Yosemite Remains Awesome

After our night stuck in Lodi, we got to the Yosemite National Park area. Not without another adventure, though. This time, it was John at the wheel when the RV sustained another oopsie. The west road into Yosemite, US 120, is NOT big-rig friendly. Oh, you can do it, but you just don't want to. Really. Very narrow, very twisty, very climbing, and for the two agoraphobic passengers in the RV, very near the edge. Also there's a state law that says slow vehicles must allow faster ones to pass. However, it is the best route in for a big rig.

John had pulled to one side of the road to let another line of cars past and was too close to the guard rail. One bolt head scraped about 25'feet of paint (but not much skin) off the right side, a straight and long line. Last fall's oopsie in the UP cost us a bit over $2,000 to repair a 3x6 foot patch of what really was a minor tree scrape eight feet off the ground.

John knows this will be a bit more, but we can put it off till the winter since it is purely cosmetic and does not impede the coach's “basement” cargo accessibility. Embarrassingly, brother-in-law Ken was in the co-pilot seat at the time. Oh, well.

Nothing else untoward occurred before we pulled into the Yosemite Lakes RV Park which is still quite some distance from the valley section of the park. RV parking also was deep in a mountain hollow with a tortuously steep downhill twist, another nice Thousand Trails park with good shade, right along a river bank for Debbie and Ken's traditional morning coffee.

We're here a total of four days with absolutely no signal for any of our phones. That means no internet, too.  Oh, well.  We're not here to make calls or upload blog pages; we're primarily here to explore Yosemite. The first day found us taking our car further east and surprising us with an awesome scene after popping out of one tunnel. Undomesticated water falls! Free Range mountain terrain! And, one bar on the phones; briefly, we each received some pending text messages but the replies may or may not have been returned.

Hetch Hetchy stuns on the drive in

After checking the visitor's center for maps and Ranger advice, we decided to visit the Hetch Hetchy reservoir first. The bill was signed by 1913's President to build a dam and flood the valley, gathering all the winter's snows. Information signs at the dam tell us this is the most significant source of drinking water for the entire –and quite distant– San Francisco area. Not everyone agrees that the best environmental decision was made when this dam was built. Harrison Ford (pilot of the Millennium Falcon among other roles) has some YouTube postings of an emotional appeal “to restore Hetch Hetchy to the American people.”

Water shot through turbines at the dam on the day we were there while the Green hydro-electrons danced away in the power lines to the west. But just talking about this picture cannot convey the beauty and awesome wonder of it all. The valleys with the runoff water are deeply cut with steep sides and crowded with trees and bushes. Mountaintops rise all around, much higher than we. Here in the third week of June, snow remained on many of them. They'd had a lot this past winter and huge waterfalls gushed from on-high, cascading the snow melt to the reservoir lake itself. Awed, by the time we'd driven back to the main road, the day was pretty much shot.

The next day, we were intent on Yosemite Valley itself, overlooked by the famous Half Dome mountain top. Debbie finally has a hiking buddy in her brother. John's fallen arch, acquired with irony at Arches in Utah, is still a mobility problem and he had not kept up with the more athletic Debbie for several years anyway. Ken, who had done this hike in his 40's, thought they could get to the top of Vernal Falls and back in 2-1/2-hours. Not a problem for John, who is working through the first book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy for perhaps the fourth time in his life, He figures to find a shaded spot and explore Middle Earth again through this dense but wonderful read. As they usually do when the possibility of separation exists, both he and Debbie have their little FRS walkie-talkies. There's no phone service, and at least we might talk up to a half mile. When they get back, we'll drive down to Glacier Point for another scenic view across the valley.

Three and a half hours later, John is well-read, well-napped, and seriously thinking to report the overdue hikers to a Ranger. He's not much worried because this is a very crowded National Park and, if his wife and her brother had gotten into trouble on the popular trail, he was sure somebody would be near. Nevertheless, he had just decided to give them a half hour more before raising the alarm when the radio crackled to life. Debbie reported, amid a lot of weak-signal static, that they were at the top of the falls and that their desire to hike had exceeded their grasp of their abilities (and their late-60's ages!). She said it might be another hour and a half before they could be back. Debbie was just amazed the little UHF radios carried the distance. So was John, who is a former Amateur Radio ham, realizing that she must be quite a bit higher than he for the two-mile-plus range to work.

The hike up the Mist Trail to the top of Vernal Falls was amazing, but also strenuous. After walking half a mile to the trail from the car, Ken and Debbie started up the moderate 0.8 mile trek to the bottom of the falls; only a 400 foot gain in elevation on this part of the trail.  There is a bridge at the bottom that crosses the Merced River, and standing on it provides a wonderful view of the falls and the river thundering down out of it. Then the trail gets steeper when we hit the steps section.  There is a 600 foot elevation gain
in the next 0.4 mile trail.

Much of the trail from the bottom to the top of the Falls was made of cut pieces of stone, and the steps were steep. When Ken had taken this hike decades earlier, it was later in summer, and he recalls a gentle mist blowing over as he climbed this portion. However, our hike was earlier in the summer (June 15) and the amount of snow this year (and therefore the amount of snow melt coming down the river and falls) was larger than usual. Instead of a mist, there was a goodly section where we had cold water raining down on us as we climbed up the steep steps. We

were not prepared for this, so when we made it to the top of the falls, we were wet, cold, and our boots and socks were well past soaked. To say that the view and the sounds of the falls was amazing would be a gross understatement. Words fail. In addition to the sound and intensity of the falls, the rapids leading up to, and emerging from the bottom of, the falls were also stunning. Huge rocks as large as 2 story buildings and weighing many tons each were scattered about the river, and the roar of the water rushing violently over and around them was thrilling. After recovering from our hike up, thankfully being able to contact John, and enjoying the view from the top, we hiked back down and rejoined John in the car.  The Mist trail actually continues past Nevada Falls to the top of Half Dome for those hearty souls who put this 14.2 mile round trip on their bucket list.

We then took off for Glacier Point, and were treated to another amazing view from a different perspective of the mountains and the falls we had just hiked up, in addition to Nevada Falls and Half Dome.  Stunning!