Veggieburghers Abroad: Yosemite

We camped at Tamarack Flat on our first night in the park. The campground is lovely but there is no running water there. After setting up the tent we went down to Crane Flat to fill all our water bottles and while we were in the bathroom doing that, a huge rain storm rolled in and started dumping bucketloads of water and hail. We ended up holing up in the restroom for about 20 minutes waiting for it to let up. Finally we braved the downpour and ran to the car, drove back up to our campsite and crawled in the tent. It continued to rain for about 2 hours during which time we played games and read in the tent. Finally it stopped enough for us to whip up some dinner around 7pm. The rest of our time in Yosemite we had spectacular weather.

The following day we managed to score a campsite on the Valley Floor at Upper Pines. We saw a few falls on our way there to set up camp.

The girls had to crawl up on our shoulders in order to properly hang the hammock at our Upper Pines campsite. What an adventure!

Deer on the valley floor

We rode the shuttle to the Mirror Lake hike in the afternoon. We inadvertently got on the shuttle in the wrong place and took a wide detour around the whole valley floor, later to be dropped off at our trailhead, merely half a mile from our campground! At any rate, we got to enjoy the scenery and the girls all had fun on the bus.

Hiking to Mirror Lake

At the trailhead we had the option to take the large paved road up the center, or the "road less traveled"--essentially a hiking trail through the woods--off to the right. The trail looked more appealing to all of us so we headed off that way, since it looked on the map like there was a bridge connecting all the trails at the top by the lake. Weeell........... there maybe was a bridge at some point, but we looked and looked and couldn't find it, so we finally resorted to fording the lake/stream to get over to the main trail.

It turned out to be much deeper than we anticipated.... about waist-deep for the girls. They all thought it was a super-fun adventure and wanted to go back the next day, of course. :-)

That evening C & HJ met us at the Upper Pines campground and we had fun roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire and getting to know our camping neighbors from Switzerland (the kids had been playing with their kids all evening on the hammock).

Next morning we hiked up to Vernal Falls on the Mist Trail, the trail head leaving basically right from our campground.

The girls all hiked up to the bridge where you can see Vernal Falls from below. At that point the rest of the crew turned around and returned to the campsite, and I continued on with HJ to the top of Vernal Falls. This is one of the most spectacular hikes I've ever done. It would have been so fun to have time to continue on past Vernal, but we had to return and break camp by check-out time since we were only able to reserve our Valley Floor campsite for one night.

On the way down we met our Swiss friends--our camping neighbors from the night before. They had the whole day and were planning to hike further than we had gone.

In the afternoon we hit Lower Yosemite Falls ...

... and then stopped and had a picnic while watching the climbers on El Capitan before driving up to Tuolumne Meadows.

One of the spectacular overlooks on the way up to the high country. The view of Half Dome from this angle is spectacular!

The Tuolumne Meadows campground was full, as were all the campgrounds just outside the park. We continued on over Tioga Pass and found a site in a campground near Lee Vining.