Westfall Meadow: Easy Winter Yosemite Backpacking
While laying in our yellow slug winter tent, in the impossible quiet of the dark Yosemite forest, the question arose: When was the last time we actually backpacked in Yosemite? It was only last spring (2015), when Curtis and I backpacked to Styx Pass and Boundary Lake – an area straddling the Yosemite Wilderness and the Stanislaus Emigrant Wilderness. But does that count since we were able to get our permits from…
Cross-Country Ski to Sulphur Works: The Green Circle Trail I Always Dreamed Of
On the second day of our trip to Lassen, Curtis and I decided to ditch the windy, wet Manzanita Lake entrance and head south. The Northern California Snowshoe Routes book hadn’t really mentioned anything about this, but I had read online that you could cross country ski up the road to Sulphur Works – which sounded cool. The drive to the southern entrance to Lassen is beautiful, and it wasn’t raining! I…
Not quite Winter Camping: Manzanita Lake and Chaos Crags
Now that both Curtis and I work for branches of the government we share some of the same odd holidays. I am talking about the type of holidays that I tend to completely forget about until looking at the currents month calendar. For example Presidents Day, most notable in my mind for furniture store super-sales, is a real holiday for both of us. Score! As fate would have it, I had…
When Underwater Bridges Emerge: Old Parrotts Ferry Rd
It is raining tonight in the foothills… as it should be in March! Hopefully soon the Sierra snowpack will grow a bit, the reservoir levels will raise, and perhaps the groundwater will be replenished (if only a little bit). I am happy for the rain, but it also means that the place I chose for today’s blog post – the old Parrots Ferry bridge – might be once again become submerged…
Snowshoeing to a Frozen Tokopah Falls, Sequoia National Park
Hiking guides for popular trails rarely have give a good impression of what you will find in the winter. For example, I just typed in “Tokopah Falls Winter” into Google image search, and that 5th image is not really winter. Pah-lease, Google. And forget about it when looking for postcards: As you can see, Tokopah Falls in the summertime looks like a familiar Sierra Nevada cascading fall tumbling down granite –…
A Bright Dot Lake among Sierra Peaks, Backpacking Inyo Forest
Most of my pictures in the High Sierra focus around two opposites, a rocky peak or a watery blue lake (except, maybe, for the hundreds of photos of rock piles that may, if you look hard enough, have a pika in them). The side trip Curtis, Trails (& pup) and I took from our backpacking camp at Mildred Lake to Bright Dot Lake highlighted this even more. Bright Dot is a lake…
Hiking out to an Icy Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park
Wintertime weather in the Sequoia Giant Forest followed this pattern when we visited: A beautiful clear morning, followed by an afternoon snowstorm (complete with a gray fog obscuring any distant vista), and then the snow would slowly peter out, the clouds breaking in the middle of the night to allow all the warmer air to float away – leaving us with a frigid night under the stars. Curtis and I…
Remember that time we backpacked to Mildred and Genevieve Lakes?
There is quite a few trips from this past summer that for one reason or another I wasn’t able to blog about when it was fresh in my mind. Luckily, that usually that means I must have been prioritizing something else that was pretty cool, probably ecoSUMMIT or attending a wedding. But now in the heart of winter, denied of that thin alpine air, I am ‘wistfully’ looking organizing these…
Winter Camping in Sequoia National Park
This year Curtis and I made our thanksgiving feast in a dutch oven, over a campfire, surrounded by snow, in Sequoia National Park. Last summer we bought the ‘America the Beautiful’ all national parks annual pass, instead of the plain old Yosemite annual pass. Yosemite had upped their fees for the annual pass, so it was only a $20 difference – and great motivation to visit a laundry list of the…
Hello! I am a 30-something outdoors-lady, backpacker, and resident of Groveland, California - 
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