First, a shout-out to the new Blog Readers who attended my REI talks in Marina and Dublin. The Dublin store is the newest in the REI Bay area line up. Welcome to the party – we’re running low on dip . . .bring some soon.
The headquarters for the Yosemite Search and Rescue group is located in this non-descript building in the main valley. (The sun angle played havoc with my lens….my worst photo ever.)
YOSAR Headquarters
It’s near the Administration Building where the Superintendent’s office is and close to the cemetery, where the dead people live. Insiders call it the “cache” – I suppose because it’s where all the rescue gear is stored. The YOSAR head is Lisa Hendy who arrived this spring from Grand Canyon NP. She is an NPS top performer; she received the National Park Service’s 2011 “Harry Yount National Park Ranger Award” for excellence in the field of rangering. The award is named after the nation’s first park ranger (hired in Yellowstone National Park in 1880) and is the highest honor that can be bestowed on a park ranger today. In her career, she has been at Yosemite before and also worked in law Enforcement at Rocky Mountain, Arches and Yellowstone National Parks.
Ranger Hendy has a tough job managing the limited Emergency Services resources in one of the busiest parks in the nation. We had over 4.1 million visitors in 2011 with hundreds of calls for help. Through her support, the park is now updating the Friends of YOSAR site. It provides brief summaries of rescues in the park. I hope yall have discovered the new blog that provides good content on rescues. We talked about it in a previous HikeHalfDome.com blog. Enquiring minds want to know.
Caution: late summer brings thunderstorms. When the Central Valley is above 100 degrees, the rising hot air meets cooler masses and cumulo-nimbus clouds appear. They are loaded with moisture and charged particles that tend to discharge in lighting. Half Dome is a 9,000 ft lightning rod and lightining can travel about 10 miles from its source. Yikes.
Unrelated thought worth quoting: “There is this to be said for walking: It’s the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.” – Edward Abbey
MrHalfDome™ – Rick Deutsch – www.HikeHalfDome.com
One Best Hike: Yosemite’s Half Dome
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