Today was our day for big trees and star-filled skies. We are camping at Hodgdon Meadows, which is at the north entrance to Yosemite. Our first stop today was the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees at the south entrance of the park. That meant lots of driving on winding, 35 MPH roads. Luckily, we had our John Grisham book to entertain us as we drove.
After an hour-and-a-half, we finally reached the road leading up to the Mariposa Grove only to discover that the parking lot was full. We would have to drive back down the hill to Wawona and catch a shuttle from there. That complicated our photo equipment choices, and the tripods were left behind.
We finally reached the Mariposa Grove about 11:30. We got our bearings and started hiking toward the Grizzly Giant;
the largest Sequoia in Yosemite. It doesn't have nearly the stature of the General Sherman Tree or the
General Grant Tree in Sequoia National Park. The Grizzly Giant is a massive tree, but doesn't seem nearly as tall as its bigger brothers.
My main goal in the Mariposa Grove was to photograph the site of Galen Clark's cabin in the upper grove. That meant hiking up and over a ridge blackened by fire. The mile to the site of Clark's cabin was a steady climb with almost no redeeming scenic qualities. A pair of blacktail deer provided much-needed entertainment about halfway up the ridge. We saw them feeding above the trail, so we found a spot ahead of them and waited. They nearly walked right up to us. I was within 3 feet of one of them without moving a step. The close proximity was good, but the background was terrible.
Revived from the rest as we photographed the deer, we finished the hike up to the site of Galen Clark's cabin. His cabin is gone, but a log cabin museum stands in its place. Clark's original cabin sat at the head of a small meadow which was surrounded by giant sequoias. I can imagine Galen Clark sitting on his porch watching the deer feed in the meadow while being completely dwarfed by the size of the giant sequoias. He had his own bit of heaven.
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This was our turnaround point, so we decided to take a different trail back to the shuttle stop. It was a half mile longer, but it provided views of the Clothespin Tree and the Faithful Couple. At the Faithful Couple Tree, a young couple asked us to photograph them beside the "Faithful Couple" sign. As we neared the parking lot, we discovered an area with snow plants scattered throughout the hillside. In one spot, there must have been 20 snow plants making a bright red mound against the brown of the pine needles and rotting wood.
We took the shuttle back down to Wawona and the Explorer. After a brief refreshment break at the Wawona Store, we started for Washburn and Glacier Points. By the time we reached Washburn Point, the sun had nearly set and the good lighting was gone. Even without good lighting, it was a good opportunity to practice panoramas with the new tripod head Carol gave me for my birthday. I decided to get "tricky" and shoot an HDR panorama. That meant shooting 3 images at each location in the panorama, merging those 3 images for each location into a single HDR image, and then creating the panorama from the series of HDR images. Using a couple pieces of excellent software and the panorama head, everything worked perfectly. The lighting was still flat and the images will be throwaways, but the HDR panorama process worked great.
We reached Glacier Point
just as everyone else was leaving. They had been shooting the sunset,
but we were interested in the stars over Half Dome. After about 30 minutes, the sky started to darken
and a few stars appeared. By 9:00, the sky was filled with stars, and we began shooting in earnest.
We had about 20 minutes of shooting stars against a blue sky background. By 9:30, the sky began turning browner
and the beautiful blue background was gone. We're theorizing that we get blue skies until the end
of astronomical twilight. We're going to test our theory later in the week. We didn't get any great images,
but we're getting a little closer to figuring it out.
We finally got back to our campsite about 11:30. We were too tired to care about dinner. We downloaded our images and went to bed.
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