Snowbows, rockfish and bobcats in Yosemite

My recent trip to California prompted me to pull up photos I've taken from previous trips, so here are some from Yosemite! I took all the usual shots of Half Dome and El Cap, but I'm not going to bother showing you those when there are thousands of photographs from much better photographers than myself.

I visited Yosemite in early December of 2012 during an unusually warm stretch. The valley and the majority of trails were still free of snow and I was able to do a few day hikes up to the valley rim. The first day, I hiked up 2600 ft (790 m) to the top of the Yosemite Falls. In December, the torrent of Yosemite Creek slows to a tranquil pace, and the flow into the edge is a shower-like mist rather than roaring waterfall. At the first main landing of the falls, the cool temperatures and reduced flow combined to create the unusual site below:

Snowpile at the base of Upper Yosemite Falls

That is a several meter tall pile of snow! The mist created by the water fall was freezing, precipitating and piling up! And for good measure, there's a rainbow thrown in. Yosemite magic.

Up near the top of the falls, I came across these cool little guys:

centimeter scale dioritic inclusions

The little dark blobs are tens of centimeters long and sitting in classic Yosemite granite. Based on a bit of googling (see figure 15 here), the blobs are dioritic . What's neat about these inclusions is that (1) they're all stretched in the same way (this is called a stretching lineation) and (2) they're globular. The shared direction is a record of past stresses in the rock and the inclusions' morphology indicates that the stretching of these inclusions occured while the rock was still hot and relatively squishy.

On the second day, I hiked up the Mist Trail by Vernal Falls (usually closed by this time of year) up to the back of Half Dome (which was closed) and looped back around and down the John Muir Trail. There were spectacular views of falls and frozen water spray, but the treat of the day occurred within the first few miles, when I caught site of this bobcat hanging out right by the trail:

Lynx Rufus in on the Mist Trail in Yosemite Valley

No, that's no housecat. Based on the white splashes on the inside of its ears the general coloring and little bobtail visible in the blurry photo on the right, I'm fairly sure this is Lynx Rufus (here's a much nicer photo).