I’m juggling lethargy, which keeps me from doing anything productive during my rare free time, with a plethora of events and ideas to report, which keep me up nights ruminating on how I let another day go by without recording them. Today I am determined to use my mental cattle prod to get a blog out, even if it means I don’t get to grocery store before the lines form.

In mid-August we took a microvacation to Yosemite that we had reserved a year prior, a lead time required if you wish to visit during any season except winter. At the time–such an innocent time it was!–we thought 2020 would be a year of normal everything, including traveling, so we set aside only three midweek days for this relatively local jaunt. I remember choosing the dates to avoid payroll entry week at work, but I don’t remember choosing them for the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, yet there it was.

We left shortly after 8 AM on a Tuesday, and around 1 PM we had were heading up–a word I choose with intent–the Mariposa Grove trail. It’s fairly short when the free shuttle takes you to the trailhead, but the shuttles were victims of Covid this year, so we hiked 5 vertical miles round trip hike during a heat wave in the middle of the afternoon. It took almost four hours, including some rest time at the top, where we saw lots of sequoias and a handful of deer who missed the We’re A Crepuscular Species memo.

We had plenty of water but no food, so back at the car we had a tailgate snack before driving along a winding road through a Ponderosa pine forest perched on a cliff above the Merced River. This took about an hour at the posted speed of 35 mph, which we were not tempted to exceed. Yosemite is a mostly wooded park famous for huge rocks, and these icons emerge abruptly as one enters the Valley from a tunnel, this one through a mountain instead of a tree.

Really a paragraph like that merits a picture, but my husband has most of them and he has a critical honey-do going today. I will post more on this topic after he finds time to share them.

After unpacking our gear in our tent cabin and grabbing a meal, we headed to a nearby meadow for the first night of star-watching. Arriving at twilight, we were pleased to see a young bear scamper across the meadow then turn onto the path on which we were stationed, the pleasing part including its turning away from us. I did not use lumber to describe the animal’s gait because while we think of bears as moving slowly, they don’t, even the large ones.

There must be the same number of stars over every part of Earth, but it’s rarely that people like us get to see them. The meteor shower was almost a sideshow amid the glorious–my husband’s word–sparkling heavens, with the Milky Way winding through half the sky. The meadow display, while gorgeous, was slightly marred by occasional headlights sweeping through and kids shining white flashlights around the meadow, so the second night we went 3200 feet higher to a rocky overlook, joining 30-40 enthusiastic amateurs, serious star-gazers, and night sky photographers, all of whom (including us) sported red flashlights.

At home we can sometimes view a few stars, using our eyes, a telescope we fumble with, and powerful binoculars that are surprisingly helpful, turning, for example, the Pleiades from a fuzzy clump into distinct stars and nebulae. We used those binoculars in Yosemite the second night and were astounded to find that among the spilled-glitter naked eye view were many, many more stars, maybe ten times as many. So many stars!

We last saw stars like this in Yellowstone a decade ago, and we have not forgotten it. This time there were meteors too. Some streaked across half the sky, some seemed to explode, some were languid and silky. I’m not skilled enough to describe it. I don’t even want to describe it. Any description pales beside the memory.

We could have, probably should have, and my husband would have stayed longer, but we failed to bring sufficient warm weather clothing, and by 11 I was shivering so much I could not hold the flashlight steady while walking to the car.

Lessons learned, and very, very much worth the minor discomfort.