With summer coming to an end soon (nooooo! I was getting used to the 8 pm sunsets), I thought I would finally share the biggest highlight of my summer, and that was my birthday adventure in a little-known gem of the Eastern Sierra called Florence Lake. What makes it so little known, and what makes [...]
kayaking
With a place as picturesque as Yosemite, it’s hard to not find a view anywhere you go. I’ve seen Yosemite Valley from above (high above — 7,200 feet — atop Glacier Point) as well as below (from the valley floor on the main road that loops through the park). But one of the most spectacular ways to [...]
I have special memories of the Kings River. The first and last time I paddled its roller coaster rapids was back in 2008 for my birthday, which kick-started all the river trips every summer since. After a few years of kayaking our local Kern River and exploring more remote rivers, my guy and I decided [...]
I had always heard about a certain part of New Mexico called “Georgia O’Keeffe country,” but I never really knew what it meant or how the American modernist painter came to own the landscape. In the 1930s, Georgia O’Keeffe moved from New York City to Abiquiu, New Mexico, a Spanish Colonial-era village that at one [...]
It was Fourth of July weekend, and we’d just taken out in Gardnerville, Nevada, after an overnight kayak excursion on the Carson River. But we weren’t heading home just quite yet. With Tioga Pass recently opened, we detoured to Yosemite National Park by way of Lee Vining, California. Lee Vining is a modest mountain hamlet [...]
The East Fork of the Carson, a designated California State Scenic River, is one of the few rivers that flows down the steep eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Range. Straddling Northern California and Northern Nevada, the raftable section of the river runs from Markleeville to Gardnerville, a 20-mile stretch of high desert canyons with [...]
Up until this past June, I had never visited Lake Tahoe outside of winter and I’ve been going up there every year for the last five years. So it was kind of a culture shock to visit this summer and realize that driveways weren’t always buried under snow, people actually wore less than three layers [...]
