A Trip to Yosemite – Day 1

By Jason

One of the many cool things about my job is working with folks from all over the world.  Periodically we’ll have people in town from Dublin, Beijing, Hyderabad, and other places.  When Robin (from Beijing) and Tilek (from Kyrgyzstan by way of Dublin) mentioned they wanted to see Yosemite before they left the U.S., I planned a weekend trip to see the national park.  Robin’s friend Lu Lu, also from Beijing, came along as well.

It turns out that it’s pretty hard to find a place to stay in or near the park on a few days’ notice at the height of tourist season.  I looked about 15-20 places and only found two with vacancies.  I decided to go with the Yosemite Lakes campground, just a few miles outside the park, which had a yurt open.  What’s a yurt?  You can see in the picture below.  It’s basically a big round tent, common in Central Asia (including Kyrgyzstan).  The yurts at this campground were pretty nice, with bathrooms, showers, kitchenettes, and even satellite TV.  So we weren’t really roughing it.  It was so convenient that I’m thinking this might be a good place for our baby’s first camping experience some time next year.

Yurt at the Yosemite Lakes campground

We drove in to Yosemite in the morning.  This photo is from the Valley Portal, a scenic spot at the side of the road before you get into Yosemite Valley.  That’s the Merced River below and from this point you can see a couple of waterfalls in the distance.  As always, click on the photos if you want to see larger versions.

Yosemite Valley

We stopped at Bridal Veil Falls and had something to eat at the village in the valley before starting our hike.  We didn’t really get an early enough start to do the famous hike up Half Dome so we decided to hike up the Yosemite Falls trail instead.  The first stop was the bottom of the lower falls.

By the Lower Falls

Here I’m retrieving my hat after it the wind blew it off.  Lucky it landed on rocks and not in the creek.  The hat is from the DVD release of the movie WarGames – Google had a panel discussion with the movie’s writers and it was one of the giveaways.

Retrieving my fallen hat

This is about as close as I got to the bottom of the Lower Yosemite Falls.  There were some people climbing the rocks closer but it was already pretty wet at this point – I don’t think my camera would have survived any more of a soaking.

At the bottom of Yosemite Falls

Next we started the long climb up.  The trail goes back and forth with a series of switchbacks.  It seems like you’re going back and forth for hours.

Climbing the switchbacks of the Yosemite Falls Trail

The trail winds in and out of tree cover.  Every few hundred feet you get another incredible view.  The trail is very well-maintained and we passed people climbing down on a pretty regular basis.  Still, it was a lot less crowded than the trails along the valley floor.

Yosemite Falls trail

This bright blue bird is, as far as I can tell, a steller’s jay.  They’re related to our common blue jay’s in Ohio and always show up when I’m hiking in all the beautiful parks in the area.  They stay in the shade and don’t like to sit still so this is about the best picture I’ve been able to get.

Steller's Jay

Here’s a photo from Columbia Rock.  Behind the guard rail is a drop straight down to the valley floor, maybe a thousand feet or so.

Columbia Rock

Soon after we were able to see the Upper Yosmeite Falls, the tallest waterfall in North America.

The Upper Yosemite Falls

The trail took us pretty close to the falls but we decided to so some easy boulder hopping to get a better view.  You can get an idea how far the water is falling in this picture:

Upper Yosemite waterfall

This is the spot where we sat for abit to watch the water.  you can see Half Dome in the distance.  We noticed someone climbing the boulders down the slope, much closer to the spot where the waterfall lands, so we decided to make our way down.  It wasn’t too difficult of a climb, just lots of boulders.

Precarious rock

We stopped when the rocks started to get wet a slippery.  You can see our reward- a great view of the falls, a rainbow, and Half Dome and the other peaks in the distance.

Waterfalls, rainbow and Half Dome

Here I am above the rainbow.  You can make out the double rainbow in the photo.

Sitting on the rocks above the rainbow

And here’s the upper Yosemite Falls from below.

Directly below the Upper Yosemite Falls

The wind can blow the water around a considerable distance, which we found out the hard way.  Right as we started to head back, the waterfall blew sideways a bit and landed around us, really soaking Tilek.

About to get soaked

Our way back up to the trail was a bit more difficult than we planned.  In the tumble of rocks and random tufts of tree cover, we couldn’t spot the exact route we had taken to get down.  We weren’t really lost, since if we went to high on the hill we would hit the granite mountainside, and if we went to low, we would stop at the cliff.  But we needed to get back to the exact same spot because that’s where we had left Lu Lu – he was too tired to make the climb.  We spent about 45 minutes climbing up a bit, getting stuck, then climbing down a bit, then going back up, yelling for him to let us know where he was.  Finally we saw the precariously perched rock from the photo above and turned a corner – only to find Lu Lu listening to his headphones.  He didn’t have a clue we were shouting for him.

We walked back down the trail and had dinner at the food court near the lodge.  We were all pretty exhausted, but when we got back to camp I introduced everyone to the great American delicacy of smores.

You can see a lot more photos, including more landscapes and pictures of the waterfall, at Flickr.

Next up: another day at Yosemite and a visit to Mono Lake.

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