Yosemite!! I was insanely excited for this portion of the trip, and rightfully so, because Yosemite is a majestic place that I think everyone should experience sometime in their life. It's not the easiest national park to visit though... let me tell you why. First of all, unless you have an insane budget, you should maybe consider camping because the lodges even remotely close to Yosemite (in El Portal or other surrounding towns) START at about $300 per night for the bug infested dumpy room (just going off yelp reviews here). I spent a significant amount of time poking around Airbnb trying to find us a reasonable place to stay. We settled on a cabin in the town of Mariposa which was neither close to the park or a bargain... but it was large and had every amenity we could ever need. The other reasons that make Yosemite tricky include the fact that majority of the main trail heads are inside Yosemite Valley which gets horribly backed up with traffic and parking is tricky (don't you dare try to arrive later than probably 10-11am if you hope to park your car). Once you're parked, there is a free shuttle that can take you to all of the different trail heads in the valley. And lastly, Yosemite is difficult exactly because the trail heads start in Yosemite Valley... VALLEY. Haha. Get my point? The elevation changes for every hike are just bonkers... but I'll get into that later.
We had two days to hike here so we planned some pretty ambitious endeavors. Day 1 would be the Four Mile Trail up to Glacier point. Now... I admit right away that you can drive to Glacier Point... but this trail looked like an amazing experience so I said, let's do this. It's 4.6 miles one way... which, when you're a runner, doesn't actually sound like very much at all. What I didn't pay attention to was the elevation change... 3200 ft... thirty two hundred feet. Yeah... whoops. We did it though!
Courtney's looking so fly close to the beginning of the hike. We were not making happy faces later, lol
Wow, all those switchbacks and we get a beautiful view of upper and lower Yosemite falls!
Four mile trail... a better name for it would be four hour trail because that's how long it took us to get to the top. Man, it was brutal. We're in good shape too... I'm not going to sugarcoat this and be like yeah we beasted four mile trail... there were moments were we were not actually sure we were going to make it and LOTS of moments of "why are we doing this".... but we did it! Lots of water and sunscreen application breaks and just being patient with ourselves and we made it!
So at the top there's a whole little cafe with ice cream! We earned this!
Glacier Point lookout! That's Half Dome on the left and Yosemite Falls
The night before, we had gone grocery shopping to stock up our cabin and to pack lots of food for these hikes. We sat at the top of the mountain and ate our sandwiches, potato salad and fruit before scoping out the trail to Sentinel Dome. Now, the drive up to Glacier Point is an entire hour from Yosemite valley (and our cabin is an hour and twenty away from yosemite valley)... in hindsight, one hour each way is a lot less than the 6.5-7 hours we spent hiking up and down, but we both agreed we were glad we hiked it! Just next time can we not destroy our legs in a very hilly San Francisco before trying this... please. But if you do drive up, you get the option to continue on to Sentinel Dome and Taft Point which are only a couple miles out. Well, I had fully intended on continuing on to Sentinel Dome which was the closer of the two... we made it about 20 steps before we were like we can't do this. We can't go a whole other mile upwards :( Listen to your bodies. Always. We made the right decision - Next time we're driving up like all those flip flop hikers!
Now, the thing about climbing up a mountain for four hours is that you still don't expect it to take very long to climb down... I think we were both under the false impression that we'd be back rather quickly... well, going down in almost as difficult as going up but in a different way. Two and a half hours, a couple rolled ankles and some very sore legs later, we FINALLY made it back to the valley.
How I spent that evening :P poor little swollen ankles! Courtney was on the couch with her ice packs as well, lol. We made a frozen pizza, had beer and a pint of Ben and Jerry's this night. We earned that too!
Day two: Mist trail to Vernal and Nevada falls :) after draining all our blisters and stuffing our feet back into our hiking shoes, we were ready for day two. I'm sorry I'm not sorry if some super hiker reads this and thinks I'm wuss... we're not professionals! Haha. In fact, on the four mile trail, we were joking about how our parents used to take us on hikes as kids and we thought it was torture. LOL. Arches national park comes to mind for me and Courtney's kid hiking torture experience was Smokey mountains. We can't believe that we're putting ourselves through this for fun now! The pictures speak for themselves though (of course the pictures don't do anything justice either), Yosemite makes you work hard and then rewards you handsomely.
The very beginning of the mist trail up to Vernal falls :)
The trail to Vernal falls is an "easy" 1.6 miles... it starts off super vertical and miserable just like it seems all the trails here do... :P and then it takes you along the rushing river and leads you to a rock staircase that's completely soaking wet due to getting absolutely hammered by the waterfall. You literally get drenched on this trail... it's insane. We made sure to put away our phones from taking pictures as we could barely see through the water while navigating slippery rocks upwards while other people are trying to climb down. I was also trying to not completely soak my shoes... I was mostly successful. Courtney described the soaking section of the hike "liberating" and I totally agree!
The top of Vernal Falls! You can see on the left where people are climbing up.
Courtney actually saw one of the actors from Breaking Bad on this hike. Dean Norris! I had never heard of him, lol. She didn't say anything to him to not interrupt his family vacation, haha.
Yes that's a tin foil spoon! So crafty! Nothing was going to keep us from our potato salad... certainly not forgetting our forks.
Continuing on on this trail takes you to this really neat (and a little dangerous) section of rushing water heading to the waterfall. I was amazed at the amount of water moving as such a high speed. It makes you feel tiny and powerless for sure.
It's kind of funny, we stayed in Mariposa, CA which is the Spanish word for butterfly. Courtney had mentioned to me that mariposa was her mom's favorite word in Spanish just early this day, and would you know... we saw many butterflies this hike. This little guy landed right next to me when I was sitting by the rushing water. I don't really believe in seeing signs or anything like that, but it's hard not to feel something in times like that <3
More selfies :)
Against our probably better judgement, we decided to take the John Muir trail down instead of going back the way we came and getting all soaked again. The problem with this trail is that it goes UP before it goes down... which we were not about with our tired legs. On the plus side though, we would have not seen these amazing view of Vernal and Nevada Falls otherwise.
Amazing Vernal Falls
Nevada Falls from a distance! We would do this hike next time :) it's a continuation uphill from Vernal Falls for about 2.5 miles.
That wraps our eventful two days of adventuring around Yosemite! I don't have a ton of national park experience yet, but when I compare it to Olympic, Yosemite seems to be a little more majestic but it makes you work SO hard for it, these hikes do not mess around. We were also a little disappointed that we didn't see any bears :P If we ever make it back here, I would definitely do the hike to Upper Yosemite Falls (the waterfalls from the pictures at the beginning). We went to Lower Falls, which was basically a stroll on a sidewalk compared to the other hikes. It was overrun with flip flop hikers, haha. We would also do the hike up to Nevada Falls. We would still NOT do Half Dome. Can you even believe that there's a hike scaling the side of Half Dome? It includes seven miles of intense uphill and switchback hiking, then 400 ft of walking up the side of Half Dome using chains to help you. Then you have to go all the way back! They only let about 75 people do this hike per day and you have to apply for a permit well in advance!
So we wiped the dirt off our legs with baby wipes (since we had to check out of our cabin) and set off on the long drive back to our hotel by the San Francisco airport for our flights the next morning. Another best friend vacation in the books! I love adventuring with this girl - we have all the right priorities... mainly food, but also mountains and waterfalls :) I think it sparked something in Courtney because even though we both had swollen ankles and a touch of altitude sickness (maybe mixed with exhaustion, not sure exactly what it was), she was already talking about which national park we would visit next year! I still haven't been to Colorado... maybe it's time!
So that's it for now! Andy and I have our giant Iceland adventure coming up in September that I can't WAIT to share on here!
No comments:
Post a Comment