I have been fortunate enough to have visited on several occasions. I prefer to go on a week day so I don't have to deal with all of the foreign tourists who have no respect for what they are seeing. Really gripes me. My good friend Matt joined me for this years trip. Now Matt is a professional hiker and has done all of the trails at Yosemite probably twice if not more. So a 10 mile hike up the mountain is like a walk in the park for this guy.
Todays mission, Nevada Falls.
The day started at 4:30am for me which really isn't all that bad because really its 6:30am at home. So I had an hour drive north to pick up Matt from his house. Then it would be a 3 hour drive directly east to the park. Earlier in my blog you could see we stopped for breakfast. :-)
We arrived at the park only to see that there had been a snowstorm blow through the night before. All of the pine trees were covered with fresh snow. The sun was out, and the sign by the ranger station said CHAINS REQUIRED! We didn't have chains and luckily I smiled at the Honey in the ranger booth and she allowed us to go right on in to the park without chains. Ok, maybe it wasn't because I smiled at her. At least we looked like we knew what we were doing.We found our parking spot and geared up all of our stuff. We carried quite a bit of stuff. GPS's, camera gear, food, phones, you name it.
We headed down the Mist trail to the Vernal Falls Bridge and then we were switching over to the John Muir Trail and taking that to Clark Point. From there spectacular views of Nevada falls and the back side of Half Dome.
We ate our lunch here. Peanut butter on bagels, all the beef jerky you could eat, nuts and gatoraid....yummy.
AHHHH to be on top....
The trail to this point had some pretty hairy areas to cross. I can see why they close some of the trails. There were a couple of places where the trail was in the snow and only as wide as your shoes were sitting side by side and it was basically a ledge. You fall to the right, you fall in snow. You fall to the left....you're going to be falling for a while.....pretty risky.
Some of the areas we had to climb up the snow bank to reach the trail. It was difficult enough to go up, I was thinking more about the trip back down.
Here is part of the trail I was talking about:
The hike to Clark Point I think was only a 3 mile hike up. 1800 feet in elevation I think. We came back down to the Vernal Falls Bridge.
From here the trail can split and you can go to the Vernal Falls. Only thing, the trail is closed because the spray from the falls makes the steps shear ice. Well, we climbed over the fence and went to take a look anyways.
Now a few years ago, Dawn was with me and I dragged her up to the top of the Vernal Falls. To get there you have to climb over 600 stairs. Near the top, there is a small railing and you have about 18 inches to get by. So if people are coming down, it can get hairy because at this point its STRAIGHT down.
We ended up going up probably halfway.
As you can see, we were not the only ones there.
After getting sprayed a little we headed back to the car. Went looking for the Chapel and found it after walking through the jungle with our GPS devices. Only small problem was we needed to cross the river so we had to find a bridge.
This I think is probably one of the more interesting shots I got on the trip.
I made a couple variations of it and included them on my website. Another shot of the Chapel I liked was this one:
After a quick walk over to the Lower Yosemite falls, which look quite little in the pictures, but keep in mind, that lower section is 400ft, longer than a football field. Combined, the Upper and Lower falls drop 2425ft, the 6th highest waterfall in the world. I did that hike last year and nearly died!
After that, we headed back to the car and headed home after a quick stop for Pizza! Matt knows all the places to stop!
For this trip, I was really trying to shoot for HDR photos. So every picture I took, I took three pictures with different exposures. So I ended up with 109 finished photos, I took well over 900 pictures and filled two 16 gig CF cards. The 7d camera, being an 18mp camera eats up card space rather quickly!
Fun trip...if you haven't been...add it to your list. Wonderful, quiet, peaceful, refreshing place to visit. Nothing like it...
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