Candy Weather Again

Warm, dry conditions continue in a very poor winter for the Sierra. We've had a few storms and there is some snow (mostly above 7000'), but we seem to be having a weak winter like those of 2011-2015. Things could still change, but this feels too similar to those seasons of poor skiing, thin waterfalls and early fires. The Merced is running just a bit above average volume, but this is runoff that shouldn't be happening until April. Candy weather: it's nice in the moment, but you know it's not good for anyone in the long term.

Fiddleneck, chickweed and blue dick are blooming in the lower Merced Canyon now. I always look for the first fiddlenecks on the grassy bank outside my Yosemite Conservancy office in El Portal; the first optimist opened 16 January. Waterfall buttercups are profuse in their favored locations (first flowers noted 31 December near Ned's Gulch).

I walked up the remnants of the 1856 Coulterville Free Trail the other day. This climbs steeply to the north and west from below Pohono Bridge up the canyon wall toward Tamarack Flat, intersecting with the Old Big Oak Flat Road somewhere west of the road's Cascade Creek crossing. The road was put through to the Valley floor in 1874, so the trail was used by stock and foot traffic for less than 20 years. Like most of the early routes built by Euro-Americans, it was developed not by the government but by entrepreneurs hoping to make a buck from tolls. In places the trail is still clearly built and obvious, in places it's been entirely absorbed back into the landscape since it was replaced by the stage road when Grant (who later visited Yosemite) was president 144 years ago. This photo shows rockwork along Fireplace Creek.

One special traveler who arrived via the Coulterville Free Trail and got his first view of Yosemite Valley was John Muir in 1868. It's interesting to imagine Muir and his traveling companion Joseph Chilwell finishing their walk from San Francisco Bay by leaving the snows of Crane Flat, descending this steep toll path, and seeing the cliffs and Bridalveil Fall. Muir was a nobody when he showed up in Yosemite; he was 30 years old, a transient laborer, who passed through the Valley and Mariposa Grove then went to find work in the ranch country of the lowest Sierra foothills to the west of us. The Valley and the Grove were well-known tourist attractions and had already become protected reserves four years before Muir came to California. More than a year after coming over the Coulterville Trail he came back into the high country above Yosemite Valley tending a herd of sheep and then found blue collar work in the Valley for two years. After that point he was mostly a resident of the East Bay, building a career that included plenty of return visits to Yosemite Valley and the higher terrain to the east. The rest is history. You never know which poor immigrant will go on to change our world so much for the better.

Autumn Out

Walked up northwest from Foresta to Little Nellie Falls on Saturday - very crowded - with foliage color, blue sky, deer and bear tracks, a few birds (including a surprise solo horned lark!), and millions of springtails. There were some puddles in ruts on the Coulterville Road from the prior weekend's rain. On the surface of the sunlit puddles were rafts of millions and millions of the tiny gray insects, too small to break the surface tension, even when massed this way. They were hopping continuously, there were dispersed individuals on the muddy road surface, but the party was all afloat. Hard to comprehend but wonderful to observe.
Sunday's saunter took us from Chinquapin out the old logging rail grade southeast to the Alder Creek watershed. It is unusual to be able to stroll on the horizontal for mile after mile above 6000' in the Sierra, but here's a pleasant legacy of commercial forestry. From the 1907 railroad that came to El Portal, steep (up to 78%!) inclines were built up the south side canyon wall in 1912 and the north side canyon wall by 1924. It's hard to imagine the costly labor of hundreds of people creating this access for extracting sugar pine from what is now peaceful forest. There's a bit of patchy snow, which held tracks of coyote, deer, bear and squirrel. Aspens in Bishop Meadow are bare now, the black oaks and dogwoods still have a bit of color hanging on.
Glacier Point and Tioga Roads are still closed, though the weather will determine whether this is a closure for the whole season or not. A La Nina season is expected, which could go either way for wet/dry.
A new speed record for ascending the Nose Route on El Capitan was established over the weekend: just under two hours, 37 minutes. Human springtails?