Which raises a question: where do I write about my hikes and post my pix? The working plan is to keep posting them here, so as not to annoy any readers looking for more general-interest hiking stuff at Two-Heel Drive.

So those of you who can’t live without my weekly ramblings through the dirt can keep on checking in here.

I’ve got the beginnings of a hiking blog going. Working title: Two-Heel Drive, A Hiking Blog.

My digital camera gave up the ghost over the weekend. Picking a digital camera is a dreadful slog through a zillion options, none of which all reside on the camera you want at the price you’d prefer to pay. So here’s what I did: I ordered one most similar to the one I already have, because the latest model does everything my old one did at half the price.

Even though my last Canon had a manufacturing defect that caused its early demise, I still have no gripe with Canon gear. Mine took pretty good pictures, saved me tons and tons on film, processing and printing, and worked fine, till it didn’t.

Having no pictures to post also offers me a perfect excuse to avoid writing about what I did over the weekend, which mostly amounted to hiking 10 miles uphill, camping out, waking up the next morning, stowing all my gear and walking 10 miles downhill where I started. I might decide to write about it later in the week, but maybe not. I was never more than eight miles from home (as the crow flies) the whole time, so the scenery is very familiar.

Next weekend I’m going to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival for the third year in a row, so I’ll have lots o’ fun pictures of Bluegrassy stuff, assuming my new camera gets here in time.

OK, last week I promised more about Yosemite. Here goes:

Day 1 (Tuesday):

Arrival at the Bed & Breakfast. We track down the owner of the B&B, a retired federal judge who has a small ponytail and walks with a strange waddle/shuffle that suggests too much time on horseback or the need for hip-replacement surgery; perhaps both. (The judge, a purposefully crusty character, was responsible for dispensing justice within the national park’s borders; I sense litterbugs ending up in Leavenworth)

He shows us around. Reminds us to close the doors to keep the bears out.

We unpack, then retire to the back yard, where a large double hammock has been assigned to tenants of our room (called the Alpenglow, which describes that yellow-orangeish glow mountains get from the day’s last rays of sunlight). I lie down in the hammock, beer in hand, and briefly consider spending my entire vacation there. Temptation is strong, yet I resist.

Day 2 (Wednesday):

Having resolved not to spend vacation in the double hammock, I’m obliged to find a place to go hiking. Yosemite has hundreds of miles of trails, so settling on one is no small task. I fantasize that one day I might hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which starts in Mexico and ends in Canada. The trail goes through Yosemite, and has one stretch near the main road at Tuolumne Meadows, going to a place
called Glen Aulin. People who hike the whole trail are called "thruhikers" and I ponder the odds of meeting one. Given that only a few hundred attempt the whole trail every year, and that only a tiny fraction finish, and that the trail’s 2,000 miles long, and that it takes six to nine months to hike it, I see these odds at less than zero.

So I park my car at the Glen Aulin trailhead, and as I’m getting out, I see a bearded guy with a backpack headed my way. He’s wearing shorts and I notice his legs have a deep-brown tan you’d normally associate with beach lifeguards. I ask him if he’s a thruhiker and sure enough, he says "yeah" and asks me if I know where the grocery store is. I tell him it’s probably around here somewhere. He tells me he started out in Mexico, hiked to the southern Sierra, then caught a ride to the Canadian border and hiked south from there.

He seems to be in a hurry, which means he probably ran out of food yesterday because he knew he could resupply at the grocery store, assuming he can find it. We chat for another minute or so, then he’s off down the road in search
of the store.

About a mile down the trail, I see a backpack on the ground and an hiker soaking his feet in the Tuolumne River. "Are you thruhiking?" I ask him? "No, I’m just resting here," he says.

The Glen Aulin trail is a fairly easy hike, hillwise, though it’s a 12-mile round-trip rather than the 9.5 jaunt that my guidebook promises. I stop for lunch near a pedestrian bridge that crosses the river at the beginning of a
cascade. It’s another three miles to Glen Aulin and back from here, and I figure this is as good a turn-back point as any other. When I get back to the room and dig out my guidebook, I learn that three lovely waterfalls are just down the trail from where I gave up. At least I have an excuse to go back.

Day 3 (Thursday):

Another hike day. I choose the Panorama Trail, which starts out at Glacier Point and goes five miles, mostly downhill, to Nevada Falls, passing the little-known Illilouette Falls along the way. The trail forms a ragged semicircle with the Half Dome in the center. Along the way my eyes are always drawn to that strange hunk of ruck. Maybe the rock is so big that it has its own gravity, which just
naturally attracts objects with lesser mass. Or maybe the curved surface seems like a cathedral’s roof, giving it a divine aura.

Whatever the rock’s strange magic, it’s shrouded in morning mist when I arrive, adding to its mystique. It’s just layers of granite, I try to tell myself.

As for the hike: four miles of down and about a mile up; the opposite on the way back. Not too bad till about mile nine, when, scenery or no scenery, I’m getting sick to death of this trail.

Melissa and I have a real meal in the Mountain Room at the Yosemite Lodge (really expensive, too, but hey, we’re on vacation, right?).

Day 4 (Friday)

My feet beg for a day off, so Melissa and I set out in the car for a High Sierra road trip. We take Highway 120 out of the park at Tioga Pass and head south to an area called Mammoth Lakes, which is a major ski area in the winter but seems listless and devoid of purpose at summer’s end.

We have lunch at a little diner called Tom’s Place. Because we have to. Mostly, I stop and take pictures of the scenic splendor, which is abundant. After you’ve hiked up and down some of these hillsides, they seem much nicer from a distance. We stop at a place called Convict Lake, which is achingly gorgeous and surrounded by terrible gray peaks that seem to promise a bleak outcomes to any who dare to go there. The lake got its name from a famous jailbreak of the 1870s, when a band of desperadoes went on the lam, got involved in at least a couple shoot-outs with posses and had a showdown near this lake. A lawman was killed and some of criminals disappeared into the mountains, never to be caught. My hunch is they became coyote food after a couple days up there.

Day 5 (Saturday)

Tossing common sense to the wind, I decide to spend a weekend day in Yosemite Valley, which is mobbed with humanity. Mostly I’m wandering around looking for interesting things to take pictures of.

At one point I’m parked off the road and I see this young couple taking pictures of each other on this rock next to the Merced River. I offer to take their picture; the guy hands me his camera, I look through the viewfinder and the guy says, "hey, you’ve got it backwards." Sure enough, I’m looking through the wrong end of the camera. Yeah, so now that guy (he sounded French to me) thinks all American tourists are morons, but hey, hey probably already knew that, right?

The amazing thing about spending the day surrounded by masses of tourists is that the valley’s scenery trumps humanity. Every time I look up at the canyon walls I see an amazing rock formation that I hadn’t noticed before. Happens over a dozen times.

That night we went to dinner at the Wawona
Hotel and had another of those amazing meals more often associated with dining in San Francisco. After dinner we stopped by this little salon area where this buddy of Krustee the Innkeeper was playing piano and singing show tunes. A buddy of his takes over the piano for a moment and relates a tale of how he was performing at the famed Ahwahnee Hotel one night, when a woman in the audience requested that he play "Forever Young" to celebrate the woman’s mother’s 85th birthday.. You may remember Forever Young was recorded by Bob Dylan, who was once married to Joan Baez, who also recorded the song. Well, it was Joan Baez requesting that song for her mom that night.

The regular piano player guy comes back with a slideshow about the history of Yosemite. He tells us about the strange tradition of the firefall,
in which a huge bonfire was ignited at the top of Glacier Point, then shoved off the cliff for the amusement of campers down in the valley. The park service stopped the practice in the late 1960s — not because shoving an inferno off a three-thousand-foot cliff posed a forest fire danger, but because the park had become so popular that thousands of people would gather in the valley’s meadows to watch the firefall every night, trampling all the meadows’ tender grasses, flowers and other flora. Ah, tourism.

Well, those are the highlights. Sorry, no new pictures this week, I got lazy over the weekend and the camera never left the shelf.

I’ll write more about Yosemite when I’ve got more time, but for now, here are
a few pix to whet your appetite.

Wednesday morning along the Tuolomne River on the Glen Aulin Trail, a segment
of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Thursday morning on the Panorama Trail, overlooking the Half Dome.

Friday morning near Tioga Pass in the Yosemite High Country.

Friday afternoon at Tunnel View.

Saturday afternoon near the base of El Capitan.

Lots more pics and a bit of commentary at my
Flickr photo-sharing page.

I’m trying something different this week: posting most of my pictures at flickr.com,
a photo sharing site, and putting a few highlights here on the main page.

To get started, check out my Yosemite
2005 photo album.

When we were leaving for Lassen last week, one of the last news items I noticed
was that the levees keeping water out of New Orleans were starting to give way.
While we were camping the city of New Orleans filled up with water, turning something
nasty but containable into a certified national disaster the likes of which the
country has never seen, not even on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

As the Led Zeppelin song went, “when the levee breaks, got noplace to stay.”

Or hide, in the case of the Bush administration, which is looking like the
gang that couldn’t shoot straight. But you know what? The Bush gang did a fine
job of cleaning up Florida — you know, that key state full of swing voters
— in an election year when three hurricanes struck in a single summer.

But no levees gave way, leaving, say, Miami or Tampa under water.

Since Bush is the boss of the whole country, he’s got to take his lumps on
this one. Disaster happens on your watch, the response is a national shame,
you have to face up.

Truth is, though, that the your everyday cynical political calculation is the
real culprit here. What happened last week was that Bush & Co. knew from the
get-go that they had few friends in a 60-percent-black city like New Orleans.
They were in no hurry to help because they had no votes to gain, and they gambled
that Katrina would be a three-day story that disappeared once the waters began
to recede.

Only the waters didn’t recede after three days. They kept rising. Once the
Bush gang knew they had a genuine 9/11-style catastrophe on their hands, they
had to do something about it. But by then the city and all its infrastructure
was ruined. So it took a few more days to get military boots on the ground to
restore order and usher in relief supplies. Add it up and you’ve got thousands
of people suffering for a week with no electricity, no fresh water and only
whatever food they could scrounge or steal.

The Bush people made a similar calculation during the California energy crisis
of a few years ago. Nothing was done to intervene when canny energy speculators
were manipulating the state’s energy market and costing its taxpayers billions
of dollars and forcing rolling blackouts during the hottest days of the summer.

Why didn’t Bush act? Because he had nothing to gain in helping a state that
didn’t help him get elected. If the California equivalent of the levees giving
way — a devastating earthquake — had happened during the electricity crisis,
Bush would’ve been in the same jam he’s in today. He and his people rolled the
dice and lucked out. And guess what: California voted for a Democrat in the
next election, just as his people predicted.

You hate to think of politicians making these “what’s-in-it-for-me” calculations
when thousands of lives are at stake, when a jewel of a city has been turned
into a steaming toilet bowl. You hate to see people pointing fingers when they
oughta be lending a hand.

But this is how the world works and, I suspect, always has.

And with that thought, I’m leaving for Yosemite National Park, to walk in the
woods and gawk at big trees and amazing rocks, which always seem to avoid getting
themselves into these predicaments.

This is my last post describing our trip to far northern California last week.
(Our camping trip here;
my Lassen Peak hike here.)

On Friday morning we left Lassen
Volcanic National Park via the northwest exit and headed to Redding to check
out the way-cool Sundial
Bridge, which was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and
opened to the public on July 4, 2004. I saw a documentary about the bridge’s
building earlier this year and knew I had to see the thing up close.

Here’s one look at most of the bridge, commissioned by the McConnell Foundation, which apparently wanted to build something
unforgettable and opened its wallet wide. Final cost: $23 million, of which the foundation supplied more than half. As much as
I hate to quote the Mastercard commercial, here’s one case where the result
is truly priceless.

The bridge has only one job: giving pedestrians and bicyclists a quick way
to cross the Sacramento River. You can’t see it from this angle, but the supporting
spire rises at the same angle as the riverbank, making it seem integral to its
surroundings.

The spire practically begs a photographer to capture it from numerous angles.
They’re all pretty cool.

Note the sun’s rays seeming like more cables from the bridge. I can’t imagine
the architect had this effect planned out, but the guy is a genius so
one never knows.

I’m especially fond of the solar-eclipse effect.

One more angle from the nearby shore.

Salmon spawn nearby, so the the bridge was designed to span the river without
touching its waters.

A sculpture by the architect is beneath one end of the bridge.

The Sacramento River glimmers in the morning sun.

OK, one last look from the opposite bank.

This one little project in a small city 200 miles from the nearest metro area
seemed to define why humans have had this perpetual urge to create wonderful
public art. The art is never exactly necessary but once finished it seems absolutely
essential.

It reminds me of the Sistine Chapel, whose ceiling would’ve required some kind
of a paint job. Any old painter could’ve put a nice, comforting tint up there.
But one pope decided he wanted something special up there, so he hired one of
the best artists of his time — Michaelangelo — to paint biblical scenes on
the ceiling.

I’m not saying the Sundial Bridge is in the same league as God’s finger touching
Adam’s, but the idea is similar: taking something that is merely useful and
making something amazing. Not all the motives were the noblest: just as the
city of Redding enjoys the tourism dollars spent by folks coming to see the
bridge, it’s a fair guess that the pope who hired Michaelangelo was flattering
his own ego and hoping to create an attraction that would fatten the Vatican’s
receivables. But if greatness happens, all is forgiven.

The documentary about the bridge’s construction featured interviews with befuddled
people of Redding who didn’t quite know what to make of the bridge, particularly
during the mess and tumult of its construction. Even after it was done, they
couldn’t figure out what the fuss was about; some thought it was an eyesore.

I practically shouted at my TV: People, one of the world’s greatest architects
is building something remarkable that he’ll get no use out of but you’ll get
to use as you please for years to come. It’s not costing you much. Try to
show some appreciation.

People usually get what they deserve, but the magic happens in those rare instances
when they get something better.

(If you’re curious: a blogger from southern Oregon has a pair of interesting posts about the bridge here and here. The San Francisco Chronicle also has a review of the bridge.)

If you’ve been stopping by long enough, you know the three things I’m apt
to write about: being outdoors, listening to rock ‘n’ roll and gawking at cool
cars. I got a chance to experience all three Saturday in downtown San Jose,
which is having its first-ever Grand Prix race this weekend.

The car race has to be outdoors, and only cool cars are allowed to race. That
much is obvious. The rock ‘n’ roll connection is more subtle, until it, too,
becomes obvious. I noticed it as soon as I passed through the gate and started
walking toward the race course. A high-pitched roar approaches from the right,
getting louder and more intense as the car gets closer. The deafening blast
hits its climax just after the car passes (sound traveling slower than light,
you know) and I notice an adrenaline surge that feels exactly like standing
in the front row of a really loud rock concert when the rhythm guitarist is
pounding out his power chords.

That realization guaranteed I’d get my 35 bucks worth, though I never saw any
actual races — just race practice and qualifying runs (there was only one race
Saturday and I had to be somewhere else when it started … naturally I didn’t
know this until after I’d bought my ticket and had been inside the race grounds
for a half-hour). The real race happens today, but watching it is hardly necessary.
In fact it’s slightly beside the point.

The best place to see a grand prix race — if you care about the actual competition
— is from a couch or barstool, safe from the noise, the sun, the exhaust fumes,
and secure in the knowledge that well-informed commentators will keep you apprised
of all critical developments and will provide replays of the really cool crashes.
You get none of this at the actual race; either you pay double for a grandstand
seat and you’re rooted in one place (and missing nine-tenths
of the action), or you buy a general-admission ticket and you wander along the
race course, realizing you can’t see squat through the fence and would’ve been
better off ponying up for a grandstand ticket.

Race fans come to the track anyway because a big race is a big event, like
Fourth of July fireworks. Happens once a year and they go for the experience
of being there. And their brains will store the experience of the guitar-chord
adrenaline rush to provide a little context when they’re watching races from
the couch or barstool.

At least that’s what I think. I took my camera long, of course; the highlights:

Race organizers set up a bunch of grandstands along the race course,
which goes for just over a mile through downtown San Jose. This is one of the
smaller sets of bleachers near one of the sharp turns. Racers can do two interesting
things on turns — pass other racers or crash — hence the necessity of having
people nearby to watch it happen.

The fence is the permanent reality of having a general-admission ticket. People
in the grandstands have giant-screen televisions to keep ’em up on the action
but here at ground level, all you can see is cars ripping past at impossible
speeds. This is one of the first cars I saw in a sports car-class practice run.
In the sports car class, the cars are pretty much like the ones you’d see on
city streets, but with the interiors ripped out and the mufflers removed. They’re
plenty loud but not nearly as fast as the open-wheel racers in the grand prix
class.

The litter-intensive underside of the main grandstand. Imagine what it looks
like on race day.

The second event was a practice run by "vintage" stock cars — ones
that you might’ve seen in the 1980s if you went to NASCAR races back then. The
San Jose track has a long straight-away that takes a mean U-Turn which forces
the cars to slow to a crawl. Normally the cars are zipping by so fast that I
have a hard time getting a picture with a car in it, so I went down to this
turn to see if my luck would improve. The car’s close enough that you could
almost spit on the windshield from here, which is one of the nifty things about
buying a general-admission ticket. The cars pass right next to you, something
you’ll never experience in the bleachers.

One of the many giant-screen TVs placed strategically around the race course.

Hey look, it’s somebody sitting on a Mercury News box! (It’s Friday’s paper,
alas.) You can’t really see it in this picture, but the Knight Ridder sign above
the Knight Ridder Building is also at the top of the frame. (Knight Ridder is
the heavenly father of the Mercury News and many other fine newspapers that
your grandparents read). See, the Merc is always in the business of providing
a better perspective on the news, even at the Grand Prix!

All men know this and yet they are powerless to act upon this knowledge.

(The T-shirt says "If it has wheels or a skirt, you can’t afford it.")

After awhile the really fast grand prix cars show up — these are qualifying
runs for Sunday’s main event. Normally you have to shoot though two rows of
fences so the pictures aren’t particularly satisfying, but there was one break
in the main track fence here, so I had only one fence to shoot through.

The view improved a bit when I figured out I could rest my camera on top of
the fence here and aim it down at the track. Then the trick was to time it so
that a car was in the frame when I clicked on the shutter button. This is the
best picture I got, which sorta sums up the difficulty in photographing car
races: It’s all about the motion, and photography is all about stopping the
motion for a fraction of an instant. Professional photographers have all sorts
of tricks to make racing pictures interesting but the first requirement is being
next to the track with a wide range of perspectives. The second requirement
is knowing what the hell you’re doing. Lacking both of these prerequisites,
I don’t feel so bad that I managed to get one car in the frame out of a dozen
attempts.

Kids can get a better perspective if they’ve got strong-shouldered grownups
to help out.

Because it’s not actually race day, it’s a good time to check out all the exhibits,
most of which have to do with cars. I’m guessing I looked pretty much like this
kid the first time I saw a race car up-close.

The ever-popular Cosworth Ford race-car cutaway, with other a couple Ford Mustangs
nearby. It’s uncanny how Ford has milked the Mustang mystique for 40 years.

The race goes right next to San Jose’s convention center, which has been filled
with all manner of race-car coolness. Oblivious to all this automotive goodness,
kids make good use of the fountain outside the convention center.

In the convention center foyer, it’s one of my favorite classic cars: the 1955
Chevy Nomad two-door.

In the exhibition hall, it’s wall-to-wall race-car paraphernalia

Goodyear Eagle racing tires. Ever wonder why race car tires don’t have tread
like your car? It occurred to me awhile back that it’s simple physics: the more
rubber in contact with the road, the better the traction. Grooves in a tire
mean less rubber against the road, hence less traction. The grooves channel
water away from the tire, making a car safer to drive in the rain. Some races
are rain-or-shine events, which obliges pit crews to switch over to "rain"
tires, which have those grooves, allowing a measure of safety racing on slick
tracks (they still go too fast for common sense, but it wouldn’t be a race otherwise).

There’s an inevitable testosterone rush from driving a car fast, offering inevitable
marketing tie-ins.

The Marine Corps’ "chin-up challenge" attracted a bunch of muscular
guys. A T-shirt went to anybody who could chin up to this bar 20 times; this
guy had a surfer’s build and looked plenty strong enough to do the whole 20.
He quit after five, which made me wonder if he looked down at those Marines
starting to like the looks of him and started wondering if the grand prize was
an all-expense-paid trip to Baghdad.

It rained all day Sunday and Saturday was a training hike: 40 pounds in the backpack lugged to the top of Mission Peak. Didn’t take the camera and there wasn’t much to report on unless you want to hear about how sweaty things get when you double the weight in your pack.

We’re going to Yosemite in September, and I’m hoping to hike to the top of the Half Dome. It’s a 16-plus-mile round trip with something like 4500 feet of elevation gain. Should be some fun, though getting in shape for it will be, well, smelly.