Laurabelle's Blog

I am not generally a spontaneous person; I like to plan things out. Jeff and I had plans for this weekend (maybe not perfect plans, but plans nonetheless). As you might guess, our plans didn't exactly work out.

We had been planning to hike the Alder Creek Fall trail (starting at Wawona near Yosemite's south entrance). I worked a slightly short day on Saturday; Jeff picked me up, and we headed straight to Yosemite. The drive was excellent — nice traffic levels, and we saw no fewer than four large gliding birds that we thought were California Condors (I could be wrong — I don't remember seeing white on the bottom of the wings although I didn't get that good a look).

The plan was to stay the night in Wawona, then start on the trail on Sunday morning. It would be a two-day hike, in-and-out, camping at Alder Creek Falls. Unfortunately, what I hadn't planned for well enough was where we would stay the night on Saturday. I had sort of figured that would work itself out, I think; I guess I figured there wouldn't be many people there in the off-season. When we got there and realized that, gee, there were people there and we didn't have campground reservations, we panicked a little and decided to start hiking with the last of the sunlight and camp somewhere on the trail. Then when Jeff tried to fill out a wilderness permit (on paper from my organizer since they were out of actual forms), he noticed that the Alder Creek Trail was closed for controlled burns. Expletive!

This made me pretty mad at the park ranger who had responded to Jeff's query about hiking in the Wawona area that weekend, since she had not mentioned any controlled burns. I'm sure they plan these things in advance, and that's important information!

Friday was a holiday at Jeff’s work, so I took a day off too, and we made a day trip to Yosemite National Park.

The day commenced at 3:30am, and we were on the road by 4:40am. The highways were empty that early in the morning, so we made good time and reached the trailhead shortly after 8am. It isn’t much of a trailhead, just a little gravel parking lot with a couple of road signs that there’s a trail somewhere around. It was 8:30am when we hit the trail.

The guidebook described the first half-mile as punishing, but we found it to be nothing of the sort (possibly because it was still early and the air chilly). Before we entered trees, the top of the hill featured lovely views of Yosemite Valley, including El Capitan and Yosemite Falls.

Last weekend Jeff and I went to Yosemite National Park for the wedding of one of his best friends. It was a tiny, beautiful wedding in a huge and magnificent park. I probably would have had the wedding in the warm indoors, or failing that, in the daylight so that the cliffs and trees and waterfalls could be seen, but that’s just fine, because it wasn’t my wedding.

But speaking of the dark, the first time we saw Yosemite was after sunset, and thus we were rather underwhelmed by the park. As we wound along narrow twisting roads, all we could see in the blackness was trees, more trees, and eventually the buildings of Yosemite Village — hardly my idea of a spectacular vista.

When we went back the next morning, we could hardly believe what we had been missing on the previous evening. I kicked myself black and blue that I had forgotten my camera.

But no matter; we will go back. No question of that.