Yosemite, part 2. (A loquacious account, with illustrations)
Recall, if you will, that last week I mentioned that my brother and I made a visit to Yosemite, the occasion for which was my mother desiring to attend a ten-day meditation retreat at the Seriously-Scary-and-Possibly-Cult-Like Meditation Center somewhere in the Sierra Nevada. B and I being dutiful children, we cheerfully deposited her there last week, and then, ten days later, I went back up there to pick her up.
Actually, it was nine days later, because her thing ended at 7:30 in the morning and it takes about five hours to get there from home, more if one gets stuck in traffic trying to get the hell out of Los Angeles, and I was not all that keen on getting up at 2:30 in the morning and driving up there and then turning around and driving back. So what did I decide to do? I decided to go a day early, and enjoy the scenery and go hiking and have adventures and that sort of thing.
It still involved getting up at 2 o'clock in the morning, though. I wanted to spend the portion of the day lit by the sun frolicking outdoors rather than driving, and also, since shoving my way through a herd of people who are walking slowly to the base of Yosemite Falls is not my idea of a good time, I thought it might be best to do all my waterfall-communing early in the morning, when most visitors are asleep in their tents/trying to start fires to cook breakfast/chasing away bears/still driving to Yosemite. So my plan was to leave home at 2:30 a.m. and drive through the night, get to Yosemite at seven or eight, spend the day hiking, and then drive back down to Bass Lake in the evening and spend the night there, since it's only about ten miles from where my mother was staying.
Driving in the middle of the night is great; there were hardly any cars on the road, and within an hour I was already driving up the mountains north of the city and coasting down all the hills at ninety miles per hour, and by 4:20 I was past Bakersfield. By then the road was very flat and straight, and I was driving rather fast, because I was all alone, the only car on the road for miles--I could see the red lights of the cars miles in front of me and the gold lights of the cars miles behind me, with me all alone in between. It was very peaceful.
I stopped in Fresno around six in the morning to get gas and breakfast. The sun was up by then, lighting up the land so that it seemed to glow, and I drove north through a beautiful country of green trees on yellow hills. I got to the south entrance of Yosemite at seven, and I reached the Valley around eight. Stopped at Tunnel View to take pictures, because I simply cannot pass by that place without stopping to take pictures. This annoys my brother. He's always like, "Why do we have to stop? Do you realize that this is the sixteenth time that you have stopped to take pictures from here?" But he wasn't here this time (afraid of camping) so I got out and snapped pictures to my heart's content. Here's one of them:
I like this one better than last week's Tunnel View picture.
After that, I looped around the Valley. Waterfalls were falling all over the place: there were these huge torrents gushing impressively over cliffs--the waterfalls that exist for most of the year and thus have proper names--and also lots of minor little streamlets trickling down thousands of feet, which will be gone in a few weeks. I walked to the base of Bridalveil Fall--the waterfall featured in the picture above, and it was wonderful. The water was pouring down with such force that when it hit the ground a substantial portion of it flew back up in the air, throwing up so much mist that it looked like a cloud had fallen from the sky and was sitting at the base of the waterfall. And when I walked through it it was like walking through a rainstorm.
I drove around to Yosemite Falls after that, and had much the same experience, so I was thoroughly drenched by the time I got back to the car. on the way, took this picture of Yosemite Falls from the meadow:
That hike up to the Middle Cascade has got to be fabulous, walking right along where the water gets thrown back up. Anyway, when my waterfall-touring was complete it was after nine, and the Valley was beginning to fill up with people, so I figure it was time to flee up to Hetch Hetchy, which most visitors to Yosemite don't know about. Sure enough, as I was driving out on 120 (to get there you have to drive out of the park and then back in through another entrance), I passed this huge line of cars all waiting to get into the park--I think it was about a quarter of a mile long!
The road to Hetch Hetchy is kind of awful--potholes everywhere, no actual lane divider so cars are always driving on the middle of it--but there were hardly any cars so it was OK. After that not-so-harrowing adventure I made it to the Hetch Hetchy entrance. Finally. B and I had actually planned to go when we went last week, and hike along the Hetch Hetchy reservoir to some waterfalls, but after that Panorama Trail hike that left me unable to walk downhill I just wanted to go home and lie in bed and not stand up again for a couple of days. So we settled for a nice flat exploration of the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias before driving back to Los Angeles.
Before I set out for the waterfalls, though, I decided to hike to Lookout Point, from which, I was told, one might see a magnificent vista of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and the O'Shaughnessy Dam and Wapama and Tueeulala Falls.
Lookout Point is totally not worth hiking to. No one's lying; you do get a nice view:
But you can get pretty much the same view from the road while driving down to the dam. Without having to hike up a thousand feet on a rather rough trail when it's ninety degrees outside. On the other hand, there's no place to stop and take pictures on the road. But anyway, the point is, I hiked up a thousand feet to Lookout Point when it was ninety degrees outside. It was hot. So whenever the trail passed by a stream, or crossed a creek, I just tramped right through the water. My shoes got all soaked. It was nice. But when I got back to the car, my shoes were all soaking wet and muddy, and I pulled them off and threw them somewhere and put on my sandals instead. Then I drove down to the dam to walk out to those two waterfalls. The wispy piddling one on the left is Tueeulala Falls and the gushy one on the right is Wapama Falls. I was promised a footbridge across the base of Wapama Falls, upon which one could stand and get absolutely drenched by the waterfall, at least at this time of year. It was, by that point, about a hundred degrees, and I was looking forward to it.
So I set off still in my sandals, because it was hot and I wanted to be able to splash my feet around in any convenient waterfalls that I might find along the way. Now, obviously, everyone knows that hiking is Serious Business and you have to Respect the Wilderness and not go frolicking around in flip-flops, but this was not exactly a true wilderness experience where you go off in solitude to commune with nature. Sure, not many people visiting Yosemite make it up to Hetch Hetchy, but of the ones that do, just about everyone is there to hike to the two waterfalls, or to the backcountry further along the same trail. There were hundreds of people on the trail, which generally means that unless you do something insanely reckless (slide over waterfalls, etc.) you probably won't die of exposure or starvation or rattlesnake bites, because, chances are, you'll run into someone who was less of an idiot than you and who has matches / extra food / water / wilderness first aid training.
Anyway. The hike was very nice. Picturesque. Good views all along the reservoir, and the trail was pretty flat and smooth and wide--I had no problem negotiating it in platform sandals.
Until, of course, I ventured off the trail to get a better view of the water, and, on the way back, had to cross a mucky and swampy patch of ground. My left foot made it out okay. So did my right foot. And the sandal strap that was wrapped around my right foot. The rest of the sandal, alas, was not so lucky. It stayed in the swamp. I fished it out, but the strap had been entirely yanked out and there was no way to fix it back in.
So I was sitting there by the side of the trail, unable to walk, rummaging through my backpack in search of something that might affix my sandal to my foot again, at least temporarily. I thought I might have some string or something in there. I did not. I thought I might have a rubber band or elastic hair tie. I did not. Backpack proved entirely useless. Then--I looked at the skirt I was wearing! It was a wrap skirt, that tied with a ribbon which was decoratively long. Success! I could cut off a length of it and use it to tie my sandal to my foot. All I needed was a knife to cut it, and I thought I might have a Swiss army knife in my backpack.
I did not.
And, frankly, the passers-by I encountered were similarly useless. No one had hair-ties or string or even a knife! And here I thought I lingered rather near the bottom of the Hiking Responsibility Gradient. Apparently I was far closer to average than I thought, which reflects--well, which doesn't reflect very well on anybody, actually.
But being, nevertheless, a plucky and resourceful girl, I determined to sacrifice my camera strap to the noble cause of Allowing Self To Walk Again. It was rather crude, since I couldn't cut it and had to make a rather elaborate yet unstable series of knots and wrappings to hold it on, and in the end it did not prove to be an adequate solution, but it served its purpose: it got me to a minor waterfall several hundred feet down the trail, where I encountered a Boy Scout troop.
And now, all due credit and homage must be given to my personal lord and savior, Vincent the Boy Scout. This is how it happened: The troop was resting by the waterfall, having gone to Wapama Falls earlier that day and returning now. The scout leader, having taken the motto of the organization to heart, did indeed have upon his person a trusty knife, and I sorrowfully prepared to mutilate the beautiful blue ribbon of my wrap skirt. But then, Vincent the Boy Scout came to the rescue! The scout leader may have been a minor acolyte at the holy shrine of preparedness, but Vincent was surely its high priest, for on this two-hour trip, this four-mile hike over level terrain, on a well-marked trail trod by hundreds of feet per day, he had seen fit to bring with him three lengths of climbing rope, in case circumstances warranted some impromptu mountineering. Anyway, he let me have one of them, and I tied it around my foot. My experimental design seemed to work pretty well, but I didn't want to cut it until I was sure that it would work out, so I held the trailing end of the rope in my hand as I walked, rather in the manner of a leash. It was like I was going on a hike with my pet foot.
It actually worked out rather well; I thought there might be problems negotiating the steep stone steps near the waterfall with sandals and the rope, but I didn't have much trouble. Wapama Falls was great--it was around a hundred degrees on the trail, but as I got near the waterfall the flow was so great that there was a cold wind in the air, and mist everywhere. And when I stood on the footbridge at the base of the fall, I got entirely drenched, and not just from the mist; there was so much water that it was falling directly onto the bridge in a violent cascade. It was wonderful--I was actually cold and shivering when I got off the bridge. I rested there for a while, darting back onto the bridge whenever I started to feel warm again, and got good and soaked one last time before heading back. And it was actually so hot out that I dried off within a mile, and had to find another waterfall to hang out under along the way.
On the way back, at the same minor waterfall where I encountered the Boy Scouts, I met two backpackers on their way to Rancheria Falls. They noticed my rope and asked if I didn't want something a bit more practical. And so I sat on rock and they duct-taped my foot to my sandal. It was nice to have the use of both hands again, very convenient for taking pictures. I took this one while I was standing on top of O'Shaughnessy Dam after I got back:
It was around 3:30 in the afternoon when I got back to the car. And then I drove pretty much all the way through Yosemite, back to the south entrance. On the way, while I was taking 120 into the park again, I stopped at this gorgeous overlook, high above the Valley, with a good view of Bridalveil Fall:
This is actually the same spot where I saw Yosemite Valley for the first time last summer, when B and I stopped on the way to Oregon, and I remember that I squealed and cried for him to pull over when I got that first glimpse. It looks much better now; back then there were forest fires and there was so much smoke hanging in the air.
After I got out of the park I drove to Bass Lake. I didn't get there until seven, but it wasn't very crowded. I found a nice campsite, and was proudly surveying my domain trying to decide where the tent should go when I realized that I was providing dinner for a veritable swarm of mosquitoes. Hopped back in the car, got some bug spray, returned, slaughtered them. But not before I got about thirty bites. Anyway. Pitched the tent, threw all my stuff in it, had dinner, got bored by the lack of entertainment when the sun went down, went to bed. It took me a surprisingly long time to fall asleep, considering that I had been up since 2 o'clock that morning.
I woke up pretty much with the sun the next day. The meditation center my mother was staying at was only about ten miles away from Bass Lake, so I had a pleasant time driving there extremely slowly in the morning sunlight. I met up with my mother, who was, shockingly, not malnourished and traumatized from her ten-day ordeal, but rather all chipper and enlightened.
Since it was yet early in the day, I proposed an expedition to Glacier Point before we headed back to Los Angeles. In support of this proposal, I pointed out that, in explanation of her ten-day absence, my mother had told her acquaintances and co-workers and, yea, even her very mother that she was going on a "vacation to Yosemite," and, having said this, would it not be better to actually set foot in the park, so she would not be entirely a liar? (My mother was reluctant to tell her co-workers about the meditation thing because, I think, she thought that they might think it was a bit odd and unfamiliar. And she can't tell her mother about her interest in Buddhism because, rather hilariously, my grandmother converted from Buddhism to Christianity when my mother was four years old, and my mother doesn't dare inform her of this apostasy.)
Anyway, we drove up to Glacier Point. It was very impressive. I took this nice picture of Half Dome:
And then we drove home. That went pretty well, except I had to drive barefoot the whole way because my real shoes were still all soaked and my sandals were held together with duct tape and anyway my feet were all bruised and abraded from the duct tape and the hiking so it hurt to wear shoes.
The End.
Actually, it was nine days later, because her thing ended at 7:30 in the morning and it takes about five hours to get there from home, more if one gets stuck in traffic trying to get the hell out of Los Angeles, and I was not all that keen on getting up at 2:30 in the morning and driving up there and then turning around and driving back. So what did I decide to do? I decided to go a day early, and enjoy the scenery and go hiking and have adventures and that sort of thing.
It still involved getting up at 2 o'clock in the morning, though. I wanted to spend the portion of the day lit by the sun frolicking outdoors rather than driving, and also, since shoving my way through a herd of people who are walking slowly to the base of Yosemite Falls is not my idea of a good time, I thought it might be best to do all my waterfall-communing early in the morning, when most visitors are asleep in their tents/trying to start fires to cook breakfast/chasing away bears/still driving to Yosemite. So my plan was to leave home at 2:30 a.m. and drive through the night, get to Yosemite at seven or eight, spend the day hiking, and then drive back down to Bass Lake in the evening and spend the night there, since it's only about ten miles from where my mother was staying.
Driving in the middle of the night is great; there were hardly any cars on the road, and within an hour I was already driving up the mountains north of the city and coasting down all the hills at ninety miles per hour, and by 4:20 I was past Bakersfield. By then the road was very flat and straight, and I was driving rather fast, because I was all alone, the only car on the road for miles--I could see the red lights of the cars miles in front of me and the gold lights of the cars miles behind me, with me all alone in between. It was very peaceful.
I stopped in Fresno around six in the morning to get gas and breakfast. The sun was up by then, lighting up the land so that it seemed to glow, and I drove north through a beautiful country of green trees on yellow hills. I got to the south entrance of Yosemite at seven, and I reached the Valley around eight. Stopped at Tunnel View to take pictures, because I simply cannot pass by that place without stopping to take pictures. This annoys my brother. He's always like, "Why do we have to stop? Do you realize that this is the sixteenth time that you have stopped to take pictures from here?" But he wasn't here this time (afraid of camping) so I got out and snapped pictures to my heart's content. Here's one of them:
I like this one better than last week's Tunnel View picture.
After that, I looped around the Valley. Waterfalls were falling all over the place: there were these huge torrents gushing impressively over cliffs--the waterfalls that exist for most of the year and thus have proper names--and also lots of minor little streamlets trickling down thousands of feet, which will be gone in a few weeks. I walked to the base of Bridalveil Fall--the waterfall featured in the picture above, and it was wonderful. The water was pouring down with such force that when it hit the ground a substantial portion of it flew back up in the air, throwing up so much mist that it looked like a cloud had fallen from the sky and was sitting at the base of the waterfall. And when I walked through it it was like walking through a rainstorm.
I drove around to Yosemite Falls after that, and had much the same experience, so I was thoroughly drenched by the time I got back to the car. on the way, took this picture of Yosemite Falls from the meadow:
That hike up to the Middle Cascade has got to be fabulous, walking right along where the water gets thrown back up. Anyway, when my waterfall-touring was complete it was after nine, and the Valley was beginning to fill up with people, so I figure it was time to flee up to Hetch Hetchy, which most visitors to Yosemite don't know about. Sure enough, as I was driving out on 120 (to get there you have to drive out of the park and then back in through another entrance), I passed this huge line of cars all waiting to get into the park--I think it was about a quarter of a mile long!
The road to Hetch Hetchy is kind of awful--potholes everywhere, no actual lane divider so cars are always driving on the middle of it--but there were hardly any cars so it was OK. After that not-so-harrowing adventure I made it to the Hetch Hetchy entrance. Finally. B and I had actually planned to go when we went last week, and hike along the Hetch Hetchy reservoir to some waterfalls, but after that Panorama Trail hike that left me unable to walk downhill I just wanted to go home and lie in bed and not stand up again for a couple of days. So we settled for a nice flat exploration of the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias before driving back to Los Angeles.
Before I set out for the waterfalls, though, I decided to hike to Lookout Point, from which, I was told, one might see a magnificent vista of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and the O'Shaughnessy Dam and Wapama and Tueeulala Falls.
Lookout Point is totally not worth hiking to. No one's lying; you do get a nice view:
But you can get pretty much the same view from the road while driving down to the dam. Without having to hike up a thousand feet on a rather rough trail when it's ninety degrees outside. On the other hand, there's no place to stop and take pictures on the road. But anyway, the point is, I hiked up a thousand feet to Lookout Point when it was ninety degrees outside. It was hot. So whenever the trail passed by a stream, or crossed a creek, I just tramped right through the water. My shoes got all soaked. It was nice. But when I got back to the car, my shoes were all soaking wet and muddy, and I pulled them off and threw them somewhere and put on my sandals instead. Then I drove down to the dam to walk out to those two waterfalls. The wispy piddling one on the left is Tueeulala Falls and the gushy one on the right is Wapama Falls. I was promised a footbridge across the base of Wapama Falls, upon which one could stand and get absolutely drenched by the waterfall, at least at this time of year. It was, by that point, about a hundred degrees, and I was looking forward to it.
So I set off still in my sandals, because it was hot and I wanted to be able to splash my feet around in any convenient waterfalls that I might find along the way. Now, obviously, everyone knows that hiking is Serious Business and you have to Respect the Wilderness and not go frolicking around in flip-flops, but this was not exactly a true wilderness experience where you go off in solitude to commune with nature. Sure, not many people visiting Yosemite make it up to Hetch Hetchy, but of the ones that do, just about everyone is there to hike to the two waterfalls, or to the backcountry further along the same trail. There were hundreds of people on the trail, which generally means that unless you do something insanely reckless (slide over waterfalls, etc.) you probably won't die of exposure or starvation or rattlesnake bites, because, chances are, you'll run into someone who was less of an idiot than you and who has matches / extra food / water / wilderness first aid training.
Anyway. The hike was very nice. Picturesque. Good views all along the reservoir, and the trail was pretty flat and smooth and wide--I had no problem negotiating it in platform sandals.
Until, of course, I ventured off the trail to get a better view of the water, and, on the way back, had to cross a mucky and swampy patch of ground. My left foot made it out okay. So did my right foot. And the sandal strap that was wrapped around my right foot. The rest of the sandal, alas, was not so lucky. It stayed in the swamp. I fished it out, but the strap had been entirely yanked out and there was no way to fix it back in.
So I was sitting there by the side of the trail, unable to walk, rummaging through my backpack in search of something that might affix my sandal to my foot again, at least temporarily. I thought I might have some string or something in there. I did not. I thought I might have a rubber band or elastic hair tie. I did not. Backpack proved entirely useless. Then--I looked at the skirt I was wearing! It was a wrap skirt, that tied with a ribbon which was decoratively long. Success! I could cut off a length of it and use it to tie my sandal to my foot. All I needed was a knife to cut it, and I thought I might have a Swiss army knife in my backpack.
I did not.
And, frankly, the passers-by I encountered were similarly useless. No one had hair-ties or string or even a knife! And here I thought I lingered rather near the bottom of the Hiking Responsibility Gradient. Apparently I was far closer to average than I thought, which reflects--well, which doesn't reflect very well on anybody, actually.
But being, nevertheless, a plucky and resourceful girl, I determined to sacrifice my camera strap to the noble cause of Allowing Self To Walk Again. It was rather crude, since I couldn't cut it and had to make a rather elaborate yet unstable series of knots and wrappings to hold it on, and in the end it did not prove to be an adequate solution, but it served its purpose: it got me to a minor waterfall several hundred feet down the trail, where I encountered a Boy Scout troop.
And now, all due credit and homage must be given to my personal lord and savior, Vincent the Boy Scout. This is how it happened: The troop was resting by the waterfall, having gone to Wapama Falls earlier that day and returning now. The scout leader, having taken the motto of the organization to heart, did indeed have upon his person a trusty knife, and I sorrowfully prepared to mutilate the beautiful blue ribbon of my wrap skirt. But then, Vincent the Boy Scout came to the rescue! The scout leader may have been a minor acolyte at the holy shrine of preparedness, but Vincent was surely its high priest, for on this two-hour trip, this four-mile hike over level terrain, on a well-marked trail trod by hundreds of feet per day, he had seen fit to bring with him three lengths of climbing rope, in case circumstances warranted some impromptu mountineering. Anyway, he let me have one of them, and I tied it around my foot. My experimental design seemed to work pretty well, but I didn't want to cut it until I was sure that it would work out, so I held the trailing end of the rope in my hand as I walked, rather in the manner of a leash. It was like I was going on a hike with my pet foot.
It actually worked out rather well; I thought there might be problems negotiating the steep stone steps near the waterfall with sandals and the rope, but I didn't have much trouble. Wapama Falls was great--it was around a hundred degrees on the trail, but as I got near the waterfall the flow was so great that there was a cold wind in the air, and mist everywhere. And when I stood on the footbridge at the base of the fall, I got entirely drenched, and not just from the mist; there was so much water that it was falling directly onto the bridge in a violent cascade. It was wonderful--I was actually cold and shivering when I got off the bridge. I rested there for a while, darting back onto the bridge whenever I started to feel warm again, and got good and soaked one last time before heading back. And it was actually so hot out that I dried off within a mile, and had to find another waterfall to hang out under along the way.
On the way back, at the same minor waterfall where I encountered the Boy Scouts, I met two backpackers on their way to Rancheria Falls. They noticed my rope and asked if I didn't want something a bit more practical. And so I sat on rock and they duct-taped my foot to my sandal. It was nice to have the use of both hands again, very convenient for taking pictures. I took this one while I was standing on top of O'Shaughnessy Dam after I got back:
It was around 3:30 in the afternoon when I got back to the car. And then I drove pretty much all the way through Yosemite, back to the south entrance. On the way, while I was taking 120 into the park again, I stopped at this gorgeous overlook, high above the Valley, with a good view of Bridalveil Fall:
This is actually the same spot where I saw Yosemite Valley for the first time last summer, when B and I stopped on the way to Oregon, and I remember that I squealed and cried for him to pull over when I got that first glimpse. It looks much better now; back then there were forest fires and there was so much smoke hanging in the air.
After I got out of the park I drove to Bass Lake. I didn't get there until seven, but it wasn't very crowded. I found a nice campsite, and was proudly surveying my domain trying to decide where the tent should go when I realized that I was providing dinner for a veritable swarm of mosquitoes. Hopped back in the car, got some bug spray, returned, slaughtered them. But not before I got about thirty bites. Anyway. Pitched the tent, threw all my stuff in it, had dinner, got bored by the lack of entertainment when the sun went down, went to bed. It took me a surprisingly long time to fall asleep, considering that I had been up since 2 o'clock that morning.
I woke up pretty much with the sun the next day. The meditation center my mother was staying at was only about ten miles away from Bass Lake, so I had a pleasant time driving there extremely slowly in the morning sunlight. I met up with my mother, who was, shockingly, not malnourished and traumatized from her ten-day ordeal, but rather all chipper and enlightened.
Since it was yet early in the day, I proposed an expedition to Glacier Point before we headed back to Los Angeles. In support of this proposal, I pointed out that, in explanation of her ten-day absence, my mother had told her acquaintances and co-workers and, yea, even her very mother that she was going on a "vacation to Yosemite," and, having said this, would it not be better to actually set foot in the park, so she would not be entirely a liar? (My mother was reluctant to tell her co-workers about the meditation thing because, I think, she thought that they might think it was a bit odd and unfamiliar. And she can't tell her mother about her interest in Buddhism because, rather hilariously, my grandmother converted from Buddhism to Christianity when my mother was four years old, and my mother doesn't dare inform her of this apostasy.)
Anyway, we drove up to Glacier Point. It was very impressive. I took this nice picture of Half Dome:
And then we drove home. That went pretty well, except I had to drive barefoot the whole way because my real shoes were still all soaked and my sandals were held together with duct tape and anyway my feet were all bruised and abraded from the duct tape and the hiking so it hurt to wear shoes.
The End.