Rivers and falls... A ride to Yosemite National Park

[Papa-Ken]

Rivers and waterfalls.

Our Wednesday ride was to travel to Yosemite and take pictures of the water levels in the four rivers we cross on our way into the park traveling in from Sacramento.

The rivers are the Consumnes, Mokelumne, Tulomne and Merced.

After our arrival into the park, we would then film the gorging display of water erupting from the various crevices that display some beautiful waterfalls.

Our ride would cover about 400 miles and was going to be a long day, but we didn’t realize what this day was going to encompass before we returned home that night.

Let me preface our ride with the news we were taking a new person along with us to Yosemite. Demenshea (Donna) wrote and ask if it would be OK for her to ride along with us on our planned ride and I replied sure that would be fine, so as planned we were to meet at a breakfast shop on Folsom Blvd. at 6:15 to eat and get acquainted a little before moving out on the ride.

Charlie was taking point on this ride and that means you take as many back roads as possible in order to miss towns, traffic, bottlenecks of any kind and I believe Charlie knows more goat trails than most goats. So, it came as no surprise to me that we weren’t going to see much of the towns that comprise much of the history that attracts visitors and the traffic they create.

We intended in leaving by 7:00 AM but were a little late, but who cares, we were off to have fun and see some beautiful country and ride some very good motorcycle roads.

Just a short distance into our ride (about an hour) we had some bad luck, Donna drifted off the road and took a flying nose dive while her Yamaha V Star 1100 did a few flips. It was ugly, but Donna wasn’t injured very much, only her pride as I believe she was more embarrassed than hurt.

The bike looked a lot worse at first than it turned out, after we gathered all the parts, did a little backyard mechanics and cancelled the call for a tow truck by a county sheriff.

After a call to her husband Gary to explain her situation and the realization she still had a bike to ride, she decided to continue on with us for the rest of the ride.

I call this pretty gutsy as she was only about 70 miles or less into the ride when this happened and the hard part was still ahead.

After she assessed the damage to her bike (Tank, windshield, right mirror and numerous scratches, dings etc). we tried to shine a bright light on the situation by explaining the savings on the cost of a collagen injection in her swollen upper lip, or the cost of a full body massage in lieu of the roll in the dirt when thrown from her bike.
This incident added some time to our long day but Charlie took us down a road through some cattle crap at the tail end of a cattle drive that had no beginning and no end.

After moving a few feet at a time, we decided to turn around backtrack and see if we could find a few chips we missed before finding 49 and hi-balling on towards Yosemite.

We fueled in Mariposa, got some lunch for Donna and started towards the entrance into the park, when I heard some chatter over my CB with Wes complaining about the feel of his bike.

It turned out he had picked up a piece of glass in his rear tire and Wes, Griff and Charlie stopped to plug his rear tire and told us to go into the valley floor and have lunch and they would meet us there.

Our expectations were justified when we followed the swollen Merced River for miles making our entrance into Yosemite. The white water being made by the churning, raging rush of the river blasting out of the park was a sight to behold.

The many waterfalls that decorated the faces of so may cliffs and bluffs in one of the most beautiful places in America, made this a trip to remember and I would say, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would have to rate it 12. The way I feel is every day you wake is a gift and then to be able to take a ride and visit sights like this, it don’t get much better.

So, all in all another day in paradise for the Oldfarts…….Ken



I love this old bridge.



OK boys lets make it rideable. Thanks for this picture Donna.


















Charlie is always pointing at something.









Donna on her crippled steed.



Griff showing off.



The road ahead, looks like fun.






The road behind was fun.



OUCH!



Some very fast moving water.



Donna is hypnotized!












Waterfalls eveywhere.















Falls and more falls.












The Merced river at a very high level. The park was closed due to flooding a week before.

[Big Kahuna]

Again, no pics? You're killing me!!!!

[Loki]

Sounds like you guys had a great adventure with the problems you experienced. It's great no one was seriously injured. Donna is one determined lady to be able to continue with the ride after her spill.

For some reason, your photos aren't showing. I'm sure they're great.

[Papa-Ken]

Originally Posted by Big Kahuna

Again, no pics? You're killing me!!!!

Sorry William, I hope the reason you couldn't see the pictures was due to the fact I was editing. Hope you are able to view them now........Ken

[Big Kahuna]

Nope, still can't see them. It's so painful because by the looks of all those little red x's, you have a lot to show. I've seen this problem a lot here on Pashnit forums. Then again, I don't think I've ever seen so many attachments on any forum before.

[pashnit]

Ken - fixed all your sizing - plus looks like your cut & pasting this from another program like MS Word. This is not advisable since it'll pull all the random formatting from the other program. Use notepad (on all windows computers) to write the text in. OR... write the text in MS Word, then cut and paste it into Notepad. Then cut and paste in into the forum, sounds complicated, but it takes only seconds. Notepad will get rid of all the background formatting. Just use the forum default font size btw too.

And somehow, someway, you deleted all your photos after you uploaded them. Go into your Attachment Manager and you will see they are not there. I think you are doing one or two more steps than is required when you attach photos.

My guess to what you're doing is you're uploading the pics to the server, than cut and pasting the image location in between {img} tags manually, then you're going back and deleting the attachments so they don't show up twice as in your previous posts.

Ironically, the default vBulletin program isn't designed to do this which is probably why you're struggling so much with this. You could probably make that work but it's one or two more steps for an advanced user of the program.

My suggestion is to not try to put your entire text/photos into one post. You can do this, but you would need an image hosting service to do it- preferrably one of the less-commercial ones like SmugMug.com that'll make it through corporate firewalls. You might try several pics at at time (instead of all) until we develop a patch for this to allow the program to let you do this (we're already working on it actually )

It takes a bit more time, but post your text/photos in multiple posts dividing up the pics if you are going to use the Pashnit Server to store your photos.

Here's an example: http://www.pashnitforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61

[Papa-Ken]

Originally Posted by pashnit

Ken - fixed all your sizing - plus looks like your cut & pasting this from another program like MS Word. This is not advisable since it'll pull all the random formatting from the other program. Use notepad (on all windows computers) to write the text in. OR... write the text in MS Word, then cut and paste it into Notepad. Then cut and paste in into the forum, sounds complicated, but it takes only seconds. Notepad will get rid of all the background formatting. Just use the forum default font size btw too.

And somehow, someway, you deleted all your photos after you uploaded them. Go into your Attachment Manager and you will see they are not there. I think you are doing one or two more steps than is required when you attach photos.

My guess to what you're doing is you're uploading the pics to the server, than cut and pasting the image location in between {img} tags manually, then you're going back and deleting the attachments so they don't show up twice as in your previous posts.

Ironically, the default vBulletin program isn't designed to do this which is probably why you're struggling so much with this. You could probably make that work but it's one or two more steps for an advanced user of the program.

My suggestion is to not try to put your entire text/photos into one post. You can do this, but you would need an image hosting service to do it- preferrably one of the less-commercial ones like SmugMug.com that'll make it through corporate firewalls. You might try several pics at at time (instead of all) until we develop a patch for this to allow the program to let you do this (we're already working on it actually )

It takes a bit more time, but post your text/photos in multiple posts dividing up the pics if you are going to use the Pashnit Server to store your photos.

Here's an example: http://www.pashnitforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61

Thanks Tim:
Can I just remove all this thread and start over? You are right about using MS Word when I first copied and pasted it was showing all the HTML and I went back in to remove all that stuff. I think I might understand it now.

I will upload all the pics, then paste the text in the locations I want them to appear.

Will that do it?..........Ken

[pashnit]

Originally Posted by Papa-Ken

I will upload all the pics, then paste the text in the locations I want them to appear.

Will that do it?..........Ken

Actually no unfortunately. Although we are working on away to improve the default program. The feature to allow multiple attachments as you have done is very unique to this forum. Most allow 1 per post. That's it.

Plus most people don't realize you can upload 5 pics, then go back in using the edit button and upload more to the same post. You kind of figure that out on your own. This does work, but the result is what you see above. All the pics in one place. All the text in another place.

Andy of SBR wrote his own code to allow this, and we've discussed that, but he went back to the default program after struggling with some of the side effects of modifying the root program. Ben might know if this new version of vBulletin will allow that although we are working another project to make the Pashnit Forum also a picture storage place for the members just like SmugMug or some of the other image hosting sites. Little better control.

If you want to start over - no worries, we can always delete all this stuff. Or you can fiddle with the existing post.

[pashnit]

Ken - my suggestion for this style of post is write all your text, make sure you get rid of the formatting by using Notepad.

Break up your text so you know where you photos go - most of us pre-prepare the photos also, resizing to 800x600 or less (I see you even number them 1-20 which makes it even easier for you when uploading). Then cut and paste the first paragraph (of many) into a thread - upload the 1 or 2 photos that apply to that paragraph, no more, then hit reply.

Cut & paste the 2nd paragraph into a NEW post, then upload the 1 or 2 photos that apply to that paragraph.

Since it seems most of your stuff is pre-prepared to put on the forum - once you do this a few time, it can be done rather quickly. You can even try it out in the test forum, and if it works and it makes sense, then we'll re-title the thread and move it into the proper forum. Try that. May save you a lot of time of trying to make the forum do something it can't do .

Seems you've reworked this at least 2-3 times attempting to make it work in last couple hours - would save you a lot of time.

[Papa-Ken]

Originally Posted by pashnit

Ken - my suggestion for this style of post is write all your text, make sure you get rid of the formatting by using Notepad.

Break up your text so you know where you photos go - most of us pre-prepare the photos also, resizing to 800x600 or less (I see you even number them 1-20 which makes it even easier for you when uploading). Then cut and paste the first paragraph (of many) into a thread - upload the 1 or 2 photos that apply to that paragraph, no more, then hit reply.

Cut & paste the 2nd paragraph into a NEW post, then upload the 1 or 2 photos that apply to that paragraph.

Since it seems most of your stuff is pre-prepared to put on the forum - once you do this a few time, it can be done rather quickly. You can even try it out in the test forum, and if it works and it makes sense, then we'll re-title the thread and move it into the proper forum. Try that. May save you a lot of time of trying to make the forum do something it can't do .

Seems you've reworked this at least 2-3 times attempting to make it work in last couple hours - would save you a lot of time.

Thanks Tim,
I don't have time right now, but will try that later on tonight. I appreciate all the help you guy's are sending my way.....Ken