OCTOBER 13, 2017
Smoke fills the city, and Friday afternoon drags along. I sit at my desk, daydreaming, deciding if I should take an impromptu trip to the mountains. The answer is yes. It should always be yes.
Hours later I set off for the Sierra.
OCTOBER 14, 2017
There's no traffic, but the time between midnight and 4am passes slowly on Highway 120. Saturday I wake up in a another world. The air is crisp.
OCTOBER 14, 2017
I'm just outside the eastern entrance to Yosemite, camping near Lee Vining. I only got two hours of sleep last night, so I need to get my blood flowing. I head down to the south tufa area of Mono Lake for sunrise, then take a hike around the rim of Panem Crater, a volcanic cone.
From the top of the crater, I see patches of orange in several of the mountain valleys to the west. I hop in the car and speed towards the nearest one, eager to see the fall colors up close.
That's the main reason I came to the Sierra this weekend. I read reports online that Mono County should be full of color for the next few days. The reports were right.
I spend all day driving from lake to lake, canyon to canyon, hiking here and there. In some stretches, I can't drive more than two hundred feet without pulling over again to take more more pictures. It's that good.
San Francisco doesn't get much color in the fall. Even where I grew up in the East Bay, there were just a few colorful trees sprinkled throughout the neighborhoods.
Nothing prepared me for the immersive feeling of standing in a grove of aspen in autumn.
OCTOBER 15, 2017
The cold wakes me up around 4AM, which seems like a good time to start the drive to Yosemite Valley anyway. I blast music to stay sharp on the dark drive through Tuolumne. The sky is purple when I pull into the Tunnel View parking lot just before sunrise.
I guess I can't escape smoky air this weekend. A nearby fire has filled the valley with smoke. The air quality is awful, but the hazy valley looks surreal.
There's color in Yosemite as well. Big leaf maple, dogwood, ferns, and other plants dot the granite & green landscape with pinks, yellows, and oranges.
There are not many people in the valley today, which makes wandering around a dream.
Near the base of Lower Yosemite falls, I look up through the trees at Lost Arrow Spire. Something catches my eye. There's a person way up there, walking a rope from the spire to the wall. Two thousand, eight hundred feet below, my jaw drops.
Despite the smoke today, this trip has been refreshing, in a way. After eating a quick breakfast and filling up my thermos with coffee, I find the best tree of the trip near the Yosemite Chapel: a sugar maple in peak color. Greens, yellows, and oranges dot the branches.
The sun peeks over a ridge and the tree comes alive with color. It's just perfect.
I sit under the branches and look up for awhile.
