Yosemite National Park

Yosemite National Park is the hardest national park to spell correctly. Oddly enough, as many places as i've been in the North America (and even California) i had never been to Yosemite until this past September. I planned a few hikes in the park and then a week before i was supposed to go i was in a freak accident. Some woman's psychotic dog purposely smashed into my legs (on a big trail in the city) so hard that i flew head over heels and landed on my shoulder and head on a rock. The impact severed two of the tendons that hold my arm to the rest of my skeleton. I am still not recovered from this incident even 8 months after surgery to replace the tendons. In fact, the surgery has failed, and i'm looking at another one. Whether or not i'll be able to do much hiking with a pack on my back this coming summer is, at this point, still a mystery.

 I have to admit that the Half Dome is a mighty impressive sight. More so than i expected.

Yosemite Vally as viewed from Glacier Point. In addition to crowds we dealt with smoke from forest fires. You can see it creeping in already from the right side of the photo. By late afternoon it was ruining the views even for short distances in the valley bottom.

My plans were destroyed. I showed up at the park wearing a sling and was confined to easy walks and viewpoints. This was driving me nuts, not only because it is a great place to hike, but also because it was Labor Day weekend - the worst time ever to go visit Yosemite. There were so many people, combined with the park service deciding it was a good idea to do some road construction that weekend, that we actually left the park on the first day, unable to deal with the crowds we were confined in. It was so crowded that two of the areas we wanted to visit were actually closed -- due to overcrowding!

Maree relaxes on a boulder at Tenaya Lake. This was my favorite area. It is about as perfect an alpine lake as you can imagine. The rocks are warm, the water clear, and one side even has a white sand beach. In this bottom picture you can see a man with his grandkid wading in an extensive shallow area.

We had better luck on Monday after the weekend. I was still disappointed though, to find that Yosemite Falls, the one hike i thought i could do, was bone dry. I had no idea that could happen, and i started to suspect all those old Ansel Adams pictures had been Photoshopped. Apparently by late summer it is quite common for the falls to not exist.

Not a good picture, but i posted it to show the character of the landscape. This type of stuff is very fun to wander around exploring.

Tioga Lake at 9,600 ft (2926m), is man made but very pretty.

Yosemite Falls has the title of the tallest measured waterfall in North America, but i'm going to have to argue about that. For one, it doesn't even flow half the time in summer. If you are going to count intermittent falls, which it clearly is, then that really widens the list of candidates. I can think of some huge 3,000 foot cliffs in Zion that have waterfalls when it rains, and the Alaska Range is developing some big falls in summer right off the top of some of the peaks.

Secondly, saying it's the tallest "measured" falls is just silly. It doesn't mean anything. It's definitely not the biggest falls around, anyone who has seen a lot of falls can just look at it and tell. There are numerous waterfalls in British Columbia nobody feels like "measuring" that are larger, like  Desert River Falls, B.C. 830 meters (2,723 ft), James Bruce Falls, B.C. 840 meters (2,756 ft), Alfred Creek Falls, which is 2,297 meters (7,536 ft), etc.. etc.

Although lower in altitude and less than a mile from Tioga Lake, Ellery Lake (another dammed stream) already bears the signatures of a drier climate. From here the road descends into the high desert of the Mono Basin.

Lastly, when listing the height they seem to be counting the upper falls, the cascades in the middle, and the lower falls all as one single waterfall, even though the upper and lower falls are separated horizontally by nearly a quarter mile. I don't think that counts as one fall. But that's me. In any event, researching this just a little bit has made me realize how ridiculous it is to make a competition out of water sliding off of stuff.

Another feature Yosemite is known for is it's groves of Giant Sequoia Trees. We saw some of those, and i have to report that Sequoia National Park has a much better selection of the giant trees. In fact, it has the biggest of all of them. Sequoia also has spectacular granite canyons just as deep as Yosemite, it has Mt. Whitney (the highest in the lower 48 states and a hike that i highly recommend), and it is far less crowded. Can you tell i was grumpy that weekend?

Grant Lake, another pretty reservoir, leads back into the June Lake ski area.

It's not all bad though. Yosemite really impressed me in the highlands and outside the park on the eastern range. Tioga Pass Road climbs up to just shy of 10,000 ft. (3,000 m) and it's a very nice drive. Many trails and stopping points along the road offer easy access to the highland meadows and mountains. This is a HUGE advantage over Sequoia, where one must spend several hours trudging uphill in order to get to the pristine tablelands above treeline. The other huge benefit of the road is that it goes straight through the park. In Seqoia if you wanted to hike from one end to the other, or climb Mt. Whitney when you live in the Giant Forest, you have to make a 5 hour drive south to the Mojave Desert and then back north to at least Lone PIne.

Lower down on the east side of the range are a series of beautiful lakes, some of them reservoirs. One area that was a big surprise is outside the park in the the desert. We took a loop drive to an area called June Lake. Its a hidden valley that looks similar to the Tahoe area. Based on what i saw i imagine it's much less crowded than the park on a non-holiday. I plane on returning there at some point.

On the ground here is a huge campground and "Silver Lake", which mainly seems to be a fishing lake. A good trail ascends from the right into the upper valleys. In that area is a place called Lake of 1,000 Islands. It's on my list of things to do.