Apr 2007

Another cold morning, but I have my morning routine of getting up and going for a walk over to Curry Village. This place is even beautiful in the cold and gloomy skies. I especially enjoy the quiet mornings – it is almost magical to be here in the peace and quiet of the mornings.

We pack up and get our money refunded for the next two nights. Then begins the long curvy trek out of the valley pulling the trailer. It seems like we go for miles uphill, but the truck doesn’t seem to have any trouble pulling the load. Now, the problem is that we then go downhill – I guess we should have used a lower gear, because by the time we get to the NP gate, the ranger says we should check our breaks because ‘they smell hot’. We pull over and let them cool down – doesn’t take too long in the 37 degree weather.

The trip to Petaluma, CA is scenic. No digital camera, so unfortunately no pictures.

We make several stops along the way before pulling into a KOA for the night. Free wifi.....Joe is a happy camper! Electric and nice warm showers....Claire is a happy camper!

Another cold morning in Yosemite Valley, so of course the heater stopped in the early morning hours and it’s 50 degrees inside. BUT I am prepared for the cold and hop out of bed with my clothes already on, put on my winter coat, hat and gloves and head to Curry Village for coffee and heated restrooms :-)

The day is cold and damp, so we decide to take a ride in the warm truck to Hetch Hetchie Reservoir. On the way through the valley we pass a herd of deer:

We stop at Bridalveil Falls on the way out of the valley and I DROP MY CAMERA. Yep, I broke another camera!!! It only dropped a few feet and landed on the soft dirt, but it no longer works. So no picture of the falls or anything else today.

As we travel up in altitude, the rain turns into snow. We stop at the gift shop on the way to Hetch Hetchie and I buy a warm sweatshirt and a disposable camera. We continue onto Hetch Hetchie Reservoir and then take a walk across the top of the dam and along the lake. After about 30 minutes, Joe and I get cold – it’s probably around 40 degrees and drizzling at this point, so we return to the truck for the drive back.

The weather report is cold with rain/snow for the next few days (4-8 inches snow Saturday night), so we decide to leave Yosemite tomorrow morning. Jere packs up the bikes in the rain and then we plan to just honker down in the RV for the night. But Joe and I decide to take a short walk and then end up riding around on the shuttle for about an hour, enjoying the last night at Yosemite in the warm dry heated bus :-)

This is going to sound disgusting to some people (unless you have camped in the cold), but I wore my clothes to bed last night anticipating that our heater would stop running sometime over night. And the heater did stop, but I was prepared—I hop out of bed and put on my winter coat/hat/gloves and go for a walk. They are predicting a high of 45 degrees today so we figured it was going to be below freezing last night. Our propane heater uses a battery-powered fan to circulate the hot air. The problem is if the heater/fan run too much overnight, the battery gets low and then the fan/heater stop. It happened the night before also, BUT this morning I’m prepared. It was early so I went for a walk over to Curry Village to use their heated restroom with hot water and grab some coffee. I come out of the coffee shop and it is flurrying snowflakes!!! So I drink my coffee in the snowflakes enjoying the incredible view of the valley. The one end of the valley has snow/ice on the granite and is especially beautiful this morning.

We go for a bike ride after breakfast and see a coyote at the entrance to the campground.

We continue our bikeride to Curry Village and Yosemite Village. It continues to flurry off and on, and we are bundled up!

By 3pm, I’m really cold so I come back to the trailer while Jere and Joe continue to bike. Within an hour Jere and Joe are also back and building a campfire. It was in the low 40s all day. Brrrr….

We do some schoolwork and chores in the morning and then bike up to Mirror Lake before lunch.

We enjoy the view/scenery (eventually we are going to develop stiff necks) and then head back to the campground to have some lunch before venturing off on a longer bike ride to the Ahwahnee Hotel. We stayed at this hotel 5 years ago when they had special rates because no one was traveling right after 9/11/01. The hotel is one of my favorite hotels of any we’ve stayed at EVER. It’s an old historic hotel that was built to attract wealthy influential people to the valley. It’s a classic mountain retreat with wonderful craftsmanship. They have a tour of it on Thursday afternoon which we might take, especially if we get the rain/snow they’re calling for on Thursday.

There’s a park ranger led program meeting at the hotel at 2pm on trees. The ranger is a fantastic speaker with a wonderful sense of humor, and so the 90 minute program goes very quickly. We learn a lot about the trees in the valley and laugh a lot.

After the program we bike over to the visitors center, spend some time in the gift shop (much of the time talking to two fellow RVers that we met earlier) and then bike back to the campsite. We bike much of the time looking up at the scenery--We’ve been here 3 days and still spend a large part of our time looking up at the scenery. I’m surprised one of us hasn’t tripped or crashed into something in the last few days. The valley walls and waterfalls are amazing. The valley is around 4000 ft elevation and the top of the valley is around 7000 feet, so we’re basically surrounded by 3000 feet tall walls of granite. The waterfalls are running really heavy today so they’re especially gorgeous.

After dinner we go for a walk around the campground and I realize that I can see the Yosemite Falls from the end of the campground. We also see someone who has a Jaguar sports car and is tenting – that’s a first for us this trip. We also see someone who has a platform on the top of their pickup truck cab for their tent – another first for the trip.

It was cold this morning! The sun doesn’t get to the campground til around 10am, and then it finally warmed up. Gorgeous day…so we decide to drive south to the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia trees. We stop along the way and take a picture of the Yosemite Valley on our way out. Actually we took lots of pictures, along with several dozen other tourists.

The hike around the sequoias is all uphill. We take our time looking at the trees

and hike up to Wawona Point, where we take a break to eat some snacks. The several mile hike took us 4 hours, but we saw lots of beautiful sequoias and a nice vista of Wawona Valley at the top of the mountain.

We drive the 90 minute drive back to the valley,

,eat dinner and make a campfire. It’s s’mores time again :-) So we have a campfire, making s’mores….to the left of us someone is playing a Spanish guitar and to the right of us is a group playing guitar, harmonica and singing the blues. Sounds great, right? It would be, except that I left out the part where Joe and Jere are arguing about the fire :-)

Today was supposed to be the warmest day this week, 70 degrees. The afternoon was nice, but the morning was definitely winter coat and gloves weather. We may leave a day or two early if the end of the week gets cold and rainy.