SOUNDSOURCE YOSEMITE FULL

The restaurant also offers trail lunches to go, and we both order the BLTs. Oatmeal and fruit for me a vegetarian breakfast burrito for my son. We order a delicious breakfast at the resort’s June Bug Cafe. My legs, thankfully, are not sore, but they are heavy and offer little encouragement for repeating yesterday’s effort. Gingerly standing up, I feel twinges of pain on the bottoms of my feet. I swing out of the comfortable twin bed onto the wood floor of our air-conditioned tent cabin at Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort. It’s an unexpected and welcome reward for our efforts. The bright colors arch across the entire base of the fall. Turning, I see a gorgeous rainbow formed in the rising mist and afternoon sun. Suddenly in the periphery of my vision, a glint of something catches my eye. Nearing the bottom of the trail at Vernal Fall, my focus is necessarily down, as I choose my steps carefully over the uneven rock. The sky is a deep blue and all the more striking as it contrasts against the white rock.Īfter snapping a few photos, we reluctantly agree to err on the side of caution, and we carefully find our footing back down the slope. We briefly continue the climb along the trail, zigzagging partway up the steep rock face to take in the amazing views. We are tantalizingly close to our goal, but with no place to replenish our water within miles, the calculus of hydration, time and distance is not in our favor. We discover we are running precariously low on water for the estimated two hours of hiking ahead. My son and I make a quick gear check before starting the climb in the midday heat.

A ranger checks my identification, gives us a rundown of the rules, and allows us to proceed. The landscape teases with occasional flat sections, but in truth it is an unrelenting upward slope that demands all my cardiovascular system can muster.Īs we approach Half Dome, the cables to the summit are visible as a couple of parallel lines, with tiny specks of people making their way up the gigantic smooth hump of white rock. After this, the trail becomes hotter and drier. (Mark Hume / Chicago Tribune)Ībove the waterfalls, there is brief contact with the Merced River and an opportunity to refill drinking water using a filter made for backcountry hiking. The peak of Half Dome is over 8,000 feet above sea level. We stash our car at Curry Village and walk a mile past silent campgrounds to the Mist Trail.Ī visitor snaps photos of Half Dome from Washburn Point in Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, Aug.

The park service recommends starting the hike to Half Dome at dawn, a difficult goal for us, as we are driving nearly an hour to the Happy Isles-based trailhead. While searching information on top Yosemite hikes, I happened upon a National Park Service video describing this 14-mile round-trip trek that gains nearly 5,000 feet in elevation as “one of the longest and steepest day hikes that you’re likely to encounter in a national park.” Training in advance is wise. Months before this trip, I had never heard of the cables. The cables on this peak are a pair of stretched handholds fixed to the steepest part of the pathway to aid hikers brave and fit enough to walk to the summit. Unlike in Rio, there is no cable car ride to the top. Half Dome is one of the most recognizable rock formations in the world, like a Northern Hemisphere cousin of Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain. We brim with excitement at the prospect of hiking the cables on Half Dome. It doesn't sound like a wav or a computer generated sound.The next morning we are again driving in predawn light, following the winding road from one of Yosemite’s western entrances on California State Route 140 into the heart of Yosemite Valley. The popping sound sounds very close to taking a 9v battery and passing it over the leads to a small speaker.

Now, I am not sure if an application using the direct x api's could play a sound that wasn't controlled by the master audio output or if there is an undocumented API that allows direct access to the hardware so that is a possibility. If that happened, I would expect that the music playing in the background would be audible with the popping, which it is not.

SOUNDSOURCE YOSEMITE FULL

I'm assuming that all of the applications running at start up use the windows audio api's which would mean that they would need to alter the master volume to full and then back to zero to annunciate the sound. The master volume doesn't not have an affect on the sound level of the popping at all. As I stated before, even with the master volume control set to 0, the popping sound still occurs. I was thinking a little more about your suggestion that the sound source could be coming from a windows application.

Soundsource yosemite