Go West, Young Man…
In which I finally get around to exploring some of my own country
I was born in Milwaukee, WI. I don’t ever say that I’m from there, though, because I moved to PA when I was two and haven’t been back since. I’m only bringing this up because, well, Milwaukee was about as far west as I had ever been in the US until a few weeks ago. Yes, I’m 40 years old and visited two dozen other countries before managing to cross more than about a third of my own. This had become an increasingly embarrassing fact to me in the last few years, especially as I met more and more non-Americans who had seen more of my country than I had. Well, the Great Rectification began this summer, as my girlfriend and I drove 2,000 miles around the American Southwest. 7 overnight locations, 3 states, 2 baseball stadiums, and 2 national parks, none of which either of us had ever seen before.
I hadn’t planned to go sightseeing around this part of Earth this summer (or any summer, really). However, it seems I’m not quite old enough not to have my plans disrupted by weddings (I was sure this was a problem for 20’s and 30’s me only), so any hopes I had of visiting more countries that aren’t America were scuttled by mid-July nuptials in Long Beach, CA. No matter; when life gives you matrimonial lemons, you make California lemonade. The itinerary mapped out above wasn’t the first iteration of the trip. I had planned for us to drive all the way from Long Beach to Vancouver, BC, but I discovered that America is, like, really big, so that was out. Even truncating the route to end in Seattle was impossibly distant given the amount of time we had to work with (about 10 or 11 days). Eventually I reimagined the trip with national parks as the primary destinations rather than cities and towns and ended up with the above, which we covered between the 17th and 27th of July. So follow along, dear reader, whether you’re looking for advice on planning your own trip through this part of the country or just want to gawk at panoramas of the Grand Canyon.
Long Beach
Although we were in Long Beach for three full days at the start of this trip, much of that time was occupied by various must-attend events associated with the wedding, so we only had a morning here or an afternoon there to absorb the vibes of the LBC. I only have two observations about the place, but each one was shocking to me. The first is that LB and my hometown of York, PA are somehow located in the same country. This made less and less sense as time went on. I mean, your average York county native is an overweight, middle-aged schlub who only speaks English (with an overt, hyper-regional drawl), wears an Operation Desert Storm Veteran snap-back, and voluntarily eats at Ruby Tuesday™ (which he pronounces /’rubi ‘tuzdi/), whereas the typical Long Beach denizen is tan and fit, speaks Spanish, and vapes legal weed as she walks to a tarot card reading with her two French bulldogs. And these people, somehow, are to choose a leader for the country every four years. Suddenly our shambolic federal politics make a lot more sense. The second shocking observation about Long Beach is that I could totally see myself living there. I have never been (and am still not) a beach person, yet I found the place to be enticingly inhabitable. Great weather, multicultural and multi-ethnic residents, abundant tacos and coffee, two Major League baseball teams adjacent, a prominent car culture… man, Long Beach is cool.
CA-1 and Big Sur
The first leg (and one of the main attractions) of our trip was the scenic drive up the California coast on Route 1 from LA to San Francisco. It’s too far to go in one day (probably about 8 hours of driving without stopping), so we decided to add one stop in the middle and overnight in Big Sur, about three quarters of the way. (One could easily add more stops and spend several days making the way up the coast much less assiduously than we did - there’s no shortage of sightseeing here.) Following Route 1 out of LA, we passed through Santa Monica and Malibu, picking up CA-101 in places to keep our northward trajectory, then through Pismo Beach and San Luis Obispo. Along the way there are countless vista points, especially when CA-1 traces the Pacific coast again north of San Luis Obispo.
During certain stretches of CA-1, we were pulling over every few minutes to take in vistas like this one.
Unfortunately CA-1 was closed about 20 miles south of Big Sur, so we had to detour eastward on CA-46, take the 101 past Big Sur, and then pick up CA-1 and drive south to reach our hotel. This turned out to be quite a long detour, adding a couple hours to the trip and getting us to our accommodation quite late at night. We stayed at Glen Oaks Big Sur, a 3-star hotel made up of detached cabins. The rooms are incredibly cozy - ours had a fireplace and a heated bathroom floor, both of which we appreciated upon our chilly evening arrival. There’s a restaurant across the street that serves as the dining area for the hotel, so the next morning began with a light breakfast and what may be the worst cappuccino I’ve yet had in my life. (Cheers to the “barista” who accomplished this amidst stiff competition throughout America.) We did some exploring of the scenery around the hotel itself and then drove south as far as we could on CA-1 before we hit the road closure. After that it was back on the road to San Francisco, making stops at Monterrey and countless vista points along the way.
San Francisco
This trip was (by design, for better or worse) a whirlwind adventure, so we never stayed in the same place for more than a couple days, and that includes San Francisco. We stayed at the Argonaut in the Fisherman’s Wharf area for maximum convenience (and safety, frankly). We had good weather for a full day of touristing; that is, until we made it to the Golden Gate Bridge, which apparently exists in its own bizarre microclimate. The top part of the bridge was enshrouded in typical bay area fog (thanks for nothing, San Francisco), and intense wind made the area nearly unbearable. Add to that the presence of extensive scaffolding along the bridge to install a suicide-prevention system, and the city’s most famous landmark became a rather uncomfortable place to be. Luckily the sunbathing sea lions at Pier 39 lifted our spirits. In the evening we took BART over to Oakland to see a baseball game in the infamous Coliseum - more on that later.
I’ve been hearing for years about how big cities on the west coast have become ruined by rampant homelessness and out of control petty crime and drug use, but it was hard to get a real sense of the state of the city in just a couple days of tourism. Friends who live there admit that the problems are real, but the city seems to have enough charm to keep many folks around despite these shortcomings. I found the city to be interesting, not particularly intimidating or gritty, and actually a bit empty. About 800,000 people live in and around the city, but crowds of any appreciable size weren’t to be found anywhere during our stay. The financial district, where the Transamerica Pyramid and other skyscrapers are, was particularly barren - apparently the work-from-home culture from the pandemic tenaciously persists here. I find it eerie and unsettling to be in the presence of all of the ostensible markers of commerce except the people. I should also mention the weather, which was all over the place. When we arrived around dinner time the first night, the wind was whipping around like crazy by the pier, and the air was so cold that neither one of us wanted to get out of the car. San Francisco’s weird geography means that September is the warmest month of the year, although the average temperatures don’t fluctuate all that much across the seasons. During the day when the sun was shining it was downright pleasant, but at night and/or when the wind got going, it sucked. I think the weather alone is a deal-breaker for me living there - forward my mail to Long Beach, please.
Yosemite National Park
From San Francisco we drove east toward Yosemite, where we’d have about two more days of nature-walking and vista-viewing. We didn’t manage to get a hotel inside the park limits, which turned out to be important, but we did get a great accommodation just outside of the park - Yosemite View Lodge. It’s situated alongside the Merced river, and I mean alongside. If you sit on the balcony outside the back of the room, the rushing water is so loud that it’s impossible to have a conversation. Better to commune with nature in silence anyway, I suppose. The lodge really was a self-contained entity with everything a traveler needs, which is important in this part of the country where settlements are sparse and there’s often no cell service. Staying outside the park meant that we had to drive into the park ourselves each day. The entrance fee was mercifully reasonable - admission is charged per vehicle ($35) rather than per person, and the ticket is valid for an entire week - no need to pay again on subsequent days. We spent most of the first day in Yosemite Valley, the area just inside the entrance to the park. Some of the main attractions can be accessed easily from there, but many others require long drives to reach - the park occupies nearly 1,200 mi² of land. We spent a few hours in the park on the first day before retreating to the lodge for dinner and to plan out the next day’s itinerary.
We had a look at the sights within the park and determined that we could see two of them in a day without too much trouble. First we headed for Tenaya Lake, which is more than an hour drive beyond the park entrance but easily accessible from the roads within the park. It’s a smallish alpine lake (at an elevation of over 8,000 ft.) carved out of the surrounding granite mountains by glacial activity. There are small sandy beach areas in a few places allowing easy access to the water, which was quite cold despite it being mid-July. Boating, fishing, and swimming are all permitted in the lake, and it’s possible to hike the entire way around its circumference. As we discovered, however, completing the hiking circuit at this time of year meant wading through knee-deep water on submerged stepping stones at one point, which I can declare as “fun” given that I didn’t fall in and ruin any of the thousands of dollars of photography equipment I was carrying at the time.
Our other stop for the day was Glacier Point, one of the more popular destinations in the park due to its convenient location above Yosemite Valley and the stunning panoramic views it provides. It’s only accessible by car from around May to November - you need to hike or cross-country ski your way there if snow has closed the road. The view from Glacier Point (at an elevation of over 7,000 ft.) is of many of the park’s best known landmarks, like Half Dome and Vernal Falls, but it’s also one of the best places to peer down into the Valley below. It’s the sort of view that would be worth coming back to at different times of day and year just to experience in all of its possible moods. We filled the better part of the daylight hours visiting these two locations within the park as well as stopping along the way whenever something caught our eye - you never have to go very far within the park to find something worth pulling over and gawking at, even if it’s not labeled on the map. We also spent more time in the Valley itself, especially around El Capitan, the prominent 3,000-foot tall granite monolith featured in the documentary Free Solo (which I have not seen, as it would scare the bejeezus out of me.) While two days absolutely seemed like a woefully inadequate amount of time to spend at a place as sprawling and destination-dense as Yosemite, I also feel like we could have spent two weeks there and still come away with the same feeling. A lifetime may not even be enough to experience it all.
Las Vegas
Our longest day of driving was between Yosemite and Las Vegas, since Death Valley separates the two and needs to be circumnavigated to the north or south. We opted for the southern route, so that we could break up the drive with a stop in Bakersfield, CA for lunch. We asked the internet where to eat, and it recommended 24th Street Cafe, which was a great little diner with a huge menu and bottomless drip coffee for the weary road warrior. It was still another three or four hours to Vegas from there, bringing the total drive time on this day to over seven hours. We got in to Vegas a bit before sunset and made a quick detour to the famous “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” sign for the obligatory photo, then continued on to Caesars Palace, the resort I booked for us. (Go big or go home, when in Rome, et cetera.)
So, here’s the thing about Las Vegas: it’s dumb. You don’t need to go to Las Vegas. It’s the most uncomfortably hot place I’ve ever been (dethroning Cambodia, an actual jungle). It’s crowded, fake, expensive, vapid, tacky - a poor person’s idea of a rich person’s fantasy. It’s not that there’s nothing entertaining to do once you get there - it’s a firehose of sensory stimulation - it’s just that whatever fun you intend to have could probably be had more comfortably elsewhere. If you’re in the neighborhood, though, and have your heart set on seeing this shameful oasis, then you may as well do it properly. Caesars Palace (no apostrophe, as I learned but still do not understand) is one of the most ridiculous places I’ve ever been. This sprawling labyrinth of marble and plaster punctuates its domed atriums with simulacra of the revered deities of the ancient Roman world, in some respects indistinguishable from the sacred altars they plagiarize. This probably doesn’t occur to many people because Paganism has been defunct as a prolific worldview for millennia, but this is actually highly offensive. It’s like if someone bought the Pantheon in Rome and turned it into a sports bar but didn’t bother to remove the crucifix or the sarcophagi. Is it still blasphemy if no one is around to be offended? That seems to be the question that Caesars Palace asks around every corner. I understand that I’m uniquely sensitive to this stuff as a Classicist, but I was hoping that the place would channel slightly more from the ancient world than the opulence of imperial Rome. I mean, is it too much to ask that everyone at the concierge be able to speak Latin? I want a proper immersive experience here, Disney style. I did finally find some Latin, though, to my combined delight and horror. The hotel rooms are situated in several large towers surrounding a massive pool(s) area, from which the façades of the towers can be seen, and two of the buildings are inscribed with stately Latin capitals. On one of them, OMNIA MVTANTUR NOS ET MVTAMVR IN ILLIS - “all things change, and we too are changed in them". The line itself does not appear in any Classical sources, but the sentiment it expresses is a common one in the ancient world. Why this axiom in particular was selected to gild a building at a resort/casino I am unable to explain, but I’ll take what I can get. Oh, what’s this? Another building has an inscription - VIVE DIV ET PROSPERA. “Live long and prosper.” Oh. Well, at least they gave some work to a struggling Vulcan-to-Latin translator. I can still see one more - a small temple selling food and drinks - and again in stately capitals, SNACKUS MAXIMUS. Sigh. I think I’ve had just about enough of this “palace”.
The Grand Canyon
Our last proper destination (apologies to Phoenix) was the Grand Canyon, which, like Yosemite, is absolutely huge and can’t really be experienced in a few days. On the other hand, it’s basically just a giant hole in the ground, so there’s considerably less topographical variety. The easiest way to experience the canyon when you’ve only got a couple days is to stay inside the park in the Grand Canyon Village, a collection of several hotels situated along the canyon’s south rim. We stayed at El Tovar, a charming and rustic wooden lodge that was only separated from the rim of the canyon by a parking lot. Much like our time in Yosemite, we arrived in the afternoon on the first day and spent the remaining daylight hours surveying what we could easily reach before planning a deeper dive the next day. From the south rim there’s one main itinerary if you’re not planning to hike deep into the canyon (which we did not): drive east along Desert View Drive and stop at the six vista points carved out along the way, so that’s what we did. These points are spread out across more than 20 miles, so there is some variety in the scenes of the canyon as you move along. If you want to see other parts of the canyon, it’ll be a long drive, since there aren’t many places to cross it. Horseshoe bend, for example, is over two and a half hours northeast of the village by car. Grand Canyon West skywalk (the glass-bottom bridge) is almost four hours west. It’s a big hole.
The experience of standing next to the canyon is… indescribable. I know it seems like I’m punting here, but that really is, paradoxically, the best way to describe it. You can’t be told what it’s like to peer into it, nor do pictures convey its profundity. It doesn’t seem real, like it’s a giant mural or projection. There are informational signs with facts and figures about the canyon - it’s 277 miles long, a mile deep, 18 miles wide - but I found myself constantly failing to comprehend the scale of it all. Except in the places where human trail-walkers are discernible, there’s no reliable way to understand the enormity of the place, no reference point - it’s just vast. There was some unsettled weather while we were there, and as the storms moved around, it was possible to see, at various distances, portentous clouds cascading rain into other parts of the canyon while we stood dry in the sunlight. I don’t think there’s much more to say about it; you really do just have to see it for yourself to understand, as best as you ever will, this geological wonder.
And that’s about it for our trip, really. We drove from the canyon to Phoenix in the evening and got a hotel near the airport so that we could return our rental car (a 2019 Honda Civic sedan, incidentally, that was uninspiring - when did Honda get lame?) and fly home. The Phoenix airport - surprisingly great. Phoenix weather, on the other hand… let’s just say that the short walk from the hotel parking lot to the front desk was so unpleasant that the first thing I said to the woman at the desk was, accusingly, “WHY DOES ANYONE LIVE HERE?” She didn’t have a good answer.
Don’t worry - I’m not done writing and photo-dumping. Please see, additionally, the following, which shall be filed under miscellany.
On National Park Tourism
Two more thoughts to share about the US national park experience, while we’re at it - one positive, one negative. I’ll start with the negative one.
It’s the crowds. While I was planning the particulars of this trip and choosing destinations, I did some research to try to figure out how best to use the time we were going to spend in places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. During that search I came across this video from Wendover Productions, describing the near-crisis levels of attendance that US national parks are experiencing. On the one hand this seems like a positive thing - more people than ever are spending time outdoors and spending money in and around protected public lands. The problem, though, is that the vast majority of these people (like me, I’m part of the problem) are visiting just a handful of parks, like Great Smoky Mountain, Yellowstone, Zion, Acadia, and the Grand Canyon. You might remember that I mentioned that we couldn’t get a hotel inside the park limits at Yosemite and had to stay outside the park. Although we loved the hotel we ended up in, the dark side is that, during peak periods like summer, there’s a line to get into the park in the morning. We sat in the car for over an hour to enter Yosemite on our second day, and the waits are even longer on the weekends. I couldn’t help but recognize the perversity of an hour-long line of idling motor vehicles leaking carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a designated nature preserve. Once we got into the park, I have to say that the crowds weren’t too bad, nor were they unmanageable around the Grand Canyon; the parking lots were full in most places but not overflowing. If you’re looking for practical advice, either pick some parks that are less known to tourists, go at times that are slightly off-peak, or simply be prepared not to be alone wherever you decide to go exploring.
And now the thing that surprised me (the small-l libertarian) in a positive way: the complete lack of nanny-state safety provisions. It’s totally possible to get yourself killed in these national parks, and I appreciate the hell out of that. And people do die in these places! In fact, between 2010 and 2020, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite were the top two most murderous national parks, with 134 and 126 fatalities in that period, respectively. (I’ll hold for applause to celebrate my survival.) I’m being a little glib about this for comedic effect, but I do genuinely appreciate that every lookout isn’t ruined with high railings or plexiglass to save people from themselves. The general policy of the National Park Service when it comes to safety is to put up a sign warning you not to do things that you probably already know you shouldn’t do. (You can see my favorite example of such a warning in the photos below, sunburned exhaustion barf-man.) I suppose the main reason for this lack of supervision is that the parks are just too vast to maintain high levels of oversight. Even most of the trails that exist in places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon aren’t always maintained, so there’s no guarantee that your planned route will even be passable during your visit. This is the right way to do public health and safety policy: give people the information they need to make a decision, and then let them kill themselves if they want. 🗽
Flora and Fauna
We did have a couple noteworthy run-ins with the local wildlife, although nothing too traumatic. Yosemite is home to quite a large number of bears, such that every year a few of them get taken out by cars speeding around the park. We neither saw nor ran over any bears on our trip. We did, however, get up-close-and-personal with a couple male bighorn sheep. At the (very busy) rim of the canyon in the village, we were getting our first looks at the canyon when two of these fellows came a-bouldering up the steep slope of the canyon to the observation area by the lodges. One of them set up camp next to one of the hotel buildings and proceeded to ram his head into the corner of the building repeatedly, causing noticeable damage to the building (see photo). The other one just sort of stood around, not ramming his head into anything. We also saw an elk grazing in a forest not too far from the road, and I saw a little crab when I was climbing around some rocks off of CA-1. I didn’t bring a macro lens with me on this trip, so this is all the magnification you’re getting.
A Tale of Two Cities (specifically their baseball stadiums)
I was a big baseball fan when I used to live in the US, but it’s been pretty hard to keep up with US-based sports given the 12-hour time difference, so I’ve been out of the loop for a long time. I do still enjoy going to baseball games when I’m home, though, and I managed to visit two stadiums I hadn’t ever seen before - Angel Stadium of Anaheim and the Oakland Coliseum. Despite these two stadiums opening in the same year (1966), they have had very different histories and offer very different experiences in 2023.
Angel Stadium is… fine. It’s just kind of there. It still feels fairly modern since it’s been renovated and updated a few times since the 60’s, but it doesn’t really have a stand-out feature or attraction (other than Shohei Ohtani, who hit a go-ahead HR in the late innings) that makes it particularly memorable. It’s just a pretty nice place to see a ballgame. The Oakland Coliseum, on the other hand… yikes. It’s been called (by the few people who still like the place) “America’s last dive bar stadium.” That’s definitely what it feels like. The Coliseum is in an industrial area that doesn’t seem like it should contain a baseball stadium. The building itself is just a giant concrete lump that’s painted green in a few places. It might be the only ballpark that still has the bullpen on the playing field rather than behind the outfield walls. The persistence of the hated “Mount Davis” seats (closed and covered for A’s games) calls attention both to the team’s poor attendance and the stadium’s previous dual-use as the Raiders’ home field. I’ve created a helpful side-by-side below to show the differences in the experiences we had at the two ballparks. The section we were seated in for each game is the big red blotch.
Angel Stadium - Monday, July 17th vs. NYY. Ticket Price: $85. Attendance: 41,180.
Oakland Coliseum - Thursday, July 20th vs. HOU. Ticket Price: $90. Attendance: 4,757.
I’ll just point out a couple things here. First of all, it cost about the same to sit directly behind the home team’s dugout in the Coliseum as it did to sit in the 3rd deck in Angel Stadium. Our A’s seats were so good we were actually on television every time there was a right-handed batter. My girlfriend got a baseball - not because she caught it, but because one of the A’s personnel rolled it up to her over the top of the dugout. Secondly, the attendance figures. 4,575 for the A’s game, 41,180 for the Angels. I haven’t been keeping meticulous records of these things, but I think 4,575 is the worst-attended professional sporting event I have ever been to, and probably by some margin. I mean there was nobody at that game. Two very different experiences, but both ultimately enjoyable. It really doesn’t get much better than a night out at the ol’ ball game.
Photographic Nerdery
Lastly but not leastly I thought I’d write about the experience of trying to photograph everything to my satisfaction on this trip. It was a bit daunting, needing to be equipped to capture some of the most iconically picturesque parts of America but also keep everything light enough to carry around with me to the best viewpoints. Knowing that I’d be shooting a lot of multi-image panoramas, I upgraded my tripod hardware to make that process easier. I normally use Peak Design’s travel tripod (the aluminum version), which has a swiveling ball-head as standard equipment. This isn’t great for panoramic shooting, since there’s no easy way to keep a flat horizon while panning, so I got a Really Right Stuff panoramic clamp with a nodal slide and a 3 Legged Thing L-bracket for one of my camera bodies so that I could shoot panoramas in portrait orientation. I won’t bore you with the details, but I also figured out the no-parallax point (sometimes called the nodal point or lens pupil) on one of my lenses so that I could shoot without worrying about parallax problems. This makes combining the images much easier, especially when the scene has elements in the foreground and background. I wasn’t familiar with RRS before I found these upgrades but quickly found out why so many professionals swear by their products, even though they’re very expensive and made in limited quantities. I was able to find the head and slide used on eBay since neither was available new from RRS. Everything they make is built like a tank and will last forever; the drawback is that the stuff is also quite heavy. This was not ideal given that I needed my setup to be portable, but I lugged it around and made it work anyway.
Nobody is paying me to shill for my camera gear, but I rarely miss an opportunity to sing the praises of OM-System (formerly Olympus) and the micro four thirds format. I sold all of my Canon equipment back in 2013 just before I moved abroad and bought an Olympus mirrorless camera body (the original E-M5) and a couple lenses and haven’t looked back. I feel the need to make the case for smaller sensor cameras these days when the industry is being dominated by Sony full-frame cameras (with Canon and Nikon slowly catching up). While there are drawbacks to every camera system, the fact is that the shortcomings of the smaller sensor are almost always invisible to me, while the advantages are constantly reasserting themselves. On this trip I had two camera bodies with me pretty much at all times, each with a lens mounted: an Olympus E-M1 mkii + 7-14mm f/2.8 and an OM System OM-1 + 12-100 f/4. (This gives me coverage of 14-200mm in 35mm terms, at f/2.8 or f/4.) Each of these was mounted on my belt with Peak Design capture clips so that I had both hands free at all times and no weight hanging from my neck or shoulders. This wasn’t a hiking-intensive trip, but I can walk for hours and barely even notice the weight of the cameras when they’re attached this way, and they don’t really restrict my movement. I was also able to capture 90% of the shots I wanted with these two cameras without changing lenses. (I did also bring my 40-150mm f/2.8, but only used it a few specific times when the extra reach was needed. Most of the time it was in the car.) One of the reasons that I bought the newer OM-1 was that it has a hand-held high resolution mode, which I used almost as a default on landscape shots. (This means the camera captures a 50mp RAW file instead of the standard 20mp by using some clever sensor-shifting trickery.)
Shot with the RRS panoramic clamp and the 40-150mm f/2.8. The original file is 148 megapixels (24,700 x 6,000).
Another reason I feel the need to talk up OM System/Olympus is that I had a slight equipment-related hiccup on this trip that I hadn’t planned for. I did something that I don’t think I had ever done in nearly 20 years of being a photographer… I dropped a camera. 😬 We were doing a little excursion at Partington Cove, a scenic waterfront area off of CA-1 around Big Sur. There’s a dusty trail leading down from the road to the coastline, which is extremely rocky. The rocks are of very different sizes and textures; some are well-worn by the sea, others more roughly hewn. If you’re brave enough, there’s not much stopping you from moving around the coastline as far as your boulder-navigating will take you, so I decided to spend quite a bit of time climbing around as far as I could. With my cameras both hip-mounted, I had all four limbs free and could climb around unencumbered. Like I said before, each camera was mounted with a PD capture clip - what I didn’t mention was that only one of them, the OM-1, was attached with a pro pad, an accessory that allows the capture clip to be mounted horizontally on a dedicated pad and not directly on the belt. My other camera, the older E-M1, was mounted on a capture clip directly on my belt. (I’ll be getting a second pro pad to avoid this situation in the future.) While I was climbing around some rather large rocks, the capture clip holding the E-M1 pressed upwards against my stomach, releasing the catch that holds the camera. I immediately felt its weight disappear from my left side and knew almost as instantly what horrible thing had just happened. (This was completely my fault; the capture clip has a locking mechanism that would have prevented this, and I was not using it.) I cringe even now to recall the sounds of the body and lens banging repeatedly against the jagged granite surfaces below me. I couldn’t see where it fell, but my first and only thought in that moment was “that’s broken.” I was sure that the lens would be toast at the very least - the 7-14mm has a bulbous front element that’s hard to protect in the best of times, and the lens cap wasn’t on it. I wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to retrieve it, wherever it ended up, since I was in the middle of a pile of rocks. I made peace with the loss almost immediately - after all, this was my backup camera body and the less important lens for this trip. I could get by without them if I had to. I climbed down a few feet and located the camera, which thankfully came to rest in a spot where I could reach down from where I was standing and snatch it back. Upon initial inspection, things were ok but not great. The front element of the lens hadn’t shattered, nor was there any damage around the lens mount on the body. There was a pretty substantial dent in the lens, though, and a couple of chunks of aluminum had been taken out of the body. To my utter astonishment, however… the thing seemed to work. The camera switched on immediately and both the zoom and auto-focus of the lens seemed to be fine too. I’m not sure whether to put this down to the high engineering standards of Olympus or sheer luck, but the camera and lens seem to have survived the fall with only minor bruises.
And finally!
This was a really great trip. I did what I always have a tendency to do when I’m visiting somewhere new, which is too much, so if I had to reimagine this trip I’d probably either make it longer or cover less ground, although my brain would try to stop me. Both Yosemite and the Grand Canyon are absolutely worth seeing; I’d even be completely fine with going back within just the next few years to explore more. The weather was generally kind to us; no part of California was on fire, and we only got rained on for a few minutes here and there. It was dreadfully hot in a few places, but I’m well used to living in a tropical climate at this point. I struggled way more when it got cold than when it got hot. Anyway. I did my best trying to capture the beauty of these places photographically and the experiences of the trip narratively. If you’ve read this far, wow, you really need to put a higher value on your time and attention. I’ll share a few last images here for you, steadfast and loyal reader. Cheers! 🌄
