10,000 Feet and Above

We're home from our family reunion. I'll post pictures from that shortly, but in the meantime here are a few of my favs from our camping time with my sister and her husband and our two morning hikes.

This shot was taken on our drive to Mammoth Lakes. It looked like a fire had recently been through the hwy 89 area and I thought this was a telling image.
The first night we arrived we walked around our campsite at sunset. Aren't these cool as you see the light streaking across the sky?!
I just love this one of Cory! Those of you who know him....this is Cory's signature pose.This is Gracie - Val and Rob's dog that was our resident watch dog from the bears.
The next morning we did a hike around Convict Lake and we saw several deer. One was only about 10 feet away from us when we came across it. We stopped at one point to let Gracie have a swim to keep cool.The 2nd morning we did a much larger hike from Lake Mary up to Lake Barney - with about 5 lakes in between. Lake Mary is at approx 8500 elevation - when we hit the 10,000 feet sign we couldn't help but take some pictures! Talk about sucking air - we are not used to that elevation - instead of water breaks, we needed oxygen breaks. The view into the valley was awesome - you can even see one of the lakes in the distance that we passed on the way up to the top.These last two shots I took the last night in camp. I put the camera in manual mode at 2000 ISO with a shutter speed of 8 seconds. I used the timer on the camera so that the depressing of the shutter button wouldn't blur the shot. Pretty cool huh? We can see the Big Dipper in the first shot with just a slight silhouette of our tent, and you can see the Milky Way and the Little Dipper (far lower right) in the 2nd image. The brightest star is either Venus or Mars - not sure - but it's definitely a planet. I could sleep under the stars every night.