The Old ‘Dan’s Outside’ Blog: Time to Move On!
Quite a while ago (a LONG time ago in “web years”) I operated the “Dan’s Outside” blog as a way to share stories and news related to my “outdoor life” of hiking, backpacking, environmental concerns, landscape and nature photography, and more.
During the past decade, my photography increasingly became the focus of my time in the “outside” and of my online posting. As this happened, the inclination to post separately here diminished to the point that a year and a half or so ago I essentially stopped using this site.
So, if anyone is still here to read this, a few final thoughts, announcements, and recommendations:
- If you enjoy my writing and my photography (especially my photography), I invite you to wander on over to the G Dan Mitchell Photography web site, where you’ll find a new photograph every day along with occasional writing on photography and related topics including some that are similar to what I used to post here. There is also an extensive gallery of my photography there for your pleasure… and for the sale of prints and licenses.
- If you are a social media user, you might want to follow me in a number of other online venues including Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, 500px, Google+, and to some extent Picasa. (I’m especially active on Google+, where over 40,000 individuals have “circled” me.)
- While there is some material at what I’ll now call “The Old Dan’s Outside Blog” that seems worth keeping, the site as a whole is not something that I’m going to maintain. I haven’t decided quite how to handle that yet – I may let some of it continue to live here “secretly,” I may move some of it to another site (perhaps a sub-section of the photography blog?), and some of it may simply go away. Your thoughts on this are welcomed.
- Finally, as should be clear from what I’ve written above, the “Dans’ Outside” blog will cease to exist before long. In fact, I’m likely to reposition the danmitchell.net domain for an entirely different purpose in the not too distant future.
If anyone reading this is a former follower of the old blog, thanks for reading it! I was great fun to create and maintain it, and now we’ll just move on to a new location at G Dan Mitchell Photography.
Yosemite Blog Reports High Water in Yosemite Valley This Weekend
According to a post at Yosemite blog, the weather service is forecasting that high levels of spring runoff water in the Merced River may cause some flooding in Yosemite Valley this weekend. Before you panic, a bit of flooding in wet years is a normal thing and is part of the natural life cycle of meadows there. And, if you are a photographer, this can provide some very special photographic opportunities.
Read Muir Without Killing Trees
Thanks to Yosemite Blog for pointing out a link to John Muir’s famous book, My First Summer in the Sierra in a free downloadable form. See the Yosemite Blog link for more information.
Yosemite blog also posts about the troubling irony of a naming a Sierra highway after Muir.
Gear Links at Two-Heel Drive
My friend Tom Mangan has been steadily plugging away at creating the must useful hiking blog in Central California, and he has now added a gear page to the site. Tom tracks and lists lots of great deals on outdoor equipment. Don’t miss the rest of his site either – tons of great stuff there. I recommend subscribing to his RSS feed like I do.
A photo at Yosemite Blog
I somehow forgot the mention this, but Yosemite Blog pointed to one of my recent dogwood photographs from Yosemite Valley. Yosemite Blog is a great source of current information about the Valle and the Park – they are in my RSS reader!
You can see much more of my photography at my photography blog.
May 22 Opening for Tioga Pass?
Edie reports at the Little Red Tent blog that her “sources” say that Tioga Pass is likely to be open by May 22. Apparently the roadway is now clear and some work remains to be done widening the plowed area and working through some hazard zones.
Take Transit to Trails?
Tom Mangan of Two-Heel Drive (Tom, again I first typed Two-Hell Drive before backspacing and correcting… ;-) has an interesting post with a quick overview of some options for getting to your San Francisco Bay Area hike on public transit. (See Transit accessible trails in the Bay Area)
Read Tom’s Post for details and links to more information. The short story is that you have lots of options if you live in certain areas north of the Golden Gate. You have limited options if you live elsewhere in the Bay Area, but some of them do seem pretty interesting. His report on Mt. Diablo, for example, is intriguing. I’ve often considered heading to New Almaden Quicksilver County Park on a VTA but have never quite gotten around to it – something about schlepping my typical Big Bag o’ Camera Gear through city streets and on the bus perhaps?
A day after posting this I realized I could have had even more perverse fun with the title of the post – “Time to Take Transit to Top Trails” would have worked. (I suspect that Tom would have approved… or at least chuckled a bit.)
Yosemite Spring Progress Report
Several thing define the progress from winter to summer in Yosemite, both in the Valley and in the high country. Edie Howe (of The Little Red Tent) posted two indicators this evening. First, she reports that the recent warm weather may have jump-started the dogwood blossoms – it will be interesting to follow this since some had speculated that the bloom would be delayed this season. Maybe not. She also posts a web cam photo of the Tioga Pass entrance kiosk… showing that plows have made it to that point from the east.
What's Happening in the Yosemite High Country?
I always look forward to reading the Tuolumne Meadows Winter Report from the rangers who spend the off-season generally keeping an eye on this part of the high country. There is a summary at Yosemite blog right now.
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Dan's Outside 
My Photography
It occurred to me after I moved this blog to the new URL that some new readers might arrive here without the context that some who followed the old version of the blog might have. One big chunk of that context is my photography – the thing that often takes me to the places I write about here.
While I did travel to Yosemite last weekend largely to see and experience the transition from winter to spring in the Sierra, making photographs is a very important part of such trips. I don’t post them all here, but I do post a new photograph every day at my photography blog: G Dan Mitchell Photography.
Additional photographs from opening day along Tioga Pass Road are already posted there, with more to come from TP Road and Yosemite Valley.
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June 9, 2010 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary, News, Photography, Site News | blog, dan, g, mitchell, photo, photograph, Photography, site, web | Comments Off on My Photography