Advertisement
Yosemite is set up for people on short breaks that don't mind spending lots of money quickly. The price of accommodation in and just outside the park is stupid expensive, and once you´re booked into these places you´re held to ransom to eat in their overpriced restaurants because there's nowhere else to eat nearby. So me and Lynn stayed well away from all that in an little country town called Mariposa 43 miles from the park entrance. It was nice, nice and cheap and surrounded by mountain scenery.
By luck when we visited Yosemite it was Spring and we found out that that has important benefits. In Spring glacial melt off the mountains feeds spectacular waterfalls into the valley that are all but gone by Summer. I think I read that two or three of the worlds top ten tallest waterfalls are here in the valley. Yosemite gets 3.5 million visitors a year but most of them must come in the Summertime because there's not all that many people on the trails in Spring. There were not the heavy traffic and parking problems that I had expected. There were no seriously big crowds, and Yosemite is big enough that you
can easily get away from the flock anyway. Its a massive 750,000 square acres, I'm not sure what that converts to in square miles but I'm positive from looking at maps that Yosemite is a similar size to some African national parks in being bigger that some European countries, like say the Netherlands or Wales. We only had time to visit a tiny fraction of the park around Yosemite Valley, but it was truly mind blowing.
The Lonely Planet guide book states that..... 'Yosemite national park makes Switzerland look like God's practice run'.
I measure one outdoor place I've been against another by the amount of times I find my jaw dropping at the sight of things I'm seeing when I'm there. It could be some aspect of wildlife like watching colorful birds flitting about or birds of prey, a vista of mountain scenery, a massive waterfall, whatever.
We were walking, driving and cycling around Yosemite for three days and I was often and quite loudly exclaiming, "Fuck - ing - hell ...... look at the fucking size of that!" So by this barometer I'd have to say that Yosemite is one of the top if not THE top
natural wonder that I've ever seen. Lynn would agree.
First day we walked a loop trail of the valley. It took all day, it was a 13 mile low level walk but I got us lost twice so we can call it a 14 or 15 mile walk. I decided to do the loop in reverse thinking there would be less people on the trail and that turned out to be the case. At the beginning we walked for about 4 hours and saw nobody. It was spectacular. Walking at the bottom of the valley looking upwards at times you feel almost hemmed in by the mountains. 'El Capitan' 'Cathedral Spires' and 'Half Dome' are all nearly 8000 feet high. Fucking massive sheer granite walls looming over you. And they are not the tallest peaks in the park there are mountains over 13,000 feet high that we never had time to see.
I've never met anybody in the past who's been to Yosemite or even heard anybody talk about it. Lots of people talk about New Zealand or mountains like Kilimanjaro in Africa or the equivalent places in Asia. It could be just my experience but incredibly it
doesn't seem to me to be a place many European tourists or backpackers go to. I'm surprised I knew so little about it considering how good it is, the only time I've ever seen any information or photos of Yosemite before is once or twice browsing other peoples´ blogs on this site.
The second day we went to Mariposa Grove, a pine forest that includes a few hundred giant redwoods (Sequoias) the largest living trees on the planet. The biggest sequoia in the forest they have named 'the grizzly giant'. It´s 290 feet tall dwarfing the fully mature pine forest surrounding it and it´s 2700 years old. Sequoias are interesting, they are immune to all modern diseases that kill trees and they are forest fire resistant. The only thing that eventually kills them is that because they have a shallow root system they eventually topple over due to soil erosion at their bases because of snow melt year on year over centuries. Otherwise they could live on and on for.........a long time. Some exist in other parts of California that are over 3000 years old. When they do eventually topple over they don´t smash to bits they split into
waterfall
The power of the waterfall creates its own wind, I was soaked in spray from half a mile away huge sections like if a Roman stone column fell. Even then a chemical in the tree called tanin resists rot, it can take the tree another 500 years to decompose. To see Sequoias is so impressive. I´m no tree hugger, but if I was I´d hug these ones! ha
Sequoias need fire to recreate. The seed cones you'd expect to be be huge are only the size of say a squash ball. They can sit high up on the tree for 30 years waiting for lightning to start a natural forest fire which heats the cones up, then they know its time to fall. The Sequoia cones survive the forest fire and the new saplings that grow from them have no competition for light as the other tree species in the forest have all burnt down.
It reminds me of when we went on a trip in the northern territory Australia. I found out that many trees in the Australian outback need fire for their seeds to germinate. And I saw plants like cycads sat looking green and healthy in totally fire scorched landscapes. Australia is the oldest continent on the planet and Sequoias are some of the
oldest living trees. It makes me think that it could be that in pre history many more tree species alive then needed fire to reproduce.
After a couple of hours walking in the forest Lynn had to sit for a while because her hips were sore from all the walking the previous day. So I walked on for about a mile myself until I came out in a clearing surrounded by an entire grove of Sequoias. It was really impressive seeing so many all in one place. The smell of Sequoia wood filling the air especially when the sun is shining on them is like the smell of no other tree, very nice.
There were no other people around so I sat quietly in the sunshine for half an hour listening to the wind high up in the treetops, the woodpeckers at work in different parts of the forest, and watching the various colorful birds flitting about. I really could have sat there all day......all week......all month. But I got back up on my feet to go down the trail and find out how Lynn was doing.
On the way back I saw a park ranger working on
merced river
in full flow during the Spring glacial show melt off the mountains his own sweeping pine cones off the public path. For a second it crossed my mind to forceably take his uniform and his ID, bury him in the woods, pick up his broom and start his doing his job hoping nobody noticed the change in personnel. Its was tempting!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.078s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0496s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Eds
non-member comment
Fuckin' Beautiful!!!
What dramatic, fantastic scenery!! Glad you visited California-hurray for piggy flu eh?!!! Will email you Hope your both well-you look it on the photos BIG HUGS Eds XX