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Yosemite under Orion's gaze

Monday, January 13, 2020

Earshplittenloudenboomer

So after I ate my expensive breakfast at the Ahwanee I was walking back to my car and somebody had posted a photocopy on a sign that read "If you walk to Mirror Lake from here it is only a mile, if you take the shuttle it is still a mile."

Hot damn I thought, a good samaritan. I will do just that. So I take the trail and walk about two miles and then see a sign that says Mirror Lake 1.7 miles.

Oh well, maybe it was a practical joke, I didn't care. I can take a joke. A walk would do me good, sore ankle and all.

At some point I came across a logging crew in the forest. There were flagmen and I was waved through. A few minutes later I heard one of the loudest noises I have ever heard.

They felled a large redwood not three hundred yards from me. The crash when it hit the forest floor was indescribable. I felt the shockwave come up through the soles of my feet.

I have been on the other end of a Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon and it was comparable if not louder.

As a sensory experience it rocked my world, definitely unbelievable. Not sure how much a two hundred foot redwood of this kind of massive girth weighs but it had to be hundreds of tons.

When I was a kid in Idyllwild I was once caught out in a storm and had a tree come down about a hundred yards from me but it was nowhere this big. Still very scary. A peak sensory experience.

I once saw the aftermath of a giant crane falling down off Friars Rd. in Mission Valley. It fell on the 163 Highway and fell on the back of a pickup truck like a cat catching a mouse's tail. Always wondered if the occupants survived?

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I did everything wrong on my walk. I had a down jacket but no waterproof windbreaker, which I left in the car.

I had six thousand dollars worth of camera and lens around my neck with essentially no protection. Of course I had the perfect plastic camera wrap, back in the car.

I did a lot of hiking as a youth in Idyllwild, I should know better. Barely enough water, no windbreaker, no ankle brace.

The reality is that the weather can and does change dramatically in these high elevations. I was really dumb but I managed to get lucky and dodge my idiocy.

Mirror Lake was frozen and a bit underwhelming. Great walk nonetheless.


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