Yosemite Wednesday

On Wednesday we headed out of San Francisco once more on an epic day trip to Yosemite National Park.

Yosemite Valley

Yosemite is over 300km east of San Francisco, so our tour started pretty early. Once we’d met our Dutch guide, Lars, and boarded the bus, Luke fell swiftly asleep again. By the time he started waking up properly, the bus was well out of town into the agricultural valleys of California.

It was surprising to see such extensive farmland in a state that is currently in the midst of a three-year drought. We later saw for ourselves how serious the drought had become when we drove by one of the major reservoirs supplying water to California, which was so low in some areas that you could see the bottom. Fingers crossed for a bit of rain this winter. If we could, we would send over a few ponds worth of water from Newfoundland. We’ve got far more than we can use!

As we progressed on our journey, we moved from incredibly flat plains to rolling hills covered in golden grass as we made our way into the Sierra Nevada. Sierra Nevada means “snow-covered mountain range”, and for a long time, that’s all they were to the European settlers in California - mountains off in the distance that nobody went to. That would all change during the California Gold Rush which began in 1948 when gold was discovered in Coloma by James W. Marshall. Of the 300,000 prospectors who rushed to California in the next seven years, few ever got rich from gold. Instead, it was the shrewd business folk that sold mining equipment and loaned these “forty-niners” the cash they needed to buy said equipment who made a killing. There’s probably a lesson in business there…

Foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

The mountains got bigger and the roads got windier as we got closer to Yosemite. Forests of incredibly tall trees began to replace the wide open grasslands. Along the way we passed some true Wild West towns, including the town formerly known as Garrote - as in a device used for strangling criminals in a “humane” manner. We also learned from our guide that the first non-indigenous people to discover Yosemite Valley was the Mariposa Battalion, a group of white settlers who were hunting a band of Ahwanechee Native-Americans. 

Once we finally reached the park our first stop was for a hike down through some very impressive woods to go see some Giant Sequoias at Tuolumne Grove. We obviously took lots of photos, but it was very hard to capture the scale of the ancient trees. To give you an idea of just how large these things are - one of the tree stumps of a dead Giant Sequoia has a tunnel cut out of it that’s large enough for a car to drive through it.

After visiting the trees, it was time for the main event: Yosemite Valley. Our first view of the U-shaped valley was truly breathtaking. Enormous granite cliffs rising up from the flat valley bottom, with the main attractions of El Capitan and Half Dome clearly visible in the distance. We stopped for a quick photo shoot of the two granite behemoths before heading to the valley bottom to eat our packed lunch beside a river, surrounded on all sides by big trees and big cliffs. Hanging out in the valley it was easy to see why John Muir - a naturalist who played an important role in the preservation of the area in the 1800s - fell so in love with the place.

Elizabeth by a Giant Sequoia.

Yosemite Valley.

Before we started on our way back to the big city we stopped in a meadow below El Capitan to crane our necks upward and have a closer look. The huge granite rockface, which is apparently three times the height of the Empire State Building, is something of a rock climbing Mecca. With the help of Luke’s brand new binoculars we were able to spot a few tiny, ant-like figures halfway through their climb which takes the average climber over two days to complete. The record, however, is 2 hours and 23 minutes!

Can you spot the climbers on El Capitan?

From there it was back onto the bus for the long drive back, with one brief stop to check out the San Francisco skyline at night. It was a very long day, but was absolutely worth it. Now we’re eager to check out the other National Parks!

In case you missed them, here are links to our previous blog posts about this trip:
A Week in San Francisco (Part I)
Napa Valley Monday
A Week in San Francisco (Part II)

And here are the rest of the posts from our trip:
A Week in San Francisco (Part III)
Muir Woods Friday
A Week in San Francisco (Part IV)

Finally, here are some more pictures from our Yosemite tour: