Laura and I had a great weekend....
It started out with work. I needed to visit a job site outside of Salinas on Thursday. I caught a ride down and when we were done I got dropped off in the little town of San Luis Bautista, where Laura picked me up at 2:00 pm.
By 3:30 pm we were on the trail at Pinnacles National Park, a truly great place to hike. Watch for when the Condors are flying for a real treat!
Here we are parked and getting ready to go
And here is Laura telling me to "come on!" (That girl loves to hike!)
We had been watching the weather all week with respect to conditions for Firefall, an annual natural occurrence in Yosemite Valley that has been on the bucket list for years. If you don't know what it is, take a look at this:
https://yosemitefirefall.com/yosemit...orsetail-fall/
We wandered our way to Yosemite on Friday and everything worked out for us. Parking was (of course) atrocious, but we found a spot and made the 1+ mile hike to the viewing location in good time and were rewarded with these views:
Well worth sharing the view with several thousand others....
Laura posted some really good pictures plus a couple of short videos as we drove into the Valley on her Instagram account, look to geologistonboard if you want to see more.
Then on Saturday we wound our way back to the Bay Area with this being one of the stops along the way. This is the Coyote Creek Cave on the Natural Bridges Trail near Vallecito CA.
Water in:
Water out:
And water immediately downstream:
We rolled in Saturday late afternoon after wandering across the Central Valley and around the base of Mt. Diablo to home. Thursday and Friday nights were spent with temps in the upper 20's, the weather was great the entire time, and I can't think of when we last had a better weekend!