Tales Of A Yosemite Dirt Bag

I'm with the grassy hoppers and sneezeweeds, the lodgepole pines and towering craggy peaks. I'm with green's greenest green and all the living things dancing in between.

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Jumping into Snow Creek before breakfast. A cold,brisk mid-October morning, but this is my favorite swimming hole in Yosemite. I would probably consider taking the 18-foot leap even if the surrounding ground was frozen with snow. I love this spot that much. At this time of the year Snow Creek is barely a trickle; however, this pool always remains approximately 9-feet deep thanks to the basin carved out by the waterfall. Which makes for a nice water slide when the water is generously flowing. Of course these kinds of feats are usually done Yosemite style - naked.

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Walking alone along the Mirror Lake trail after sun down, I hear a familiar sound, almost like a rock fall. I look up to see a parachute being deployed. I grab for my camera as a I see a second jumper still falling through the sky. They pull so low to the ground so they will not be seen by law enforcement. BASE jumping is illegal in Yosemite and comes with a fine of thousands of dollars. Plus seizure of all equipment, which is also thousands of dollars. Yet still they do it. I don't blame them. Maybe some day.

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Four of us piled into a tiny Honda Prelude, from before a lot of you were born, and drove to the hot springs in Mammoth to stay up all night and watch the lunar eclipse. The temperature remained below freezing until after sunrise; my feet burned even inside my sleeping bag the entire night until I jumped back in the hot spring at 8:30 am. While the full blood moon proved difficult to photograph, here is a shot of my friend Adam standing on some boulders behind the smaller pool at Wild Willy's shortly before the eclipse started.

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Some city folks came up to visit us Yosemites so we decided to show them the East Side (of the Sierras) with its dramatic mountain horizons and great desert expanses. At Twin Lakes I ran up to everyone exclaiming, "Look at these bird parts I found!"

Sometimes I feel like a caricature. The unshowered dirt bag running around the woods with ripped up clothes and empty pockets holding dead animal parts. Yet I shamelessly love finding the dead things. Never does one get closer to examining a wild animal. 

I still have no idea what bird this is. The colorization of the flight feather suggests a Clark's Nutcracker; however, the gray is too smoky, and the throat has hints of aquamarine instead of red.

I found a similar flight feather hiking with Yosemite's Owl Team, but the scientists all begrudgingly guessed a Clark's Nutcracker, not knowing what it really was.

Does anyone have a guess?

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