Yosemite

With Ansel Adams pictures in our laundry room and ancient geography lessons having droned on and on about onion skin weathering in Yosemite, it was a big time must-see for Joe and I. We are still not sure, now having seen several national parks and monuments, how on earth they decide to draw the line around one particular area when all is so spectacular. Yosemite is incredible, but so is the land around it. The largest granite outcrops in the world are here – el Capitan and Half Dome, thrust up into the sky by massive mountain making forces and too strong for glaciers and millenia of weathering to make any impact on. The rivers are absolutely crystal clear … just inside the park we found a beautiful, calm stretch of deserted river that, even at massive depth, was transparent. What a place for a picnic! We did manage to wade across to a spit of white sand, but the water was glacier cold, and we heeded the warnings that white water is never far away, so didn’t swim. Well, the white water may still be down in the valley, but Yosemite Falls? Nah, it doesn’t. Not in the height of summer. The fifth highest waterfall in the world was bone dry, we discovered on a walk through the dusk.

Now, I had decided pretty unilaterally that we should stay in the park to see the stars and be ‘close to nature’. When we checked in at Housekeeping Camp, one of the few places with any accommodation available, the check-in guy said “you know this is pretty rustic, right?” Keen to show we were hardy world travellers, not just day tourists, I reassured him we were well used to camping and nothing could shock us. When we reached the shack, Rowan said “oh my god, we’re staying in a prison.” Joe just wet himself laughing, saying “what has your mother brought us to” while Jenna and Rhys just carried on their endless litany “LOOK! ITS A SQUIRREL! LOOK! ITS ANOTHER SQUIRREL!” (There were hundreds, all around the camp. So, the shack was … a shack. Three sort of walls, with canvas pull across sheets for the front which didn’t really meet or provide any privacy or shelter. Heigh ho. Still, we were next to the river, in view of the (dry) Falls and Half Dome and certainly near nature. A stag ran past, and a coyote sauntered by.

The big news in Yosemite was the bears. Dire warnings of bag snatches and cars being destroyed for the food stored inside were everywhere, and we had to store everything that could possibly be construed as food … toiletries, medicines, rubbish and every scrap of food or food preparation material … in massive steel bearproof lockers that they put, somewhat illogically, right next to the shacks. I asked the check in guy if there were bears around at the moment, and he said “oh yeah, but they usually come down around 2am so you don’t see anything, you just hear about it.”

We decided exhaustion for the kids and alcohol for us should do the sleeping trick, so after the long walk to the (not) Falls, and a pretty disorientated and at times plain scarey walk back in the pitch black, we played bridge around the camp fire and ate dogs (of the hot variety) until Jenna begged to go to sleep, and we finally persuaded the other two to go too. Jenna instantly fell asleep, but the other two – older and wiser – needed a bit more reassurance, so I slept with Rowan and Rhys bunked in with Jen, leaving poor Joe up on the very precarious top bunk.

Almost as if we had an alarm clock set, Joe and I woke at 2am. He woke up and was sure there had been people shouting, but as I’d beat him awake by a bit, I could reassure him it was a dream. After a mildly thrilling risky trip to the toilet, we fell back asleep. I woke up again around 4, and this time there WAS action … I heard something large on top of one of the bearproof boxes, then two car alarms, then rangers driving around and releasing bear canisters and rubber bullets. With only the ill-fitting sheet between us and the bears, I was mighty glad of those rangers!

After the wildlife dearth we found in Canada, Yosemite was a big – if somewhat scarey – bonus on the nature front. And the scenery? Well, just look at the pics. And so we began our southwest USA national parks odyssey, heading first to Death Valley.