Greetings from Salt Lake City, Utah! I’ve been home for almost a week now, but today feels like I could still be on the road. I’ve been sitting at the Toyota dealership for the last five-plus hours, laptop open in front of me, Monarch playing through my headphones. I wasn’t planning on being here quite this long, but I’ve managed to finally finish the post-processing for the last batch of photos and am now writing this second-to-last trip blog. Turns out I have some suspension issue or other (tie rod maybe?) that’s going to cause my 4Runner to fail its safety inspection in March, so I figured I might as well deal with that now while I’m getting everything else taken care of. It was pretty funny, the tech had looked at my service history and wondered where I had driven my car to put 25,000 miles on it since he saw it in July, and the guy at the service desk said the better question is “Where didn’t she drive her car?” Despite the high mileage, though (almost 191,000 miles, 116,000 of which I’m responsible for since buying my car a little over three and a half years ago), I’ve been told my 4Runner is in great shape and that it’s obvious I take care of it. Yay!
But anyways…I’m trying to recall where I left off…Oh yes, the Starbucks/Safeway in Carmel Valley! The gloom had set in by the time I finished posting that last update, and I wound up spending more time reading and catching up on my TV shows than taking pictures for a couple days. Luckily for me, I caught a break and the uncooperative weather decided to play nice for an hour or two when I was at Pfeiffer Beach. It wound up being one of the prettiest sunsets of the entire trip, and I had good company on the beach as well. Jeff, an actor from New York who was working in Los Angeles in a theater production, had made use of his days off by driving up to Big Sur to take some pictures. He was a lot of fun to chit chat with as we got our shots while trying to make sure we didn’t wind up in each other’s shots either.
Unfortunately, that sunset was the last of my interesting weather on the coast, and I decided to detour inland to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks instead before heading down to Los Angeles. I didn’t get to see much of Kings Canyon since most of the park is only accessible by backpacking, and only one section that’s drivable hadn’t already been closed for winter. The drive from Kings Canyon down to the entrance to Sequoia, through the Sequoia National Forest, was absolutely beautiful. There was a layer of fresh snow on all the trees, and initially blue skies with good clouds, and then as I headed into the national park itself, the blue skies turned to clouds and fog. I did a short hike through the Giant Forest, down to the General Sherman Tree, and the scenery was spectacular. The General Sherman Tree was highly impressive as well. Even though the top of the tree has died, and at 275-feet tall, it’s no longer growing upward, the roughly 2,200 year-old tree continues to grow width-wise and is the largest tree in the world. My park brochure mentions that each year the General Sherman grows enough new wood to make a 60-foot tall “regular-size” tree.
I would have hiked more, but it had started to snow and I hadn’t worn the right hat for keeping my ears warm so I wound up heading back to my car. I opted to head back down toward Visalia and then took a winding mountain/forest road through the Sequoia National Forest toward Death Valley. I’m sure that if I’d gone a ways further south and taken one of the highways, my drive would have been much faster, and less stressful, but then I would have missed the view when I came over the top of Sherman Pass. It was dusk by then, and all the needles on the trees along the road looked as though they had been crystallized. It was exceedingly pretty, as well as exceedingly cold.
Death Valley was a major letdown. I had such a great shoot there when I first visited the park on my 2006 trip, despite the summer heat, but I’ve now been back twice during the cooler months and found myself bored to tears. In fact, with a complete lack of clouds, I was already bored and uninspired before the sun had even come up. I drove up to Dante’s View and then dropped by Zabriskie Point, but I know what Death Valley looks like with clouds, and found myself highly disappointed everywhere I stopped. I left not long after that, without ever taking a single picture, and headed toward Lone Pine to scout out Mobius Arch in the Alabama Hills. I’d tried to get the famous shot of Mt. Whitney through the arch at dawn back in January, but I’d arrived at the location too late and there were already several photographers set up in the small area in front of the arch. It was late morning by the time I arrived, so the good light was already long gone and having exhausted my reading supply, I realized I couldn’t fathom sitting there in my car for twenty hours to wait for sunrise.
Had I known that Death Valley was going to be so uninspiring, I could have saved myself many, many hours and miles of driving and headed to Los Angeles straight from Sequoia. And had I known that my Los Angeles locations were going to be so uninteresting with the too blue skies, and that I would opt to scratch the last week of the trip, I could have saved myself even more miles by just having driven home when I so close to the Nevada border, on the eastern side of Death Valley. Unfortunately, my psychic powers are rather lacking…
By Saturday evening I was still planning on going to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, but that didn’t last very long. After I’d given myself a quick tour of the mostly abandoned and often mud-covered remnants of neighborhoods along the Salton Sea Sunday morning, I decided just to drive through Joshua Tree National Park (which turned out to be fairly ugly) and go home from there. I was done. I touched base with my boss and co-workers and let them know I wanted to start back Thursday, let my mom know I was on my way, and less than twelve hours later I was back in Salt Lake.
It’s good to be home.
I figure I’ve got one more blog entry left to write, I need to sum up my thoughts on the trip as a whole, and thank a whole lot of people for a whole lot of different things. But first I think I need a couple more days to finish getting settled back into life in the Real World before I do. Soon…
The last of the new photos have been posted in the Pfeiffer Beach, Sequoia, and California albums.