Yosemite 2024. We finally made it.
Day 1 – Friday – Arrival
This day was everyone making their way to San Francisco from various locations. For a change most of the flights were on time and everyone got to the hotel ready for some beers and dinner.
Day 2 – Saturday – Off to Yosemite
Today the aim was to collect the cars at 10am, drive across to Yosemite via the supermarket to get food and more importantly, drink.
The morning started a lot earlier than anticipated due to jet lag, so Steve got a taxi and Ray, Jake and Tom joined him in collecting the vehicles. This was the first experience of OTT US service – we had a very comprehensive explanation of the collision damage waiver using a couple of Dinky toys and were then waved off with a smiley face on a paddle.
Driving was left to the two US residents – which went well, though Steve's Google satnav had a habit of blacking out at critical junctions, making for some guesswork on which was the right way.
Steve had planned lunch at “the Post restaurant”. According to the internet it was only open Mon-Fri 12-3pm, but maybe they heard we were coming as they had opened specially. It turned out it was an 80s event with really loud music so we relocated to a different venue.
What do you get with 9 men asked to get food for a week? Carnage. Luckily Steve had foreseen this and had written a series of shopping lists (including pictures for the hard of reading). Broadly followed, but additional liquid sustenance was added.
We arrived at the lodge, unpacked and had a well deserved drink on the deck, – at which point Graham and Ray were attacked by the flyscreen whose modus operandi was to cause you to tip your tea down your front – solved by the addition of sticking a teabag envelope to the screen with duct tape.
The lads busy at work. Well, some of them.
Day 3 – Leg stretching
Today was trip into Yosemite valley – see the views and get a short(ish) walk in. Lots of pictures of very large mountains and waterfalls resulted – It was magic!
The short walk was to see the sight of mirror lake, a good circuit made, with much anticipation especially given we had to wade up to our knees though the flooded path…
Turns out the Mirror Lake was more a pond/puddle rather than a lake, but Steve found bikini bottom - courtesy of a young lady sunbathing.
Whilst we were walking Ray spent his time around the two villages in Yosemite, he particularly enjoyed the mountaineering talk, maybe more the speaker as she was very captivating.
Day 4 – Waterfalls
Today was hiking up to the top of Nevada Falls via the Vernal Falls. Waterproofs were needed as we all got very wet walking up the side of Vernal Falls which definitely lived up to its moniker of the Mist Trail.
Through this walk we discovered Alasdair’s kryptonite – heights - the top of both waterfalls allowed you to look over the edge and it was a long way down.
In true US fashion there were lots of good signs telling you things not to do.
Get a bit wet Ali?
We decided not to go for a swim
The bear unnecessarys the simple bear unnecessarys... I will leave you to sing the rest. It seems from the photos that the boys have had a few close encounters of the furry animal kind. Although the pedigree of the pictures is in some doubt judging by some of the pictures below.
Some of the new recruits seem tough it is noticeable that at the top of a mountain Alasdair is wearing flip flops and Jake is bare footed!
Best not say anything about these poses but Lucas junior seems to be holding sticks, he will lose his inheritance!
Day 5 – A Dome and some fissures…
Todays walk was a slightly easier one, off up to Sentinel Dome and then down to Taft Point and back to the car park. One problem was this dome is at +8100 feet of altitude, so a lot higher, though luckily we could drive to within 2 miles of it. Ray was left at home to mind the fort and prepare dinner for our return.
First thing we encountered was the toilet (sorry restroom) extraction truck.
Yosemite have been really organised and put lots of toilets in useful places for the visitors – good start especially as some of the boys are getting a bit older, the issue is that these are very basic long drop type ones and they absolutely stink to high heaven. The day before Alasdair disturbed an Asian lady as she had forgotten to lock the door and then Jake opened the door on the adjacent one to find that someone had managed to miss the long drop and left a present on the floor, today whilst the guys went for a quick wee the cleaning operative was extracting the contents which was quite off putting as the hose and the guy were below them. We have vowed to only use these if absolutely necessary as it is better to brave a rattlesnake than visit the loos, of course for those who were on the Everest expedition it felt like home.
Day 6 – Yosemite Falls
Today was an early start as it was forecast to be hot and we wanted to miss some of the worst of the heat as the walk to the top of the falls was exposed to the sun and steep with lots of switchbacks.
We got to the base of the falls for 08.30 and started walking with rather heavy packs as the guide book suggested at least 4 litres of water was needed – turned out they were not wrong. Lots of monotonous switchbacks and serious elevation gain…1000ft in the first mile, overall 3000ft in 3.5miles. This gave us plenty of time to see views and curse the heat. We ended up getting split into two teams, the youngsters plus Graham and the rest. Jake more or less ran up and had a good 15 mins chill at the top before Tom arrived, closely followed by the rest. We then wandered around the top of the falls, including going to a rather precipitous staircase to the overlook, which was much easier going up than down!
By this point Ian had arrived so after some more photos we decided to head up to Yosemite point – Not on the official Steve sanctioned route, but it was only another 1.6 miles there and back and as we had made the effort to get to the top of the falls, not much extra effort and we were rewarded with some more spectacular views…
We then met Steve and John for lunch and headed down. Jake doesn’t like going slow so decided to jog down, taking just over a hour to cover the 3.5miles to return to the camp and finished the walk by 14.30. Steve and Graham were last down at 16.25, so plenty of recovery time.
On arrival back at the start we found out that the official temperature for the day was 95F (35C) – with exposure to the sun and reflected heat we thought another couple of degrees was experienced, so f’ing hot and the water we had carried was much needed.
Observations on this walk was it was a really good walk, though a little busy and was surprising now unprepared people were – expecting a lot of heatstroke in the crowds!
Jake, Alasdair and Steve went for a quick dip afterwards and had to share the pool with some young ladies, which was really difficult.
Day 7 – Big trees!
Today according to Steve was a rest day and only 3.5 miles and fairly flat. Once we actually checked it, it was at least 5 miles and 2000ft of climb and to make it worse the temperature was 35C and humidity also up so a bit sweaty!
The aim of the walk was to bimble along from the Wawona hotel to the Mariposa Sequoia grove, home to a tunnel tree and the Giant Grizzly (amongst others – the big trees all have been named), then we would meet Ray there and have a look around – simple…
We started the walk ok, nice change of scenery walking through woodland on a sandy path, gentle gradient up and best of all no one else (so no annoying Yanks and their loud children). The route we were using was also used by the Wawona horse trekking so we were pretty sure of the route – follow the hoof prints and regularly spaced fly infested droppings.
This gave us our first indication that we were not alone in the woods – we could quite clearly see bear prints in the sand, so our heads were on a swivel.
John was feeling the heat and the exertions of the previous day the most so was our rear gunner, which gave us ample opportunities to stop and take in more water. (by this time in the week we had realised that Steve’s estimations were optimistically shorter and easier than reality!)
Just after one of these stops Ian spotted a rather large and magnificent bear grazing in the woods downhill and upwind of us…As we were walking to get a better view a twig snapped and it did a quick scarper for 100yds then turned round and gave us the eye. We decided that this would be a good time to carry on walking.
The route was generally easy to follow – although we did get to a T junction and despite asking Steve a couple of times, we went the wrong way and had to double back, before finally getting to the entrance to the Mariposa grove.
This is where the simple plan went slightly awry.
The national park service had very kindly set up a lower car park to park and provided a shuttle bus to the top which is where we had organised to meet Ray. Whilst we had lunch three buses came and went sans Ray so Steve kindly offered to head down whilst we went and looked at the trees as he had seen them before.
The rest of the guys then walked up looking at the trees and reading the plaques, making comments around "not as big as we expected".
Just as we got near the Giant Grizzly (which actually lived up to its name) whom should we meet but Ray, who had got there sharp and decided to wander up on his own, thinking he would meet us, totally ignoring the plan agreed at the beginning of the day.
So what did we learn about sequoias:
1. They are the biggest trees by mass in the world, though the coastal redwood is taller
2. Big grizzly is somewhere between 1800 and 2800 years old!
3. The tunnel tree is rather lucky to be alive and is actually slowly trying to seal the hole (which was wide enough to fit our hire car through, provided you didn’t mind losing the mirrors.
4. For a massive tree, its pine cones are the same size as a small UK pine tree, but they produce over 400,000 seeds per year
5. The roots are really widespread but shallow, so putting roads and paths around them affects them
6. They band together and share resources, each Sequoia needs 3-4000 litres of water per day.
After our bimble around the sequoias we met Steve at the entrance – Whilst we had been admiring the view, he had managed to hitch a lift back to the Wawona hotel and collect our other car – though he was a bit coy over with whom he had hitched a ride.
For the rest of the day we split up – Ray, Ian and Steve headed out of the park as we need more beer and food. The rest of us went and had a look around the historic Wawoma buildings and then went for a swim.
The Wawoma historic buildings were really quite interesting and gave us a bit of an understanding of what life was like previously along with a bit of social history –
The original Park rangers were the US army and post civil war these were the buffalo soldiers, so they had had to patrol the area and stop people grazing livestock, prevent poaching, confiscating firearms (until the person left the park), building roads and generally act as the police service to a population who would not necessarily understand the need for the park and were also incredibly racist. A reminder of how lucky we are they did this role to preserve the wilderness.
Whilst looking at these exhibits, we saw how unchanged things have been though some of the photos from the early 1900s.
Day was finished up by swimming in the river– The locals thought us as a bit crazy as we were jumping into the cold river and also had a beer, we just thought it was refreshing – though Jake managed to take a chunk out of his big toe whilst swimming when he kicked an underwater rock – Ian and Graham checked it out (after making sure his insurance was up-to-date and will be sending a bill later)
Day 8 – Hetch Hetchy
Today was a drive to Hetch Hetchy reservoir and a short flat walk (where have we heard that before!).
Bit of history – Hetch Hetchy is were the water for San Francisco is collected. Prior to 1906 it was a wilderness and another valley similar to Yosemite (though not quite as spectacular). However following the devastating earthquake in 1906 which destroyed a large portion of the city infrastructure, along with the 3 days of fires, the city wanted a more reliable source of water. This debate took 7 years, with environmentalists lead by John Muir trying to prevent the dam being built finally being overruled in 1913.
The dam took 20 years to build and now transports snowmelt 167 miles to San Francisco entirely by gravity. Also since 1925 it has provided hydropower to San Francisco (1.7bn Kilowatt/hours per annum) so a crowning example of renewable energy in action. (you can tell Tom has written this as an engineer and working for company that does a lot of this…)
Anyway back to the walk – 6 miles there and back and only 600ft of climb along the shore of the reservoir – which you were not allowed to drink, swim in or boat in and if you needed to go to the loo you had to be at lease 100m away from water…
This walk was nice, some rocky bits and some wildflower meadows, but the best bit was the waterfall – Jake declared it his favourite waterfall ever…and hard to disagree. The park service had brilliantly put some bridges across the falls, but close enough that you could get really close to the falls and get soaked from the spray and splashing (much needed on a hot day).
The yanks are pretty good at warning you about dangerous things and that you might die, but think they need to review their signage more regularly as we were warned of an impending torrent, only to find a trickle which small children were happily playing in.
At the end of the walk we headed home with the mission to eat and drink everything left before checkout tomorrow.
