After leaving Santa Cruz (and the coast, sniff sniff) Saturday evening, I headed for Yosemite National Park. I’d given myself two and a half days to play there, and very quickly found myself bored and uninspired. I lasted less than 24 hours before I left the park, forfeiting one night’s campground reservation, and in that time frame I showered, did laundry, and took a nap…if that tells you how unimpressed with the park I was. My friend David says I’d like it much better in the spring, so I haven’t completely written it off just yet. Upon leaving there I spent a morning at the Bodie State Historic Park, another ghost town in “arrested decay.” I still think Bannack State Park in Montana is more impressive, but I was pleasantly pleased to find that Bodie was located at an 8300+ foot elevation, so I didn’t roast there like I had thought I might. From Bodie I drove south to Death Valley National Park. Whereas Yosemite did not float my boat in the least, I LOVED Death Valley….well, everything except the heat. It was 114 degrees…in the shade…when I arrived at the ranger station at Stovepipe Wells around 5:30 Monday evening. I headed for the sand dunes to shoot sunset anyway, wound up with a mild case of heatstroke, and found myself having to sit at the top of every dune I climbed until I stopped feeling lightheaded. Not really my best hiking experience, but I was pretty pleased with a couple of the shots I got, and I didn’t die, so I think it was worth it. It barely cooled off once the sun went down, and my truck was warm and toasty, to say the least, at the Furnace Creek campground (I think they got the “Furnace” part right!) at 196 feet below sea level. It was after midnight before it had cooled down enough to just barely be tolerable enough to sleep, with the fan on high. I was almost thankful that I’d planned on getting up at 4am to be ready to shoot sunrise at Zabriskie Point. I’d really had no idea what time the sun would be up, so I was in position by a little after five, and the sun didn’t even come up over the mountains until almost seven. It was well worth the wait when the sun finally hit Zabriskie Point (above) and I really couldn’t have asked for a better sky that morning. From there I drove up to Dante’s View, five thousand feet above the valley floor, to get a bird’s eye view of the salt flats, and the temperature was lovely up there. I headed back down to the bottom and checked out the Devil’s Golf Course (“Links so rough only the devil would play there.”) and then stopped at Badwater, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere at 280 feet below sea level. I find it mind-boggling that this is also the starting point for the Badwater Ultramarathon, which covers 135 miles and finishes on Mt. Whitney (13,000 feet of cumulative vertical ascent, and 4,700 feet of cumulative descent), often in temperatures up to 130 degrees. I’ll stick to running my 26.2 miles in Seattle, thank you very much…in November, when it’s generally about 50 degrees. I would have liked to have spent another sunset/sunrise in Death Valley, but wasn’t willing to spend another night in the back of my truck (I’ll be going back in the spring or fall next time) so I headed to Laughlin, NV a day early to spend time with my grandparents. A big thank you to them for giving me a real bed, air conditioning, a shower, several meals, air conditioning (did I say that already?), and a lovely car ride out to the Hualapai Mountains (haha….we all agreed, been there, done that, no need to do it again!). Thanks, Grandma & Grandpa!!!! I’ll be leaving Laughlin in the morning and heading to the Grand Canyon, and from there it’s home, sweet, home! I can’t wait!

Let me first say I HATE San Francisco. It’s a highly interesting city, lots of great architecture and sights, and I’d probably enjoy it here if I didn’t have to drive. There is no parking, the streets are confusing, and I have absolutely no sense of direction in this city, and it’s been next to impossible to find anywhere to pull over just to even look at a map. Today’s update is going to be awfully short, because quite honestly, I’m f’n cranky and about all I feel like typing are nice long strings of swear words, and my usual sense of humor is currently MIA. Been a busy week, waterfalls, lighthouses, the drive down the California coast made me carsick, and I can only imagine how lousy I’d have felt if I’d been a passenger and not the driver. I’m missing Chris, my friends, my bands, my cats, etc, and am looking forward to being back in SLC for a few days soon. The next week will be equally busy so I’m not sure if I’ll get a chance to post another update before I get home. On that note, I’ve got a ferry to catch out to Alcatraz, and hopefully my foul mood will improve soon.

Update…Several Hours Later….I got lost, repeatedly, again, on my way down to Fisherman’s Wharf, missed my ferry reservation, and basically had a meltdown. I called my mother (she’s so lucky). I yelled. I cried. It’s been the only point in my trip where I’ve wanted to just go home. I left San Francisco (without taking a Single picture, I might add), ate, peed, took care of the more, uh, pressing issues, and life began to get better. Headed down to the coast to Santa Cruz to shoot the lighthouses, I love the ocean. I’m a bit sad, I’m headed inland now, in Yosemite the next couple days and on my way back to SLC, I’ve had my last glimpse of the Pacific for who knows how long. On the upside, I’ll be on the coast again in another month…just on the opposite side of the country. I’m off to find a campground for the evening, just thought I’d add to today’s entry now that my crankiness has more or less passed…

I had actually thought today’s entry might be incredibly short this time, just not really much to say when things have been going fabulously, but someone must have known my readers might be a little bored and threw me a couple curveballs yesterday. I left Seattle Tuesday morning and hopped a ferry over to Kingston, where I headed up to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics National Park. The mountains were hazy and I was rather unimpressed with the view, so I found a pullout and took a nap for a while. Slept a little too long though and Lake Crescent, where I had planned on staying the night, was already in the shadows so I opted to drive to the coast instead. Quite thankful I did, since thus began a string of like three days of the best photos I’ve taken all trip. I was very much in my element on the coast. I wandered around the harbor and jetty taking pictures in La Push, then headed to the Hoh Rainforest in the Olympics NP the next morning. Talk about some impressive trees!!! After I finished wandering around a couple little nature trails there I headed back to the coast and played on the beach til the tide started to get a little higher than I liked. Thursday I drove down to Astoria, and I must say, I was absolutely in love with the city within about three minutes of being there. I was immediately drawn to the Astoria Column, which sits on top of the hill, and a dollar will buy you a yearly parking pass there. I climbed the spiral staircase up to the observation deck and was able to get some good, almost aerial, views of Astoria and the river from there. I headed over to Ecola State Park from there, and sat in traffic on the highway for quite some time while they cleaned up an accident (an SUV pulling a big camper-trailer had rolled and was blocking most of the road), and I took advantage of the extra time to write some postcards. I did eventually make it down to Ecola, but couldn’t stay very long as I intended to shoot sunset at the shipwreck of the Peter Iredale at Ft. Stevens State Park a little further north. The line at Taco Bell took Forever (I’d been trying to satisfy my nacho cheese craving through like four counties at that point, so leaving was Not an option) and I wound up missing the actual sunset, but I must say I was quite pleased with some of the shots I did get. Photography-wise, it’s been a fantastic few days. From Astoria I headed back up to Mt. Rainier National Park where I hung out at a couple waterfalls in the park and just outside it. The mountain itself was hazy and not particularly photogenic that day, which was too bad. It was a bit strange to be there and not be hiking up to Camp Muir, the summit base camp, which I’ve hiked up to the past three years in early September. I’ve spent the last couple days shooting waterfalls in Skamania County, Washington, and along the Columbia River Gorge here near Portland.

All had been going quite nicely until yesterday evening, when all of my mishaps for the week seemed to strike at once, within the span of about two hours. I followed the sign for the Meklato Falls viewpoint down a small trail, which dead-ended in the middle of a very steep hill…not exactly my idea of a “viewpoint” though it did have a lovely view of the falls. While setting up my gear, my tripod head fell off and went tumbling down the hill, where it caught in a small bush and barely missed tumbling over a cliff. Needless to say, I freaked out. My tripod head is almost as important a piece of equipment as my camera itself, I am completely screwed without it. I sat on the path, staring at my tripod head laying down there on the cliff edge for quite some time, trying to figure out if I could make it down the hillside to retrieve it, and thinking, if I call B&H (my camera store of choice) Right Now (as if I even had reception up the canyon), can they overnight me a new head??? on a Saturday night??? when it’s already 9pm on the East Coast??? Can I make a lasso and haul it back up? I eventually sat on my butt, dug my heels in, and inched down the slope, which thankfully had much better traction than I had anticipated, and was able to safely recover my tripod head. Heart pounding, I got my pictures, and was Ever So Carefully stowing my gear when my zoom lens FELL OFF the camera body. This type of thing just does not happen. If you’ve taken a lens off an SLR before, you know that you have to hold in the little button while twisting the lens, and if it’s not securely attached, the camera doesn’t know its there and it won’t focus, which hadn’t been the case. Regardless How it happened, it hit the dirt on the path, no lens cap on either end, and started to roll, and rather than let it roll of the cliff (I didn’t think I’d get lucky with the bush twice in a row), I Stepped On the lens to stop it. At that point I just needed to get off that hill, so I just threw caps on the lens and shoved it in my bag. I headed over to Punchbowl Falls next, and eventually stumbled across a path down to the bottom of the falls. Path might be a bit of a stretch, I mostly slid down the hill, bit by bit, but did eventually reach the beach below in one piece. Once I was at the bottom, I had a good view of the nice set of stairs that led up to a lovely, wide, gradual incline path that lead back up to the top. Only once I had taken the path back up (after I cleaned up my zoom lens – which was miraculously unscathed, and still worked, despite the drop and stepping on – and waded out into the river in flip flops to get the “classic” shot of Punchbowl Falls, that water was Cold, how people were swimming in it was beyond me!) did I figure out where the path started, behind a bench that had been occupied when I had walked by, and it seems that every sign along the trail is on the backside of a tree and not actually facing a direction anyone coming from the trailhead will see. And as I hiked back, I also discovered the trail for the Real viewpoint for Meklato falls, which does in fact have a fenced in viewing area (though I must say my view from the hill was better). The hike back to the car was mostly uneventful, but as I was debating whether I should call it a “Good Day,” based simply on the fact that I survived the day with all of my gear more or less intact, I dropped my cell phone and cracked the screen. At that point it became a “Bad Day”, until I took my phone apart and saw that I’d actually only cracked the faceplate and not the display itself, and it still worked, since I was able to call my mother and vent about my evening. She said call it a “Good Day”; it could have been Much Worse. If nothing else, it does keep my blog interesting, it wouldn’t be “Tiff’s Big-Ass Misadventures” otherwise!

I need to wrap this up, I’ve been sitting at a Subway in Portland for so many hours that I’ve actually eaten two meals here, and they’ll be closing soon….at midnight. It took forever to sort through the pictures from the last few days and clean them up, but I’ve had some great shoots lately and it was hard to pick just a couple, so there’s actually sixty-four new shots. Hope you enjoy, I think they represent some of my best work of the whole trip. It’s funny, in a good-funny way, but I’m actually starting to feel like a Real Photographer, and not just feel like I’m stumbling my way through. It’s kinda nice.

A quick note on the Signpost Forest photos (above) I shot in Watson Lake, YT a couple days ago on my way back down from Alaska…Being there was quite the trip down memory lane, as my family stopped there when I was seven when we were getting transferred from North Bend to Kodiak. It’s one of my few real memories of the drive up to Homer (where we caught the ferry to Kodiak), besides a ghost town, lots of mosquitoes, and listening to Jim Croce. People post street signs, city limit signs, license plates, homemade signs with their family name and the year they visited painted or carved onto boards…it’s quite the collection, signs from all over the world. And my how it’s grown in the last 20 years! If I’d been more prepared, I would have brought my own sign to put up, but that was not the case. Maybe next time…

I crossed the border back into the U.S. Saturday night and had intended to spend Sunday hanging out in the North Cascades National Park, but I soon began to feel Seattle’s pull and midday Sunday decided I’d rather head into town early. I’ve been quite pleased with that decision. I headed out to the Ballard Locks, one of my favorite places to shoot, to try to recreate some of my metal sculpture shots now that I have a camera with more megapixels. Got a couple shots there I was pretty happy with, as well as some nice flower shots in the botanical gardens before I headed to Green Lake to run a lap around the lake. I used to live a mile from the lake my senior year in college and this has been my favorite place to run for years. Headed back north to Everett to crash at my friend David’s place. I hadn’t seen him since last fall, and he hugged me even though I was sweaty and likely smelly…a true friend. Got to meet his girlfriend, Kristin, as well, and I very much like her. (A Much better choice this time, David! ) Today I headed back into Seattle to visit my old coworkers at Stonepath, it was so nice to see everyone. They’ve got two open seats in the Surface Transportation department, and I got the feeling they’d have hired me back on the spot if they could have convinced me to stay. Pete even asked me if i wanted to build a Fuji load, sigh…one of my beloved accounts. They’re in the middle of their busy season, and I miss being there. I couldn’t stand the boredom that comes with the slow winter season (though Stacy said they never really slowed down this past year), and I lived for peak season when I was working there. Made my rounds on the second floor and then headed over to Dispatch and a couple of the warehouses before heading over to Bellevue to meet up with Rishad. I’ve been craving good Thai food for eons, and I’ve even got leftovers for breakfast, yay! Rish and I have a lot of history together, but we’re long past any awkwardness and I had a great time hanging out with him. And congratulations are in order, as he and Uma just got engaged! I’m quite excited for them, though it sounds like a four day, traditional wedding ceremony in India will be in the works, and I must admit that just seems insane. Four days??? I’m all for a quickie Vegas wedding myself. Oh, and Happy Birthday, Rish, since it’s now after midnight. Sorry I won’t be at the birthday bash tomorrow, but be sure to eat lots of curry for me! Headed back up to Everett, took care of a couple things, and then went out to dinner with David, where I got to satisfy my ketchup craving, and have a couple Mac & Jacks, my all-time favorite beer. I think we sat at Red Robin for a good two hours (minimum) bullshitting. Quite honestly, I can’t remember the last time I talked THIS much! I’ve had a lovely day, and will be a little sad to leave Seattle in the morning. I’ve been in Salt Lake City for almost two years now, and quite happily for a year and a half, I didn’t even realize how much I still miss Seattle until I was actually back in town. So…to David, Rish, Sara, Stacy, Heather, Larry, Pete, Kevin, Chris, Mike, Allan, Corgi, Scott and everyone else I got a chance to catch up with today, it was lovely seeing you!!! And a special thanks to David for letting me crash at his place and shower, do laundry, dishes, etc and talk his ear off constantly It’s been wonderful to be back in town, even if it’s not quite “home” anymore….

Speaking of my mother….As I’ve been detailing my journey for those loyal friends and family members who can actually stand to read my long-ass blog, I’ve been thanking those people I’ve met along the way who have helped me out. The person I owe the biggest thank you to is back home in Salt Lake City…my mom. She is keeping my attention-whore furballs, Squeaker Zeke and Miss Magpie, fed and petted (and likely scooping their litter box(es) much more often than I ever do), watering my plants, and worrying about me and making sure I check in often enough. And if she’d been charging me rent at any point in the two years that I’ve been living with her since I moved to SLC, the funding for this trip probably would not have been possible. Thanks, Mom!!!!

(I accidentally deleted this blog, but I think I remembered it more or less….oops!)