Monday, October 18, 2021
I have wanted to go to Yosemite for a very long time but every time that I started to plan this adventure, I would become overwhelmed; the park is over 1000 square miles, there are five different entrances, should I stay in one of the park’s lodges or should I stay outside of it? I would end up realizing that this was going to require more research and would set it aside.
I finally decided to dive in and go. The drive from Los Angeles to Oakhurst took about 5 hours but we took our time and stopped for lunch along the way. We arrived mid-afternoon, found a place to eat, turned in early. I knew that the tour started sixty miles north of where I was staying and according to Google maps, it would take close to two hours to drive to get there.
We were up at 5:00 AM and headed out not too long after that. It was dark for the first part of the drive and I soon realized why it took close to two hours, the roads curved around and around. When the sun began to rise, I wish it hadn’t. I am scared to death of heights and seeing just how just how high up we were and just how steep the drop offs were on the other side of the shoulder scared me.
We arrived in plenty of time and went looking for coffee. We couldn’t find it but our tour guide was happy to make a stop at a Garden Café where they sold garden supplies, plants, and coffee – my kind of coffee place!
Our guide explained that he was very excited about today, it was the first snow of the season. The downside of that was that we couldn’t go up glacier point but I was OK with that. I didn’t come with a set of things I had to see. I was there to get an overview of the park and to see some highlights. I was glad that there was snow.
Our first stop was Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequoias. I think he said the hike was about 3 miles. Along the way we spotted plenty of animal tracks including deer and bear tracks. As we headed down into the grove I began to wonder just how far were we going to go, it wasn’t like there was an escalator at the end to bring us back up. Along the way was the tunnel tree carved in a dead Giant Sequoia. The guide pointed out that a lot of people had carved out their name inside of the tunnel, the oldest one they found was from the late 1800s.
It was a great hike but climbing back up the 400 feet that we had descended after a year plus of not using the gym.
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