Tag: wildlife

Costa Rica – Coast to Coast

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I just returned from a fun and challenging little adventure (arranged through BikeHike.com) where a group of eight of us made our way across Costa Rica from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean entirely under our own human power… and a fair amount of gravity assist!

We started in Quepos, on the western coast, and we proceeded to bike, hike, raft and kayak our way entirely across the country until we reached the eastern coast and the Caribbean.  We mostly camped at sites along the way and a support vehicle carried our gear but we otherwise made our way from one coast to the other.  Along the way, we encountered (or sometimes befriended) caiman, monkeys, sloths, toucans, turkey vultures, frogs, bats, snakes and some biting fish, as well as numerous insects including various spiders, ants, butterflies and a particularly aggrieved, giant grasshopper.

Click on through for my gallery of photos and videos from the trip:

   

Perseids at the Pinnacles

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Darlene and I camped out on the east side of Pinnacles National Park this past Sunday to watch the Perseids meteor shower. We had some fairly dark skies as Pinnacles is in a somewhat remote location. The glow of lights from Hollister and Salinas (about 25-ish miles away) were apparent to the north but the Milky Way was still quite visible. And the crescent moon set nice and early. We spotted probably several meteors per minute.  There were a few clusters of four or five.

I made a little video of some time lapse images I captured during the night:

As it was a Sunday night, getting a campsite was easy – most of the sites were vacant — not so on a Friday or Saturday night!  There was lots of wildlife though… of the more natural variety.  We had multiple visits from human-habituated deer, rabbits and a coyote in our campsite.  (I don’t count the yellow jackets!)  We went for a hike to see the nearby talus caves and saw a couple of bats but part of the caves were still closed to protect the bat colony.  (Talus caves are formed by rocks and boulders falling into a narrow area to form a ceiling and block out the sky.)  On Monday, we hiked the High Peaks loop and happened to run into an old coworker from FileMaker.  We also saw some turkey vultures and possibly some California condors.

 

Climbing Mt. Whitney

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These are pictures and videos from a three day backpacking trip with Stéphane and Darlene to summit Mt. Whitney (14,505 ft).  Second time for me!  (Here’s the first.)

We chose to camp at Outpost Camp (10,400 ft), a relatively short 3.8 miles from the Whitney Portal trailhead at 8360 ft. However, this made for a long summit day of over 14 miles round trip. We made it though and enjoyed a beautiful day and stupendous views all along the way!

Click on through for the full gallery:

   

 

On the Mississippi

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Pictures and video from a week of visiting with Darlene’s family along the Mississippi River on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin. We also visited an eagle rehabilitation center in Wabasha, a limestone cave near Harmony (Niagara Cave), enjoyed a dinner cruise on a paddle wheel boat out of La Crosse, went riding some all terrain vehicles through the mud and visited some llamas.