Into Oregon, Volcano Country

We left California entirely behind as we moved into a lushly green forested land. Oregon has some stunning mountain scenery poking up from among the trees. The land formations in this part of the country were not made the same way as those in Utah. Oregon has actual volcanoes considered still active by those who know such things, even though none has done any more than burp in recent times.

“If I hadn't seen Utah first,” John lamented at one scenic point, as he and Debbie rounded a corner to find a panoramic valley laid out before them, interrupted by hills and fringed with mountains  The scene was as vast and beautiful as we had encountered further south. Just more green, is all.

After searching around a bit, we found Crater Lake. It has no shores to speak of, just high rocky walls all around that slowly erode into the lake with each spring's snowmelt.  ''I will never see this blue a blue again,” mused Debbie. This lake is extremely deep, more so than any of the Great Lakes. John was asking himself if this were a meteoric lake, when the two of us learned there was nothing alien about it. Geologists had puzzled out that the ancient lava-built mountain that had stood here originally, Mount Mazama, had a huge magma chamber deep under it. Seemingly in unique coincidence, it sprouted cracks to the surface all around the perimeter and, all at the same time, they began venting magma high into the air in the form of pumice, ash, and hot gasses. When these simultaneous eruptions were done, there was not much left in the chamber underneath, so the entire top of the mountain collapsed into what, essentially, was the empty basement. They figure that happened in just two or three hours. Or maybe days. They're not sure, but it would've been fun to watch, yes?

Wizard Island is a volcano in a volcano

The blue results from the 1900 foot depth

A few centuries of heavy snow (44 feet per year!) melting each spring filled the bowl that remained and it has stayed this way ever since. Only melted snow goes in. Only evaporation (and a like amount of mysterious underground seepage) goes out.  Crater Lake has been like this for about 7-1/2 thousand years.  A new volcano erupted, beginning to grow inside the lake, forming an island inside the crater. All these will erupt again. Some day. Scientists do not expect it will be anytime soon, however.

There have been more recent volcanoes. From Bend, OR, we were able to climb up and into some of them. Lava Lands National Park has an “active volcano” that spewed

molten lava 1,300 years ago, the most recent of any in that state. The type of magma made a volcanic glass called obsidian. Debbie climbed a steep stair to wander among many acres of this “glass rock”. Park Rangers tell us the Indians in that area would come to that area to gather shards for making arrowheads. Obsidian glass holds a very sharp knife edge, much like the “ceramic knife” you may have in your kitchen.

Nearby, the Mackenzie-Santiam Scenic Byway drive took us up the cindercones of other volcanoes. During the Depression, a government CCC project built an observatory near the top of Belknap Crater.

From here you see several area mountains, including some of the more famous. If you're adventurous, you can park and hike across the tumbled boulders inside the currently dormant cones of these things.

Get this view while picking the
blueberries in the foreground!

We're going to meet with John's brother, Bill, and his wife, Alex, near Seattle in mid-July, so Debbie's frantic plans to get us situated for this heavy tourist month took us from the area around Bend a bit farther north to Parkdale. It's a small town that would have remained unknown to us except that a farm near there is one in the Harvest Host association (see our #3).  Montavon's Berry Farm is a U-Pick operation for raspberries, blueberries, and

cherries. When we parked the Bry RV there, we discovered it faces another volcano, Mount Hood. John and Debbie picked a few pounds of cherries, looking up at the mountain the entire time. It was the first thing we saw out our motor coach's windshield each morning and the last thing at night. We would take our appetizer and drinks outside just to look at it in the evening.

Here's one more since we can't get enough of this view:

Further north, the Columbia River flows along a huge valley created by much more ancient volcanic flows, then eroded by the water flow.

Here the river flows along I-84 headed for the Pacific Ocean, behind us, to the west. The water in the river comes from smaller rivers all along its route, but because the surrounding land is so high –and because the big river has cut so deeply into the volcanic debris that covers the state-- many of those smaller rivers become stunning waterfalls. One of the more spectacular is Multnomah Falls. 

You can see it's quite popular, too (and this was a mid-week Thursday). The small parking lot and the narrow two-lane US-30 were just overwhelmed. We spent a good half-hour creeping ahead until we, too, could park and explore. 

Crossing the river, we crossed the state line into Washington, where the most famous and still very active volcano of our times is Mount St Helens. (Debbie allows that Hawaiians may disagree.) This is what it looks like today, nearly 40 years after the top 1,300 feet of the mountain disappeared in 1980, much of it falling into the valley below, but some of it becoming thick clouds of debris that drifted around the world in the weeks after the eruption.  The landslide was 3.3 billion cubic yards, equivalent to 1 million Olympic swimming pools.

The ranger suggested that to visualize the amount of mass removed from the mountain by the landslide, draw a line using the angle of the remaining sides to see how much of the mountain fell down into the valley below.

Fifty-seven people died that Sunday despite the blast's effects extending out many, many miles. Population density around here is nowhere near what you're used to back East.

Next  up:  Bill and Alex.

Northern California

From the Peanuts Place, we explored that section of California after getting some essentials from the magic delivery at an Amazon Locker. We drove north and south from our campground over a few days, just looking around the coast mostly. We even attended Rockin' Friday Night in Cloverdale itself. They had shut down a couple blocks right downtown, hosted food and trinket vendors, and had some live local music. We did not have a hunger for trinkets, but Debbie allowed us to spend wayyy more money that she would have liked on unique local eats. We'd rather spend $48 on that than at Applebee's or some such any day. Been there, done those. We both discovered a unique (to us) roasted corn on the cob at one food booth called Mexican Street Corn. Both of us considered it really tasty and maybe we'll try to duplicate it. We had discovered Vietnamese sate at GR's Arts Festival near-about 40 years ago, and it's been a staple in Debbie's repertoire since.

It's closing-in on the 4^th of July and Debbie –our non-planner, remember-- begins to panic when thinking of the hordes of coaches, trailers, and pop-ups that might already have crowded us out of living quarters for the upcoming month. She gets online and starts making reservations here and there.

In the next few weeks, we found ourselves in several RV Parks, including one just down the road from The Legend of Bigfoot 

and across the street from both The Famous One-Log House and the World Famous Grandfather Tree.

Don't feel bad about the latter two; we'd never heard of either ourselves before reading the signs.

And, sorry, Sasquatch remains an unsubstantiated myth.

We also found a number of “preserves” dedicated to Saving The Coastal Redwoods. The thing is, as we discovered while driving along US-101, the Redwoods are very numerous in this part of the state and pretty much free-range flora; they really don't seem to need to be kept in pens.

On many sections of road, they were close enough to the asphalt that we expected them to jump in front of our car! And big enough to scare the bejeebers out you as they do.

Then there's the Mendocino Botanical Garden, which was somewhat extensive in size, squeezed between other coastal properties, but here only a small part of it is actively tended; we found the presentation -uh- eclectic, if not downright chaotic and non-educational. Rhododendrons especially abounded –as they do on most properties in this environ –and back in Michigan –and along parts of the Appalachian Trail that John has hiked back on that other coast.

Mendocino is a small town that also had a sort of Farmer's Market Day going when we were there. Debbie bought a cheese to try with our pre-dinner wine. It was pretty okay.

We discovered Shelter Cove along this state's  “Lost Coast” which is so named because, at one time, the only way to get to there was by boat. The steep California hills had stymied road building for a long time. These days it also has its own airport: Shelter Cove, 0Q5. It's about like Jenison's strip, but near foothills, with newer asphalt.

The narrow two-lane road leading to it off US-101 today is about 18 miles long, which is to say, a three-quarter hour drive.  It is posted at 55mph with 10- or 20mph yellow advisory signs at almost all the curves, which are nearly contiguous to the others! Debbie kept accusing John of drifting through the hairpins as he were in a video game. Boy, does he miss his Jeep!

Local volcanic rock fills the beaches with Black Sand along much of Northern California.

One evening we had our appetizer and drinks at the Benbow Inn, on the terrace overlooking the river, served by a real waitress who brought us salmon pâté and caviar. It wasn't even our anniversary; we just felt like pretending to be the kind of people who would do that, instead of divvying up a bottle of wine and tasty cheese on the lawn aside our home-with-six-wheels (or throwing money at BigFoot "souvenirs"). We left before the guitarist finished his acoustic warm-up. Debbie was singing along with Sweet Baby James Taylor's Fire and Rain lyrics.

As pervasive as the Sasquatch mythology seems to be in this part of the country, there are real life –alive– attractions. Our last California camp was at the Elk Country RV Park, not far from the coast, near Trinidad. The park's manager was adamant that we not bother the elk, but we were disappointed not to see any even though signs in the area warned of the hazards of encounters.

The next morning, however, we woke up to find a couple dozen females had settled into the front lawn.  The manager was kept busy shooing folks off.

A few miles up the road, at a state park, the guys were hanging out in longer grass.

Apparently these animals are like 7^th graders; the two sexes would rather be in their separate groups unless there are special social events.
 We call 'em “school dances.” They call it “the Rut.”

Those NorCal day trips finally led us to explore into Oregon, where it turned out John had married a Planner after all.
In the week before crossing the state line to the north, Debbie asked about 42 times what the latest mile-per-gallon cell showed on John's TripWest fuel spreadsheet, fretting that we might have to pay California's bandit tax for ten or 12 extra gallons of diesel just to get into blissful Oregon. As it turned out, when we did fill the tank at Grant's Pass, it took a little more than 120 gallons. The tank will hold 150. You see why Debbie's been scheming. Why should we donate that kind of fuel tax to a state government for which we have no respect?

She'd had us fill on Morongo tribal reservation land in western Arizona where there was no tax at all in the last week of May (but they charge just a little less than the stations that do need to pay tax, and apparently, keep the extra profit). Then she gritted her teeth for half a tank of $4++ diesel in Salinas, CA, in June. She'd planned our next fill up for Carson City, Nevada at the end of June where diesel was about 1.40 under California's $4.30/gal. And now –July 10th-- diesel at an Oregon Fred Meyer was only $3.19/gallon. Take that, Gavin Newsom, and stick it!

By the way, if you've not been West, don't confuse Fred Meyer with Fred Meijer, even though they're both in the same business and you could step from one store into the other without noticing any difference except the spelling. In the Eastern time zone, Meijer's family apparently had lagged Meyer's in the grocery biz by a dozen years.

Getting into Oregon we discover the state seems cruelly divided into high mountain sections with valley sections between and very few east-west roads connecting them. The coast is ragged with rocks, the mountains are many and some are still active volcanoes: Jefferson, Hood, and, of course, Mount Saint Helens. All are on our list for the weeks ahead.

There's a Kite Eating Tree in Santa Rosa

From the inland mined-out desert, we moved to the coast again. Our RV Park was next to the Russian River somewhat south of Cloverdale, CA. The funny thing about the internet, at least for us, is that we really don't search for wonderful things until we're near an area, then we happen on awesome unknown places like the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

Archivist Sarah answers Debbie's 

question within minutes, showing 

the 1950 strip in which Snoopy 

danced on two legs for the very 

first time.

Research Center? you may scoff. The kindly older lady who took our tickets said many people come simply to study this man's work. She seemed happily content just to be there, lively talking with us for a few minutes about the wide range of visitors who come to learn more about Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the whole Peanuts gang. 

 It seemed to John that the visitors broke into three distinct groups. We, who grew up spreading the paper on the floor to devour the comics section every day, wore huge nostalgic smiles.  Nothing could bother us in the hours we were there; we were eagerly excited, immersed in our innocent nostalgia, and we saw each other walk with a youthful bounce.

The 40-and-under folks who'd brought their own children wore smiles, too, but you could tell they were not our deep seated smiles. Their memories always had included that little yellow bird. Woodstock, to them, was just a note in their history classes, not a continent-wide, personally defining moment.

 And their kids just whined, “When are we going home? ”
Shuddup, kid, and go google “newspaper.”

Schulz was “Sparky” to everyone who knew him and everyone here praises him. He built an ice skating center there in Santa Rosa. He ate the same breakfast at his same table every day at the same restaurant, The Warm Puppy. His secretary went through the trash every day to take home the crumpled preliminary sketches and iron them flat again. The Museum was honored when she donated those keepsakes.

A replica of his work studio is on the second floor here, including the scratched wall behind the chair from leaning back while thinking. 

It seemed we could wrap this place around ourselves for a long visit, but the rest of the world is out there, too. We'll go back some day perhaps. The exhibits change regularly. Schulz drew nearly 18-thousand strips. One 70-year old docent admitted that he read five every day with his morning coffee –and hopes to live long enough to finish them.

We'll leave you with two points that man made in a soft, wistful tone of voice while touring us around: Charlie Brown never did manage to kick that football; and he never –ever– spoke to the Little Red-Haired Girl.

Gold Rush Towns & Lake Tahoe

Leaving Yosemite, Ken's plan was to rent a car, drive up through the Sonora Pass, and take two scenic days getting himself to his desert home in SoCal while his sister and brother-in-law continued exploring California to the more verdant north.

We ended up near Columbia, an historic town that happened to be on our travel route through Sonora. It also, as we adventitiously learned, happened to be an historic town taken over by the state government to become a re-enactment village. Government workers, docents and happy-to-be-there volunteers were populating the old buildings that dated from the mid-1800's. Sutter's Mill wasn't too far away, and in that same year of 1848, a couple guys happened to kick over a rock and find gold in Columbia. We call it the “49'ers Gold Rush” these days because they didn't have Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest, so it took time for the word to spread.

Within a couple years the area's population had gone from almost zero to thousands. Our State Parks tour guide, Ryan, was an excited fount of enthusiastically detailed information about the people there then. It took a couple weeks, nevertheless, to appreciate that this town actually was a microcosm of The 49er's.  The town and Ryan's vivid descriptions encapsulated the whole Gold Rush era, pretty much.  We were going to stay just one night to drop Ken at the car-rental, but this –just down the road a piece– had us extending at our RV park another day just to explore. We consider discoveries like this better than cake icing.

Okay, that was a lie, but– See how freewheeling, educational, and entertaining life can be when you're retired?

So next stop is Lake Tahoe. John has to admit that, even though Bonanza was a favorite show for years as a teen, he never actually had put two-and-two together on that burning map. Ohhh! That Lake Tahoe! And that Virginia City! There's nothing more self-embarrassing than a fifty year overdue Duh! slapping you upside your head.

But then Debbie admitted she's always had the idea that the Calaveras County of Mark Twain's celebrated jumping frog was closer to Missouri.  Perceptions changed as we found place-name after place-name north of Sonora along the lines of Clemens Highway or Twain Boulevard or Riverboat Mall or Jumpin' Bar and Grill or.... You get the picture.  

We stayed near Carson City, Nevada, and drove our Honda to the no-longer mythological towns of Silver City and Virginia City. Debbie was just thrilled to see the California gasoline tax disappear and immediately implemented the next step in her long-laid-out plan to screw that greedy state's government out of our big 7mpg diesel fuel tax bonanza. Stay tuned to see how that worked out in the end.

Silver City ain't much. Truly. Just some small rundown buildings and a nearly bare hill overlooking a valley on which three signs sing of the late 1800's when the rare metal ores were mined there. One board named some local people who died in the pursuit including one Richard Brey.  John's brother, Bill, has done some extensive digging into the family past and found that we may originally have been Breys ourselves, but for something of an emotional schism in Pennsylvania and New Jersey at some point. Our branch seems to have dropped the “e” sometime before the birth of JCB, Sr. We never knew him; John's Dad never knew the man who's name he carried, but passed it on nonetheless. And, yes, there is a John, IV, who now lives with his own family four time zones north and west of the ancestral Brey/Bry home.

The next town over is Virginia City, the real life Western town that fictional Ben, and his sons, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe always did business in. Thank you TV show for turning this otherwise sleepy place into a six block long jumpin' Tourist Trap (italics and capitals!) with everybody trying to get into our pockets:  four museums each charging admission, a newspaper office (Mark Twain wrote here!), hotel (with rooms to let), saloons (dispensing drinks), and two Honest To Real cowboys tossin' their six shooters in the street and crackin' the bullwhip while loudly proclaiming their Wild West Shootout Starts at One O'clock Just Up The Street.

Debbie and John aren't amused.  John is affronted.  We've been to Disneyworld, where fantasy is done professionally and very well. On the other hand, we are wandering America's West for the first time in our lives and –if the town really has nothing but history going for it– we would appreciate a less fantasmagorical presentation. We can't help but compare to Ryan, the state government tour guide in Columbia, CA, who was so enthusiastic about the personal stories of real people that he'd unearthed there. But Debbie forgives, arguing that Columbia was a somewhat staid government production while this is a hodgepodge of private enterprise, real people trying to earn a real living instead of sucking off an entire population's taxes.  John just wishes it were a lot more classy.  

After spending $4 apiece on one museum that focused on 1850's mining equipment (what else?) and refusing to take a picture of the gun-totin' rootin' tootin' bullwhip cracker, we got in the car and turned at a right angle to head out of town on the very first street we saw.  That was John's perception, anyway; Debbie just wanted to git outta Dod- er, Virginia City.

It was called Six Mile Canyon Road and dropped sharply from the fake glitz to wander among closely spaced steep hills that never cease to thrill us flatlanders. It followed a creek and was very near totally undeveloped.  Debbie was commenting that this probably looked exactly the same as it had for centuries.    John could envision miners with their pack mules camping under the cottonwoods at one bend, and cowhands sweaty off the trail under the next. {So, who's fantasizing now? --blush}
John was a bit surprised to see a familiar pattern in the desert of greener brush along the creek banks morphing into groves of trees at the bends where the water slowed down; he had unconsciously noted this exact pattern in every cowboy movie he'd seen. Seeing it in person, now, he understood why, and appreciated how those small, lusher areas became favored camping spots between the arid hills.  This is The West.
The real Virginia City, by the way, sits on a hilly steep ridge, not the flat studio lot of Bonanza.

The only thing of note for John from that town had been in the museum where some wine glasses were on display. They had belonged to a rich guy who was interwoven into the area's history. It was Debbie who got it first; the gold rim on each glass has the exact same pattern that a set of tumblers

has in our house in Michigan. They had come to us from John, Jr's mother and aunts. We'd known they were old but now we wonder: are they from the same set? If so, how did they become separated from his mansion in Nevada to end up in a Philadelphia home where they came to the table every Thanksgiving and Christmas as they do now in ours? Did Me-Ma and her two sisters know Adolph Sutro's family? And how? All intriguing questions, but in the end probably not worth the time to track down and –really– only of curiosity value to John, his brother, and sister anymore anyway. 
Ahhh-- ...well, maybe they came from Woolworth's.

Back to the modern day at Lake Tahoe, John appreciated the whimsy of this beer can tab chain that obviously has been in progress on this tree's limb for some time. Either that or there was a heckuva party here! Debbie wanted to know why he was wasting pictures. Unlike decades earlier, he could safely ignore her because there is no one-use-only film in this camera. 

Today we drove south around the east end of Lake Tahoe, which is nicely blue when you can see it past the crowded tourist infrastructure. Toward the south end, we ended up at a federal Park preserving some nearly hundred year old vacation cottages built by wealthy folk. Here we could even touch the water.

Interestingly, every “Dogs Must Be Leashed” sign included the specific cite from the Code of Federal Regulations. John wonders what sort of bureaucratic psyche is so weak that it must justify such an innocuous order– and take money from our pockets to pay for it.  Does the guy even have a chin?  

If Lake Tahoe were a wall clock, we'd gotten around to Emerald Bay at the eight o'clock position when it was late enough that we wanted to get back to the coach for our own dinner. The next day, we set out westward to Lake Tahoe again, but turned right to go north and west. We stopped at Lupita's near Crystal Bay for an “authentic Mexican” lunch of chili relleno and a burrito. John is so into West Michigan Mexican that he had not noticed the lack of “wet” in the burrito's title. It was tasty and good, but not anything at all like the Beltline Bar's version. Almost finger-food really.

We continued driving counter-clockwise until we reached Dollar Point, which actually seems to have properties of lesser value than the previous cluster of homes that had some other forgettable name.

The next day, Debbie determined to go back to Emerald Bay and walk the mile down to tour the "Vikingsholm," another uniquely personal vacation property on which another well-off woman had spent her own money.   Now it's a sightseeing destination, down the steep bank to the Lake's edge.  John elected to stay in our new RV location mainly because he is anything but a Parade of Homes type of guy.  Also, our coach now is parked on a bounteously beautiful BLM site near Truckee, CA, overlooking a gorgeous lake with a snow capped mountain in the background. He was trying to catch up on these

blog postings, but spent much of the time immersed in the scenery, instead. When we first arrived later in the day before, John had busied himself with setting up the coach, then settled in for a nap, so it was not until our wine-and-cheese moment that we try to reserve before dinner that he'd taken the time to actually look at our surroundings.  His first words were heartfelt and contentedly appreciative, "I could die here."  Debbie suggested that perhaps we could enjoy it without going to that extreme.   The view so mesmerized the two of us that we forgot all about taking pictures, until we snapped phone-cam shots just before leaving. D'oh! Your loss; our memories until we do pass.

Speaking of death, our camp on the Prosser Reservoir was not far from Donner Pass. That would be the Donner Pass of your history books where 87 pioneers hoping to find their new land were caught by an early high country snowy winter and some survivors fell to eating the only meat available. On the way in, we had passed a sign that pointed toward the “Donner Camp Picnic Area.” Both of us thought aloud that, perhaps, the government could have reconsidered that designation.

We're working our way north toward the Seattle area for mid-July to meet up with John's brother Bill. Thing is, NorCal is relatively primitive compared to Palm Springs, LA, San Francisco –and we like rural sightseeing anyway. We spent nearly two full weeks totally out of touch. Entire days with no bars on the phone, or on the internet 4G box either.

Stay tuned to find out how much fun it was.

Yosemite Remains Awesome

After our night stuck in Lodi, we got to the Yosemite National Park area. Not without another adventure, though. This time, it was John at the wheel when the RV sustained another oopsie. The west road into Yosemite, US 120, is NOT big-rig friendly. Oh, you can do it, but you just don't want to. Really. Very narrow, very twisty, very climbing, and for the two agoraphobic passengers in the RV, very near the edge. Also there's a state law that says slow vehicles must allow faster ones to pass. However, it is the best route in for a big rig.

John had pulled to one side of the road to let another line of cars past and was too close to the guard rail. One bolt head scraped about 25'feet of paint (but not much skin) off the right side, a straight and long line. Last fall's oopsie in the UP cost us a bit over $2,000 to repair a 3x6 foot patch of what really was a minor tree scrape eight feet off the ground.

John knows this will be a bit more, but we can put it off till the winter since it is purely cosmetic and does not impede the coach's “basement” cargo accessibility. Embarrassingly, brother-in-law Ken was in the co-pilot seat at the time. Oh, well.

Nothing else untoward occurred before we pulled into the Yosemite Lakes RV Park which is still quite some distance from the valley section of the park. RV parking also was deep in a mountain hollow with a tortuously steep downhill twist, another nice Thousand Trails park with good shade, right along a river bank for Debbie and Ken's traditional morning coffee.

We're here a total of four days with absolutely no signal for any of our phones. That means no internet, too.  Oh, well.  We're not here to make calls or upload blog pages; we're primarily here to explore Yosemite. The first day found us taking our car further east and surprising us with an awesome scene after popping out of one tunnel. Undomesticated water falls! Free Range mountain terrain! And, one bar on the phones; briefly, we each received some pending text messages but the replies may or may not have been returned.

Hetch Hetchy stuns on the drive in

After checking the visitor's center for maps and Ranger advice, we decided to visit the Hetch Hetchy reservoir first. The bill was signed by 1913's President to build a dam and flood the valley, gathering all the winter's snows. Information signs at the dam tell us this is the most significant source of drinking water for the entire –and quite distant– San Francisco area. Not everyone agrees that the best environmental decision was made when this dam was built. Harrison Ford (pilot of the Millennium Falcon among other roles) has some YouTube postings of an emotional appeal “to restore Hetch Hetchy to the American people.”

Water shot through turbines at the dam on the day we were there while the Green hydro-electrons danced away in the power lines to the west. But just talking about this picture cannot convey the beauty and awesome wonder of it all. The valleys with the runoff water are deeply cut with steep sides and crowded with trees and bushes. Mountaintops rise all around, much higher than we. Here in the third week of June, snow remained on many of them. They'd had a lot this past winter and huge waterfalls gushed from on-high, cascading the snow melt to the reservoir lake itself. Awed, by the time we'd driven back to the main road, the day was pretty much shot.

The next day, we were intent on Yosemite Valley itself, overlooked by the famous Half Dome mountain top. Debbie finally has a hiking buddy in her brother. John's fallen arch, acquired with irony at Arches in Utah, is still a mobility problem and he had not kept up with the more athletic Debbie for several years anyway. Ken, who had done this hike in his 40's, thought they could get to the top of Vernal Falls and back in 2-1/2-hours. Not a problem for John, who is working through the first book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy for perhaps the fourth time in his life, He figures to find a shaded spot and explore Middle Earth again through this dense but wonderful read. As they usually do when the possibility of separation exists, both he and Debbie have their little FRS walkie-talkies. There's no phone service, and at least we might talk up to a half mile. When they get back, we'll drive down to Glacier Point for another scenic view across the valley.

Three and a half hours later, John is well-read, well-napped, and seriously thinking to report the overdue hikers to a Ranger. He's not much worried because this is a very crowded National Park and, if his wife and her brother had gotten into trouble on the popular trail, he was sure somebody would be near. Nevertheless, he had just decided to give them a half hour more before raising the alarm when the radio crackled to life. Debbie reported, amid a lot of weak-signal static, that they were at the top of the falls and that their desire to hike had exceeded their grasp of their abilities (and their late-60's ages!). She said it might be another hour and a half before they could be back. Debbie was just amazed the little UHF radios carried the distance. So was John, who is a former Amateur Radio ham, realizing that she must be quite a bit higher than he for the two-mile-plus range to work.

The hike up the Mist Trail to the top of Vernal Falls was amazing, but also strenuous. After walking half a mile to the trail from the car, Ken and Debbie started up the moderate 0.8 mile trek to the bottom of the falls; only a 400 foot gain in elevation on this part of the trail.  There is a bridge at the bottom that crosses the Merced River, and standing on it provides a wonderful view of the falls and the river thundering down out of it. Then the trail gets steeper when we hit the steps section.  There is a 600 foot elevation gain
in the next 0.4 mile trail.

Much of the trail from the bottom to the top of the Falls was made of cut pieces of stone, and the steps were steep. When Ken had taken this hike decades earlier, it was later in summer, and he recalls a gentle mist blowing over as he climbed this portion. However, our hike was earlier in the summer (June 15) and the amount of snow this year (and therefore the amount of snow melt coming down the river and falls) was larger than usual. Instead of a mist, there was a goodly section where we had cold water raining down on us as we climbed up the steep steps. We

were not prepared for this, so when we made it to the top of the falls, we were wet, cold, and our boots and socks were well past soaked. To say that the view and the sounds of the falls was amazing would be a gross understatement. Words fail. In addition to the sound and intensity of the falls, the rapids leading up to, and emerging from the bottom of, the falls were also stunning. Huge rocks as large as 2 story buildings and weighing many tons each were scattered about the river, and the roar of the water rushing violently over and around them was thrilling. After recovering from our hike up, thankfully being able to contact John, and enjoying the view from the top, we hiked back down and rejoined John in the car.  The Mist trail actually continues past Nevada Falls to the top of Half Dome for those hearty souls who put this 14.2 mile round trip on their bucket list.

We then took off for Glacier Point, and were treated to another amazing view from a different perspective of the mountains and the falls we had just hiked up, in addition to Nevada Falls and Half Dome.  Stunning!