The bed was comfortable, the girls were quiet, and then the noise of crinkling was heard somewhere close by. Jada heard it too, but thought it was an alarm. She sat bolt upright, but then went back to sleep. I stayed up to investigate. It didn’t come from the girls room. It didn’t sound like it was coming from next door. I got up and checked our bags which I know have crinkly wrappers and the garbage which we also put wrappers in. I couldn’t see anything, so I turned off my flashlight and waited. I saw the shadow of a mouse dart out from under the couch. I shined the light over, and it took off back under the couch and around the wall to a hole under the sink in the bathroom. I stayed there for a while until I heard the sound of scurrying under the bathtub. It was very similar to our mouse problem from a couple years ago. I first heard it at 1am, and it was closing in on 2am by now. I sent off an email to the people who run the place explaining what happened, and that they’d probably want to have someone check on that since we had to replace all of our insulation after we found them. Then I plugged the hole with a washrag. I also found a fly trap in a closet that I put down near the hole just in case. Only then could I fall asleep around 3am.
Morning came early. The girls were awake at 5:30am even though they had an alarm clock in their room and knew they aren’t allowed to speak until 6am. I got up and showered. We had a quick breakfast of cereal in the room and packed up the car. Jada ate her cereal in the car because she didn’t have time to eat in the room with the hair fixing for the girls before we left. We were out and on our way by 7:08am. Jada noted a fragrance in the air that she liked. We’re not sure what it was though. I assumed that it was fresh pine scented mountain air. We did our brief jig into Utah before heading up to highway 6/50 for the long march across Nevada. Highway 6, by the way, has a sign on it through Utah and Nevada that reads, “Highway of the Grand Army of the Republic”. When I read that, I immediately think of Emperor Palpatine’s declaration in front of the Senate that a clone army had been grown and was ready for war with the Separatists. We don’t have wireless again tonight, so I’ll have to wait until San Francisco to look it up (This highway used to be the Roosevelt Highway). There are also interesting signs along the way. The fist one I call the Cheeky Elk. Most deer crossing signs have the symbol of a deer or elk leaping as if they’re scared of getting hit. These signs have a picture of an elk just standing there as if facing away from you with it’s head turned back toward you. I told Jada I didn’t like those signs because it’s as if the elk is saying, “Go ahead, bub. Hit me. See what happens.” It’s very cheeky. Well, that’s not all. The cow signs don’t just have a picture of a cow walking along, this one seems to be almost nonchalant in it’s gate. It’s hard to explain it. There’s just something I don’t like about it. Have I been driving a few too many miles this summer? Perhaps. We made a stop in Ely, NV which was about 70 miles from Baker to get provisions. Based on intelligence from our hostess last night, it was the most likely town along our route to have a good grocery store. We bought a cart full of groceries plus ice, and packed it all in the car in the parking lot. It’s quite an efficient operation we have going now. Oh, the other funny thing we saw was a hotel in Tonopah, NV called the Clown Motel. I wish I was making it up. Who would stay there? I’m guessing all the rooms are too small, and they expect you to sleep 15 to a room. (Where’s my rim shot?)
However, the scenery has been great. Some may think it’s boring. The roads are flat and straight as the weave through the mountains. You drive northwest for a while up one valley, veer into the mountain range on the other side, wind over the pass which was typically between 6000 and 8000 today, come back down and repeat, but going south west now on a stretch of road that you can see miles ahead of you. It’s really amazing. Plus the mountain ranges just keep coming one valley after the next they rise up to meet you. And the closer we got to California, the bigger they got. They were lonely roads too. There were not that many people on those roads until we joined the road to Reno briefly. Across the desert floor, there were some rest stops. They had individual stalls to pull your car into with canopies and a grill plus a central bathroom. It really looked like a camp loop. I guess they know lots of people will drive all night across the desert to make it to Las Vegas, so they’re giving them a good chance to rest.
We finally hit the California some time after noon, I want to say 12:45pm. There was a fruit inspection station inside the border where they quizzed us about what fruit we had with us. The odd question was, “Did you come in from Oregon?” Well, considering that the road we came here on only comes from Nevada, I’m going to say no. What I really said was, “Not directly.” Right after this, we turned right onto California highway 120 into the Sierra’s. This is an epic road. Beautifully black topped, smooth, curvy, and hilly. I wanted so much to be riding my bike on it when we started up. It also had some awesome (or as Jada and Ellen might say, crummy) dips that made up a series of whoop-de-doo’s that Phoebe had a lot of fun on. The hills out of them were totally blind and steep making them really fun. The scenery after we came out of these was a high mountain meadow at 8000 feet with snow dappled peaks on all sides. It was beautiful. The 2-lane highway wound around through this in a very inefficient manner that maximized the view into the canyons below and across the meadows.
Once off highway 120, we made the turn onto Tioga Pass which is the only east entrance to Yosemite National Park at 9945 feet elevation. It was the usual big park fee of $20 to get in for 7 days. What struck me most was the high volume of people in the park. Every roadside parking was full, and the sides of the road were full of cars wanting to use the trailheads, picnic areas, or climbing routes. The other thing was that almost all of the plates are California. This is definitely the Disneyland of National Parks. Yellowstone didn’t have a majority license plate. They came from all over. We came to the Tuolumne Meadows visitor center which is the main point for the east side of the park. There are multiple dome hikes in this area and a long distance view of Half Dome which is in the center of the park and is most pictured with Yosemite. I pulled off at Olmstead Point to view it. The rock all around is white. I don’t know what sort of stone it is yet, but the roads seems to use this in it’s make up because they sparkle just like the stone. There are some glacially created areas of the park because there are boulders that just shouldn’t be where they are. The drive across the park to our campsite in Hodgdon Meadow was roughly an hour and a half. It seemed like it would never end. We’d been on the road driving hard all day to make it here by late afternoon to get settled, and it was starting to wear on me. The entrance to our camp site was literally 50 yards from the Big Oak Flat entrance to the park.
Bears are a much bigger concern at Yosemite than the other parks we’d been to. There are bear boxes at every camp site unlike our previous bear country sites that shared bear boxes for an entire loop. Our site is 43, and they are in clusters all around. So there is a parking area, and then our cluster has about 8 sites in a cluster roughly 2 deep. We’re in the middle and close to the parking area, so that’s nice. I’m assuming there’s some safety in that. Though we’re a bit of a walk from the bathroom, so I’m concerned about tonight. The bears in this park are very used to humans, and they aren’t shy from what I have heard. No food or toiletries can be left in the cars at night. Everything must be in the bear box. It’s a good sized box, and we could fit everything in it easily enough. We’re even leaving our clothes in the car trying to minimize our smells. The flat spot for our tent was just big enough, and it slopes slightly away from the parking area, so cars pulling up shouldn’t bother us too much with their headlights. There was one space not used yet. Hopefully they don’t come in too late. The site has lots of trees, so it shouldn’t get too hot, and the mosquitoes haven’t been horrible, but with the fire and the citronella candle, it’s hard to tell for sure.
For dinner, I made a small fire, and the girls got to cook their turkey dogs over the flame. It was a very fast and easy dinner so we didn’t have to pull out too much. We’ll pull the grill out tomorrow for something else. We got the girls to bed around 7pm. Close enough, at least. Jada and I toasted a few marshmallows, and I worked on this. The campground is really full and noisy tonight, but I think they fell asleep. It’s only 8pm as I type this, but I hope it calms down soon.
August 1: Yosemite National Park (129 miles )
The campground (Hodgdon Meadows) was really noisy all night. Between people yelling and talking loudly, car alarms going off in the middle of the night, people arriving after midnight, and slamming things in the garbage, we got very little sleep last night. I managed not to get up to go to the bathroom last night, but this morning when I went, it was disgusting. Both of the stalls were clogged with toilet paper. Jada said that the women’s was bad too. There was partying going on last night I know because of the beer bottles and the guy puking in the men’s room when I was getting ready for bed. This campground is by far the worst of any of the national parks we’ve visited so far. The scenery is beautiful, but if you can’t go to the bathroom or get any sleep at night, what’s the point?
We were up promptly at 6am making breakfast. I made eggs and Jada made pancakes, so we used up all of our eggs and made more room in the cooler. Then Jada broke out the rest of the Strawberries to finish up. We were ready to leave at 7:40am so that we could make it all the way to the south edge of the park in the area of Wawona for a ranger led walk in the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoia. We arrived at the visitor center for that part of the park by 9am after driving through miles of construction. The rangers in the visitor center let us know that the road to the Mariposa Grove closes as the parking lot gets full, so we bolted right away so we could get in. We were able to find a spot in the lot, and we met the ranger at the trail head. Somehow, when she saw us, she knew we were waiting for the walk. The group was nice and small, and the girls, especially Phoebe, trailed right next to the ranger. We learned lots of interesting things about the sequoias. They have a very low tensile strength, so they aren’t good for much, but that didn’t stop people from cutting them down anyway. They found they’re really only good for match sticks and pencils. Because they have such a low tensile strength, they shatter when they fall over, yet, they’re bark is so strong and thick they decompose very little even though they’ve been down for centuries. They’re very resilient to fire too because of the thick bark and the tannin in the trees. Many of the trees we saw had massive fire scars, but were still standing. Even the California Tunnel tree (the tree that was cut out so cars could drive through it) was starting to regenerate. There is also a tree they call the Grizzly Giant that was struck by lightning and looks dead on top, that has a severe lean and burn scar, but it still lives. The roots (which on a typical sequoia spreads out no more than 6-7feet deep, but 150 feet laterally) on the giant are thicker on the leaning side to buttress itself up.
After the walk, we headed back to the visitor center which was set up in the Thomas Hill studio. He painted the pictures of the park that helped it become a national park. The picture of the valley with Half Dome is hanging in the White House. We ate a quick lunch of bagels, cheese, carrots, and grapes on the porch of the visitor center. We had planned on eating peanut butter, but we had forgotten it back at camp. The girls were sworn in by the rangers there, and I submitted my complaint form to the rangers for our camping experience so far.
On the way back towards our campground, we drove up the spur to Glacier Point. This is a point 3200 feet above the Yosemite Valley floor. It is an incredible view of Half Dome, and the double falls of Nevada and Vernal on the giant’s stair steps. There is also a rock feature called the Royal Arch which is granite that had been ground by a glacier into an arch pattern. I was able to be close to the edge without feeling jittery this time. Probably because I only had 3 hours of sleep last night...not all in a row. It was 2pm by the time we headed back to our campground. We saw a coyote cross the road right in front of us. That was a first on the trip. It took until 4pm to make it all the way back because there is no direct route from the road from Glacier Point to north western entrance. I decided we should visit the Big Oak Meadow visitor center since we hadn’t yet. The girls got to learn how a bear canister works. These canisters are required for all back country hikers to keep their food in because bears can’t get into them, and they know it. The bears also know that not everyone is diligent about closing them, so they’ll still give it a try.
When we got back to the campground, the first thing we did was check the bathrooms. We had decided if the bathrooms were still a mess, we’d leave tonight for Pete’s near San Francisco. They had been cleaned, and they were in functional order. We went looking for the camp host then to ask about enforcement of the rules for the campground, since they were not being enforced last night. We ran into a park ranger who informed us that the hosts hadn’t arrived yet. Convenient. So basically no one is minding the store. She said she’d ask the patrols to check on the camp ground tonight, but they’re off duty at 10pm which is coincidentally the supposed quiet hours start time. So, we don’t have really high hopes for tonight. Instead, we are already planning on bugging out a night early. We’re going to head into the Valley tomorrow morning, and we’ll pack up and leave tomorrow afternoon. It’s a 3 hour drive by the Garmin, but it’ll probably be closer to 4 hours by the time we factor in traffic.
We made chicken for dinner with rice and green beans. We made some Jiffy-Pop and peanuts for the girls. While we were cleaning up from dinner, the new neighbors next to us were just pouring out water on the ground behind their tent. When Jada called the lady on it, she said, “oh we come here every year, and we’ve never seen a bear. There’s not a bear problem here like out in the valley.” I bit my tongue instead of explaining that laxness is exactly why bear problems start. People tell themselves that there isn’t a problem, and as a result, they become less diligent in cleaning up their things until there is a bear problem again. As the park signs say, a fed bear is a dead bear because they become a nuisance in campgrounds which have to be removed. It’s easier for them to gain weight and fat for the winter slumber on our food than to make the effort to find grubs in logs. They forget how to do it, and they die, or they have to be put down. Not to mention that there are several red bear, dead bear signs on the road near our campground which signal that a bear has been killed by a speeding driver. If there are no bears in the area, then how are they being killed on the road? That’s my conservancy message for the night.
I made a fire to roast marshmallows and use up the last of my wood. I’ll just have to purchase some more at the California Redwoods, or we could skip it altogether. The girls are having trouble falling asleep due to the noise tonight so far, but it’s not quiet hours yet. However, I’ve heard that same car alarm go off at least 5 times since we’ve been here this evening that I heard twice in the middle of the night last night. Plus our neighbor’s rat dog was nosing around our site not on a leash. I told Jada to just chase it off into the woods since it was out of it’s natural habitat of a handbag, but the owners found it instead. The rangers have seen mountain lions around here, so that’ll make a tasty snack later tonight. Can you tell I’m not impressed with camping in this park? The park is beautiful. There’s no denying that. The glaciers left some incredible marks on the canyon walls, and deposited massive boulders in places boulders just shouldn’t be. It’s just the people that come to visit it that don’t respect the park and their fellow park visitors that I have a problem with.
August 2: Yosemite National Park, CA to Mountain View, CA (213 miles)
There was only one party going on last night, but it was the same people as the night before. They were loud until at least 3am. I think someone in the next tent went and asked them to quiet down, because though they didn’t completely stop, it did seem like I heard shushing a little more...or at least at all. After I had just fallen asleep from that, Ellen woke me up saying that she thought she heard a bear or a mountain lion outside the tent. When I came around, I realized what she was actually hearing was a man snoring in the next tent the other way. I explained it, and she must have felt comfortable with that since she fell right back to sleep. There was a baby in one of the tents too that kept getting woken up by the partying, but that wasn’t much of an annoyance. Not much you can do about babies. I have no problem with that.
I was still up at 6am to start breakfast. As I walked to the bathrooms, I saw large amounts of alcohol still sitting out on the tables among other things. It’s nice to know people pay attention to the rules. The bathroom wasn’t quite as disgusting, but still only 1 stall appeared to be working. There wasn’t as much toilet paper all over the place though. I made up my old fashioned oatmeal once again and filled up the Camelbacks in anticipation of some hiking in the Yosemite Valley this morning. We had selected some of the “easy” hikes from the information paper we got with the map.
We departed the campsite at 7:30am, and we reached the first waterfall hike on our list by 8:15-ish. It was called Bridalveil Falls, and it’s right on the end of the valley. It falls from a hanging valley. We actually drove over the Bridalveil creek that feeds it up in the Glacier Point drive yesterday. The view point was only 1000 feet from the parking lot, but it was pretty close to the base of the falls. It’s fed constantly throughout the summer by the meadow and soft soil up on top, so it is usually the one that is always running (Contrary to what I overheard from another tourist at the base of the falls). Then we drove to the Valley Visitor Center parking area. In the Valley (like, totally tubular), there are central parking lots or parking at pull outs, but the visitor center doesn’t have direct parking. There’s a free shuttle bus that drives around the valley loop dropping off and picking up at different attractions. The bus starts at 7, but only runs every 20 minutes until 10am when it changes to every 10 minutes until 7pm when it returns to every 20 minutes until 10pm. We didn’t see any buses after we found a parking space in the first lot, so we walked the half mile to the visitors center instead.
When we found we were too early for the Valley Visitor center to be open, we walked to the trailhead for Lower Yosemite Falls. The upper falls is the highest waterfall in the US. Unfortunately, the plate I read that on didn’t include the distance of the fall. It was another easy trail in the guide which we found out means paved and wheelchair accessible. It was only a half mile up to the viewpoint at the base of the falls. On the way back down away from the crowds of people there, we found 5 mule deer walking along the creek. I think they knew that we were there, but they’ve learned that we’re not the ones to fear. A few other people came along the trail, and they also stopped and watched them in silence.
The girls all walked back to the Visitor Center while I walked back to the car to get some snacks. I met them out front on a bench in the shade where we had our snacks. Then we went through the exhibit about the formation of the Sierra Granite that is the main feature of the Yosemite Valley. It’s what forms the high walls of the valley and the popular images of Half Dome and El Capitan. Then the exhibit moved into the different areas present in the park. By moving through just this park (and the Great Basin National Park had this similar feature), you go through the same set of biomes that you’d find if you went from the Equator to the Arctic, but you do it in under 100 miles of driving. After that, the exhibit got into the history of the park with the pushing out of the Native Americans who had lived here for thousands of years in the name of commercialism, and John Muir who preached preservation of this park and others like it. There was a section for the artists that made the park famous through paintings (Thomas Hill) and pictures (Ansel Adams). Finally, it went through all the people who were important to the park and postcards from visitors to the park superintendent telling of what they had done that stuck with them. It was really well done. I think it’s a must see if you go. We did skip the film since it was almost 30 minutes in length, and we didn’t feel like sitting through it. We followed that with a visit to the Valley Museum which showcased the Native American contributions from the Paiute and Ahwanhee to the Valley. There were some neat artifacts and pictures in the exhibit. They even had a computer setup where you could search the guest book from the early 1920’s to see if a relative had made the expensive trip.
There was much we didn’t see, but we felt like we’d hit the highlights, and truth be told, we were looking forward to moving on. Six hours of sleep in 2 nights had done it’s damage on us. Jada whipped up a quick lunch out of the back of the car of peanut butter sandwiches, carrots, and grapes that we ate on the way back out of the Valley and back up to our campground. The maintenance crews had worked their miracle yet again (miracles served daily here in Hodgdon Meadow campground) on the bathrooms. The party group had packed up and gone. Their spaces were already being filled by a different bunch of people. That didn’t change our minds though. We packed up in record time, and we were ready to roll by 1:30pm. We told the ranger why we were leaving early, and his response was really surprising considering the response of others there. He said that they hadn’t been able to find camp hosts this season, and the noise is to be expected at a reservation campground in Yosemite in the summer. He didn’t say, “Oh well”, but he might as well have. We left disappointed and saddened that a National Park Ranger had told us that the rules were merely guidelines and don’t expect them to be enforced after dark.
Highway 120 delivered the goods yet again on the west side of the park with a 2000 foot drop down a narrow, steep, and curvy road to the valley floor. Is there anything that highway can’t do? Not to mention, it was smooth pavement all the way. The speed limit sign actually said 55, but there’s no point on that part of the road that you could actually do it. They might as well close the road for professional drivers only and shoot commercials there. We hit some traffic at Groveland, CA, though we’re not sure why. It looks like an interesting touristy town on the way to Yosemite. We tore straight west for San Francisco. Gone were the days of 80 mph across a lonely desert highway. We were stuck at 55 on 2-lane roads most of the way until we caught up with I-5 and the subsequent highways to the west. No slow traffic was encountered in our direction, but the opposite wasn’t true. It seemed to always be backed up. I couldn’t figure out why the heavy traffic on a Monday afternoon.
We reached our friend Pete’s apartment by 5pm. We were hungry, so we walked to downtown Mountain View for dinner without first taking a shower. The air was cooler than we’d felt in an afternoon in a very long time. We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Tacqueria Los Charros that we had eaten at last summer when we stopped through to visit. Ellen almost finished a Super Burrito on the menu. It was the same size as mine. Phoebe had a mini, and Jada had a taco. When we got back to the apartment, I checked my mail and found a receipt from Yosemite National Park where they had refunded our last night’s stay, so that was nice at least.
We got the girls into the shower when we got back, and then into bed by 7:30pm. They didn’t stay awake for too long it seemed. Then I took my shower followed by Jada. Ah, it’s nice to be clean again. We don’t have a lot of plans for our stay here. We’ll do laundry and swim. Maybe try to get a couple more badges in the National Parks in San Francisco area.