Yosemite Trip 7/12/2008 - 7/19/2008

7/12 -13/2008: Day 1 - Saturday started off around 8:30am when Tom picked me up for the airport. Roughly a five hour flight with no issues, but then we go to get our rental car and apparently so did most of Europe. We spent an hour waiting to get the rental car. Then we began our 3.5 hour drive out to Yosemite. We took our time and stopped for some dinner, fuel and lighters. The problem was it was around 9:30PM PST, before we finally got into our "Tent" at Curry Village in the valley. Warning: Never stay at Curry Village if you would like a good night sleep.

After a very sleepless night, on Sunday we picked up the hiker shuttle to go around the park to our starting point. The bus trip was around 2 hours, but we got to check out the beautiful views and were quite entertained by the disgruntled bus driver. We picked up our permits and packed up our bear canisters with all our scented items and headed out into the woods. It was beautiful and all the work and money I spent to lighten my pack seem to have worked. After an 1.5 hours we took a break and decided to have lunch. After lunch, Tom was greeted by a bear that had smelled our gourmet cooking. Fortunately, they both got scared and went there separate ways. We walked through beautiful Lyell Canyon for about 8 miles following the river, but as we got to our trail junction to head up over the pass, we heard a thunderstorm, not too mention we were dragging from the lack of sleep the night before. We walked up 90% of the path in rain, thunder and lightening and finally decided we had it and found a decent campsite among the trees. It was still raining, so we had to setup camp in the rain. I hate setting up camp in the rain, everything gets wet.

Click here to see the elevation profile

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• The next 5 pictures are from Olmsted Point, where the hiker bus stopped on its route to the our starting point.
• Today you can see quiet a bit of haze from the California fires. I was concerned that we would lose some of the view because of smoke.
• Half Dome from Olmsted Point.
• Clouds Rest from Olmsted Point.
• Clean, shaved and ready to hit the trail.
• We came across this beautiful creek as we begin our trek through Lyell Canyon
• The meadow that the creek is flowing through.
• There were lots of these meadows throughout the trip
• We knew the weather was too good to be true.
• We took a break at this bend in the river.
• From our break point, this was a view looking back at some mountains.
• Close up of those mountains through the trees we were resting under.
• Captain Slacker!!
• This little ground squirrell had its mouth so full of food that it looked like it was growing a beard.
• As we begin climbing out of the canyon and over the pass we could see that our path was looking a little wet.
• Every year Jared wants me to take a little toy to the top of the mountains, this year Anakin went with me.

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