Incredible! That one word sums up Yosemite National Park for many reasons. It's incredible how many people visit Yosemite. 6,000,000 people a year stop at Yosemite, and one doesn't just stop there on a whim – you must travel miles and miles of rugged, steep, winding, narrow roads to even get into the park. Anyway, we have shared Yosemite for the last two days with a good share of the 6 million! It was like being in Times Square on New Year's Eve – there were so many people in Yosemite Valley, we could hardly move down the trails, and finding a parking place anywhere on the premises after noon is impossible, so everyone is driving around in a kind of gridlock. Luckily we had campground reservations and could park at the campground and take the shuttle wherever we needed to go.
The park is incredible because there are so many things to do. You can hike on easy trails, or choose to hike up a steep mountain; you can go on a lazy raft ride down the calm part of the Merced River; or you can go horseback riding on the many trails. You can take a tour, listen to a ranger talk, watch a video of the park, attend a play about the park, and swim in the river, a lake, or the pool. If you want to drive some more, you can take other very rugged, steep, winding, narrow roads to incredible views, granite cliffs, and sparkling lakes.
Most of all the park's beauty is incredible! There are waterfalls whose water drops for a half-mile. Yosemite Falls – upper, middle, and lower together drop for that distance. If we had been able to come to the park in the spring, we would probably have gotten extremely wet just from the mist coming off the falls. When we went there yesterday in the 100 degree heat, we wanted to get wet, along with the hundreds of other people who were there, but the only way to get wet was to wade in the creek at the base of the falls, which several hundred people were doing.
We thought about joining more of the masses in the float down the creek, but decided we should take another hike, this time to Mirror Lake. We felt like we were walking in Central Park, because there were so many people on the trail. Mirror Lake is pretty, but mostly dried up in the summer., so after wading in the water for a few minutes to cool off, we hiked back down. We did a few other things on the valley floor, but we got tired of the masses, and tired from the heat, so we went back to the campground and treated ourselves to a steak dinner.
Other incredibly beautiful spots in Yosemite are away from the valley floor, so consequently away from most of the people. We drove through the mountains above the valley to Glacier Point where you can look down on the valley floor where it looks like ants are crawling around. We saw not only Yosemite Falls from there, but Nevada Falls and Vernal Falls, both of which seemed to have a lot more water than Yosemite. It seemed like we could reach across and touch Half Dome, the huge granite rock that is such a famous face for the park. We also saw all of the other waterfalls, Mirror Lake, and domes, mountains, etc. from the Point. Until 1969 there was a hotel there overlooking the valley. I would love to have stayed in a hotel up so high, but that hotel burned and was not rebuilt.
After that, we left the park via the Tioga Road which is about 40 or 50 miles long, and connects with a road in Nevada that we had to go on to get to Utah. The Tioga Road wound around in the mountains above the valley, too, but we couldn't see down to the valley from there. We could see the backside of some of the mountains including Half Dome. A large part of the Tioga Road goes through huge areas of granite, some just piles of rock, but much of it huge hills of whitish silver rock that you can easily climb on to the top. Many of these rocks have trees growing right out of the rock! One wonders how that can happen, but it does, over and over! We also saw some beautiful wildflower meadows today, and several large lakes. Just after we crossed out of the park at Tioga Pass, 9900 feet in elevation, we saw Mono Lake which appears to be a large salt water lake.
Now that we have visited Yosemite once, and know what's there and the best time to come, we hope to visit again some time.
At the present time, we are driving across the desert in Nevada on diesel fumes. The last several towns on the map seem to have disappeared. We have one possibility left before we run out, so we're hoping that's not a mirage, too!