Adventure Night

In my last post, I told the story of "Adventure Day 2010", and the sequel - "Adventure Day 2011". Well I'm home alone again this week, so yesterday at work I decided to have "Adventure Night". When I got home from work, I grabbed the telescope, my camera, a sweater, some food and jumped in the truck for "Adventure Night 2011"! I drove straight to Shaver Lake, pretty adventurous huh?

Wow! the water was right up to the top of the dam -



I clicked a quick pic, then jumped back in the truck to continue "the adventure". I went straight up the hill to Huntington Lake. The sun was getting pretty low by this time.



I was almost out of time. You see, the goal was to make it to the vista point above Kaiser pass before the sun went down. So I took a couple of quick snaps of Huntington and then jumped back in the truck to race to the top!

Kaiser pass is 9,100 feet above sea level. Once you get there, you can turn right off the paved road and head up a "Jeep trail" for two more miles, to a lookout point with an excellent view of the "Crest of the Sierras", a portion of the "Great Western Divide". You can see Edison Lake from there, and you have a pretty good view of the entire sky.

This is the first thing you see when you round the last turn and drive out into the opening at the top -



It's July in Central California, so the air-quality is not very spectacular. Hence the hazy appearance to the pictures. I made it to the top just in time to see the alpine-glow on the peaks, which is one of my favorite things. For the next 15 minutes, I ran around looking for some good shots. The poor air-quality didn't help, but it did add a lot of orange to the pictures. Here's the sun, just as it was going down -



I brought along my tripod, and a remote shutter release for the camera. I've never made any long-exposure pics of the night sky, and that was part of the "adventure"!

I was surprised at how they came out -



I've seen how photographers will shine a flashlight on objects in the foreground while making a long exposure, so of course I had to give that a try -



You know, it gets pretty cold above 9,000 feet, even in California in July. So I packed it in at 11:00 and headed back down to warm, cozy Fresno. Adventure night was pretty fun. Maybe I'll do that again in 2012.

Adventure Day - 2011

Last year on July 29th (2010), Tracy and Nick were out of town, so I got up early and went on a little road-trip. I went to the top of Fremont Peak, then to Pacific Grove where I biked around for a while. Then I went North through San Francisco, over the Golden Gate bridge, and ended up in Petaluma. I had fun posting pictures on Facebook throughout the day, and I started referring to it as 'Adventure Day'. So I thought I would have another 'Adventure Day' this year. Here are a few pictures from the first Adventure Day last year -

I stopped along Highway 99 to take this shot of the sun rise -



This was a little foot bridge on the trail to the top of Fremont Peak -



This was the vista I enjoyed when I arrived in Monterey -



Foggy in San Francisco, as usual -




This year's Adventure Day was hiking to the top of Yosemite Falls. Nick came along, and we had a nice little hike. Here's an HDR Panorama I took from Yosemite Point, which is a vista point about a mile past the top of Yosemite Falls. You'll want to click on the picture to open the full sized image -



It was pretty hazy that day, but there were some nice clouds that came along in the afternoon. Here is another HDR picture I took on the way back down -