Yosemite National Park
My second visit to Yosemite Park. While not as memorable as the first (Ed and Frances’s Wedding) was a totally different experience all together. The first day, we found the campgrounds and staked out our tents. Yosemite had one thing different than any other camping ground I had ever visited before, there were bears all throughout the valley, and so you had to use the provided bear lockers to store all food and toiletries at night so the bears couldn’t get to them. They ended up being very much needed, as we had bear visitors every night we stayed.
Frances starts off the day by showing us the joys of the bear locker. The first day we spent most of our time checking out the valley floor of Yosemite, buying souvenirs and generally just checking out the village.
Later that day, some of us decided to drive up to the Glacier Point overlook for a spectacular view of the valley. Near the end of this set of pictures you see two waterfalls. They are were to be our destination for the next day’s hike.
It was a vacation, so we slept in, and then made some breakfast. Around noon we decided it was time to see what the valley had to offer, and some of us started out on the hike to Vernal Falls. We got off the bus at the trail head, and it was already immediately obvious how the lack of rainfall had dried up the river from the falls. Vernal Falls itself was also somewhat meager, but it was all very pretty none-the-less.
Once we made it to the top of Vernal Falls, we took a quick break at the small lake above the falls, and then decided that the we could press on for the second part of the hike, up to Navada falls (which you can see in the latter pictures). An interesting side note, someone skilled in rock stacking had been hard at work up here, there were stacked rocks all through out the area, sometimes even in defiance of the river itself.
Finally we reached the top of Navada Falls. Needless to say, we had a good long break here before starting the return trip.
Squirrels from around the park. There were plenty of animals, but they were the only ones that would stop for pictures. Bears would only come at night when it was two dark for them, and all the other animals were just too darned fast.
