Thursday, January 9. Don Pedro Reservoir is down and the hills are still brown. So far it's been an extraordinarily dry fall and winter.

Entering the Rim Fire zone, just beyond the Groveland Ranger Station.

The eponymous Rim. Schicke died in an earlier fire. There's a memorial here: in 2004 she was the first woman CDF fire fighter to lose her life in duty. There's also a memorial up here to USFS crew chief David Erickson who died in the 1987 Stanislaus Complex Fire. That fire burned some of this same area.

The Rim and this part of the Toulumne canyon got hammered.

Rim Fire details were posted up here.

I stopped again where Highway 120 crosses the South Fork of the Tuolumne about 4 miles short of the Yosemite Park Entrance. Burnt here, but a little green too.

The story at Carlon, a few miles upstream on the South Fork and near the park entrance, was very different. Almost no fire damage even though this is well inside the fire perimeter. And snow! Carlin is only at around 4300' but it's a cold pocket. For the most part there was no snow below 6000' or so.

Still, brown remains an operative color down here. Lots of dry grass and naked alders.

The fire extended into the park. This is a few miles in from Big Oak Flat entrance station. Even this is not the end of the burn. There were islands of burnt and unbrunt forest throughout.

The Merced Grove Trailhead was (finally!) past the burn. Time to stop driving and start hiking. There was no snow beyond on the almost-melted parking lot piles.

Down through the mixed coniferous forest -- Douglas fir, white Fir, Ponderosa pine, sugar pine, and incence cedar.

Sequoiadendron giganteum (giant sequoia). The first trees of the Merced Grove. It's a small grove. It begins with these five, plus a few more scattered near by.

Two more a little farther down the trail. The trail here is the track of the Old Coulterville Road, carefully routed to give the wagon passengers a thrilling view of the giant trees.

And then this park building among the last few big trees.

Sequoiadendron giganteum. The two biggest ones in Merced Grove are down by the cabin. My hiking poles give scale -- each is about 4'.

Sequoiadendron giganteum. A long fat trunk -- very little taper -- leads up -- a long way up -- to remarkably sparce branching in the crown. A few of the trees in this grove were fuller.

Sequoiadendron giganteum branch. More like juniper than a cedar and, of course, nothing at all like Sequoia sempervirens. Merced Grove, Yosemite NP, January 9, 2014.

Not all of the giant sequoias are giants, and that's fine.

Pinus lambertiana -- sugar pine -- as I head back up to the parking lot.

Into the valley now. Yosemite Falls is essentially dry.

View from the Sentinel Bridge just as the last sun hits Half Dome. A little snow along the Merced. Yosemite Valley is a dandy cold air trap.

I walked around Cook's Meadow after dinner and explored what my new camera could do under very low light. ISO 6400, f/1.8, 1/4 second hand-held, 17 mm, +2EV during processing. Dark, banded, and grainy, but Half Dome is there. Those are stars! First attempt at a this sort of night shot. I'll keep working this.

Friday, January 10, 2014. Bridalveil Meadow and the Merced River below ... El Capitan, the Cathedral Rocks, and Bridalveil Falls above.

A somewhat similar view looking up this valley, this taken about 1000' higher. Today's hike started at the Wawona Tunnel headed up the Pohono Trail. This was taken a about five minutes after I left the trailhead.