We opted to drive along Highway 1 going North and stopped in Cabot Cove to see how Jessica Fletcher was doing … Mendocino was used to film the street scenes. It was a quirky little town …

As usual on the Coast, it was cool and cloudy … we didn’t really do much other than visit the Pygmy Forest and walk around the town along the shore.

The only pictures I ended up taking in the Pygmy Forest was of the California Rhododendron which was in full bloom.

Since leaving Yosemite, we have been to two State Parks in California – Van Damme on the Coast near Mendocino and Jedediah Smith near Crescent City. As I write this we are driving North to Portland.

Before getting to the pictures from those places, I wanted to post a few more pictures from Yosemite – it was all about the Fall(s) and I have a bunch of photos from all different angles.

We took a short stroll out to Bridalveil Fall but is was too wet under the fall to take any close up pictures – just this one in the distance.

Yosemite Falls was really something – at first you see this:

Then as you walk away and turn around you see this:

Yosemite Falls dries up in the Fall but there was plenty of water flowing when we saw it!

We left Mono Lake and headed West into Yosemite National Park. It was beautiful – there was still some snow on the ground and the air was crisp. All the lakes were crystal clear.

We got our first view of Half Dome from Olmsted Point.

The road into the Valley was very steep and curvy. We stopped to take a look and give the brakes an opportunity to cool down. The view was breathtaking – at first you don’t even see the Falls far in the distance.

By the end of the day, we had spent a couple of hours just walking around Yosemite Valley. It would have been nice to have more time but we got a nice feel for the beauty of the Park.

Watch for future posts with more pictures ….

On our way to Yosemite we stopped at the Manzanar Historic Site. When we lived in California, we had friends whose parents and grandparents were held at the camp during WWII. It was definitely well worth the time – they have a relatively new and very informative visitor center. I highly recommend it to anyone traveling this way.

Rather than trying to make it through Yosemite in a short afternoon, we opted to stay over in Lee Vining and explore Mono Lake. We were here in 1989 while on our honeymoon.

This lake is highly saline and is famous for it’s tufa that form when fresh water comes up through springs in the bottom of the lake. The taller ones are a little further south from here but these are still interesting.

We never unhitched the trailer but that wasn’t a problem – we hiked from the campground to the Visitor Center (which was closed!) down to the Lake and up along Lee Vining Creek and returned to the trailer through town.

This is what it takes to walk 5.5 miles in a town that is only 3/4 of a mile long!

Hiked at Mono Lake: 5.5 miles
Total: 15 miles

We left Kingman, AZ heading for California through Pahrump, NV (former home of Art Bell – Hi Janice!) We had reservations at a little campground just inside Death Valley National Park – Panamint Springs Resort. (I should put Resort in quotes.)

The campground is “quaint” but they had hot showers, a beautiful view, decent wifi (especially considering we were in the middle of nowhere,) quiet, and a ton of stars!

On our way through the Park, we stopped at Zabriskie Point. There is a nice overlook there but we decided we should take advantage of the opportunity to take a little 2.5 mile loop hike that went down towards the Salt Flat (or so we thought) to get some exercise and stretch our legs. It was only in the 90′s, so we grabbed some water and headed out.

The views were awesome.

The trail was really well marked in the beginning but after the second fork all the sign posts were gone and we ended up missing the third fork that made the loop. We hiked more than 2 miles out before we turned around and retraced out path. We wouldn’t have gone that far but we thought we were close to the edge of the Salt Flats and just wanted to see what was just around the next turn!

The only down side of this hike was as we returned to the trailhead, we took a wrong turn (my fault this time) and took the trail that headed back UP to the overlook! We probably climbed an extra 250 feet UP that we could have avoided and did I mention that it was really hot? You probably can’t tell from this picture, but it was.

We enjoyed a few more stops on our way through Death Valley, including at the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes.

We missed a lot of the big tourist attractions but at least we experienced the beautiful and vast landscape.

POST NOTE: When I first wrote this, I thought we would be traveling through Yosemite today. (The WordPress iPad app was torturing me and I couldn’t get the post up this morning!)

After an extended stop at Manzanar and knowing we would want to take our time through Yosemite, we opted to overnight in Lee Vining on the edge of Mono Lake. I will try to schedule another post for tomorrow morning with our pictures from today. We came through this way on our honeymoon 23 years ago.

Death Valley Hiking: 4.5 miles
Total Miles Hiked: 9.5 miles

We left Canyon de Chelly and headed West to Kingman. We had planned to make only one stop here and go on to Death Valley. It turns out most of the campgrounds with electricity in Death Valley have closed for the summer and we weren’t up for hot nights without air conditioning.

A quick check of Yosemite made it clear we wouldn’t be camping there either. (That will have to be a separate trip someday with advanced reservations – although I’m not sure if the crowds aren’t too much … Can’t wait to hear about your trip, Rachel!)

Since we didn’t really have a plan for the rest of our trip and didn’t know how much time we would want to spend in the Northwest, we decided to spend another day here (Blake Ranch RV Resort – thumbs up on the wifi even though they will only give you one passcode) and do some research.

We are now set – we will be skipping the Bay Area and head up the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We are thinking we will get to Redwood National Park around the 13th of May. The rest of our stops are as follows:

Portland
Olympic National Park
Seattle
Spokane
Glacier National Park
Calgary
Edmonton

By now you are probably wondering why there is a horse at the top of this post – no reason. I had the picture from the Canyon de Chelly and wanted to share – he was just hanging out on the rim checking out the tourist (maybe thinking about he could get down to the valley where all the good grass was!)

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that there is only one trail in the National Park that you can hike without a Navajo Tour Guide. It was only about 2.5 miles round trip but had a 600 foot climb back out. I took all my pictures on the way down so that we could keep a good pace coming up – any little bit of exercise helps when you are spending days riding in the car!

Alan is always having his straw get loose in his water bottle (the ice is probably knocking into it.) He won’t usually pose for me when we are hiking, so I seem to get a lot of pictures that look like this:

There was an large tunnel blasted into the trail. We’ve seen these in other Parks that had trail development done during The Great Depression by the “CCC Boys.”

I couldn’t get a good photo that showed both the tunnel and the cool rock formation next to it. We always call these water-carved channels/holes “tenajas” since that is what they called them in Big Bend. I probably don’t even have the spelling right and I suspect it really isn’t the right term for this:

After a hike across the sand, this is what you find:

Besides our hike into the Canyon, we only have hiked one other time. Here is the first entry in our hiking log:

1) Petroglyph National Monumnet – 2.5 miles
2) Canyon de Chelly – 2.5 miles

Total Hiking Miles: 5 miles

From Albuquerque, we turned north to Canyon de Chelly National Monument. We had skipped this on our tour through Arizona/New Mexico in 2008 partially because we weren’t set up to camp without electricity. Now we have a generator and more importantly, new batteries. We lasted two days and didn’t even bother to recharge.

This National Monument was unique in that it was nestled well within the Navajo Nation. I’m sorry to say we didn’t really experience anything of any cultural significance. There were beautifully woven Navajo rugs for sale at the Thunderbird Lodge but that was really just about it. (I wish we had had the opportunity to visit Navajo Museum but we hadn’t read anything about it ahead of time and didn’t take the right route.)

The Monument didn’t do nearly the job as say Mesa Verde in providing information about the people that lived in the Canyon and built the structures that we saw.

This photo is from the one place where you can hike into the Canyon without a guide – White House. We probably should have taken one of the tours that were available but it was a full day just to drive both the North and South rims of the Canyon.

I really enjoyed the hike … the weather was perfect and I think this was one of the most beautiful Canyons we have visited. This may sound strange but the scale was good – you could see into the bottom but also appreciate the vast landscape and huge cliffs. There were several places where separate canyons came together and the views were gorgeous. I don’t think my photos do it justice.

We are in Kingman, Arizona now and we are planning on heading to Death Valley tomorrow. I am going to schedule a few more posts for the next couple of days with more
pictures from Canyon de Chelly.

Im not sure about this filter … made me think that this is what a plant would look like on Mars.

I don’t have a picture of the cute Ranger chick that Alan says was hitting on him before I came into the Visitor Center but I do have these much more interesting (and heavily edited/filtered flower pictures …)