Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Commentary

Drive to Fix California State Park Funding

A Tom Stienstra article at SF Gate reviews an initiative to fix the gross funding problems with California State Parks. The governor and the legislature have used this California legacy as a gambling chip for the past couple of years, and it has to stop. The parks are too valuable to the state in so [...]

Bad News for Climate Change Deniers

Although the preponderance of evidence clearly points to warming global temperatures in recent years, there are those who prefer not to accept the evidence. One thread that got a lot of coverage during the past few years was the claim that poor siting of weather stations used to acquire long term temperature data had biased [...]

Yosemite’s Delaware North Companies Customer Service: Mea Culpa

I hate it when I blow it. Double-hate it when I do it so publicly. But better to own up and apologize.
I earlier posted a message about what I thought was a customer service issue with my Yosemite lodging reservation. But it was my own error and my fault. It took me a while, but [...]

Better prospects for a good wildflower year?

After several years of below-normal rainfall, it is great to find myself living through a week of solid rain with more on the way! (It is interesting to watch the “typical” El NiƱo pattern play out – tons of rain heading toward central and southern California.) While it is too soon to know how the [...]

About this blog…

I realized recently that I haven’t posted here in some time – despite the fact that I post daily or more frequently at my photography blog, sometimes on related subjects. I haven’t quite decided yet whether it is better to:

get my act together and post here again more regularly, or
do all of my posting in [...]

Left is Right. Up is Down. In is Out. And Schwarzenegger to be honored for protecting state parks!

According to the LA Times California’s incompetent lame-duck governor who threatened to close most state parks, later backed off and only wanted to close some, and eventually played a huge cut in park funding as a positive thing…
“… will be honored Oct. 29 with the National Park Trust’s Bruce F. Vento Public Service Award in [...]

And so winter begins…

An unusual-for-October strong storm is to come onshore in California in the next 24 hours or so. While the snow levels are forecast to be quite high – around 9000′ – this storm could well close several passes if things pan out as forecast.
The folks at the Dweeb Report include an ominous sentence in [...]

The Start of “Sierra Winter” Next Week?

Sometime between mid-October and (usually) early November, the first real winter storms start to arrive in California and the Sierra Nevada – and we move from occasional temporary closings on the highest passes to the annual winter closures.
Judging from the current predictions, travelers need to keep a watch out starting next week. Right now [...]

Clint Eastwood Talks to the Trees

Ken Burns National Parks program online at PBS

Although I was in Yosemite this past weekend when the program started (yes, doing photography), between making photographs and working on them after returning I have yet to see any of the Ken Burns National Park series on PBS. However… I see now that you can you can watch them online for a limited time.