I’ll have more from our trip to the Yosemite Valley shortly, but for starters here are some views of El Capitan, showing some of the climbers who attack this granite monolith. A pretty picture alone doesn’t give any sense at all of the grandeur of this place or any sense of scale.
We walked a little bit up a dead-end trail near the base, and LF lagged behind a little chatting with some other tourists. They told her that they saw a rock climber up there, and with a great deal of effort we were able to see him too. They were barely visible with the naked eye.
First, a zoom-in on the green outline here.
Gives you this:
See him yet? He’s inside the green rectangle:
LF started scanning the face with her binoculars and spotted a group. When she tried finding them again it was difficult! There are three of them in the outined area;
Zooming in:
See them? They’re above and below a rectangular formation we were calling “the piece of cardboard.”
A bit later on in our walk there was an “ask the climber” group with astronomical telescopes trained on the groups. The solo climber, they told us, hadn’t moved since the same time yesterday. We hope he was just resting and not in trouble.
Wow, nice job on the scale thing.