Friday, April 27, 2012

Yosemite!!


There’s not much to say about Yosemite. It is a beautiful place, no doubt. Trey and I stayed just outside the National Park for eight days. The weather was perfect and people were friendly. I wasn’t expecting such a tourist trap, but I guess it is a place that everyone wants to see. Next time we go there, we want to do some high country hiking, maybe then we will find some solitude. We really want to climb Half Dome, but there is still too much snow and ice. Most of the high country is still under snow. We hadn’t exactly planned to be there at that time. It just worked out that way because we couldn’t mountain bike and needed something to distract us from our grieving hearts.
We did two major hikes. The first one was to Upper Yosemite Falls and the second hike was Vernal Falls to Nevada Falls. Upper Yosemite was one of the hardest yet most groomed trails I have ever done. We climbed 2700 ft over three and a half miles. This hike is totally worth it, the views are stunning. We came off this trail in the dark along with a dozen other people, including a pissed off elder woman who was swearing at her husband, saying she was “NEVER” going to do this trail again, and a family with four young children. I can only imagine how often rangers have to rescue people off the trail at night. We met another couple who said that rangers routinely hike up that trail to help people who are coming down without flashlights. Trey and I tend to bring flashlights with us on hikes because we get caught-up taking pictures and loose track of time. I would say 90% of our hikes end in darkness.
Vernal Falls to Nevada Falls was really cool too. We must have arrived at the right time for Vernal Falls because there was a rainbow at it’s base.  It was really beautiful and neat to see. Nevada Falls was my favorite waterfall. We had to hike about a mile or so past Vernal to get to it. The people really thinned out too, so that was nice. We met this crazy old man who wanted to show us how to get to the base of the falls, but he was on the way out, and we were still climbing up. He left us cairns to mark the way to the  bottom of the falls. That was awesome, and he had to have spent at least an hour doing that for us.
You can watch our videos of the two hikes. It’s a lot of me and my butt as I’m hiking up. J
Hasta luego me amigos.

I'll post more photos later!

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