We decided to take a little break from San Francisco’s busy lifestyle and drive up to Yosemite for a short 2 day hike with camping in the wilderness.
It was Tuesday night, we were meeting at 7pm at the house as we wanted to leave by 8pm… Well that didn’t quite work and we were only going at around 10pm to Hudson’s cousin’s house, where we’d spend the night and get going again early in the morning to avoid the crowds.
Yosemite
We woke up at 6am, got breakfast burritos from the supermarket and drove through California’s gold weed desert and some awesome lakes. Gradually, the landscape was turning green and around 8:30, we were already at the Yo’s ranger station getting our wilderness camping permit and latest info on trail closures, which completely changed our plans. The upper Yosemite part still had too much snow (and it’s late June!!). We opted to hike up to El Capitan and follow the trail until Yosemite Falls, where we would camp.
We parked the car, left food in bear-proof lockers and set out. It was hot and dry, desert kind of climate, every step made a dust cloud come out.
It didn’t take long and we were in the woods of some majestic Sequoia trees and purple wildflowers carpet.
Then we got lost
We followed the trail along the accessible asphalted portion - a way to ruin the nature. However, the human-made road didn’t quite survive, mother nature reclaimed the trail with numerous landslides and overgroving vegetation. We realised we didn’t climb at all and as we stood up to a magnificent view of the valley with El Capitan on the left, we realized we got lost!
It took us maybe two hours jumping from one rock to another down the rock fields, the views were awesome, but the crew’s mood was worsening. Eventually, we made it down to Yosemite valley, where we snacked on tasty Jerky and Bananas with Peanut Butter (a very American thing to do, I know!).
We thought we’d just camp down in the valley, but everything was overbooked. We had no choice but to push it and hike all the way up to Yosemite Falls. We squeezed the remainder of energy left in our body and it was worth it, we made it up for the sunset. It was incredible!!
Darkness
It was getting dark and it seemed a storm was coming in - some distant sound of cracking. I was almost right, it were the Yosemite Falls, which had an enormous amount of water flowing out and boy were they loud!
The last portion of the hike saw us navigating through the darkness with our headlights on. We found a good place to camp, we filtered water and cooked dried food. Hot chocolate was surely the highlight of the day before going to sleep.
Sunrise
I woke up early in the morning to see the sunrise. It was windy, but the view was absolutely amazing as the whole valley was waking up to a new day.
We then set off quite early as Christina had to be back to SF for some meeting. We had around 20km before us, so we had to be quick.
Mosquitos land
The hike led through the forest full of annoyingly unbearable mosquitos - nothing helped until we got out to the sun.
We were walking up the El Capitan, with a group of three tired guys on the horizon. Guess what, they just spent two weeks climbing El Capitan’s wall, impressive!! I cannot imagine doing that, I fear heights and cliff camping doesn’t sound like my thing.
We took a nice bath in one of the creeks before heading back in the green mossy woods for the final stretch to the car.
It was a short, but great trip, we hiked around 45kms in two days and saw most of what Yosemite has to offer!
As we were late to our original plans, Christina missed her appointment. To make up for this, we stopped at an amazing ribs place on the way back, we were all very satisfied.
