California Mountain Road Trip - May 2013 - Part 2 - Crossing the Sierras

We spent the first 4 nights of the trip on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and on Friday we crossed over the crest of the mountains on Ebbetts Pass Road (California State Highway 4) on our way to Lake Tahoe.

Still on the western side, we stopped for a hike at Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

The California State Parks Department, with the help of many volunteers, maintains a nice interpretive trail through the trees. The explanation for this next image gives an idea of just how big these trees really are. That's not a whole tree lying on the ground, but rather, it's just a branch that fell from one.

California State Highway 4 is also known as the Ebbetts Pass National Scenic Byway. I can understand how it got the Scenic Byway designation; the "highway" label is a bit tougher to understand, since for quite a few miles the roadway is too narrow to even have a center stripe. Heather and I agree that this is one of the best roads we've driven.  Not very many spots wide enough to pull over for pictures though.

There are several alpine lakes along the way. That's Heather in the blue sweater sitting on the lakeshore towards the center of this next image.

The Pacific Crest Trail crosses the road here, on its way from Mexico to Canada.

The trees thin out as you head downslope on the eastern side of the pass.

On the way to Lake Tahoe we crossed a few high-elevation meadows and another mountain pass.

Click here to see more images from Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

Click here to see more images from the Ebbetts Pass National Scenic Byway.
    

California Mountain Road Trip - May 2013 - Part 1

We recently completed a week-long vacation road trip, this time wandering around the outer edges of the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the eastern side of California. We started out driving from San Diego to Visalia, where we spent the first night. The next morning we drove up into Kings Canyon National Park to check out the big sequoia trees and great views. From there we headed north to Angels Camp, where we spent the next few days exploring the little towns and countryside in the Gold Country, in the areas where the California gold rush of the mid-1800's took place. From Angels Camp we crossed over the crest of the Sierras heading north east and spent a few nights at South Lake Tahoe before heading home to San Diego traveling south mostly on US 395.

Along the way we saw quite a bit, from the second largest tree in the world to the largest alpine lake in North America. We toured the town Mark Twain wrote about in his story of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and toured some recently restored summer homes from the late 1800's on the shore of Lake Tahoe. We saw the sharp, ragged crests of the eastern side of the Sierras, and visited the site of the Manzanar War Relocation Center.  We left home with an itinerary of hotels for our evening stops, and a vague plan of what we wanted to see along the way, and an even vaguer idea of what routes we wanted to take to get there. We're both believers in the concept that a plan is merely a baseline from which changes can be made. Once you get that concept, if something doesn't go "according to plan", what to other people might be a disappointment becomes to us an opportunity. All that said, the Xterra is always loaded with a few days worth of food, water and camping supplies, just in case.

During our 9 days on the road we drove 1,445 miles in the Xterra, taking it from about sea level up to 9,235' and back. 

We've got our destination programmed into our low-tech but extremely reliable navigation system.

The Xterra is loaded up and ready to roll.

The original plan was to get to Visalia early enough on Monday that we could see part of Kings Canyon NP late that afternoon. We hit 3 major traffic incidents on the way up there, and what should have been a little over a 5 hour drive turned into almost 9 hours. The first day wasn't even over and we were already changing plans. We did find a good place for a late dinner in downtown Visalia, which is quite a nice little town. In the morning we headed up into the mountains.

There are some pretty big trees at Kings Canyon National Park. These aren't even the largest of them. That's Heather in the picture for some sense of scale.

We didn't have enough time to drive into the canyon itself, but we did get up to the Panoramic Overlook, which has some spectacular views.

On our way to Angels Camp we found some beautiful countryside along the backroads of western foothills of the Sierras.

The town of Angels Camp has some old buildings, and a lot of reminders about the other thing, after gold, that the town is famous for.

I found these bronze plaques in the sidewalks going back to the 1920's, each one commemorating that year's champion in the Frog Jumping Contest.

We made several trips to the little town of Murphys, which is just a few miles up the hill from Angels Camp. After a great sandwich for lunch one day at the Aria Bakery we just had to try one of their little banana cream pies for dessert. That was the best coffee of the trip too.

We also stopped into the small towns of Jamestown, Sonora and Columbia. At Jamestown we took a guided tour of the Railtown 1897 State Historic Park, which included a visit to their working roundhouse. This is one of only two remaining, fully operational original shortline roundhouse complexes in the US.

They still take this 1920's vintage oil-fired steam locomotive out on regular runs, and it has been featured in many movies and television shows over the years, including Back to the Future III.

Click here to see more images from Kings Canyon National Park.

Click here to see more images from the small towns of the California Gold Country.

Click here to see more images from the Jamestown Railtown 1897 State HIstoric Park Museum.
     

Connor, Malayan Tiger at the San Diego Zoo

Here's one shot of Connor, the 2-year old Malayan Tiger at the San Diego Zoo. I got this on Saturday, along with a lot of other shots I've not yet gotten around to sorting through. Between those, and a week's worth of images from our just-completed road trip, I've got a lot of sorting to do. All I can say is that I'm glad I don't spend a lot of time processing each photo.

The road trip pictures should be up soon, along with more from the zoo.

   

Epiphyllum

I stumbled onto the San Diego Epiphyllum Society's Mother's Day flower show today in Balboa Park.

     
     

A Little Quality Time With The Amur Leopards (San Diego Zoo)

There wasn't much going on with the Malayan Tiger on Sunday morning. Danai was hanging out way at the top of the enclosure, which doesn't make for much of a photo, so I walked over to see what the Amur Leopards were up to.

On my way out I went back past the tigers, and Danai was at least wandering around a little. At one point she went into the cave at the upper end of the exhibit, and every now and then I could get a glimpse of her between all the people.

Click here to see a few more images from Sunday, May 5, 2013 at the San Diego Zoo.
     

Saturday Morning With Danai and Connor (Malayan Tigers at the San Diego Zoo)

Last Saturday I spent about 3 hours at the Malayan Tiger enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, and got almost no photos. Granted, I did spend almost an hour of that on the phone for work, but still, even though I could see Connor almost the entire time, he stayed way up at the top of the hill. Most Zoo visitors that walked by couldn't even tell where he was. Whenever I spotted someone who looked particularly disappointed I would show them how to see him - or at least, what you could see of him.

Today was much better.  When I first got there Danai was napping right out in front. 

Over the course of the next hour and a half or so she would occasionally get up and move to another spot.

She was pretty lethargic most of the morning, but if you looked closely you could see that she wasn't always asleep.

At one point a keeper came by and tossed one of those giant femur bones over to her.  Once she realized what was going on she jumped up pretty quickly and headed down to shore of the pond to get it.

That thing is quite the mid-morning snack.

She hauled that bone back up to the rock ledge by the tree in the middle of the enclosure and spent the next half hour or so munching on it. I think it's safe to say that this is the "don't even think about taking my bone" look.

I took a walk over to the Amur Leopards for a little break. The last few times I've been there this one has been way to close to the front of the cage for me to get a shot that makes the cage disappear. I got lucky today.

There are a lot more pictures of the Amur Leopards in some of my earlier blog posts, which you can find in the Archive listing at the bottom of this page.

I walked back towards the exit the same way I came in - right past the tigers. At about 1:30pm Danai went in for the evening, and Connor came out. The keeper had put out a few handfuls of meat for him, but he want straight for the femur bone that Danai had left behind. He worked on that for quite a while, at one point you could hear a pretty loud snap as he crunched through it.

Connor had his second birthday at the beginning of April.

As I was leaving Connor decided to go wading in the upper pond, and I managed to get a few close-up shots of him.   

Click here to see more pictures of Malayan Tigers Danai and Connor, and also the Amur Leopards whose names I can't seem to remember.
    

San Diego Botanic Garden

We spent a few hours on Saturday morning wandering around the San Diego Botanic Garden (formerly known as the Quail Botanical Garden) with our local photography club.  The sky was overcast, which helps a lot when trying to get pictures of flowers.

My first stop was the frog pond, but unlike last April, there were no frogs to be found on Saturday morning. We did find some nice lotus flowers though. 

Here are a few more images of other flowers we found around the garden. 

Well, this next one isn't exactly a flower, but a leaf I found in the rainforest area. I wanted to get an example of thin depth of field with the 35mm lens on my Fuji X-E1.

The San Diego Botanic Garden in Encinitas, CA is a great place to spend a few hours walking around - and there are lots of benches placed along the paths for those times when you just want to sit for a bit and enjoy the scenery.

After lunch we stopped off at Elizabethan Desserts, a little bakery not too far from the Garden, for cupcakes.  They were good.

Click here to see a few more images from our Saturday morning walk around the San Diego Botanic Garden.