The trails were full of roots, to trip us. And rocks, to trip us. And it was just blazingly hard to see. And dammit, our own feet tripped us. We tripped, but we wanted to do it.

Here’s my narrative, with photos, covering the entire May Lake Blue Moon trip. I started blogging in 2003, before the trip, but hadn’t mastered it quite yet, so there’s no contemporaneous blog entry from that period.

At the top, with sheer drops off the peak behind us, we sat on the top to capture a time exposure with my new digital (Nikon D100) camera. (No iPhone in those days.) You’ll see we are seated rather than standing. This is because we needed to hold still for the two-second exposure. Took a bunch of exposures. Well, actually we were so unstable at this height above the ground (precipice behind us) that we sat down and clenched the rock beneath our seats.

Well, I can’t speak for Aaron and Jason, but I was clenching for sure.

So around 11:00pm here we are — at the summit.

A couple of staff from the May Lake High Sierra Camp (my interview) (read about MLHSCC online) also did the ascent that night, and they caught up with us halfway up. They told us the next morning that they slept in bags near the peak overnight and had “never been so cold.” I slept at the bottom in my warm tent, but honestly after all this excitement it took me until almost dawn to get to sleep.

When I looked at the photos, at first I thought maybe I had captured nothing. But upon photoshopping the original digital photo, I discovered I could lighten it to the point where we were quite visible. Along with the streak of something behind us (probably an airplane, though it should have been red or green, not white). And here and there were glimmers caused by cosmic rays shooting through the camera’s sensor and dislodging an electron or two.

Like I said, check my interview of Brian Shoor, manager of May Lake High Sierra Camp, in 2015 on Youtube.

The post Revisiting Blue Moon 2004 appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I have really loved being able to watch this project, from just a few miles away, and to be able to walk past the site almost weekly, observing how it has progressed. There’s a great time-lapse sequence, as well as selection of photos by date, on the Salesforce Tower web site.

This photo gives a fairly surrealistic view from near Twin Peaks, which is centrally located in the San Francisco landmass about three miles from the tower.

The building makes its own weather at its 1,070 foot height, disrupting most airflow that has come in through the Golden Gate just a few miles to its west, making its own clouds both in front of and behind the structure.

During construction, you could see work continuing well into the night — evidenced by two giant construction cranes at the top of the building with their red lights moving from side to side as beams were hoist into place. In this nighttime photo, you see three lighted spans of the (old) Bay Bridge on the right, then a second tower (blue lights), then the yellowish vertical lights of the Salesforce Tower, with two construction cranes at the top.The cranes and their towers were removed early in 2017.

The Google Maps satellite view today (2017-12-18) still shows the site as it appeared before construction of the vertical structure had begun, approximately August of 2015.

Below here’s my photo of the site before that time with  a yellow concrete rig and other cranes on the still-flat earth of the site before excavation, but after piles had been driven deep into the ground. Behind it on the right in the photo is the steel frame of the Trans-Bay Terminal, a multi-block-long terminus for busses coming from the East Bay and North Bay. That’s a completely other story, with deep excavations and long caverns destined to hold busses and eventually high-speed trains to and from central and southern California.

During construction we could view the building rising floor by floor around its concrete and steel core over the nearly two years of above-ground work from including most of 2016 and all of 2017. This pre-dawn photo is from May, 2016.

As the building grew, it was enclosed in blue protective mesh to keep debris in, and windows were lifted, one by one, on the giant construction cranes, and swung into place on every window of every floor. This took place day and night, weekends included, month after month (Photo from November, 2016 before the building had even topped out.)

When the glass exterior was completed, the building began to shine with reflections of bright sunsets, reflecting the rainbow hues from light blue above, down to reds and the yellow-red of the setting sun. The building takes on this set of rainbow hues at sunset and dusk most clear days. On other days, it may remain silvery grey, yet highly reflective, all day long.

How do they keep all this glass clean? Yet another story to be told later. My last photo, here, gives you a hint of how they will be doing it. The two devices at the top remind me of window-washing rigs.

The post Salesforce Tower completion appeared first on Sky's Blog.

You can see why they say birds are the remaining descendants of the dinosaurs. These guys look so much like the drawings of pterodactyl. Of course even those drawings are fanciful, since all we can go by are fossils. But look at these birds and how they glide just over the waves and surface of the ocean.

I usually don’t think of pelicans as beautiful birds, but this photo (and others I took that day) show the detail of their wing feathers. And I noticed that at the end of each wing are five distinct feathers — like fingers on the end of a hand.

I’m working on a (musical) suite whose working title is Flight. In this work, each movement has a riddle that goes along with it. Here are two of those riddles.

• What flies through the air but never arrives?
• The heron flies through the sky — what trace does it leave?

I know of several thoughtful and meditative answers for each riddle.

The post Pelicans at Ocean Beach appeared first on Sky's Blog.

What does an optical migraine look like? What happens for me, and this is not true for all who have this condition, is that portions of what I’m looking at are “filled in by background color” from behind the object. So, like the photo of Rick’s head, I might see clearly the left side of your face, but the right side disappears and is replaced by the color of the wall behind your head. (My opticals are not associated with headache or any pain whatsoever — they’re entirely visual and last 20 to 40 minutes.)

Really spooky to see a photographer reproduce this phenomenon!

The post Optical Migraines in Advertising and Promotion appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Jeff Goldsmith, who has made many of these trips with me and the group, was the only one with a full week to spare this summer, so he and I made this journey, which we called “27.1” because it’s the first hike of the 27th year that I’ve been doing this.

The photo gallery shows some photos taken along the way. My Yosemite page contains most of the trips taken in the last 10 years.

This year’s trip was highlighted by the following events and observations:

• We attempted to cover 10+ miles per day. We could actually only cover  8 miles on average due to the excess weight (“hobbies”) we were carrying. It is important to recognize these limitations early on and adapt the schedule!
• The amateur radio hobby was a bust this time for two reasons. Although I had a five-watt transceiver and a nice antenna, I wasn’t able to make a single contact on any band because conditions were pretty bad. I’ll have to check further into whether it was an antenna issue or an output-power issue. The second problem was that this hobby accounted for over eight lbs in my pack, which really slowed me down.
• The photography hobby needs to be scaled back. My Nikon D7000 camera works great, but it’s a heavy beast, weighing in at something over two lbs, and it’s hard to carry on the trail, since it really has to be fastened to the chest strap on the pack and it still bounces around significantly. A camera weighing a few ounces would be much better. In all I was probably carrying upwards of 10 lbs of such hobby gear that was not necessary for this trip. My pack weight was 44 lbs and could have been 34 if I hadn’t carried the extra gear. (This included 11 lbs of food, which was also excessive.)
• The Pacific Crest Trail hikers were friendly and are in general an outgoing group. Ran into more than a half dozen every day, and most were hiking from the Mexico border to the Canadian border. Many had been on the trail since April or May this year, with a few down-days (they say “zero days”) along the way. Most of them were covering 20 miles or more each day. We were on the PCT every day except for the time in Matterhorn Canyon.
• Matterhorn itself is a long ways in. I figured about 35 miles from Tuolumne Meadow. That’s just too much for slow and heavy-pack hikers to cover in three days, especially given the 3000+ to 4000+ ft elevation change on the last day going toward Matterhorn. So we just relaxed once we realized we wouldn’t make it either to Matterhorn or around the loop I had charted out in advance. We adapted and enjoyed the area.
• There are great lakes along the trail. Miller Lake, where we spent the 2nd and the 4th nights (see top photo), is a wonderful little lake and is warm enough to comfortably swim in with few mosquitoes. McCabe Lake, which I’ve visited before, is more than two miles off the PCT and thus not on the itinerary for most PCT’ers, but we spent a night there and it was a great place.
• After accounting for limitations and changing the plans, it was a memorable week-long trek.

The post Summer of Yosemite 2012 appeared first on Sky's Blog.

There is no due process and no way someone who is wrongfully blocked can get themselves quickly unblocked.

And were this legislation to pass in the US, it would signal strong support for other countries similarly blocking internationally-hosted content based on their own national laws. (Many do it already, but let’s not set an example.)

Join me in opposing these bills. Notify your US Senators and Representatives.

This site will be participating in the Strike on January 18th, 2012.

The post Stop SOPA/PIPA appeared first on Sky's Blog.

See his photos directly on Flickr for even more.

Here is the second of his photo sets that I promised I’d feature:

The post KY6R Art Gallery (2) appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I particularly like Rich’s approach of using found objects, which trigger nostalgia, and positioning and lighting them creatively. Some might describe his work as spooky or weird as well as completely intriguing.

I’m going to feature two sets of KY6R photos, one set today and one set tomorrow – here is the first:

The post KY6R Art Gallery (1) appeared first on Sky's Blog.