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Tioga
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Aerial Yosemite, a new perspective! | |||||||||||||||
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More Yosemite: |
We started at the small Pine Mountain Lake airport and followed highway 120 and the Tuolumne Canyon into the park and seemingly straight into Half Dome. At what seemed moments before kissing the face, we turned about and slid smoothly over the valley taking in one of a kind views of El Capitan, Yosemite Falls and Bridal Veil Falls. Sentinel Dome, a hike who's trailhead is just a bit before Glacier Point looks like a wonderful place to hike to—affording 360 park views...and not so many people either because it isn't directly on the road. There were a handful of the controlled burns going on so the air wasn't crystal clear, but the memories will be! Swooping back up the valley we looped Half Dome. It is actually fairly narrow, and more of a wedge than a dome. The cables do not creep up the back, but up the northern side-edge—this came as a great surprise to me. We followed the Merced river up the Little Yosemite Valley from one hike-in camp to the next. I was only remotely aware of this visitor experience, but what a wonderful offering. One can reserve space in the back country camps and have all the services of food and water and sleeping cabins available to them so that their hiking days are more enjoyable without the need to carry a big load for eating/sleeping for a week. There are 6 such cabins that take one through the prettiest and fairly remote parts of the park. From the air we could often see the camps and the trails next to the rivers. We continued over Tioga Pass and could see a distant Mono Lake and the sweeping decent of Highway 120 into Lee Vining. Rounding out our tour took us over the southern bits of Emigrant Wilderness, Hetch Hetchy, Lake Eleanor & Cherry Lake, after which we spun around Groveland and landed safely! I have to admit that I only asked Larry once if he thought he was high enough to not hit the pending mountain and only once noted that if he slowed down just a little I might be able to wash my hands in the river just below us. But the funniest was when all of the sudden I found myself sitting in the midst of a super breeze. I had nothing to attribute all this wind to and decided that the airplane had chosen this inopportune moment to peel apart and I was the only one that knew it. Larry could feel my tension and was calmly explaining about turbulence being Mother Nature's burp or something like that. I had to ask for his hand and show him that his plane had burst a hole somewhere and was leaking air. He calmly turned off the air conditioning and all was well again in my world. Thanks Larry!
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On
July 24th, 2006,
we had an opportunity to take an aerial tour of Yosemite with our friend,
Larry Jobe. What Visions! Most of you who know me are likely to guess that a
small craft airplane is not my idea of safe transportation and certainly not
a method of sight seeing I would find natural, but well it was breathlessly
wonderful. 
Hotel Charlotte
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