Once we got away from the Bay Area the weather started getting hot, up to 100 degrees as we crossed the Central Valley. As we drove up into the mountains the weather cooled to merely hot and the scenery grew more spectacular. On the way into the valley we stopped at Bridal Veil falls, one of several that spill down over the surrounding cliffs.
We met up with our friends Wanda and Chris in Yosemite Valley where we spent a couple days camping. Wanda and Chris are really excellent people, generous, funny and intelligent. I first met Wanda at a SIGGRAPH years ago when her business card read Director of Chaos. We all became good friends when I moved out to California and now they have a daughter about Michelle’s age. We stayed in Housekeeping Camp, a campground of tent-cabins peculiar to Yosemite. You can’t leave food in your tent because to the bears, so every campsite is provided with a food storage locker built like a mailbox. Since we came by plane W&C brought a cooler with cool things as well as some extra blankets and other sundries.
It was late afternoon by the time we arrived, and it took a while to get checked in and set up. Still the girls had time for a swim in the Merced River and then we went off to dinner. I’m used to cooking our own food when we go camping, so even though I’ve been to Yosemite before, it still feels weird (but good) to go out to eat. National parks aren’t your local state campground, so there’s all sorts of lodges, hotels and restaurants. We went to the cafeteria in Curry Village, which was quite good. The kids enjoyed riding around on the bus. Finally we came back to the campsite, built a fire and talked well into the night.
The next day (technically a Tuesday but Second Saturday by our reckoning) we headed down to Mariposa Grove to see the giant sequoias. There was construction on the narrow, winding mountain road, so the thirty mile trip took almost two hours. But it was totally worth it! We took a tram ride to the upper groove figuring the hike would be a lot for the kids, but hopped off on the way back and hiked down the last half. Saw lots and lots of really, really, really big trees, many of them thousands of years old. Truly staggers the imagination.
On the way back we stopped for lunch at the Wawona Hotel, a hundred-year old wooden lodge house in the park. When we got back to camp we went for another swim in the river. This time I went in and I can tell you the water was cold! That evening we had dinner in the Mountain Room at Yosemite Lodge, a fairly fancy restaurant. Chris and Wanda are big gamers and that night they introduced us to Dominion, a card game a bit like Magic but more streamlined and without all the annoying card collecting. MIchelle lost a tooth that night!
The next day (logical Sunday) we did all kinds of activities in the valley. Checked out the nature center at Happiness Isles and then went for a nice hike among a series of rocking, branching creeks. Checked out the Indian Village and (of course) the gift shop, and wound up the day at Yosemite Falls, where the kids had great fun climbing over rock and boulders at the base of the falls. W&C had bikes with them, so we split up and took turns biking aound the valley between stops.
As we were packing to go, Jeannie discovered something had chewed a hole thru a corner of her backpack! She had forgotten the tin of chocolates we bought in Marin. Even though they were sealed in shrink-wrapped plastic, some critter had sniffed them out. We found the plastic wrapper but not a trace of the tin or the chocolates. We can only guess as to what kind of creature did such an act. Lizzy speculated it was evils squirrels, but I’ve never heard of squirrels hitting a target that big. My conjecture was Otter-Bears, a mysterious animal that is rumored to live in rocky caves in mountain creeks. Michelle said it was a deer with fingers. But Jeannie and most other sensible people think it was probably raccoons.
We left the park in late afternoon, driving over Tioga pass and getting up to 10,000 feet. On the way we stopped at Olmstead Point (named after the famous park designer; not sure what he was doing way out west) and was a view of the valley looking back from the very top. The scenery for the whole drive (another 2 hours to go 30 miles kind of trip) was unbelievably beautiful, just breathtaking. Snow still lingered on some of the north slopes of the mountain tops. We came out of the Sierra on the Nevada side, into the dessert at Lake Mead. Then it was a long but relatively flat cruise north thru endless cattle ranches. Finally we headed back into the mountains as nightfall neared, headed up to Lake Tahoe. More on that in Part III.