2012/05 Western USA trip - Yosemite |
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Dear All,
At the end of Part 1 of this journal we were camping in Lee Vining, overlooking Mono Lake, at the foot of Tioga Pass. We were experiencing our first warm weather of the trip and I had just damaged my back so I was limping around with a trekking pole and Sandie was doing all the driving.
Memorial Day Monday May 28th
We woke up to a clear blue morning, and found that we were sharing the bathrooms with a vast army of tenters, mainly German and Mexican tourists traveling in small buses. Mono Lake must now be on the tour bus circuit. Were they all on their way into Yosemite? The campsites within the park are usually reserved and sold out within minutes of their opening for bookings and that had happened months ago.
I was hoping to get into one of the private campgrounds just outside the park, so I called to make a reservation at one in El Portal. The manager there said we could camp for three days but he was fully booked for the following weekend, about what I expected. When he heard we had a camper and a trailer he wanted
us to book and pay for two sites, but I hoped I’d talked him out of that idea.
We set off up towards Tioga Pass, a steady grind without much in the way of switchbacks. Cars pulling trailers often have problems there on hot days but the truck just sailed up without any fuss. We stopped for coffee by Tioga Lake at the top of the pass and Edna was delighted to find the place crawling with ground squirrels and yellow-bellied marmots.
Back on the road we quickly joined the line-up for the park entrance. The rangers were doing a good job of pulling people who already had passes out of the line and sending them through, but it was still a slow process. Sandie and I began the trip with our Golden Age passes, which 
you can buy at age 62 for $10, but the first time I'd used mine on this trip, in the Olympics, the ranger had looked at my BC driving license and told me that the card was valid only for American residents. This was despite the word “lifetime” on the pass. She let us in but told us we were likely to have problems at other parks, so we gave in and bought an annual pass for $80 at the next national park. It would still turn out to be a bargain, as it saved us over $200 on subsequent entry fees.
The scenery around the Tioga Road is spectacular, with its lakes and dark conifers and shiny granite domes. The road was both narrow and busy, though, with few places for stopping and looking. The visitor centre was overwhelmed by the crowds, and the rangers there were 
enforcing the limited time for parking. The park is only a day trip from San Francisco and Sacramento, and it’s on every international tourist’s 
must-see list, so we humans were swarming all over the park. Also, many of the trails and campgrounds were closed because of snow cover, so the main road was extra busy. We found a parking spot at Tenaya Lake and stopped there for lunch.
We took the road down into the valley and found one of the few places where it’s possible to get a view up the valley. This view is dominated by El Capitan’s cliff and by Bridalveil Falls, which leap from the opposite cliff top hundreds of feet into the valley. That’s another reason for the crowds; the park’s falls are all at their best in May with some drying up once the snow has melted.
Once we reached the valley floor, our first task was to make sure we had a place to sleep. We had to drive out of the park and down the Merced River to El Portal and the Indian Flats campground. The manager took one look at our rig and said “Oh you have a teardrop trailer. Now I understand”. He even gave us a larger site, but that was the end of the good news. The bathrooms and showers were overloaded and no doors or locks or taps or toilets worked properly. It was also expensive; the company is just milking its location, the closest place to the park.
We still had some daylight left so we went back into the valley. I suggested that we go to the tunnel on the Wawona Road as the sun should be in the right place for the view, which is even better than one we’d seen earlier. The parking lot there was crowded of course, but Sandie squeezed the camper in. Back in ’83, I took pictures from there in a snowstorm, but this time all was calm and the light a mellow evening sun. This picture of the valley was taken there, along with the ground squirrel.
The valley’s one-way road system took us past the base of Bridalveil Falls. We walked the trail and found a very damp spot under the spray and almost inside the rainbow. On our way out of the valley we stopped at the meadow below El Capitan’s cliff, too early in the year for many flowers but the cliff was nicely lit up.
Back at the campground I found the Little Guy’s work area awash. One of our water containers had been sliced by a sharp lid and we had some book damage and some clothes to dry out.