Travelling Lore

Ah, Yosemite National Park--obviously (or arguably)  the  quintessential national park of the United States.  Known for Half Dome, giant sequoias, and numerous waterfalls, Yosemite sees about 4 million people visit its extensive wilderness.  Many choose to drive through Yosemite and stop to take photos at lookouts; but many still choose to plunge right in to nature and hike one of the park's many trails. We were in Yosemite for three days, which I think is the minimum amount of nights you need to get a decent taste of the park's grandeur.  A lot of the trails are longer than five miles round trip, so unless you're a fast hiker, be prepared for those to take all day.  On our first day we opted for a shorter hike in Tuolumne Meadows .  If my memory serves me correctly, it was about a five mile round trip hike. Tuolumne Meadows has several short day hikes  and is a good place to get your feet wet and your muscles primed for a longe...

Mono Lake in California, which is about a half an hour drive from the entrance of Yosemite National Park, is an incredibly unique area in North America.  Would you believe that it's at least 760,000 years old, possibly around one million years old, making it one of the oldest lakes in the western hemisphere?  Absolutely incredible! Scientists have been able to date the lake to at least 760,000 years ago by dating an ash layer to the Long Valley eruption .  However, sediments below the ash layer suggest that Mono Lake could actually be the remnant of a much older lake that also covered parts of Nevada and Utah.  At its height, Mono Lake was about 900 ft deep.  It sits in part of the Mono Basin, which was formed over the last five million years, and has no outlet to the ocean; this lack of an outlet causes high levels of salt to accumulate in the lake, making the water more alkaline . However, now the lake is about 158 ft deep at its deepest point an...

Initially, I was a little skeptical about going to a ghost town.  I'd never heard of Bodie before, it was a long drive away, I didn't think it would be that interesting (I'm not a gold rush history buff), and I thought that it might be too touristy.  Well, once we arrived and got past the initial sticker shock of the entrance fee (our Golden Poppy annual pass didn't cover this Bodie Historic State Park ), I quickly changed my mind about Bodie. Bodie, or "Boomtown Bodie," is a gold-mining ghost town in California that was named after William Bodey, who had discovered gold in 1859 (along with three other prospectors) in some hills north of Mono Lake.  Unfortunately, he froze to death in November of that year, before the town was named in his memory.  Mining started off slowly due to richer finds in other areas of the U.S.  However, the collapse of Bunker Hill Mine exposed a rich vein of silver and gold ore in 1875, which kicked off the boomtown.  ...

I know, I know, the blog title says "Hiking in Lake Tahoe," but first, let's get to the beer.  Then hiking.  We always thinking about Napa and Sonoma and wine, but California actually has a loooooot of breweries.  So when we saw any on the map where we stayed, we did our best to check them out.  Our first stop on our way into the Lake Tahoe area was Fifty Fifty Brewing Company . We also checked out Tahoe Mountain Brewing Company , which, as you'd probably assume given its name, is closer to Tahoe.  Their Evolution Barrel, pictured above, is probably one of the best sour beers I've had.  They describe it as a blend of one-, two-, and three-year-old sour golden ales that were aged in oak barrels.  So mother pucking good! In terms of solid sustenance, I recommend Sprouts Natural Foods Cafe .  For any vegetarians out there, this place is a dream.  Though I'm not a vegetarian, I ended up ordering vegetarian meals because their descript...

Out here on the east coast I don't often here people talking about Lassen Volcanic National Par k.  Instead, people always talk about Yellowstone or Yosemite, not to mention our own east coast national parks, Acadia and Shenandoah (close enough!).  Boy, were we in for a treat with Lassen! Even in July some of the trails were still snowy and, simply put, we just didn't have the gear to hike in the snow.  With limited trails to access on our limited time (we had only one day in the park), we decided to do the Cinder Cone hike in the Butte Lake area.  The NPS marks this hike as "Strenuous," but to be honest the only strenuous part about the hike, relatively speaking, was going up the cinder cone. As you can see from this distance, it's pretty steep.  Then add in loose cinder and scoria "pebbles," which makes you feel like you're taking two steps back for every step forward.  Be prepared to slow down once you get to this part.  The tota...

The day after our failed attempt to see Crater Lake  (an excuse to go back again!), we departed our beloved Railroad Park Resort and started to make our way to Lassen Volcanic National Park.  To break up the drive we ended up stopping at McArthur-Burney Falls State Park .  Honestly, we weren't expecting much, but once we arrived our expectations were quickly blown out of the water. Burney Falls is an amazingly picturesque waterfall.  It reminded us a lot of Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia given how the falls take many different paths downward into the pool rather than via one giant waterfall mouth.  And to top it all off, the lighting was perfect that day for photographs.  We both rented cameras for this trip to see if we might want to purchase them down the road, so we spent some time adjusting different shutter speed settings to "smooth" out the flow of the waterfalls in the photos. The waterfall is very much the centerpiece of the p...

Up until this point in our travels we had luckily not experienced any, so to speak, travel "failures."  We always have an itinerary before we leave and we usually more or less stick to it.  The exceptions that arise are usually due to tired feet or, somewhat jokingly, church sightseeing fatigue.  (Europe has a lot of churches, ok?) Crater Lake National Park in Oregon was a place we were both particularly looking forward to seeing with our own eyes.  It was one of our longest days of driving (4.5 hours roundtrip) on our entire honeymoon because we opted for a day trip from Dunsmuir, California (read here ) rather than spending a night any farther north. The closer we drove to Crater Lake NP the less ideal the weather became on our route.  It rained, it drizzled, it was foggy.  By the time we finally drove into the park there were forecasts of several inches of snow within the park...in July!  Fun fact: Crater Lake National Park sees an even hi...