A View Like No Other

Winter's coming, and rocks will fall, but any time is a good time to visit Yosemite National Park.

More stunning pictures accompany the full article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which you can read by clicking here.

Emigrant Wilderness in the news

The body of Hillsborough hiker Christopher Andrews, 42, was found in the Sierra Nevada on Monday after a three-day search.

Andrews left home on Sept. 30 to go hiking in the Emigrant Wilderness of Tuolumne County and transmitted an emergency signal from his personal locator beacon on Friday.

Amy Andrews, his wife of 11 years, said her husband was an enthusiastic outdoorsman, and he wanted to go to his favorite hiking spot this week because a dark moon would allow him to see many stars.

But a Friday storm forced Andrews to abandon his camp at Iceland Lake, according to authorities, and Andrews attempted to climb north to a safer area.

At approximately 2 p.m. Monday, searchers saw the outline of a body in a crevasse on a steep area of granite. They rappelled down the wall and recovered Andrews' body, authorities said.

Tualla said that the Emigrant Wilderness is not a particularly dangerous area for hikers, but that it requires extreme caution and preparedness because it has no clearly marked trails and the weather changes rapidly. He could not recall the last time someone died there, but said a search-and-rescue was executed in the Emigrant Wilderness within the last month.

Click for the full article by Kyveli Diener in the San Jose Mercury News.

Here's a good link to the lakes of Emigrant Wildnerness; scroll down the page to see Iceland Lake.

Poor guy.

"Run for your lives!"

photo by Tom Trujillo for AP

A large slab of granite cracked loose from a cliff in Yosemite National Park this morning and crashed into the Curry Village resort with a thunderous roar, flattening tents and forcing hundreds of campers to run for their lives.

"It sounded enormous, like the earthquakes I've been in in Los Angeles," said Tom Voelpel, a lighting technician from Valencia who was sharing a tent at Curry Village with his twin brother, Dave, in celebration of their 50th birthday. "You could hear trees snapping and rocks crunching and cracking against each other."

—from the San Francisco Chronicle; reporting by Peter Fimrite and Steve Rubenstein

Click here to read the full article, and click here to see the rest of the photos.