The Cactus Trip Diaries

I guess that just about everything there is to know about the Yosemite (or Mighty Josie, as I prefer to call it, as I can’t seem to remember the US pronunciation) National Park can be found on the Internet, a mere Google Search away. Try http://www.nps.gov/yose/ for starters. What you won’t find there are the 323 image files that are my record of our visit, or the 176 pics of Cliff and another couple of hundred + taken by Eunice. This is a very photogenic location. Again, no cacti or other succulents were found, although Eunice reports Dudleya found in the Park.

We somehow managed to persuade a Ranger that we did not need Snow Chains, as we had All Terrain All Weather tyres and 4×4.

Today was a real ‘photographer’s outing’: 67 of my pictures are of ‘textures’ – pictures of bark of some of the pine trees – very individual, it seems as though each tree has its bark ‘fingerprint’.

We were by no means the only photographers, and it seemed at times as though we were at the shoot out at the OK Coral, with people parading their cameras and lenses through the park. At one location, we joined a row of cameras-on-tripods and their owners and wondered if we ended up at a Canon convention until we spotted and joined a lady with a Nikon D3. It transpired that we were in the middle of a photography class, with the lecturer a little unnerved by our invasion, particularly as Cliff put a face on a small snowman using dirt from the road. All of a sudden, tripods were turned round and people were queuing to have their picture taken with this entertaining creature, rather than with the dramatic back drop of Yosemite’s signature landmarks. And the light was poor under a heavily clouded sky, so several pictures were taken of the same subject with different camera settings to allow playtime on the laptop’s ‘dark room software’.

All good things come to an end and we managed to get back to the Great Western in Oakhurst just before 6 p.m. keen to download and view a magnificent set of pics – not so much our doing, but the splendid settings make it difficult not to take breath taking pictures – thousands of people around us were doing the same.