I don't quite remember what I was doing there, but I was flying home from Seattle.

When you fly down from San Francisco, the planes fly fairly close to the California coast. But the coast curves significantly along the west side of the continent between Seattle and Los Angeles, so the planes end up flying quite a bit further inland. I was on the left hand side of the plane, able to see the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The rolling mounds of rocks were trickling by when I saw a canyon. It sort of looked familiar. I wondered if it might be someplace interesting. Then I spotted Half Dome, the largest and easiest landmark inside Yosemite.

I said "oooh ohhhh", probably out loud, marveling to myself at how flying can show us so much wonder in the world from above. The valley was slipping away below when I realized I wanted to take a picture (doh!), but my good camera was buried in my bag under the seat in front of me and would take like, 60 seconds to get out and power up. Given the speed at which Yosemite Valley was slipping past, it would be gone before I got a photo. (Doh!).

The cell phone got whipped out, aimed, and I squeezed off two or three shots before the valley disappeared behind the wing.

Yosemite valley was created by a glacier about a billion years ago (Maybe a million... or a few weeks ago... I don't actually know). The ice carved the valley and cut off the sides of the rocks in the area; this is how Half Dome was created. It used to be a full dome, but the glacier just scraped half of it away. Half Dome is the big roundish rock that occupies the upper right third of the photo. Can you believe people climb that thing, every day?

The rocky clump with some fur of trees at the very bottom right of the photo is Sentinel Dome, which wasn't scraped in half. The primary visitor and tourist center is just out of site beyond the bottom of the picture.

It's a really crappy photo, but I was so excited to get it even if it was just a cell phone pic, and I expect you to be excited as well. Thank you for your cooperation.