We had Friday night reservations and an idea to camp out on Evergreen Road on Saturday night.
Our goal was to ride our bikes, do some hiking, take in the waterfalls, and (of course) work on photography.
We're lucky to live only five hours away from one of the natural wonders of the world. We loaded up late Thursday night after working a full day in our sometimes demanding careers. Neither one of us was ready to leave early on Friday, so it was a relaxed departure. We told ourselves, "We're on vacation."
We arrived in the afternoon and checked into Lower Pines, just missing Bill Harr and Kodachrome. We lucked out and our site was right on the Merced. It was sublime with Washington Column and Royal Arches across the river and Half Dome dominating the east horizon. We did have a couple in a Chinook van who felt compelled to run their generator for hours.
Bikes were the order of the day (and ponchos to approach any of the falls). It's a traffic jamb in Yosemite, so get on foot or on bike. This was our first trip with the bikes, so I brought a six foot ladder to mount them on some garage sale Yak bike racks which plugged onto my existing rack. Pretty easy and fast. We did cringe when driving thru the tunnels being 11'6" tall.
The falls were pumping. I used sandals to wade up the Bridalveil Falls trail meeting soaked tourists of all nationalities and got only a few frames before my lens was covered with droplets and autofocus gave up.
We biked to Mirror Lake and hiked up to the footbridge, but we're unable to complete the loop due to 2009 rockfall that closed the trail. I attempted to climb about 500' up to the base of a fall off an arch coming from Basket Dome but gave up when it became steep slabs.
It was wonderful to see the classic sites.
Upper Yosemite Falls
I've always been a big fan of granite. We visited the Le Conte Memorial and we're invited to join a talk on watershed ecology. After sitting through too many slides of charts loaded with data, I found my eye wandering to study the architecture of this magnificent structure.
We decided to do some slumming at the Ahwahnee
It was uplifting to tour the grand hotel and imagine Ansel climbing the fireplace during winter high-jinks.
Some of the residences on Ahwahnee Meadows were pretty nice too
After 30 hours in the Valley we left to visit Evergreen Road on the way Camp Mather. We found a wonderful site on NFS land with equipped fire ring. I made a blazing fire of cedar and pine.
Our next day was a hike to Hetch Hetchy. To be continiued . . .
