Sunday, May 1, 2005

The party's over, the secret's out, and now I can tell you why I left home for Yosemite Saturday morning and didn't post a journal entry until Sunday night. Late last week I got a call from Jim Shoop, my daughter Michelle's partner, with a plan to surprise her on her birthday.

Readers of my Friends and Family Newsletter know that Saturday was my birthday, but it's also Shellie's! It's pretty cool having my only child born on my birthday. She thinks so, too.

How could I resist? Of course, it meant driving to Santa Rosa (about an hour north of San Francisco) adding a few hundred miles to my Yosemite trip, but what's a few more hours on the road when the reward is so wonderful at the end? She was completely surprised when all her friends shouted "Surprise!" and "Happy Birthday" when Jim escorted her into the room.

I couldn't let newsletter readers in on the secret because Shellie reads it, too. But now the secret's out, Jim, her friends and I can all stop lying to her. (We all had a great time at the party re-living and bragging about all our clever lies.)

As you can see from the two pictures at the right, we had a great time. At the top are the two birthday kids, and under that is everyone else. (Oops...I wound up in both of them; Shellie was the photographer for the group photo.).

On to Yosemite... It took about five-and-a-half hours to get to Yosemite West from Santa Rosa, and I picked up the keys to Charlie Cramer's cabin from Kay and Don Pitts mid-afternoon today.

The good news is that I didn't have to shovel my way into it this time (see the first day of my February stay). I carried all the paraphernalia required for a two-week photographic stay in Yosemite up to the cabin and then headed out for a tour of the valley to see what had changed since Feburary.

The waterfalls, for one thing, are extremely full now compared with the winter flow. I'd guesstimate that there's about twice as much water flowing over them now. The fall at the immediate right was barely a trickle in February. I don't know its official name, but it's located just west of Sentinal Rock, so I guess it must be Sentinel Fall.

The other waterfall photograph is a close-up of Bridalveil with just a hint of rainbow colors appearing in the spray.

And although the sunset wasn't the most specacular I've seen at Yosemite, it did direct a beam of reddish light at Half Dome and its shroud of mist, making a soft spring portait of Yosemite's foremost monument.

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