1983/04 Yosemite trip - Return to Reno
Home	1983 letters	1983 TIMELINE	Reno	Donner Pass	Vernal Falls	Yosemite Valley	Return to Reno

My second night was similar to my first, but with the added stress that I would have to be up well before dawn if I was to get back to Reno that afternoon in time for the last flight to Minneapolis.  It was a very cold morning but at least the snow had stopped.  The road out was rutted and iced but there was nobody else on it so the occasional slide didn’t do any damage.  As before, Highway 49 was easier with only wet roads to contend with.  I was probably driving a little bit too fast when I came around the corner and hit the mudslide again.  The few inches of mud were now covered with a few inches of water and my view disappeared as the mud came up over the hood and covered all the windows.  My white car was now a reddish brown car, but the wipers cleared the worst of it and I carried on.

Not far down the road I spooked a bunch of little birds crossing the road.  I thought they were grouse but I now know that they were quail and my “bunch” is called a covey.  They tend to travel single file and don’t fly until the last second so they are hard to miss, but I thought I’d done a good job and there were no bodies in the road behind me.  After that the trip was uneventful, and I arrived in Reno just in time. 

As I rolled into the rental depot I heard “Hey!  Come and look at this one!”  I remembered the comment that most rental cars only did ten miles, and I’d done over a thousand, and when I got out I saw that the mud had dried to a glowing red and covered the roof as well as the wheel wells.  To finish the look I had a sad looking quail hanging from the radiator, skewered on a bracket. 

I was feeling generous so I told them they could keep the bird, and I hurried off to my flight before they had time to think about a cleaning fee.

[Curry Village is still operating in Yosemite and they still have the frame tents, but in 2008 gigantic slabs of granite peeled off the cliff above and destroyed some of the cabins, luckily with no serious injuries.  The area that I was camping in was permanently closed because of the risk of its happening again.  New cabins were built outside the danger zone, some of them tent cabins with new double-walled tent fabric.  Unfortunately, deer mice nested in the insulation between the walls, causing some of the campers to die from the hantavirus, carried in mice droppings.   All things considered I was lucky to only suffer from snow falls.]