Sunny Tenaya

After a night with all 7 of us crammed into the cabin (wasn't really a cram), we were ready to spend some more time in Yosemite's great outdoors. Under normal circumstances, one of us may have concocted some epic mission of exhaustion to go on, but nobody was really feeling like doing anything too strenuous.

To the beach at Tenaya!


Girls and paddleboards

Of course, our lazy day is still filled with paddleboarding, swimming, and rockclimbing (for the able-bodied), but we're not running from sunup to sundown or anything like that. Lazy day, indeed.


Totally didn't pay to enter the Park

Riley and Erin and Matt veered off to do some more climbing on Polly Dome, so the rest of us held down the fort at the beach. The higher they climbed, the more prominent became the thunderheads to the east, but it was still a banner summer day at the lake.


Zo-Zo has her own boat


TJaye takes it all in

I managed to swim about two-thirds of the way across the lake (and back, thanks), sans wetsuit, and it was about as rejuvenating experience as I could have asked for. Cool water, warm sun, clear skies...good life.


Yay, swimming doesn't hurt my stupid foot

Well, the thunderheads kept building. By the time our climbers descended from the top of the route (safely), the first drops were just beginning to fall. By the time they made it back to the beach, we were reaching full Time to Clear Out mode, and by the time we shuttled all our gear back to the car, we were embroiled in a thunderstorm of biblical proportions. Like, not even funny how hard it blew, rained, hailed, and generally just punished the earth with its fury. Once I was soaked (took about six seconds), I kinda enjoyed being in it. Nowhere to hide!

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Polly Dome

A couple months ago, we blasted south to Yosemite for a couple nights to help our friend Matt celebrate his, um, thirtieth birthday.

Instead of stumbling from forgettable pub to forgettable pub, we recreated in the High Sierra amongst granite, trees, and lakes. And drank some wine.

TJaye booked us a cabin at the Tioga Pass Resort, a place I've always driven by while both wondering what it was like and envying the lucky few who have used it as a winter base camp in otherwise barely-accessible terrain.


Birthday boy

After depositing our stuff at the cabin, we popped over the summit and into the park for a quick evening on the side of a cliff. Also accompanying us were Riley and Erin, so there was critical mass for some rockclimbing fun.


Zo-Zo

I was still nursing my stupid broken foot, and while hiking up to the base of the climb went OK, it took all of about 5 feet of climbing to realize that continuing would Not Be OK, so I retreated and used a glass of wine to help me lick my wounds.

Thus, with nearly everyone else climbing, Murphy and I babysat Zoe and watched the daylight wane from Polly Dome high above Tenaya Lake. There are worse ways to spend an evening.


Naked hippie far below


The tannest Murphy has ever been


Sir Maclean, Esquire


Tools

Thus began a couple fun days in the park; I've got a few more posts to share so hang tight, vampires.

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Solidarity

Not everything gets battered about in the windstorms.



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Biggest Little Smoky

As previously noted, one minor upside to the catastrophic destruction that comes standard with big wildfires is a-maz-ing photo light. Here are a few from a smoky sunset in Reno during the Rim Fire this past summer.







Couldn't resist bringing the big lens out...or exploiting Murphy as a model.

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Keep Tahoe Smoky

Back in August, there was a gigantic wildfire in the greater Yosemite neighborhood that was hugely destructive, largely because it was burning in terrain that was too difficult to access. One of the firefighting techniques employed was to actually let the fire burn up into the High Sierra granite where it would run out of fuel.

It makes me deeply happy that there are still places in this civilized country that haven't yet been overrun by civilization to the point that fires like this one are merely a part of our history. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that they wreak all sorts of havoc, and they impact entire ecosystems, not to mention nearby (or not so nearby) towns and cities.

The Rim Fire was responsible for thick smoke blanketing Reno for a few weeks, and it got pretty old pretty fast. Curiously, our air quality was on par with a nice day in Beijing, which is a sobering thought on several counts.

All that being said, smoke makes for amazing light for photos. These two are from a quick jaunt to Incline one evening prior to a Shakespeare play at Sand Harbor. The show must go on!





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Peerless Mural

Reno has seen a stunning rebirth in the form of street art in the past few years, and there's a fairly small crew of artists that's responsible for gracing the walls of the city with their vision and talent.

Just up the street from our place in Midtown is a mural that was created this summer by Erik Burke. It's on the wall of one of Reno's institutions; the Peerless Cleaners building. There's a neat writeup on the project that's worth a read, and I took it upon myself to make a couple photos that featured the awesome spinning sign at night.





I guessed that the sign would look cool, and I was right (12 seconds for a full rotation). Running a tilt-shift lens and a big strobe in the darkness garnered some strange looks from the bar-goers headed past, but at least it was a friendly crowd. There's a pretty amazing amount of hidden detail in the mural that's not apparent if you're across the street, so it's definitely worth a closer look.

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Vapor

These are a few photos resulting from a banner Reno evening spent staring through a Big Lens at some Big Clouds.


I


II


III


IV

The light didn't last very long, but it sure was sweet.

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