Los Angeles Times photographer Mark Boster tells the story of winter in Yosemite in his second installment of Four seasons in Yosemite in print in the Sunday Travel section. With snow coating the national park, Boster’s pictures take on a quiet, contemplative feeling. There's a feeling of calm and silence.
But Boster also told me that it wasn't all Zen.
In Yosemite in winter, you'll probably find signs warning travelers that they need chains. “Being the most overly prepared (paranoid) man on the planet, I grabbed the box of cable chains that I had just purchased from an auto parts store at home and began to install them,” he wrote. "It was cold, my fingers were numb, and they were too large! Yikes! Either somebody had packed the wrong size into the box or this was a horrible joke.
"Luckily, there is a great little garage in the Yosemite Village who corrected the problem (for a fee). They had the right size, they installed them and I was on my way, grinning like a cat."
His victory was short-lived. He was playing loud rock 'n' roll in the car to drown out the clink, clink, clink of the chains when he suddenly realized that they had broken and wrapped themselves around the front axle of his car.
