221–230 of 237 posts
OT - One of my most personal profound moments was chasing this winter photo [0] and sharing it with a coyote. I wanted to take a night shot of the Cathedral Rock (that I had seen a few years earlier but didn't take a good photo of it) under the full moon and fresh snow. It took me several years of driving up to Yosemite when there was snow storm and one night I got lucky. It was around 11 PM when the storm stopped an…
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Starting with growth of population. Ultimately consumption is a function of population.
> Ultimately consumption is a function of population. Consumption is a function of economic policy and wealth/lifestyle. For example, we consume more oil than china but have 1 billion less people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consu... India has 1 billion more people and we pretty much consume everything more than them. The same goes for Africa. Considering that china is moving towards a cons…
If we learnt anything from this covid crisis, it should be exponential growth can be devastating. And that we must flatten the curve. Be it the virus or global population, it’s the same thing.
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> Everest gets a break from the climbers. As there's no wildlife to damage on Everest, I don't see a big problem with it being crushed by tourists.
There is life everywhere ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile#Classifications ) including in boiling water, so why would there be no wildlife on Everest? A short search gave me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euophrys_omnisuperstes : ”the Himalayan jumping spider, is a small jumping spider that lives at elevations of up to 6,700 m (22,000 ft) in the Himalayas, including Mount Everest, making it a candidate for…
My point stands.
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Yosemite Valley is about 2% of the total area of Yosemite National Park. It's deliberately concentrated so that most of Yosemite can remain wilderness.
I've hiked the entire park. Literally ever trail except for maybe 1-2 miles. The park is massive. It would take about 2 weeks doing 10-15 miles a day to cover the entire thing. The VAST majority of the park is empty. If you go more than 2 miles in you have the entire place to yourself. There are places in the back country that would be ENTIRE national parks if they were anywhere else. Maybe of the waterfalls don't ev…
There really isn't much else like hanging out with your best friends, fishing for dinner, all alone in the wilderness for days/weeks at a time, hiking and sleeping out under the stars. It's so unique and intoxicating, I have trouble remembering it back home. I transmogrify in the dust of the trail.
I can't wait for this all to be over so I can get back out there like that again.
Us, the moon, the sweet winds, and the howl.
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Sounds like an animal encountering a larger animal and deciding to not engage.
As a reductionist I'd have to agree, but I like the idea that the coyote was wanting to share that moment while thinking (and not being able to articulate) "Nice view, huh?"
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That's a problem I have with Parks. There is a conflicting mandate. They 'protect' but they also 'promote'. My parents took us up to Yosemite on weekend trips in the summer growing up. 50 years ago they tended to studiously avoid the valley proper. The farther you're willing to hike the fewer people and more bears and Germans.
Germans?
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The goal of a park (particularly the valley) is to allow as many people as possible to see and appreciate it. There are hundreds of thousands of square miles of empty wilderness in the Sierra (including in Yosemite) , with much of it similar in scale to Yosemite. Your story is a good example for one of the goals of parks, but you seem to have missed the point. If you've never been to the Yosemite after living in CA f…
you seem to have missed the point. what's the point in allowing people to go to a park in such a way that it destroys the park? a national park simply cannot handle a limitless amount of traffic. i went to rocky mountain national park on what happened to be labor day weekend. it sounds weird, but we actually didn't plan on going there while in colorado but ended up going due to other things changing. it was insane .…
I don't mean to discount your broader position, I just don't think you're actually arguing against your comment's parent. Yes, the parks are absolutely swamped and many will gradually bring in shuttles or lotteries and the like. Zion runs a shuttle, Bryce also. Half Dome and The Wave have lottery systems as it is. Getting a camping spot in the big name parks during peak season is miserably difficult. When I went to Rocky Mountain last year, we drove Trail Ridge Road and found a parking spot just once that allowed us to stop. Every parking spot was otherwise taken along the entire drive. And the main, named trails' trailheads fill up daily too which meant we didn't even try. But that's not the entire park. Think of it like the ocean where almost everyone plays on the beach but you have to be well-equipped, skilled and aware of risks to dive at a continental shelf or cross oceans or whatever. (Just pretend cruise ships and trawling boats don't exist for this comparison...)
I wonder if we can create ways in which this will remain enabled even post the COVID crisis. Limit the amount of visitors, keep the parks open only during certain months of the year, etc.
One thing that can make overrun scenic routes a challenge is parking for photo stops and I suspect a solution to that lies in changing the way people think about photos and documenting their experience.
It's probably changed since, but many years ago I hiked a couple of days in Tiger Leaping Gorge in China. There was a lower route for tourist buses and an upper trail for hikers. Upper route required greater commitment - better fitness, multiple days, guesthouse stop, etc. As both routes were on the same side of a steep gorge, neither was really aware of the other.
https://archive.md/TpE5t
http://web.archive.org/web/20200413161736/https://www.latime... One can also get LA Times stories via Reuters, thanks to shared TLS hosting: printf " " > 1.html printf "GET /california/story/2020-04-13/yosemite-national-park-closed-wildlife-waterfalls-muir HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.latimes.com\r\nConnection: close\r\n" | openssl s_client -connect www.reuters.com:443 -servername www.latimes.com -ign_eof >> 1.html firefox…
In the example, there should be an additonal \r\n after "Connection: close".
OT - One of my most personal profound moments was chasing this winter photo [0] and sharing it with a coyote. I wanted to take a night shot of the Cathedral Rock (that I had seen a few years earlier but didn't take a good photo of it) under the full moon and fresh snow. It took me several years of driving up to Yosemite when there was snow storm and one night I got lucky. It was around 11 PM when the storm stopped an…