Sometimes the view from the office is out of this world….well, today is one of those days. The high country of Yosemite is as lovely as Yosemite Valley is. We left the “resort” around 9 am, and got to Mono Lake area around 1:00 pm. Four hour drive, nice and easy with a twenty minute layover due to road work, and many stops to just see the view. Tomorrow we are going to go back in the car and get some more shots and looks, so today there will just be a few pictures….and I hope to not duplicate tomorrow.
A little more on the Rim Fire of 2013….On this map above I put our starting point, or where we camped at the past two nights at Buck Meadows. You can see it was right on the edge of the fire. The purple line to the right of the arrow is Highway 120 where we headed east into the park through the fire zone, then north east on Tioga Road which was the south-east boarder of the fire. Eventually the road exists the fire perimeter.
So during the start of our lovely drive, we would see lots of burned trees, and we were amazed how there would be burned trees right next to trees that seem to have no damage at all. And how the left side of the road would have burned trees, while the rights side of the road had little to no damage at all. Once we got on Tioga there was around a three mile stretch where the smell of smoke was very prevalent, otherwise it was no too bad at all.
While I drove, Marcia went crazy taking pictures of trees. She sure found some nice, unusual ones
What amazed us both was how some seemed to be growing right out of the rocks.
You see any dirt up there? It looks like granite or some other stone, and they seem to be growing right out of the rocks.
As you get close to Olmstead Point, you can see the top of Half Dome. There was no room to pull into Olmstead Point, so we will make that our destination tomorrow.
And we will take tons more pictures of some real beautiful scenes.
We are at Mono Vista RV Park in Lee Vining for two nights. The park has full-hookups, some cable TV, and week Internet….but STRONG Verizon Air Card! 4G is back into our lives!!!!
And the views are not bad either….but we can’t wait to get back to the other side of them there mountains and really see the view!
As for the dogs, they are starting to get into the traveling mode again….but one of them (the sleeping one) is going though Arny withdrawals, that’s for sure.
Interesting to see how that devastating fire affected the area. You expect to see every tree burned, but it's good to see that's not the case.
ReplyDeleteYes, but after driving through it for a week two years ago, seeing it like it is now is not easy. It will grow back, but not in my lifetime since they just let things go "natural". Seems to me that man did this, so man should pitch in to fix it. When you look at the trees growing around Mount St. Helens, and then look at the very large trees growing along the lands owned by the timber industry, you can see what man can do to replenish the land with trees so much faster than nature does on its own.
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