We’ve been going through some major crap in the family, mostly dealing with lawyers and custody and psychopathic ex-wives. It’s really been getting to both of us. I simply have never been exposed to the level of evil that I now have to deal with on a regular basis.

But Karma’s name seems to be Irene. My grandma felt bad that we were being unjustly beat down so much, so she decided to do something nice for us. Initially, she offered to bring us with her on a cruise over the winter holidays through the Panama Canal. That would have been incredible, but I just can’t take two weeks off of work. So I sadly turned her down.

Grandma had an elegant solution though. Since I couldn’t do that, how about a shorter cruise? She let me pick the destination, and I picked Alaska, as Junior’s always wanted to be there. My backup operator was available to cover for me this summer, so I scheduled it with work, Grandma bought the tickets and the flight to Seattle, and we got Junior a passport.

We’ve been planning our getaway for six weeks. It was the only good thing in life lately that I had to focus on. I so desperately needed to get away, not just from the current bullshit, but from the stress of being on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It wears on you. Even if I have a backup operator cover the system on a weekend, it’s never far from my mind. I was hoping that a week completely away from it, with an operator that I trust running things, that I could let it go.

But the backup operator emailed me last night. His day job is sending him out of state that very week with only a week’s notice. He can’t work for me. And there’s no one else who can. Every operator that I know has a day job, and they can’t risk losing that. I don’t blame them. I found one who would be willing to cover for me as a consultant over the phone if something happened, but I can’t take that risk. If something did happen, which is unlikely but possible, it would look so bad for me not to be there and not to have an operator present, that if I didn’t lose my contract immediately, I’d surely lose it when it comes up for renewal in February. And if I lose my contract, there goes my house.

So all that bullshit about how things always happen for a reason? Yeah, I don’t think so. I think that’s just something people say when they don’t know what else to say. I think good people get shit on for no reason often enough and it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no greater purpose to it. There’s no getting away from it. If that kind of thing made sense, then why don’t assholes get shit on too? I always see them getting away with murder scot-free. It seems like the responsible people, the ones who actually care about consequences, are the ones always getting stepped on.

So while I desperately need a vacation, I need a job more. It’s a no-brainer when the stakes are this high.

There are so many circumstances beyond my control lately that it’s infuriating to be so powerless. I can’t talk about the actual issue online at the moment but I will one day. Possibly after the flames stop shooting out of my ears. Possibly not. It’s kept me quiet and it’s time to stop letting this nonsense keep me from doing what I want to do, when I can. So I really want to start writing more again, but you’ll understand if I stick to the trivial for the now. At least it’s something.

One of the rare things that Junior and I can do something about remains the house. We’d already committed to spending a chunk of money on the concrete around the house, so we drove on with that project.

The driveway is long, plenty long enough to park on for a party. That’s good, as we don’t have a ton of street parking due to the shape of our lot. The bad part was that it was really hard to park two vehicles next to each other, or pass one to get out, without dinging a mirror.

The line of the driveway continued on behind a gate next to the shop. This would have been an ideal place to park a trailer, as I think the last guy did, if it wasn’t about four inches too narrow. It was fine for a bumper-pull, but the fifth-wheel is higher and would hit the roof of the shop by just a little bit. A little bit is not acceptable.

The previous owner had also put in a weird planter right in the middle of the driveway. It harbored a couple of extraordinarily shrubs and when we pulled them out, it still blocked tractor access to the backyard. So that had to go.

There were a couple of other little spots that wanted concrete. Two more ugly planters and a path to the garden would be nice to have paved.

So in comes the concrete guy, who is someone we know. Junior’s project even got expanded after they demolished the ugly driveway planter and noticed all of the cracks in that section of drive. He decided it would be best to start fresh, and they jackhammered it all out. We took it, truckload by truckload, to a concrete recycler that I know. Our friend worked after his day job to form things for oh, about two months now.

And finally, Saturday was the day. Just after dawn, here came a crew of guys, with a concrete truck idling in the background. These guys wheeled three trucks’ worth of concrete, about 26 yards, into these forms by hand, lest the weight of the truck crack the existing driveway. It was a long day but they moved very efficiently. While they were here, we did some minor yardwork, like painting the gates we’d had to take down anyway.

It was maybe not the right time to spend the money to do this, but I’ve let that anxiety go, as we were already committed. And wow, is it nice to look around and see the clean expanses of concrete. I can see where I’m going to put barrel planters and where Junior’s going to build an outdoor grill. I see all the changes we’ve made to this place and how nice it’s going to look when we’re done, or as done as a house ever gets. I see home, and I’m happy in it.

Junior’s been around shotguns almost all of his life. Me, I used to shoot gophers at my dad’s orchard with an old double-barrel 16-gauge.

I don’t have nearly the experience that he does. He trapshoots on a winter league and loves it. I go with him to each one, sometimes do a little photography, and love that role. He loves it so much that he’s wanted me to try it for years; he’s pretty sure that I’d have as much fun with it as he does and he wants to share his joy.

I resisted. I went to a practice day once a couple of years ago, and it was all right. I hit maybe eight out of 25 targets, which wasn’t horrible for a rank beginner. After all, those gophers were a pretty stationary target all those years ago. Clay pigeons move. I haven’t had a chance to shoot at many moving targets in my life, only a few deer.

I shot a couple of times at fun days too, but I’d find myself getting frustrated pretty easily. There’s a lot to learn. Even though I’ve got a good background in shooting in general, shotguns are different. I’m used to consciously aiming at what I want to hit, but with shotguns, you don’t do that. You point at the target but if you stop to take time to aim, it’s long gone. It’s hard to make the transition from aiming to pointing for a beginner.

But every year at this particular trapshoot weekend the whole group of us bring our trailers to the club and spend the whole weekend. The impetus for this is one, that’s it’s pretty far away, and two, that they have a really nice sporting clays range there. Everyone gets up on Saturday and goes out and shoots sporting clays for fun before the regular league trapshoot on Sunday. Oh, and it’s really close to a casino, so there’s drinking and gambling to be had and if we don’t want to cook, we don’t have to.

Trapshooting involves standing in one place at a particular station with your team and shooting at a clay pigeon that come out of the house at a fixed point. The angle varies but at least you know where it’s going to start.

Sporting clays is more like golf, and also more like bird hunting. You walk a course and at designated stations, there are two targets to shoot at. You get whichever number of pairs that site calls for.  This particular course is for a hundred rounds. I’ve never been on any other course, so I can’t say what they’re like.

Last year I packed the camera and had a great time. The variation makes for interesting photography and I got to be part of the fun.

This year, however, I set the camera down and picked up a shotgun. You don’t know how big of a deal this was for me. I was to be shooting with some incredibly gifted shooters, the best in the league, and no matter how much they reassured me that I was welcome, I was intimidated. It was something I wanted to try though, and this setting sounded less competitive than some others. So to make myself go through with it, I told everyone that I would do it. I figured I’d feel more like a fool if I backed out, and I was right.

So Junior let me use his sporting clays shotgun and brought enough shells for me too. I had a massive case of stage fright on the first station, which was eight rounds, I think. They let me go last so I’d have more time to see what was going on. Instead of calling for both birds at once like normal, they called them one at a time so I wouldn’t have to rush. And when I broke my first target, it suddenly became fun instead of intimidating. I think I broke two on that station. Two out of eight was about the rate that I’d previously shot on the few trap rounds I’d done, but since I’ve shot less than a hundred shells since those gopher days, who knew if that rate was a fluke?

But on the second trap, Senior was calling for the birds for me while Junior was standing behind me coaching. And on one of those, he accidentally called for the second bird like he would one of the regular guys, instead of one at a time like I had been shooting. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t hit that second bird. I don’t think they saw it, but I know I did and that boosted my confidence right up there and I started to have fun. I asked them to just pull for me like the guys, so I wouldn’t have time to over think things, and that worked much better for me. It seems that the more thinking I do, the more chances I have to screw things up.

I even did well on some of the harder stations, and I broke a few more pairs. There was a tree blocking the path of the bird at one station which was giving people fits, but I surprised them all by hitting that target a few times. Of course, I was missing the one that was easier to them, but I was learning. I was getting better at each station.

There’s one called a rabbit instead of a bird; it’s rolled along the ground instead of flung into the air. Rabbits have a tendency to bounce unpredictably. Junior didn’t want me to get frustrated with myself if I missed it, so he told me it was a tough target and not to be too hard on myself if I missed it. By then, I was the first shooter; it rotates through the group and of course I got the hardest one. Man, weren’t those guys surprised when I broke three out of four of those rabbits! Junior had a little pressure on him to beat my score; of course he did, but he also got a little shit from the guys. That about made my day, until the station where I flat-out beat him. That’s the one that hooked me.

I shot the best I’ve ever shot on that station, and that’s when I decided that I wanted to do this some more. I’ll be wanting a gun that fits me, but Senior has one for me to try. Sure, our shotgun shell budget is going to go up, but that’s OK. I think I’ll have fun with this for a few years before I even think about getting on a winter league trap team (I’m not such a fan of the competition.)

And sorry, putting the camera down meant that I’m sorely lacking in illustrations. Maybe someday I’ll be confident enough that I can do both, but for now it’s best to concentrate on one thing at a time. Oh, and my end score was 52 out of 100 possible. Those guys with the eighties and seventies were awfully proud of my 52, as was I. I had no idea I’d do so well on my first try; I still haven’t shot as many as 200 shells through a shotgun. I’ll have to deflate my big head, but no doubt the next time out will do that for me. I had a ball, and that’s what the game is about. I want to do it again.

When I was in, oh about the second or third grade, my class incubated chicken eggs as a class project. Once they were hatched, we were allowed to take the chicks home if it was OK with our parents. I remember being very surprised that my parents said yes, and brought home two chicks, one for my sister and one for me.

I suspect it was my mother who built the coop out of plywood and chicken wire in the back corner of the garden. I know dang well it was she who took us to a farm and came home with some more chickens. I had several particular pets out of the chicken project, which lasted for years and years. I had at least two Araucanas, the hens that lay the green eggs, and a Bantam rooster named Rooster Cogburn that used to ride my shoulder. My sister had a fantastic Polish Crested hen named Mrs. Polowski. No idea where she got that name from, but that hen was the tamest and longest-lasting hen of all of the chickens.

There were losses, of course. The dog tore apart two of the birds, which was a shocking sight to come home from school to. A neighbor objected to the crowing hen, so that one went back to the place we got the Bantys from. And my dad wanted to kill one, a rooster that nobody particularly liked. I was a much softer-hearted child than I’ve grown to be as an adult, and that killing was traumatic. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it contributed to my sister’s stint of vegetarianism, but I got over it.

I’ve wanted to keep chickens ever since, but hadn’t ever had a place to do it. And in keeping with my hobby of growing my own food, I’ve wanted to keep them not just for the eggs, but for the meat as well. We supply a fair amount of our own meat through hunting, so why not through livestock? Besides, it would be nice to do something with that Animal Science degree that I so painfully acquired twenty years ago.

So when we bought this place that seemed to have a yard that was split in half, I suggested that the far back corner, beyond the garden, would be a great spot for a chicken coop. To his credit, Junior agreed. And when he asked what kind of coop I wanted, he took my suggestions and ran with them. He’s fenced off a good section for chickens and another pen for sheep – that’s another entry – and we got to building. I’m the dumb end of the labor, of course.

He took plans for a garden shed and modified them to be a little bigger and to use pre-cut studs. We’ll add a few things to make it habitable for chickens, but if it turns out that we hate raising poultry, we’ll still have a nice garden shed, and made stronger and for less than the commercial Tuff-Sheds cost.

My initial plan was to have a flock of about 20 birds, and to slaughter half of them. I wanted to raise some of the breeds from my childhood, and looked around here for sources without much luck. But did you know that you can buy fertile eggs on eBay? I didn’t, but I sure do now! And my little flock may have grown to as much as my incubator (which I already owned) can hold. Oops. But that’s OK; I’ll process most of the roosters and freeze and can the meat. I’ll have way more eggs than I need, so we may have to give them away daily. It’s a hobby, not a business, and I’m already enjoying it. Seamus may even join the poultry club and show a chicken at the fair next year; we’ll certainly be equipped for that.

But for now I’m obsessing about chickens when the eggs haven’t even shipped yet. And I don’t even eat eggs. I’ll keep you updated.

When I met a man with young children, I did a mental, “Oh man, here we go.”

Everyone who’s been in those shoes has said that step-parenting is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. It can make or break a marriage. Combining two different parenting styles is a shock to all involved; in the extreme version, the parents have to compromise on what’s appropriate behavior. One set of kids has to watch while the other set gets away with things they never would have, and the other set has to suddenly mind rules where they never had to before.

I’ve always been a pretty strict parent. Even though I only had the boys half the time for a long time, it was still my job to teach them manners, to raise them to be good adults. I never felt that it was my job to be their friend, although my kids and I do like each other fine, for the most part. But I had to be the only adult in the house for a long time, so I was always the bad guy enforcing the rules. I grew up in a fairly rigid structure; we had fun, but I had enough manners run into me to know how to formally set a table and how to conduct myself around adults without screaming for attention all of the time.

Junior had his kids much less often than I did, and the rules were much more relaxed around his house. So their behavior was a shock to my system. Besides that I wasn’t going to be able to stand to be around holy terrors for very long, these kids needed some basic life skills, which I happen to be equipped to teach them. The mechanism of how I teach them has been hammered out between their father and I. I have to try to be less strict than I would normally be inclined to be, which my kids find unfair, and he’s promised to back up the calls that I do make.

It’s been working OK. These aren’t stupid children, just kids that hadn’t ever been exposed to much civility. They’ve learned how to use napkins and table utensils, and not to pick to bowl of peas up at a restaurant and slurp straight out of it. In exchange, they get to have home-cooked family meals at our house, where we all sit around the table with the TV off instead of the near-constant fast-food they get the rest of the time. They like to help set the table, and they’re starting to pick up a little cooking, which they like. I like to let each kid help bake their own birthday cake from scratch, and this makes them happy.

The household is evening out, slowly but surely. There’s a defined set of roles, and each person knows what’s expected of them. They’ve all got chores, which they do without too much complaining. They get to have fun, especially outdoor fun, with the pool and the dogs and the lawns and the bikes. We’re making this home into a good place for kids to grow up, but part of that is their responsibility too, and they’re all four stepping up to the plate.

Before this, I didn’t quite appreciate the decent working relationship I’d developed with the boys’ father. It seemed natural to me that rules at one house would carry over to the other. If one kid is grounded from television at his dad’s, then there you go. Grounded at my house too. If the other kid had been doing nothing but talking back to me all week, I could reasonably expect that he’d spend his afternoons pulling weeds at his other house. If they had something to do over there on one of my days, no biggie, and the same went the other way. Their standards were pretty similar to mine, and it worked fairly well.

So there’s the big ugly monkey wrench in our combined family. Of course kids are going to say they prefer the house with the anything-goes rules. Of course they aren’t going to admit that they might have fun with me now and then when their mother is an expert at emotional blackmail. They’ve said flat-out that she doesn’t like to hear nice things about us, and they’ve artfully dodged the question of just how much prying their mother does. I would never have guessed that a parent would call the child at the other parent’s house just to work them up into tears when they were perfectly happy before the phone rang. It never occured to me to lay my load of insecurities on a seven year old. It boggles the mind. Supposedly, if you listen to the other side, they hate me and don’t want to be at our house. Of course, last year it was their father they hated, so she might want to get her story straight, but since it’s coming from her and not them, the confusion is understandable. Sure, they don’t have a slave to follow them around picking up trash in their wake at our house, but they sure seem to like the family structure we do have. It’s been harder and harder to pry them away from whatever they’re doing to go back; I don’t see that as a sign of kids hating their life.

They may prefer to be spoiled at this age, but I guarantee you, when they’re adults and looking back on their lives, they’ll remember. They’ll remember who taught them how not to make fools of themselves on dinner dates. They’ll remember who taught them to cook and grow their own food. They’ll have a lifetime of happy fun family things to look back on, from summers in the pool to hunting camp each fall. They’ll know who taught them to stand up for themselves and to be their own people, and who gave them the life skills and freedom to do it.

It’s just going to be awfully challenging to get them there with all of the interference from the other side. So I’ll continue to be the wicked stepmother when it would be much easier to just take the path of least resistance, and I will raise four healthy and self-sufficient adults. And it is certainly by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

I’ve been sick since before Christmas, and between that and the perpetual fog that hangs over the Valley in a gloomy blanket all winter, I’m starting to resent that I’ve missed a month of my life. I can barely drag myself to work where I do the bare minimum, and as soon as I get home it’s into my fuzzy britches and I curl up in my recliner with a book. I’ve hardly been going outside if I don’t have to, I’ve hardly been cooking, I’ve hardly been.

Oh, sure, I pulled myself together for New Year’s, and I had a good time, but I know better than to drink very much when I’m sick, as those hangovers are particularly vicious, but I had a little and I held my own in our little poker game, so that was fun. Sleeping in the the next day was even more fun though, and it would have been an ideal day to go varmint hunting. We’re quickly running out of that season again, and me without having taken a single shot at a bobcat for yet another year. I can’t bring myself to go sit in the snow and freeze, but I get so disappointed in myself when I don’t make the effort at least.

But I wasn’t feeling too terribly bad this weekend, as long as I kept physical activity just under the coughing threshold, which means I can sort of walk around. We farted around the house on Saturday doing yardwork – I mostly supervised, but at least I was outside. But Sunday was the first shoot of Junior’s winter league trap season. I had a good feeling about this year, and this shoot in particular. Crawling out of bed paid off when we got to the gun club; there were shadows! I haven’t seen the sun in at least a month, and finally getting out and soaking up the rays was an instant mood lifter. It even got hot – I’ve been cold so long that I wore longjohns, and I had to go peel those off in the bathroom.

So finally, my body could soak up some warmth like a lizard, and like a reptile, I basked in it. I’d stand in it until I couldn’t stand it, being overdressed and all, and then go sit in the shade for a minute, coming back as soon as I could. I’m not even cold today, and it’s 43 and foggy with the droplets that go right through your body. I seem to have stored up some of that foothill heat like a biological battery, and it’s done wonderful things for my mood. Of course, I’m still fighting the bronchitis, but that’s to be expected.

And the shoot did go well. Junior shot exceptionally well, which is always fun to watch. A friend of ours is substituting for a sick member of Senior’s team this year, and I like hanging around him. And my parents came by, since this shoot was hosted by my dad’s gun club, and they got to see what trapshooting is. I think they liked it, but I also think my dad’s going to stick with his own brand of shooting competition, which is also interesting.

So all in all, it was about a nice of a day as I could have with a lingering illness, and it makes me think that the rest of the year is going to pick up pretty soon. I’m optimistic about it anyway, and that’s a nice change.

I thought our weekend was hosed when the mountains were snowed in. If we could even get there, the animals would sure be holed up, so the hunting would be kind of pointless. We planned a weekend of not much for once; a little blobbing, a little TV-watching, and maybe a little internet surfing.

But we got a call in the afternoon that someone had backed out of going to a crab feed and would we like to go? Well, sure! We love crab.

It was a good one too. The Builder’s Exchange puts on a much fancier crab feed than the local Little League does, although we always have fun at that one. I always win something bizarre at the local one, so when I saw how cool the raffle table was, I went back and bought some more raffle tickets. I figured if anything, I’d win something perfectly useless to me, like the cigars or a designer purse. But with 1100 people there, the odds were long.

So after a great dinner, they started the raffle. Junior had bought some tickets too, so we lined them up as we wiped our hands. It went on and on without anyone even from our side of the room getting much. But then almost at the end, one of our numbers hit! It was a ribeye and prawn dinner for two at a steakhouse up in Stockton. So we were pretty thrilled.

I was still kind of buzzing from that and it was almost over, so I wasn’t paying much attention any more. At the second-to-last prize, I fuzzily recognized that the first three digits were on a ticket I had. It took a second to realize that the last two were also. And I’m not much for carrying on, but I sure jumped up and squealed like a schoolgirl when I flipped through my book and saw that it sure enough was our ticket.

And what a prize! We won a 50-inch plasma TV and a base to put all of your peripherals on. I was so excited I was shaking; I’ve never won anything like that before. We hadn’t even brought our truck; we’d rode in Junior’s folks’ car. But one of our friends had, so the men all loaded up our prize and we dodged raindrops to bring it home.

I’m still grinning like a fool, and it’s two days later. Junior’s got big plans to hang it in the bedroom, bumping that one down to the kids’ game room. It sure was worth taking a weekend off from hunting!

It’s the same thing, really, from either side of the desk.

You want someone to do things with, so you go to bars or lurk online or hit your friends up for good dating material.

You want someone to work for you, so you write classifieds or lurk online or hit up friends for good employee material.

You’ve had a good long relationship and then suddenly everything goes to shit. They don’t love you any more or they go get another job or they get caught with their fingers in the till, or worse, in someone else’s till.

Then you’ve got to stress over losing that relationship, and finding a new one, and what if you don’t? What if you’re the one doing the firing, what if you’re the one looking for the new job or the new boyfriend?

It’s hard from any of the perspectives.

This new guy looks good on paper but turns out to be completely boring. This new guy has all the right certifications but isn’t allowed by his day job to branch out. That new guy needs way too much training. Do you put the money or the time into the relationship?

I suppose you don’t have to. You can get used to being alone, you can get used to doing the job entirely by yourself. It wears poorly on your sanity either way, and you really want someone to fill the hole the last guy left. You have a life to live, and can’t do it without help.

So you take a chance on a new guy, give him some time to see if he will work out. You let your heart or your career become influenced by someone else’s actions. You have a huge potential to get burned, but there’s hope for something good there. This guy turns out to be the love of your life. That guy can be entrusted with your business on the weekends. Maybe one of them can help you make the business better, but you won’t ever know unless you try, unless you risk.

Risking the business seems scarier than risking the heart did. Maybe that’s coming from the perspective of having emotional safety now, but dating never involved the potential of destroying your livelihood, not the way you did it back then. This though, this hiring of someone new to replace someone dependable, this is terrifying. Having the only candidate be somewhat inexperienced is unsettling. Having this all happening now, at the start of hunting season is directly related to Saint Murphy.

The training of the new guy starts tomorrow. It was supposed to start today, and didn’t. This is not a good sign.

We’d planned to hike down to the top of Yosemite Falls this weekend from Tioga Road, but with a big fire in Yosemite, that wasn’t going to happen. Thwarted by the nasty trifecta of road closures, smoke, and holiday weekend crowds, we spent a couple of evenings happily poring over topo maps to pick a new destination.

I am every bit as fond of the Emigrant Wilderness as I am of Yosemite’s backcountry, so I was leaning that way. Junior’s dad has taken some hikes that sort of hit both parks, and suggested one of those. The trailhead to Kibbie Lake also contains a trailhead to the south end of the Emigrant, but the lake is actually inside Yosemite. It looked like a good distance for us, 4.2 miles each way. We might be able to squeeze in another short hike that day too, or go sight in a rifle or check out camp.

So we planned for that one and got up early. Might as well start getting used to that part of hunting season too after all. After breakfast on the road, we found the road to the trailhead closed off for firefighters, and went around the long way. But we weren’t that late for a day hike, so we got on with it.

The first mile of the trail was a good uphill pull. I think I’ll root for uphills at the start of a hike on the basis of them being downhills at the very end. The hike to North Dome the other way was the opposite way and it liked to have killed me by the time we got back to the truck.

Most of the trail was very easy walking. A little up and down here and there, but lots of flat. I wouldn’t hesitate to bring the kids on this one once they can go eight miles without complaining.

We saw bear sign on the trail and what I think was a lion turd, but not much else. We jumped a doe who just moved over a few feet and went back to bed. There were a few other hikers too, but it certainly wasn’t crowded.

The smoke from the fires to the south could have been a problem. I fight asthma anyway and a smokey day can make life pretty miserable for me. It didn’t help, and I was sucking on the inhaler a few times where I didn’t have to touch it at all on a more strenuous hike two weeks ago. That wasn’t a ton of fun.

Once we got to the lake, it was lunchtime. We walked around on the granite and noticed what looked like a trail through the water to an island. So we took our boots off, hitched up our shorts, and waded over to it to have a picnic. I just barely made it without getting my shorts wet and it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as you’d expect a glacial lake to be. We sat down in the sun and had a beautiful meal and then poked around the lake some more before we decided to head back.

The asthma was getting to me by the time we finished so we didn’t go on any more hikes, just drove around and checked out camp, admired some deer, and had dinner at the casino on the way home. It was a great trip, but one of the best things about it is that it was the last non-hunting trip of the season. The hiking this summer was all about getting ready for hunting season; it’s been fun in its own right, but the actual purpose of it is just about upon us. We’ll have a head start on adjusting to the exercise and elevation of bear of deer hunting. Quail and squirrel season starts next weekend and we’re going to bring the trailer up to camp then too. We both always start getting excited at this time of year and actually being up there really gets the anticipation going. Five more days and we’ll be back!

In our continuing pursuit of getting into appropriate shape for hunting season (which is only a month away,) we took ourselves another hike this weekend. In the last episode, we’d driven by the trailhead to North Dome but decided that it was a little too far for rookie hikers to start in the middle of the afternoon.

 

This time, we planned to get after it a little earlier, and boned up on maps and hiking equipment. We plan to do some overnighters starting next spring, so we went a little overkill for our day hike just to test some things out. We dropped off the kids at school and headed for Yosemite on Friday morning, turning up at the trailhead at about 11 AM.

 

It was a little bit of a cold start for me, with the uphills kicking my butt a bit. Still, I’m in much better shape than I was 30 pounds ago, and part of this trip was to see how I did with the asthma and the altitude. The first half of the hike was pleasantly shaded by the same kind of forest we hunt in, at about 8000 feet.  We came across a doe who couldn’t care less about our presence – those Park deer are totally immune to people – so we watched her for a while.

Once we got to a real uphill pull, I started to flag. Junior walked up ahead for a bit so he could push himself physically too, and eventually we came back together. His walking back and forth to me may have added a half mile to his weekend’s mileage total. When we rounded the point of that hill, everything changed. What was once shady forest floor was suddenly bare granite spotted with trees here and there.

 

We walked out onto Indian Point, at first thinking it was North Dome thanks to the great view of Half Dome to our left. But every time we came to what looked like the end of a dome, we’d look down and there would be more, accessible just over the crest. We were off the trail by then but found it again as we kept going down. I hated to look behind us, because every step down means two or three back up for me. Once we could see North Dome, we obviously had to drop off even lower and come back up it, so we paced ourselves, had a little chocolate fortification, and got to it.

 

It happened to be that everyone on the Dome at that time was coming off of it, and we were the only ones going up. So once we got there, we had the entire thing to ourselves, spectacular views and all. Now, views are nice and all, but not usually my driving force, but this was incredible. It’s just like us to stumble upon the most fantastic vista in all of Yosemite on our first hiking trip. How are we going to top that next time?

We circled the dome. You’ve got a 360-degree viewpoint from there which encompasses the Yosemite Valley, the Merced River, the front face of Half Dome, Glacier Point, Nevada Falls, Basket Dome, and a whole hell of a lot of high country wildlands beyond. For once, the air was pretty clear up there; I’ve seen Yosemite with such a haze that the mountains are hard to pick out, but this was almost as clear as after a scrubbing thunderstorm, but without the lightning hazard.

 

We must have spent an hour up there, all by ourselves save for a bold chipmunk and a red-tailed hawk flying below. We could see other trails headed other places, and immediately swore to ourselves that we’d be on them.  As crowded and annoying as the valley floor gets, this was as far along the scale towards peaceful.

 

On the way back, Junior carried my pack through the worst of the climb. Pride was going to stop me from that but common sense prevailed. We found the trail back up Indian Ridge that didn’t go straight up the nose, so it wasn’t quite as hard going as it could have been. When we hit the breakover point between up and down, we sat down and tested out one of our backpacking stove options with a little freeze-dried lunch. We learned a couple of lessons with that that I’m glad came to us on a day hike and not in the middle of nowhere; namely that my belly really does not care for a full meal while still hiking and that small snacks are the way to go until we make camp. Good to know.

 

By the time we got back to the truck, we’d gone nine miles. Our legs were both tired but we weren’t exhausted. Neither were we ready to call it a weekend, so in spite of only having packed day packs, we pointed the wheels east instead of west. We thought we’d try to get a room in Lee Vining, but ten minutes of circling that town twice (in a summer squall) made it clear that that wasn’t going to happen. As a last resort we spotted Lee Vining’s Chamber of Commerce office and bookstore, and popped in there. The lady working there was a jewel; she told us to head for June Lake, ten miles south, and gave us a flier with hotel phone numbers on it, and suggested one to try. Sure enough, they had plenty of rooms, so we booked a lakeside king and handed our phone to some also-stranded Italian tourists so they could book one too. Then we dropped some money as I discovered that my husband, who is not much for recreational fiction reading, has a serious jones for reference books. I’m happy to play along with that game, so we came out three books and an atlas richer, as well as a complimentary membership to the Mono Lake Committee complete with a neat steel canteen.

 

We seem to have a gift for leaping blindly and coming up roses these days, and June Lake was exactly our sort of place. It may have been a little touristy, but it’s fishing-touristy, not city-touristy. Only thing was, we rolled in after the sole minimart had closed, so we had to scramble to find a toothbrush the next morning. At least we weren’t out of place in our camoflauge in a higher-end restaurant at dinner. That’s the sort of town where they wonder if you’re bowhunters (that season is open) rather than wonder if you’re crackpots.

 

Our token reaason for going east was to see the Devil’s Postpile National Monument. I vaguely remembered seeing it when I was a kid, so it was on my list of road trips to be taken. We really weren’t all that far away, so off we went. I hadn’t realized that to get there you have to catch a bus from the very crowded Mammoth Ski Resort, which is a serious mountain bike place in the summer. It was a little bit of a shock, going from peaceful solitude to a sardine can, but there wasn’t any point in turning around.

 

We hiked down to the Postpile, which was pretty damn cool, and then kept going down to Rainbow Falls. Apparently you can see rainbows there almost any time of day, but not on a day threatening to storm on us. Still, it added another four miles to our weekend total, and got us to see some things which we otherwise wouldn’t have. But every time I see Yosemite, it just makes me want to see more of it, and I think I got my fill of Mammoth in the one shot. Too many people.

 

Come late afternoon, we were sore and ready to start heading home. Back over Tioga Pass we went with another stop in the Tuolumne Meadows Visitor’s Center for some more reference books and maps. Junior intends to learn to use a compass if it kills us, and I’m having a hard time remembering exactly how to teach it, but we found a good started book on the subject.

 

He wanted to see the Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequoias on the way home, so that was our last stop. It’s a two-mile round trip hike, but the first mile is all downhill. Unfortunately, that of course means the last mile is all uphill, and after we saw our very large trees, I got the bit in my mouth and may have become a little stubborn. I was damned if I was going to let the last mile of fifteen kick my ass, so I put it down into granny gear, breathed like a freight train, and huffed and puffed my way up that trail without stopping once. I didn’t even need my inhaler; at this time last year, a hundred feet uphill would have had me wheezing. 

So our trip was an unqualified success. We did more than we’d intended to do and had a great time doing it. Now it’s time to plan one last hike before hunting season starts and our hiking reverts to involving dogs and firearms and dragging large amounts of weight behind us. This will be the most prepared for any season I’ll have been, and I plan to get to twice the number of trees as I did last year, all the better to take the pictures.