I'm very excited to report that I'll be talking/signing at the upcoming sixteenth anniversary celebration at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego on Saturday, May 9th.

Check it out here! (The review is partway down the page.)

While in Yosemite, I hiked along the valley floor, something I've never done before in the park. It can get quite crowded in the summer months, and so, finding myself a mid-week visitor in the spring, I decided to hike the Yosemite Valley Trail.
Along the way I hiked past the famous Camp 4, home to rock climbers who gather to scale the highest freestanding cliff in the world -- El Capitan. I saw deer grouse and acorn woodpeckers. On the banks of the Merced River I stopped to eat a sandwich, and as I sat out on a boulder, a cinnamon-colored black bear emerged from the tree line and approached the shore on the opposite bank. He lifted his nose, spotting me across the river. We watched each other for a time and then he backtracked a little, dove into the water and swam across the river to my side, a bit farther up the trail. He meandered away, moving up to a boulder field. It was my first bear sighting of the year!

I snowshoed out Glacier Point Road, which is closed in Yosemite every winter to vehicle travel. But you can still snowshoe and ski its 10.5 mile stretch out to the stunning view of Half Dome and Yosemite Valley below.
On the way back, I stopped at the stunning Tunnel View of the valley below. El Cap had a cap of its own, a shelf of clouds hanging over the summit.

Despite the ice spiders, I snowshoed around the glorious meadow, with meandering streams and the blue, blue sky above the white snow. It was a gorgeous day, quite warm, and a pileated woodpecker even appeared! I could hear it drumming deeper in the forest later on.
Before long, however, storm clouds moved in quickly, the sky turning grey with billowing clouds. The cloud layer sank lower, becoming a dreamy haze in the upper tree-covered slopes.

Not long ago, I watched the scintillating cinematic feature Ice Spiders for the horror movie guide I'm writing. Helmed by one of my favorite directors, Tibor Takacs, this film terrified the viewer with a cautionary tale of experimental spiders gone wrong in the snowy forests near a ski lodge. After seeing the film, I brushed it off as a work of fiction. Hah! How naive I am. While snowshoeing near Crane Flat, I came across dozens of ice spiders, crawling across the snowy surface in search of prey. Okay, so maybe they were only a centimeter long instead of eight feet, but still...they were ice spiders!
Also in residence on the snowy meadow that day were predatory leeches. Streams ran through the meadow and on an unusually warm day, the leeches were out, hunting for prey in the icy expanse of the flat. How ever did I survive this hike, you ask? By being prepared by the fine film of Tibor Takacs, and knowing not to get worried until next winter, after the spiders and leeches have been experimented on by a team of mad scientists.