Yesterday we took the shorter ride up to Lee Vining, CA -- a pleasant little town on the shore of Mono Lake and the eastern gateway to Yosemite via Tioga Pass. There we enjoyed perhaps the best room ever outside of Hawaii or the Turks and Caicos (at Murphy's Motel) -- very light, good air flow through the room (windows in back and front), ceiling fan, full kitchen (with an actual oven -- super rare), and lots of room.
Today's ride into Walker was again a longer one with plenty of climbing but it was relatively smooth sailing. We seem to have worked through Tina's saddle issues (which was forcing frequent breaks) and we were very lucky that the daily high winds did not strike until we were headed down mountain from our last summit of the day. That said, we did have a bit of a scare on the first descent -- we were quite sweaty from the climb but the temps were still very cool and the shock freezing that came with our 45mph descent literally took Tina's breath away! Due to the wind noise it was some while before Tina managed to communicate to me that she was having problems. Anyway, we've now instituted a few new protocols for descents that should avoid this situation in the future.
After a 9 mile warm up tomorrow morning, we head directly into the steep 3000' climb over Monitor Pass -- that'll be the steepest climb Tina's yet experienced and so she's a bit nervous about that but I've got two lower gears yet to deploy (which I use alot when solo) and so I'm sure we'll do fine. I'm hopeful that we can pull off another 3000' of climbing before we're done but we may well need to settle for less and just stealth camp somewhere.
It's past biker/hiker midnight here (9pm) but before I sign off, I've got to talk about a mystery bird. Ever since Bishop we've been followed nearly continuously by these black birds -- squawking at us and flying along just to our right. After a couple hundred yards one of the birds will peel away (apparently having reached the end of its territory) only to be immediately be replaced by another who follows along for the next bit .. and so on and so forth. I've included a picture of one of the things above in case anyone might be able to identify it for us!
/David