Dewey Point, Yosemite: Get Stuck Winter Camping Here
Contemplating a wintertime Yosemite visit? Mark my words: Someone is bound to get stuck in the snow. For example, while driving into and out of Badger Pass there is always more then one vehicle slammed into a snow bank. I could feel our car shift and try to fishtail as we approached the many shadowed portions along the road. With luck and an abundance of caution we made it safely…
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…
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 –…
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…
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…
Winter Camping: Staying Warm, Safe, and Scooped!
I know, it is already spring, why all the winter? But to be fair, I attended winter camping training the day after spring officially began and we miraculously found enough snow to winter camp in during the 2015 California drought winter. Personally, I’ve had a few “Surprise” winter camping trips in the midwest – waking up under a dumping of snow in June – and while this training was geared towards have a fun, safe, and planned…
Gin Flat Loop, Yosemite: Snowshoeing & Snow Survey Stations
On Tuesday winter had a short gasp of life & snow fell from the skies very briefly around my home in Groveland. Word is that right now the Gin Flat Loop might be snowshoe-able. But not for long. The state of California hasn’t been experiencing a winter season for the last few years, as you may have heard, so obvously there hasn’t been much in the way of snowshoe opportunities. Curtis and…
Hello! I am a 30-something outdoors-lady, backpacker, and resident of Groveland, California - 
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