We had a blast at Yosemite National Park, but it was just too big! You have to be willing to spend a couple weeks there to enjoy the entirety of it, and prepared with backpacking/overnight hiking setups. We did everything we could in a week without the setups and just scratched the surface! It was just Andrew and I, Sterling spent the week with family. Our trip started on Oct.12 picking up a rental 2014 Toyota Corolla (a ridiculously nice change from our '98 Honda) and headed west on I-80.
The first couple of nights we just slept in the car...which sounded like a fine idea until we actually did it. The first night, shown below, we just slept on top of the seats. Nights after that, we put the seats down in the back and set up our sleeping bags, but it was just too ridiculously cold to be comfortable! We made it through, and didn't get attacked by bears, so I'd call it a win.
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| Notice the frozen windows |
On road trip day two we were passing by Mono Lake and were intrigued by the formations on the shore, so we decided to check it out. It is the sister lake to the Great Salt Lake, but not in any way geographically--only because it is also composed of salt water. The formations are called "tufa" towers, and are similar to limestone except in the way they are formed. You can read about it
here.
Our first day driving through was amazing-Yosemite is huge! It took us two hours to get from our entrance on Tioga Road west to El Portal on the east. It is absolutely gorgeous though, and we got pretty excited about planning out our adventures for the next day. We drove through Yosemite Valley to get our first glimpse of El Capitan.
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| Yosemite Valley |
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| El Capitan |
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| Driving between two boulders (with our map as a reflection, oops!) |
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| Tenaya Lake |
It is Andrew's dream to rock climb on El Capitan, and he wants me to do it with him. I was mostly worried before we went to see it that I wouldn't be able to make it since most of the climbs on the face take several days to complete. Now that I've seen it, I'm more worried about fear of heights, falling out of my mountain-attached tent at night, and hauling up a week's worth of water. We spent a few hours by the face watching climbers with a telescope (you can't see many of them with the naked eye unless you know where to look) and eating lunch.
We did a day hike to lower Cathedral Lakes in Tuolumne Meadows. This hike was the closest you could get to the forest fires around the area during this time, and there was smoke and the smell of burned trees everywhere. It was well worth the hours of hiking since it turned into a huge valley with a beautiful lake and view.
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| View from Cathedral Lakes to Yosemite Valley |
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| Cathedral Mountain |
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| Andrew climbing up the rock, I expected nothing less |
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| Glacial formations |
We spent a few hours at Hetch Hetchy and did the main hike towards Wapama and Tueeulala Falls. Unfortunately, we came at just the right time of year where there is no water coming over the falls! Bridalveil Falls was the same. Kind of a bummer. But Hetch Hetchy reservoir and O'Shaughnessy Dam were beautiful.
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| Foggy morning |
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| O'Shaughnessy Dam |
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| Hetch Hetchy Reservoir |
As cliche as this will sound, probably my favorite place to visit was Mariposa Grove. Giant Mariposa trees towering overhead everywhere. It was one way to make us feel very small in this big world.
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| California Tunnel |
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| Faithful Couple |
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| I'm in there somewhere...Fallen Wawona Tunnel |
It was a great trip! Happy 5 years to us!
