Yosemite, pronouced yo-sem-it-teeeee, my favourite national park for the trip! Took a rented car, and drove ~350miles from San Francisco to Yosemite! I'm adding in some snaps in addition to the photographs that shown. I'll separate out the photographs into a pure html photography link later...cheerios
One of the main attractions of Yosemite. This is the upper falls, which we trekked all the way to the top on the 2nd day!
Our budget lodging, in a tent. ~S$100/night. It was unbearably cold on the first night, rain, 2 layers of clothing, 3 layers of blanket, and it was still freeeezing cold! Every turn of the body felt the chill!! (Temp unknown, but my breath condenses inside the tent, hence cold enough!)
Some miles up the Yosemite Falls, the remains of winter melts ...
The Half Dome, one of the greatest monolith granite rocks... It looks nothing impressive here..but during the hike up Falls trail, I quaked in my shoes after staring at the half dome for a while... a more impressive half dome picture will be feature in the photography link.
Decently marked trail allowed little effort in navigation.
Went rock climbing the following day. On this particular surface, the upper body is not really required. Quite different from the rock-climbing that I've done (Gym, artificial walls & limestone), this granite is smooth!. 'All feet!' - as the old-school instructor Jo points out again. One really needs to trust the tinest dish and cranny to surface such surfaces! Here a fellow climber bravely takes on the...El Capitan?? Another shot of myself in the photography link.
After rock climbing, Siva and I went up Tenaya creek to try to capture half dome's reflection in Mirror lake. We were on the wrong side of the river, and we traversed the icy-cold (my feet went numb immediately) stream. On the reverse trip I stopped onto a rock and took this photograph. Siva fell into the river shortly after and I pulled him up in a jiff!
An attempt to shoot star trails, left the tripod directly outside our tent and went for a 15min exposure. Not long enough to get nice trails, but heck...was good enough for another cold night!
The final morning at Grand Canyon, we woke up very early to catch the sunrise. Here, Siva took a snap of yours truly gearing up for the 'moment'....
