Yosemite, Part 2 - The Day of the Long Hike

Saturday in Yosemite was epic. It was the day of the long hike.

Yosemite boasts several impressive attractions. Besides the waterfalls, the mariposa grove (think HUGE trees) and mirror lake, it has miles and miles of glacier-cut granite. After millions of years of ice-ages and global warmings, we are left with monumental structures like El Capitan, Merced, and HALF-DOME.

Ah, Half-Dome. Our mission and our day's journey. From our campsite, it was an estimated 17-miles up to the top. This was to be our "big kid hike". It would take all day.

HIKING PREPARATIONS

Our story begins Saturday night, 'round the picnic table. Dinner was over, eyelids were starting to droop, and lunch/snacks had to be made for the next day's hike. Everyone brought out their coolers and bags of food to prep.

Now, we are campers. No one at that campsite had a problem "roughing it". But we're also all foodies. How does a foodie camp? Quite deliciously, actually.

Organic fruits and vegetables were stashed in various coolers, with the all-natural peanut butter and homemade whole wheat bread. Someone had brought almond butter with flax seed for the PB&J sandwiches. There was homemade trail mix, shredded carrot salad with mint, and stovetop espresso for the morning. By the lantern light, you could see a veritable garden of goodness spread out on the table. Phrases like, "could you pass the gruyere cheese?" and "I've got your prosciutto" could be heard echoing through the trees. I'm sure our neighbors must have thought we were nuts. Oh yeah, we had those too - raw almonds, walnuts, yum. A delicious way to enjoy the outdoors.

We packed it in and went to bed, alarms set for 4:30 AM. Oh yes. We were going to get a nice, early start on the trail.

One note here: Bob and I didn't go to bed right away. We volunteered to stay by the fire until it died down, which only took about a half-hour, but it certainly wasn't boring. Why? We met Sebastian.

Sebastian was our tent neighbor and a nice young man from Denmark. He wandered over to our campsite wondering if he could smoke his cigarette with us. It would take 7 1/2 minutes, he promised. Upon lighting up, he then launched into a very interesting half-hour mulling over the wonders of the US. He was there to travel the whole country, he had 58 days left to go, and he said there was only one thing in America that had blown him away.

Walmart.

Yep. He'd seen the Golden Gate Bridge, he'd seen LA, he'd been all over California and had just hiked through Yosemite, and nothing compared, in his opinion, to Walmart. The sheer size and volume of stuff. The amount of everything. The ridiculously low prices. And the apples. "You put your red apples with the other red apples!" he said, "The Green apples are with the other green apples! It's amazing! I took so many pictures!"

I include this little story so the next time you're in Walmart, you can realize you're standing in someone's eighth wonder of the world.

UP AND AT 'EM

It has been ages since I've slept on the earth floor, and certainly never in below-freezing temperature. Even with a mummy-sleeping bag and blankets piled on top, the high-20's felt pretty chilly. Drafts would waft in my bag, and I kept waking up, shivering, rolling over, trying to find a comfortable spot. This happened all night long, until early morning, when I finally found a comfortable spot and started to drift off, my friend (and the designated alarm clock for us all) gave us the "good morning, time to get up". So much for a good night's sleep before a long day of hiking.

It was cold. It was even worse outside of the sleeping bag, and then Bob and I had to change into our hiking clothes. BURRRR! We layered up, bounced outside for a quick cup of coffee and some light breakfast and at 6 AM, headed out, the sky just starting to lighten, the very early beginnings of the day.

YOU TAKE THE HIGH ROAD, I'LL TAKE THE LOW ROAD

It was an easy walk from our campsite. We hit the trail, climbing up a steep hill for about 10 minutes before we found a mini summit to stretch our warmed muscles and take some pictures.

This was the trail marker and mileage sign for our hike. There was another trail option, a hike to Mt. Whitney. Only 211 miles to go!

We'll do that one another time.

I won't bore you with all the details of every part of the hike. It was beautiful, really beautiful, and SO hard. I've posted pictures below so you can see some of the more exciting elements. Here are some of the highlights of the trip:

          1.) Must of the first part of the trail was covered in snow. This we had not anticipated. And by snow I mean ice. The part of the trail hidden by the sun had been slightly warmed then refrozen so many times, it was a sheet of ice. Those who had gone before us had dig deep footholds in it, but it was still pretty slippery to climb. Was it the best idea to climb it? Who knows. We did it anyway.

            2.) We went through oodles of different conditions, elevations, and trails. Some were flat and coated in pine needles, while others were dirts trails covered in piles of of snow. The difficult part of the trail, however, was positioned right by a waterfall and was one long staircase of granite rock. Sure, it was pretty, but try doing the stair master for an hour and half on rickety stone steps. Great for the gluts, but wicked intense.

         3.) About 10 AM, we found the bathrooms. Yay! Hooray for camping lite! (I'll spare you any pictures)


CRITICS AND SKEPTICS


Being the early birds, we didn't see too many hikers on the trail with us. We saw a group of four at the bathroom stop, and later we ran into two hikers trekking the opposite way through the small piles of snow. These two were serious hikers. Backpackers. A man and a woman with trekking poles, snow shoes, all the gear, looking like they just stepped out of an REI catalogue. We greeting them enthusiastically (they greeted us back less enthusiastically) and the something like the follow conversation took place:

US: "Where are you headed?"
THEM: "akdflkjasodijf" (I don't remember their answer)
US: "Are you coming from half-dome?"
(We receive a look like we've just pulled dead skunks out of our packs)
THEM: "Half-dome? No."
(pause)
US: "Well, where did you come from?"
THEM: "kdfjosdf Lake"
US: "Oh...wow" (no clue where that is)
THEM: "yeah"
US: "We're going to half-dome"
THEM: (exchanging glances) "You won't be able to. It's covered in snow this time of year."
US: "oh."
(pause)
US: "Well, we're going to try and get as far as we can!"
THEM: "You won't have much luck"

And that was pretty much it. Boogers. Clearly a ragtag team of young adults in sneakers and sweatshirts was beneath them. After all, how could we make it to half-dome? We didn't have cool trekking poles like they did.

Good thing we have determination. And Spunk. Lots of Spunk. Don't we look spunky?

 So on we went. Through the forest, walking over snow, jumping over creeks, walking on creeks that spilled down our path, eventually stopping in a giant pine grove for lunch. We were getting tired at that point, and we had been hiking for over 6 hours. We needed to leave enough time to turn around and get back down before dark.

We made a plan - by 1:30 PM (it was noon-ish), we would turn around. We had 1 hour and 30 minutes to make it to the top.

On we went. We met back up with the group of four hikers we'd seen at the bathrooms. They told us not to continue. "You'll reach knee-deep snow in about five minutes," they said, "You'll have to turn around - we did."

We had no intentions of turning around, and we didn't. Yes, there was knee-deep snow 5 minutes after meeting them, but it wasn't hot coals, for heavens sake. We just trudged on through. We trudged up for another hour and a half until we saw a break in the trees. By then, there was only one track of footprints from someone before us. If we were still on the trail, we had no idea. We'd probably left it long ago.

That was our summit. That was the closest we could safely get to the top. At that point we didn't know where the ledge was, or if the snow would give way in any one part, so we staked our claim and called it done. We had made it to the base of half-dome and little dome, which was quite an accomplishment given the conditions.

(NOTE: I wasn't wearing a lot of sunblock, and if you lean in close enough, you should be able to hear the sound of my skin crisping from the reflection of the sun on the snow)

WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

With out accomplishment in-hand, we descended. Down the snow we slipped and slid, turning our shoes into skis. It worked, too. What had taken us 1 hour to climb us took us 15 minutes to get down. We started to run into more and more hikers. We were elated at our victory, and practically running down the mountainside from happiness and the sheer pleasure of walking downhill rather than up. Our muscles were happy, our packs were lighter from lunch, we had beaten out all the other hikers and had proven the skeptics and critics wrong. HA!

And then we hit the lord of the rings-esque stairs.

Going up was MUCH easier than going down. Besides the fact that hikers now swarmed the area, each step was steep and slippery, and around that exact same time, two things happened: My body said, "yes, well, this has been lovely, but I'm plum exhausted now, could we please stop?" and my face started flushing bright red and hot from the sunburn and fatigue. Put a fork in me, I was done.

But we still had 4 miles left to go, most of it steep, downhill terrain.

I can honestly say that was the only miserable point in the whole hike. Every step we took on those steps had to be calculated with an mental energy I no longer possessed, and there wasn't any shade to hide my face from the hot sun. My knees felt every blow of the decent, with my weak thigh muscles unable to give as much aid to each step.

Thank goodness for the mist trail.

With only a few miles to go, we hit the mist trail, a trail that ran right alongside a huge waterfall. Mist from the falls covers the trail, so hikers will often bundle up with a poncho or rain jacket. That mist was bliss on my face, and it made for some good pictures too.

A few miles later, we were done.

Given a few alternate routes we had to take due to closed trails, we estimated we had hiked 19 miles total from campsite to half-dome and back. We were exhausted. Elated, but exhausted. We drove to the nearby village, took showers, ordered the most delicious pizza ever, and reveled in our achievement.

We all walked a little tenderly that night. My feet have never been so sore. But we did it! We celebrated with s'mores and wine and a nice, long sleep.

Some day I'll go back and climb all the way up to half-dome, but I don't know that it will mean as much as climbing to its base in knee deep snow. We overcame everything for that summit, and nothing will ever compare to our dogged determination.