Yosemite

Yosemite Trip Report

There really isn’t a whole lot you can say that does justice to the scale of everything at Yosemite. Even the hundreds of pictures I posted don’t really capture the enormity of everything. So presumably if you are reading this you fall into one of two categories: you have or have not been there. If you have you understand what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you should go.

The day before I left Corvallis I got an issue of Backpacker magazine, and skimming through it quickly one article caught my eye. It described a “secret” trail at Yosemite, one that hasn’t been on maps for some 20+ years. I sort of felt guilty using a trail that was formerly only known to locals (until some guy’s trip report blew it up) on my first visit of my adult life to the park. I realized though that as far as this trail went, the cat was out of the bag (so to speak) and I wasn’t the one who published it, and even if I didn’t take advantage of it hundreds of other people would.

We got to Yosemite Monday night and did the typical tourist crap, stopping every 50 feet to take pictures and gape at the walls, cliffs, waterfalls, and other tourists. We finally got into the Valley around 7 pm and cruised over to the Visitors Center. As soon as we walked in you could see the sign with the status for all campgrounds – they all read “full” or “closed”. Lame. We spoke with the ranger at the desk and she said the closest place we would be able to camp was the town of El Portal, which was back outside the park and about 30 miles away. Fortunately for us, El Portal is the home of the “most expensive gas station in the country”, and not just the continental US. We paid our 3.35/gal because we had very few other options and moved on to our campground. The two campgrounds that the ranger told us about were both full, bear in mind this was a weekday night before the peak season. The people at the second campground mentioned that there was an overflow campground farther down the road. This “campground” was actually a day use area, but we still had the privilege of paying $20 to camp there.

It turns out that there is a backpacker campground in the valley, which is a relatively closely guarded secret. You can only camp there the day before or day after your wilderness permit. But, it is $5 per night. If we had known this, and gotten into the Valley early enough to get a wilderness permit that night, we could have saved an hour of driving, $20 of gas, and $15 in camping fees. Live and learn, and then get loves.

We got our permit and bear canister, and only sort of got laughed at for wanting to do the trail that was in Backpacker. We parked in the main trailhead parking lot and had to take a shuttle over to our trailhead. For some reason packing always seems to be a huge fiasco, and ultimately we end up with 50% more gear than we need. We took the main park shuttle, transferred to the El Capitan shuttle, and then walked the last mile to our trailhead. It isn’t so much a trailhead as finding an old abandoned road from a small network of other service roads.

The “secret” trail we were going to take was the aptly named OBOFRT (Old Big Oak Flat Road Trail). It was the original road into the Valley, no longer in use mainly because it was built directly in the path of a set of very active rockslides. The road definitely felt more like a secret trail than the parks other main trails. It was really nice to walk out of the valley on a road grade as opposed to a trail with endless switchbacks climbing straight up a wall. The views as we got slightly off the Valley floor were great, and it was kind of fun to hike on this historic, mostly long forgotten, old road, with its pavement still intact in places.

That night brought us to Cascade Creek. There were a couple prime campsites, both of which were taken. So we spent an hour or so looking for anywhere that had a few square feet of flat ground. Eventually we hiked up the trail a little farther and over another smaller stream and found a nice campsite set farther back off the main trail.

The next day we hiked farther up the north rim of the valley towards El Cap. Justin thought it might be a good idea to hike as quickly as possible for a little to “get his heart rate up”, thinking we could just cruise the rest of the day and build some semblance of fitness. Unfortunately, instead of leveling out like he was expecting, it kept up a pretty good grade for the next 3 miles. So the strategy totally backfired and he was toast after the first 30 minutes of hiking in the morning.
We finally leveled out and started to get some views as we worked closer to the rim. We stopped to have lunch near Ribbon Stream, where, while I was filtering water, another pair of hikers passed us and said there was a bear about 50 feet up the trail from where we were making lunch. That was the closest we got the entire trip to seeing a bear.

After lunch we headed across towards El Cap, making one brief excursion towards the brink of Ribbon Falls to take some pictures. An interesting decision on my part found me on the wrong side of Ribbon Stream with no easy way to get back. I walked back up the stream looking for an easy place to cross, but there was none. After maybe 20 minutes of searching I took off my shoes and socks and waded through a slower part of the stream.

We finally made it up to the top of El Cap where the views were, as was to be expected, ridiculous. You really don’t get a feeling for how huge a rock formation it is until you are standing on top of it. We snapped some pictures and headed on. The next destination was Eagle Peak.

By the time we were at the junction for the spur trail up Eagle Peak we were pretty tired and had already covered almost 10 miles so the prospect of hiking up 400 additional feet didn’t sound too appealing. When we got up there we felt immediately justified. The views from Eagle Peak were hands down the most incredible I have ever seen. Even a sixteen-picture panorama doesn’t do it justice. It is impossible to capture enough of the view in one shot for it to make sense. We had a completely unobstructed view up the valley towards Half Dome and the John Muir Wilderness, and the only thing blocking our view out of the valley was the hulking mass of El Cap to the West. The entire valley floor played out below us and we could see the other tourists lining up at the viewpoints. The most appropriate way to describe it is the way Justin phrased it: “it’s so beautiful that it hurts”.

We cruised back down to the trail and on towards our camp. The only problem was finding a camp. All we were going by for where to camp this night was “by the river” from the trip report in Backpacker. We had no idea what side, or how far up or down. I walked all the way down to the top of the Yosemite Falls trail before I realized how far I had gone and that we needed to be almost a mile upstream from there to be out of the no camping zone.

While at the top of the Yosemite Falls trail I ran into a guy in sweatpants and a t-shirt who looked a little lost. By this time it was 7:30 and he asked me if I thought he would be able to make it back to the trailhead by dark. I knew it was about 3 miles down to the Valley, but had no idea how long that would take and he had about an hour before dark. He pointed out that he didn’t have a flashlight, but he did have a glow stick… I presume he didn’t die because we didn’t hear anything about it in the news.

After more exploration we found a campsite on the West side of Yosemite Creek, on a small perch a couple hundred feet or so from the river. The spot was just big enough for our tent, and if we dropped anything it was going for a ride down the hill towards the river.

That night it started pouring on us during our water filtration/dish washing efforts after dinner. Only to clear up as soon as we got everything put away and were in the tent for the night.

The next day we ventured up to Yosemite Point, which was a relative let-down after Eagle Peak. On the way back down we stopped at the Yosemite Falls overlook and took the obligatory tourist photos. After we’d had our fill we headed back down the Yosemite Falls Trail into the valley. The funny thing we noticed was that the tourists that made it up to the top of the falls were 5:1 foreigners to US citizens. We hypothesize that this is because it is actually a hard hike up and that Americans are all too lazy to make the trek when there are so many nice places they can drive.
The hike down was not one I would want to make in the dark – the trail was obvious and well worn, but it was steep and parts of it were wet with spray from the waterfall. It took us 2+ hours – I can only imagine how dark it was when Mr. Sweatsuit made it down.

Once we got down, we hopped a shuttle back to our car and started trying to unpack. We were eligible to stay at the backpacker campground so we quickly made our way over there and set up our tents.

That night we drove up towards Glacier Point and watched the Sunset from Sentinel Dome, one of the only places in the park that has a full 360 degree view. Unfortunately, due to a timing snafu, we got there a few minutes after sunset… but still had a great view of the alpenglow on the mountains of the John Muir Wilderness. After that we drove over to Glacier Point and spent three hours trying to take some long exposures… without a tripod.

That pretty much wrapped up our trip. That night the snow level dropped to about 1000 feet above the valley floor and we had to cancel our plans to check out Toulumne Meadows because the road was closed. We made our way up to Sacramento to watch the IRA’s and then up to Shasta, but that’s a different trip report.