Yosemite National Park
Oh Yosemite, you are one special spot. John Muir said, “"It is by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter." Eli and I can’t help but emphatically agree.
Because of COVID-19, Yosemite is limiting the number of visitors, both overnight guests and day-trippers. You need both a good strategy and good luck to score admission into the park.
Our campsite in Upper Pines for seven whole nights was the score of the trip, locked up by Ben many months ago, as all four of us were vying for spots within the first seconds that the sites were opened for reservations.
Having a campsite in the park not only gave us a long time to lean-in to a stay here (visitors staying outside the park can come for a maximum of three days), it also made all of the valley accessible to us by bicycle, allowing us to avoid parking delays and congested areas. This was a great and relaxed way to explore some of the highlights of the valley.
What wasn’t so great was that after shelling out $1100 for a gas generator we never really wanted, the one we bought turned out to be a lemon. We couldn’t get it to start. When it started, it would fail. We spent the better part of two days feeling stressed out about managing our power needs (since seven days of dry camping is longer than a battery will last without recharging).
Eli was on endless holds trying to reach tech support, made harder by the lack of reliable cell service at our campsite. Despite his efforts, we were thwarted.
We will now need to carry a defective generator 2000 miles back to Chicago to have it inspected so that we can have it declared defective and scrapped, so that we can get a refund.
But stories like this always have silver lining: We met a campsite neighbor named Ken and his wife Kathy, veteran trailer travelers, who not only offered us a spare battery, but a portable battery charger, which has allowed us to keep one battery in the trailer while (discreetly) charging another in the campsite bathroom overnight as needed. I also made a drive to a hardware store just outside the park and bought two additional spare batteries which we will just swap in as needed for the remainder of the trip.
Although this wasn’t anything like we’d expected, and we’re so far beyond Plan B, we’re basically on Plan Q by now, we decided that we couldn’t let it get in the way of making the most of our time in the park.
Photo by Cyrena Hillyard
Our first full day here, we hiked to Vernal Falls. This is a beautiful, but challenging trail, that starts right near our campsite. We climbed more than 500 stairs before I stopped counting, taking in the beautiful view of the falls.
From here, Norah and I continued to the top of Nevada Falls as well, another 1.8 miles further (and higher) from Vernal Falls. The best part of this hike was that Norah decided she was capable of rising to the challenge – and she did. She was motivated to succeed and then proud of herself for getting to the top. The next day, when we saw the falls from a neighboring viewpoint, she could hardly believe that she had made it up so high. It was a badge of honor and I told her that she could tell her friends that she climbed to the top of Yosemite Valley while here.
The next morning, we rendezvous-ed with my dear friend Cyrena, who met up with us in the park. She and I took the kids for a drive, up Glacier Point Road, to explore the lookouts at the top.
Then, we made our way down with a quick stop at Tunnel View, which must be where Ansel Adams took one of his most famous photographs of the park.
Cyrena was a much welcomed new companion by both kids, who were happy to have someone else to talk to besides their family.
Cyrena also jumped right into our family vibe and routine. She took one of Ben’s lego guys and began making photo sequences of him having his own adventures in Yosemite. I thought Ben was digging it, but in truth, I probably dug it the most.
Photo by Cyrena Hillyard
While Cyrena was there, we also rented a bike trailer just for Toby. He seemed to like it – or at least he didn’t hate it.
The trailer allowed us to take him along by bike as we explored the valley. With temperatures rising all week, we weren’t able to leave him alone in the trailer or at the campsite during the day. Instead, we took him to check out Yosemite Falls.
Photo by Cyrena Hillyard
Photo by Cyrena Hillyard
Then, we took an ice cream break and found a shady and sandy spot along the river where the kids took a dip and the rest of us just enjoyed the breeze.
Photo by Cyrena Hillyard
Eli went to the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a rugged and less visited area of the park, to meet up for a few hours with his good friend (and former graduate student), Paul, who is now a professor at UC Davis. They hiked together and explored Tuolumne Grove.
Separately, Eli managed to turn what he thought was a loop-trail run into an excessively long one-way run – ending up about 16 miles away from where he started. After his phone died and he realized he was likely very far from camp, he flagged down a car and used their cell phone to drop a pin so that I could come pick him up.
On another day, he took a less eventful, but still strikingly beautiful run along the Panorama Trail, from Glacier Point back to our campsite.
We drove to see the Giant Sequoias in Mariposa Grove at the south end of the park. This outing was something of a COVID April Fools joke. I stayed back with Toby and sent the family (and Cyrena) off on what I thought was a “flat and easy hike with seven miles of intersecting loops to choose from.”
What I didn’t realize was that this was describing trails starting at the top of a steep incline. In normal conditions, a free shuttle bus takes you to this trailhead. Today, you have to hike a four mile out and back trail just to reach the start of the sequoia grove. The group eventually returned cranky, thirsty, and ready for lunch and a ride back in air-conditioning.
Like most of the west, Yosemite Valley is experiencing a heat wave. Our last full day in camp, it was projected to be 100 degrees. Norah and Eli put our dollar-store inner tubes into the river and spent about 2.5 hours coasting along the Merced. They saw deer and a bear while floating along.
Ben, Toby and I waited at Swinging Bridge to pick them up. I thought Ben would also take a turn in the river, but we decided conditions may be a little more advanced than he could manage (in a dollar store tube without a life jacket). Plus, we needed to get to the village for the Ranger Program so that Norah and Ben could complete their Junior Ranger kit, earning their 9th Junior Ranger badge of our trip so far.
Overall, Yosemite is an enchanting place. But, on this visit, it was clear that climate change is having an impact. You can see the strain of it everywhere. There are signs of fire all over the park – and especially just outside the park in Mariposa County where huge wildfires raged last year. You can see signs of disease and the impact of crowds. With the west already in drought, the snow already gone from the mountains, and the high temperatures, it looks like it could be another bad fire season here and that makes me very, very sad. My hope is that the kids will remember the beauty and fragility of this place and do what we can to preserve it.
