near the end of the trail. The hike took me about four hours, three on the
way up, and one on the way down.

Another look at the peak, taken later the same day.

I had been assured that Lassen Peak was an easy hike. Turns out that it was,
but only because I took it really slow, drank lots of water and had great luck
with the weather. The trail might best be subtitled "Altitude for Newbies"
– a good place to prepare for hiking up there where the air begins to thin.

After Labor Day, it’s five days at Yosemite, where everything worth seeing
has altitude issues. Check back after the 12th of September for more updates.