After I tipped over the ridge coming from Little Nellie Falls, I was hugely relieved to find that the gate was open. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to go back out through that mudhole.

As soon as I crested, the terrain changed. There’d been a fire up there over ten years ago, and while it did affect our hunting area, it didn’t look like the vegetation had come back with such a vengeance on this slope. But it gave me a magnificent view of the masters of the valley, El Capitan and Half Dome.

I kept on following my nose without looking at the map. The road kept getting better and better until it eventually was paved, so I figured I was on the right track. And I did pop back out on the highway.

I haven’t been to Bridalveil Fall in quite a few years and I was on a waterfall kick anyway, so that’s where I found myself eating lunch.

The view from my tailgate as I ate lunch in the parking lot was incredible, and it’s only a short walk up to the falls itself.

The river was iced over with water rushing by beneath. I was absolutely dumbfounded by the sight of a tourist encouraging his three little girls to go out and play on the ice. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t like them very much? One dip in that, and a kid would have a serious hypothermia thing going on, even if he could fish her out from the current.

But, idiots aside, the view was perfectly lovely. There’s a little ten-foot diameter or so landing area beneath the falls, where you get completely drenched if you go in the summer. The flow was reduced though, so there was just a little ice. The season had minimized the tourists, and most of those were probably on prepaid trips from other countries. They did luck out on the day though, as it was clear and fairly warm.

As you stood and listened, you’d hear popping booming noises. One family at the parking lot asked me if people were throwing rocks up there.

No, that was the sound of ice breaking loose. Don’t stand too close! They didn’t.

I walked back down after taking some pictures for a Korean tour group, and walked a little ways over to get a good view of El Capitan against the blue clear sky. Half Dome gets all of the press, but I think he’s my favorite. Maybe this summer, I’ll go up the back side (the trail’s not a rock climb, not if you start from the north.)

And walking back to my truck, I saw a winter miracle, one that was so rare that it took me precious minutes to recognize, compose myself, and capture.

Yes, my friends, that right there is an empty public trail in Yosemite Valley. Look long and hard; you’ll probably never spot one in the wild.

And that is why you go to Yosemite in the middle of winter.

Want to see a miracle in progress?

Coppertop’s Belgian mare, Rowan, looks like she’s about to foal on camera. Hurry, go watch!

…I think I see steamy little feet!

Cyrus, you ought to keep your nose to yourself. That momma will kick your ass.

There she goes, serious pushing now.

Fantastic! A baby! (Can’t hear if it’s a colt or a filly.) Oh, but I see it holding it’s head up, and a fine white blaze!

There’s one road that we’ll deer hunt on, but not bear hunt. It’s too close to the Park to risk turning dogs loose on, so we just don’t. I do know of one spot on it where you can stand in the sun, feel twenty degrees warmer than anywhere else up there, and enjoy a magnificent view of Half Dome and El Capitan, from outside the park.

Dennis always told me that the road went on in. I’ve never gone that far, because when I’m up there, I’m always hunting, and you just don’t want to have to track a wounded deer into a National Park. But on Saturday, I wasn’t hunting. I was following my nose. I knew the road up from Anderson Valley the easy way was blocked, and had been since bear season, so I took a right where otherwise I’d have gone left, and drove up Scott Ridge.

I was thinking that I could always turn left at Crocker Ridge if it was too snowy, but that road was closed too. Sure, I could have backtracked a little and gone down the Long Road, but what the hell. I was there for the journey, not for the destination, and as long as I wasn’t on the north side of a ridge, the road was as clear as summer. Well, close enough anyway.

So I went on up the Tram Road, figuring that if it got hairy, I could always stop and chain up. I went through some patches of snow and ice, thinking that I’d do it each time, but that ol’ Mule never slipped once, so I kept on going. Up and over the Haystack, and into the valley that overlooks the Park. I’d never been in this far before, so when I hit a Y, I stopped and looked at the map. Not a whole lot of road signs up there, you know, and it was getting a little narrow. Not quite Jeep-trail narrow, but the only tracks ahead of me were several days old and from an ATV.

But just when I was really starting to tell myself to just turn around, there it was. One lonely green picnic table, room for about three trucks to park, and the sweetest little waterfall that I’ve ever seen.

The water was flowing, but the falls were surrounded by ice. Ice covered the creek at one point, but out in the open, it was a beautiful clear pool. I’m sure there were trout lurking.

Around the falls, there are several slow seeps, and all of those were completely frozen over. The one across the granite face that must have been a favorite washing spot/gossip central for the Indians 150 years ago was a miniature falls in slow motion.

Eventually I got cold, and wondered just how close I was to the Park. I forded the creek and kept going (and ran into the booby-trapped ice, but that’s a previous story.)

Perhaps not my wisest decision of the day, but it was a good rocky ford. I kept on. It was about the journey, rememeber?

It’s a little silly, this need to be alone once in a while. After all, my day job has evolved into mostly solitude with brief moments of actually talking to someone. My business is 90% solo. And exactly half the time, I come home to my dogs and my cat and a quiet house. What more quiet do I need, really?

But I find that the background noises never really go away when you’re immersed in them. Sometimes it’s a stadium full of cheering people, almost deafening, and sometimes it’s whispering folk in a library, but it’s almost always there. You learn to tune it out in self defense, but if you listen for it, you can hear the noise in your head plain as day, and once you start hearing it, it’s really hard to turn it back to neutral.

So you take yourself away. Other surroundings can make a huge difference. Your place might be the beach, listening to the waves roll in, or the mall, finding the perfect shoes. Mine’s the mountains, as I believe that I might have mentioned a time or two.

You wake up early, having told yourself to get up without the alarm. 4:50 in the morning might be a little ridiculous, but it seems to be what your subconscious wants, so you roll with it. You get in the truck, pop in a favorite CD, and just drive. Dawn finds you still driving, and you haven’t seen another person, even at a distance, for over an hour. You deliberately take the long road, and throw your destination to the wind. You stop when you want, and go when you want, and don’t have to worry about another living soul at that moment.

You start to relax, and eventually turn off the music as just one more source of noise. Sooner or later, the background noise subsides completely, something it only does as a gift now and then, and that’s when things start to get really good. Your mind is free now to work on the things that it wants to, which might or might not be what you think they are. And it might or might not do its thinking out loud; sometimes you can drive for miles just keeping your eye out for deer and admiring nice bear tracks, not consciously worrying a problem, only to realize on your way home ten hours later, that it seems to have been laid to rest. Then again, sometimes it hasn’t, but with your mind swept out, you feel that it’s not insurmountable now and setting it aside until an answer becomes clear is just fine, thank you very much.

Eventually you might find yourself cackling with glee at having made it through that puddle of ice and mud, but what’s really entertaining you is the chance to be your own company for a while, and finding again that you like it.

Five hours into the drive, and you might find yourself to be decent company for other people again, so driving in the back door to Yosemite seems like exactly the right thing to do and at the right time. You wave to a lady at one of the cabins, and she waves back, thinking you’re a local, because who else uses that road?

You follow your nose, saying to hell with the maps, and find yourself at the bottom of one of the most famous waterfalls in the country. You walk up the short path, slipping on the ice, and take the time to really look at it, sitting through several cycles of tourists who pop in, snap a picture, and are gone again. But that’s OK; that’s their thing. Your thing is to find the quiet, and now that you have, to hang onto it just a little longer.

You’re not ready to give it all up quite yet, so on your way out, you circle through another of your sacred places. And somehow, it’s fitting and complete that you find your way back to your driveway twelve hours to the minute after you left it, but you’re a subtly different person. The voices have started back up again, started on the way home, in fact, but they’re muted and tolerable now, and should be for weeks.

Aren’t you lucky that you can find this place, this peace? People who don’t know might think that you’re crazy, a woman going out into the edge of nowhere and for no obvious reason, but they don’t know, do they? Either they’re deaf or just a little stupid, or else they’re there for the same reason you are, but those aren’t the ones wondering.

Those are the ones nodding as you pass.

I’ve been intending a sanity trip for a little while, so 5:30 this morning saw me on the road to find me some peace.

I did too, gobs of it, and in the process rescued some boys who’d gone out looking for adventure. I figure they’ll have plenty of adventure getting their Jeep out of that tree tomorrow.

I was on the last leg of the trip (which I’ll go into in bits over the week, as it was sort of epic for one day) and I came around a snowy corner to see a couple of camoflaged young twenty-somethings pop up the embankment. They looked sheepish and I didn’t see a vehicle in sight, so my first assumption was that they’d walked past their truck.

Uh, no. They’d slid their Jeep off the road not twenty seconds before I came by, and sure enough, there were the tire tracks leading straight to nowhere and I could barely see the red roof when I got out. It had rolled all the way over, landing somewhat vertically, and a tree had stopped them. There are lots of trees up there.

They were OK; one had crashed his knee up but didn’t think it was broken. I didn’t either, from the way he was walking. I took them up the road to where a buddy of theirs was parked and turned them over. Sadly, I did not take pictures; those boys were rattled enough, and to have someone who undoubtedly looked like their mom pick them up was bad enough; they did not need to be humiliated.

But check this out from earlier in the day:

I’d been driving on completely frozen puddles all day already. Must have gone over fifty of them with not so much as a crunch.

This one had a particularly interesting freeze/thaw pattern going on, so I deemed it photo-worthy.

Sure, it was a little damp on the bottom, but it didn’t look bad.

That is, of course, until I drove right over the middle of it (d’oh!) and heard an ominous “snap” and then immediately dropped six or eight inches. Into what appeared to be sucking quicksand. Seems this had been one of those deep puddles. Oops.

I was already in four-high, so I kicked that mule into four-low, rocked it back a little, and bulldozed my way on out of there. Barely, too. I was contemplating walking in to Yosemite and leaving notes as I did it.

Dear Santa:

I would like a winch for Christmas please. A nice big one. Oh, and if you could see your way to have it delivered to the middle of nowhere in January, that would be great!

Kisses!

Cowgirl Walking

But that truck has earned himself a name: “That Ol’ Mule,” and not in any derrogatory sense either. It’s not that the truck’s stubborn, so much as it is willing to dig down deep and put some muscle in it when it matters. And it’s never left me in a lurch either, even when I do stupid things like this.

So that ol’ Mule spun a little, flung mud up one side and down the other, and gripped and ripped that damn ice apart and got me out of that hole. Four-low and first gear is a force to be reckoned with in that truck. I patted ‘im on the dashboard and said, “atta-boy,” and got out to take pictures, because that’s what I do.

Once I broke through, it looked like the ice was about four inches thick. Which would have been fine if it weren’t for the quicksand. Or my stupid sense of invincibility (is it any coincidence that my Calvin and Hobbes treasury came today? I think not.)

But I still want a winch. And possibly some common sense (I did have survival gear in the truck, but what a monumental pain in the ass that would have been, eh?)

Ten years ago, the concept of actually having friends that I’d never met was so foreign to me that I’d never even given it the thought required to dismiss it. Sure, I used the internet to communicate, but that was always with people that I already knew. I wasn’t real big on talking to strangers in the first place and just did not see the point in talking to invisible strangers.

But people and technology change. Six or seven years ago, I started reading online journals, and eventually those people started to become real to me. Of course, they’d thought they were real all along, but for me, it was like developing one side of a friendship. They didn’t know it, but it was drastically expanding my world view.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I’ve got people that I consider friends, and it’s mutual. I call them ‘invisible friends’ sort of tongue-in-cheek, but there’s an undercurrent of truth to that. I’m still wrapping my head around the thought that you can get to know someone based solely on the written word, but I’m getting there.

I think I’ve finally thrown all of those reservations out. Some of my favorite people in the world these days are those who I’ve never seen in person, never gone for a beer with, and never hung out with topless in the hot tub. But friends they are, no mistake about it. I know hold the opinion that this medium lets you see much more of the inside of a person than any number of years sitting on adjacent stools at the bar. I’ve got ridiculous girl-crushes on at least two of them (Suzanna Danna and LA come immediately to mind.) I want to scoop both of these women up and go have fun with them, and I find it just mind-boggling that I could have stumbled across such incredible people on the internet. I’m sure that fabulous people exist all over the place, but how would I have found them before? Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Ladies, I so wish that I could join you at the gathering in Wisconsin. What are the odds that you’d both be there?! It’ll have to be another time and another place, but y’all are kind of stuck with me now!

Damn! Finally back up!

So anyway, my company has adopted the fabulous practice of rewarding longevity with actual almost-money instead of crap like watches or tie pins. I say almost-money, because it comes in the form of ‘points’ on an AmEx prepaid gift card with stern fine print about not being able to use it on such fine rewards as groceries or alcohol. Damn, and I could have blown the whole thing at BevMo too. I guess the IRS has issues with companies buying employees bourbon. Whatever, sissies!

But since Amazon takes AmEx and I just happen to have an extensive wish list reminding myself of things that I would like to have, well, there you go. I happily chatted online with my sister and click-click-clicked my way through the $250 in about half an hour last night.

Among the treasures which I will be receiving someday soon:

Another set of silk longjohns, both tops and bottoms, for hunting. Sadly, they were out of black in anything approaching my size, but these things are amazingly warm and lightweight. Not so comfortable when you’ve been hiking through the actual creek rather than alongside it though, hence the need for a backup set.

A polarizing filter for my best lens. This should be fun for shooting cloudy skies and who knows what else. I’ve almost bought it about three times, but now it shall be mine.

And along the same lines, a regular ol’ UV filter for my second-favorite lens, as I keep dragging it out without anything on it at all, and that’s stupid.

A couple of books, one by one of my favorite authors and one that’s new to me but was highly recommended by Kathy. Thanks Kathy, it looks good.

And the piece de resistance, fun for the whole family and a purchase that I haven’t been able to justify until now, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, woohoo! The challenge will now be to lay my hands on it before the kids do, but I see that there are three volumes, so we can all be happy at once.

And with shipping and everything, I think my total came to something like $244. Not too far off for quick spending of surprise money, eh?

I’m still taking pictures every day, but it turns out that sometimes, I just don’t want to write an entry about each one.

Some are boring, some are repetitive, some are clearly from days when I was stretching for something to photograph, and some are just too close to my heart to talk about just yet.

But I am posting them every couple of days to a photoset on Flickr, if you want to look at them there.

I’ve never really messed around with Flickr much, but I’m having fun with it now, to go along with the Project 365 and the camera-keeping resolution I didn’t exactly make.

The things I do for a picture…

On Tuesday, we had another pipe break at a plant, and of course, we’d already returned the man-lift that we used to fix the first one. So back out it came.

I was feeling brave, and asked to go up while the operator fixed things so I could take pictures from a good vantage point. Why yes, I am afraid of heights, why do you ask?

I snapped a few before my blood pressure shot higher than we were and I asked him to take me back down.

No, I didn’t last too long. The swaying of the basket was giving me the heebie-jeebies.

For just a couple more hours.

1615 hours: Call manager to tell him about one more burst valve. Manager informs me that his DSL is down, and I’m on call for the night.

2330: Hear dogs squabbling and decide to check water levels while I’m up. Crap. It’s definitely going to come on in the wee hours.

0310: Wee hours arrive, well tries to start, and fails. Calls me. Look at the screen. Can’t do squat from home, but we should have enough water to last until daylight, when I presumeably can do squat. Go back to bed.

0320: Realize that if something big bursts, it’s going to drain the tower in a hurry, and that would be bad. Get up, throw on four layers of clothing, and go out to well in 20 degree weather.

0330: Well still won’t start. Can’t figure it out. Curse incompetence, curse well, and curse weather. Go back home and back to bed.

0455: Finally fall back asleep. Have bad dreams of losing job and running out of water.

0550: Get up before alarm, get showered and dressed, and go look at well again. Admire tailless skunk caught in headlights near well. Fail to get a photo. Gate is now frozen shut. Still can’t start well. Curse some more.

0645: Go in to office, wait until fairly decent hour to lay problem in someone else’s lap.

0700: Wake up manager laying said problem in his lap. Manager suggests one more thing. Go try said thing. Fail to start well. Crap! Notice workers at line left open last night; fully expect major water loss at that break.

0730: And here we are, waiting for someone else to come in and point out the obvious. If one of my valves is frozen, there’s nothing I can do but he may be equipped to deal with it.

edited to add:

0815: Arrive back at well to find the damn thing on and three County guys standing around wondering what I was so worked up about. Apparently kicking the heater in the control box up a notch defrosted things enough to let it turn on about a minute after I left it last. Figures, but at least I can let it rest now. Turning it off will be someone else’s problem.