Anyone else find this UPS tracking as confusing (and amusing) as I?

For the uninitiated, that “Ontario, CA, US” is the city of Ontario here in California – literally the next city over, and pretty much the main land shipping hub for the region.

Yosemite National Park is probably one of the most photographed locations on Earth – and for good reason. I’ve gone camping, driven through the mountains, etc. plenty, but while I’ve seen many beautiful natural scenes I’ve never seen anything like Yosemite first-hand.

That’s not to say I wasn’t familiar with what Yosemite had to offer a landscape photographer, however. Photography legend and naturalist Ansel Adams did much of his most famous and best work here, including shots of such landmarks as Half Dome and El Capitan.

So, it was a natural destination for the first leg of my trip.

Yosemite National Park

After departing from Mono Lake, it didn’t take long to find myself pulling off to the side of the road and grabbing my camera. It probably took me three times longer to get to the park entrance than it should have because I couldn’t keep myself from stopping to take more photos. This pattern held true the entire time I was at the park.

I spent roughly 10 hours driving through the park (stop and go, really), both through the less-traveled Tioga Pass route as well as the popular valley areas further south.

There isn’t much that can be said about Yosemite beyond what the pictures themselves show.

Sunny day in Yosemite

Teapot Dome at Yosemite

Frozen stream at Yosemite

Half Dome in the distance

El Capitan

Half Dome near sunset

Twilight in Yosemite

It was a long day – 10 hours or so – and I took somewhere near 700 photos of just Yosemite alone. Be it the excellent lighting conditions or the sheer beauty of the landscape, I was consistently quite happy with the results (normally I have to throw out at least half of my shots right off the bat for being too blurry or other technical defects, but here the real challenge was in choosing which I liked the most).

If you’d like to review more photographs from Yosemite, you may do so in the Gallery.

Those following me on Twitter may have noticed that I’ve been on a road trip from home in southern California to Washington State.

This is a trip that I’ve done many times but – due to my (as of October 10th) lack of a job and the fact that I would be traveling alone – I decided to take a bit of a detour and drive up highway 395 instead of Interstate 5.

What’s funny is that, years ago (when I still lived in Kennewick), I actually lived about a mile from U.S. Route 395. Now – over a thousand miles away in California – I am still only about 20 miles or so from the same highway.

I’ve made this trip before, but this time I decided to do some photography in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains – specifically, Mono Lake and Yosemite National Park. Both are pretty much a straight shot north for me.

My first priority was to get as close as possible to Mono Lake so that I could get started very early in the morning. After a drive of 350 miles or so, I stopped off in Lee Vining, CA for the night. Remarkably, the southernmost stop in my drive was also by far the coldest (below freezing at night – I had to be careful not to slip on ice as I went to and from my room).

Early the next morning, I packed up and left for the lake.

Mono Lake

The view at Mono Lake, as I arrived, was astounding.

Mono Lake is a bit unusual in a few respects. It is a salt water lake with unusually high alkalinity, and for this reason does not contain any native fish species (though it does have, curiously enough, its own species of brine shrimp – sea monkeys!). This is also responsible for the odd “lake foam” that lines the lake’s shore.

Another interesting feature are the tufa towers, formed of calcium carbonate, which rise from the surface of the lake. Combined with the morning fog, these towers feature an otherworldly appearance.

I was only able to photograph a very small area on its western shore – some day, I’d like to return and spend a little more time capturing it from different locations.

After an hour or so, I packed up and left the lake for Yosemite. More on that shortly. In the meantime, you can review more Mono Lake photographs in the Gallery.

Some posts on Twitter a few weeks back may have clued some in that something was afoot, but I wasn’t really prepared to make public note of it until now.

After 9 and a half years working at DreamHost, I have decided to leave (effective October 10th). This was due to a handful of reasons, but the long-and-short of it is that this is a long time to work anywhere and I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to try something new.

My immediate plan is to go back to school full-time and finish up what I started so long ago (a degree – maybe even two!). Longer term, I have some ideas swirling around in my head and projects that I’ve not had a chance to invest much time on. More on that soon (this is related to the somewhat upbeat post on creative pursuits I made a while back).

It goes without saying that I am going to miss this company. I spent pretty much my entire professional life there, met all sorts of great people (some of whom are reading this weblog right now!) and I’m leaving with a ton of crazy stories to tell.

And – haters be damned – I plan to forever host my stuff here. Makes sense: Through pure luck I managed to end up on a server that almost never goes down.

I’ve been astounded over the last few weeks at a sudden burst of creative energy that I’ve discovered. Something that I used to have in spades but slipped away a long time ago.

The most obvious manifestation of this recent development is my recent redesign of this site (which I’m still tweaking off and on), but that’s hardly the extent of it. Behind the scenes I have a few projects brewing and I’ve found that the tricky process of going from good idea to good implementation is much smoother than usual.

This is probably a good thing, as recent developments in my life are likely to make this uptick of some practical benefit. More on that later. For now, though, I’m really enjoying this newfound sense of excitement and output.