A Recent Hike: A cartoon

*Note: the text may be rather small.  I believe you can click on the image which will open the image in another window.  In the new window you should be able to click on it again to zoom in.  Maybe.....

Vernal and Chilnualna Falls

I love my job.  I love my office.  I love weekends spent in my backyard.

I headed up to Vernal Falls last week for work.  One of the first views of the falls is from a bridge you cross.  Can you see the falls in the middle of the picture?

 The view looking down canyon wasn't too bad either.

 Vernal Falls!  The falls kick up a surprising amount of mist and it felt very refreshing.  There was also a lovely mist-created rainbow near the pool at the bottom.  

In the aerial photo below, the trail is in yellow.  The area between the trail and the river/falls is the mist zone.  The red lines are some of the many social trails visitors have created.  These trails are very detrimental to the vegetation and can be very slippery and very dangerous for visitors.  Our project is to determine a percent of visitors that use these social trails, their motivation for doing so, and then give the restoration team our findings so they can make restoration plans for the area.  However, there is one management hitch; some of these social trails are historic.  WHAT?!  In our meeting with the vegetation folks I needed them to repeat that for me.  Historic social trails.  Really?!  How do you manage an historic social trail?  (When I find out, I probably won't let you know because this probably doesn't interest you all that much...)

A few days later I went exploring for my weekend.  I've decided to try and hike as many miles of trail in Yosemite as I can.  Because I'm Kate, I'm taking a very systematic approach and started on the south end and decided to work my way north.  This last weekend I completed everything I wanted to do in the Wawona district of the park.

I was satisfied with my visit to the Mariposa Grove a few weeks ago and only needed a little 3.5 mile Meadow Loop.  I started this early in the morning and it was peaceful and lovely.  Then I headed up the trail toward Chilnualna Falls (it's ok, I don't know how to pronounce it either).  There was a nice loop from the falls further east that I decided needed to be seen.  My hiking routes are in red below.

There were quite a few fires burning in the area and the day started off really smokey.

By afternoon it had cleared nicely.  (Same hunk of rock, slightly different elevation.)

Along the way I startled a bear who took off.  I only saw his/her hindquarters.

The lower falls.  On the way down, that pool looked really inviting to my sore feet.

 The falls are hard to see mainly because California is so dry and there simply isn't a whole lot of water running off of anything.  It was a beautiful place to stop for a snack regardless.

I got home and tallied my miles: 19.3.  It was a long day and I was quite stiff when I tried to get out of my car after the hour and a half drive home.  I think I earned my chocolate milk that night!

Anyone wishing to take a tour of my backyard, I'm always looking for hiking buddies!

23 months later...

It happened again.  Last time I had six years and one month in between.  This time, only 23 months. 

 

I woke up Tuesday morning, looking forward to a great day.  I was going to be in the Mariposa Grove calibrating one of our trail counters and then watching a friend compete on Jeopardy! that night.  The weather forecast was perfect.

 

A little before noon, I felt a pain on my left side.  I was able to get a last reading on the counter I was calibrating.  I asked some visitors to please tell my coworker to come immediately to where we had parked the vehicle.  Kidney stone #3 was making its way out.

 

Oh my, those things hurt like no other.  And there is no relief until you get something strong pumped in you.  We were out a ways and it took a while for my coworker to get to the vehicle, for her to get a radio from trail crew who were working in the grove (in hindsight, our vehicle had a mobile unit...) and a while for the rangers to respond. 

 

Each time I have a stone I wonder if I have a really low tolerance for pain or if passing a kidney stone is just really, really painful.  I was taken by ambulance to an ER in Fresno where they finally gave me some heavy duty drugs around 4pm.  Shortly after 7pm, the stone passed.

 

It's about 3mm, so approximately the same size as my last one, but more smooth.  Amazing something that small can cause so much hurt.

Let's just say this is getting old.  I passed the stone before I got an x-ray so I don't know if there are any more stones hanging out in my kidneys and if so, how many.  I'm going to work on that.  I can only hope if there are more, that I get a nice long 6 years or more before my next one.