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Published: October 1st 2008
My postcard pic
With Half dome in the background With the whole week to spend in San Francisco I had decided to head to the amazing Yosemite national park, which judging by the pictures I kept seeing everywhere was due to be incredible. I had booked a 3 day and 2 night tour at the Yosemite 'BUG' hostel complex which is deep in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada but just on the out skirts of the national park. It was a good 3.5 hours drive inland from San Francisco which took us through some amazing countryside. The 10 of us on the trip arrived at the "BUG' early afternoon. We were all spread out but were staying in these cool wooden cabins dotted around the complex, the whole place was lovely and was such a welcomed contrast from the big city, I had the immediate feeling that I would like this trip a lot!
We all got settled in and as usually happens we all met at the bar/restaurant for a few beers. It was a great group and straight from the start we all sat in a big group and started to get on real well, so with the whole afternoon to waste and nothing really
planned to do, Tom produced a map which showed a nice little walk round the back of our camp up over a hill, through the woods and back round to the other side of the camp. So we decided to rope everyone into coming with us on our little excursion around the 'bug loop trail'. Well I couldn’t believe it, usually my navigation is pretty dame good but right from the start Tom and I missed our turning on to the track (yes we were talking and not concentrating) and made everyone walk all the way down this very steep hill we had driven up earlier until we decided to stop and actually look at the map, where it turned out we had just walked the whole way down this road for nothing, we then explained to everyone our slight error and headed back up the hill again!! By the time we got to the top and actually found the track we were already building up a sweat and out of breath! (Well that was the warm up lol!!)
The trail was really good fun, very steep and rugged and though loads of trees etc during which I couldn't
Another view of the national park
We were around 8000 meters above sea level! help winding up poor Lou about seeing bears!! She didn’t realize there were around here till I had told her the night before and she thought I was joking till I showed her a pic on the brochure lol!
The trail turned out to be a lot tougher than any of us had expected both physically and navigational wise. The map that Tom had was crap and a 6 year old could have drawn a more accurate description of what we were meant have been seeing, so anyway we ended up making a few wrong turns then back tracking, then slipping down some steep slopes that turned out not to be tracks before we finally found a road. By this time it was really hot and everyone was covered in dust and dirt, so half the group decided they had had enough and followed the road back to the complex but the rest of us especially Tom and I were determined not to be out done to we looked at the map again and thought 'bingo' I know where we went wrong and so lead the few remaining people back along another track, which then seemed to get very overgrown
(when I mean over grown I mean we were crawling through the under growth), we still persisted but after 15 mins of walking through dense bushes and sharp trees trying to follow what the map said we decided to give up and walk back along the road, and to our surprise within 50 meters we found the track again!!
We finally got back after something like 2.5 hours of hiking, totally knackered and hungry but we did do the whole 'bug loop trail' despite getting so badly lost!! I couldn't believe even towards the end we kept coming up to forks in the track that the map didn’t even mention, so we just had to keep guessing! Never mind the cold beer and the biggest plate of spare ribs sorted it all out and it gave us all something to laugh about for the rest of the evening!
The following day was our trip to the national park, this started firstly with a drive to see the worlds tallest trees named Sequoia's and when I say these tree were tall I mean they were I mean they were stupidity tall some over 300ft and some of these trees have
'The BUG' - Living out in the wilderness
Certainly a world away from the big city! been growing of over 1700 years!!! We stayed here for a short while before Dave our mad tour guide drove us to the base of Sentinal dome, we then hiked to the top which stands at 8000 meters above see level!!!! and to say the views from up here were breathtaking would be the greatest understatement. I was just gob smacked, you could see for miles and miles, but not only than the shapes and rock formations from all the granite cliffs surrounding us were incredible. Luckily we had our lunch up here which gave us all plenty of time to savor the views and recover from the steep climb.
We did have some cheeky squirrels that kept trying to nick our food though, the little furballs were so used to humans there were fearless and at one point ran off with half of Tom's lunch, which was well funny seeing him running after it trying to retrieve it back again!!
By the time we had to walked back down again I really didn’t want to leave I could have sat up here all day and just looked out over this unbelievable landscape, one of the many rock formations I
Another wrong turn
Leading us to a very steep slipperly hill lol! Don't you just love trecking did notice was 'half dome' and I have vowed to myself that I will be back one day to climb that rock as I just didn’t have time to do it this trip!
The rest of the day Dave took us around some other amazing places and look outs and then on to the valley floor where we were able to the look up at the 1000ft sheer face of El-capitan. This is apparently one of the top rock climbs in the world, but it takes 5-6 DAYS to scale these sheer rock face, which means sleeping in a make shift hammock nailed to the rock face!!!! The pictures unfortunately really don’t show the enormity of the rock, it really was massive and you couldn’t even see the rock climbers on the face unless you had binoculars and even then it was pretty difficult.
On the way out of the valley Dave stopped us at this lovely part of the river so that any of us that wanted to swim could. It was a really a picturesque area and after all that walking it seemed a good idea to cool down, that was until we ran in and
found how bloody freezing it was!! Only Simon and I stayed in, everyone else ran in up to there waist and then ran back out again saying it was to cold......the wimps!!! Simon and I swam around and did some jumps of a few rocks for while but I was so cold in there that we could hardly speak because our teeth were chattering so much!
When we got back to the 'BUG' later we found the prefect way to relax after such a hard day of strenuous activity ha ha......there was this huge 10 person Jacuzzi/spa and sauna area, this was great as we all just sat around chatting a chilling in this area while being able to look out into the forest around us! It was so relaxing and it beats TV any day.
On the last day Dave drove us back into the national park as we had a mountain to climb so that we could see.....you guessed it......a waterfall!!!! No trip into the wilderness is complete with out seeing a waterfall and because it has just come out of summer time there are only 1 or 2 waterfall left around the park.
We had
Our whole group on the BUG tour
That is one mother... of a big tree! a great hour uphill walk up to the top of the mountain were we could look out on to this 300ft waterfall. The waterfall was lovely but the view from the top was even more impressive and it was great to be able to see most of the walk back down the mountain from where we had come. I didn’t find the walk that hard at all and could have easily carried on for another few hours to half dome, but the other weren't so enthusiastic!! I will have to leave that for another time.
I loved Yosemite, everything was just so incredibly beautiful and some of the rivers winding though looked like there were taken straight off of postcards, everything you looked at was stunning in its own right. But as much as I looked around I still never got to see my bear, coyote or mountain lion. I will be back here at some point maybe in the spring as I can imagine it would be totally different and then I hope to be able to see a bear then too. This trip has really been the highlight of my trip to the USA and would recommend
this to anyone who is going to California.
Well other than heading back to San Francisco for day, I am now on my way to New Zealand, I really cant wait to see this country properly, everyone I have spoke to has just loved it here and it is true a backpacker place!
Remember if anyone wants to leave comments or messages on my blogs I would love to hear them, it great to get feedback.
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Martyn
non-member comment
Very Nice
Hi Mate, You lucky git, looks very nice! Sorry I havnt had been able to speak to you since last week, every time i have called I cant get through, I will try call tonight. Cant belive the scenery!! Amazing!! Speak soon mate, dont fall off any mountains!