Yosemite

Every US National Park has it's own personality, it seems. The Great Smokies NP is marked by dark and damp forest passages leading to misty vistas, and by crimson and saffron landscapes during the fall. "Otherworldly" is the first adjective that comes to mind when I think about the Grand Canyon. Even standing at the edge of the mile deep canyon and peering into it's grandeur hardly quells the impossibleness of its existence. Big Bend is a microcosm of all of the parks, with sheer canyons, desert landscapes, and high mountain hikes. It also affords a rare isolation from the crowds that plague most of the other parks in the lower US. At Yellowstone, everything seems to be alive. The rivers roils with rapids, the land boils mud and spews water, the sky explodes with lightning on the horizon, and the terrain is littered with charismatic megafauna.

So, when I went to Yosemite this past weekend, I really didnt expect to be so awestruck yet again. Majestic is the only word that does it justice. Though this place had inspired Ansel Adams and John Muir, I was really expecting just another park. I was expecting mountains and trees and waterfalls. I was expecting buses and crowds. But I definitely wasnt expecting Yosemite.

A mere drive down into and around Yosemite Valley along is worth the price of admission. Maybe it's my isolation from Yosemite as a born and bred Southerner, but I had only seen pictures of Bridelveil Falls. I had only heard of El Capitan and Half Dome. I knew that there would be giant sequoias because of its proximity to King's Canyon, where the largest (non-clonal) trees in the world call home.

Yosemite, though, is truly a special place.

Sheer, granitic walls are the distinguishing characteristic of the park. Glaciers carved their way through the park a million years ago, leaving behind a natural beauty that doesnt exist anywhere else in this country. Half Dome, a high outcrop that can be ascended by the hardy, hydrated, and non-acrophobic, is mirrored on the opposite side of the Valley by another outcrop, and it takes little imagination to envision that they were once part of one, contiguous structure. The lush, verdant valley below is dominated by a central river, fed by waterfalls that line the high, granite walls.

Unfortunately, as my grad advisor used to like to say, we're loving Yosemite to death. Most of the drive into and through the valley had bumper-to-bumper traffic. We hiked one of the more popular trails this past weekend, the trail to Half Dome. At no point were we truly alone (a quality I measure quantitatively by my comfort with using the bathroom close to the trail; if it's crowded, I've got to go real fast). And, while we weren't really considering hiking all the way to the top (a 16 mile, rigorous RT hike), we ran into plenty of fellow hikers who had done so. Apparently, the final push up to the top of Half Dome had a several hour wait yesterday. That's right, you could hike for 7 miles, ascending sharply the entire route, and a 1-2 hour long line is your reward.

That being said, even though we were rubbing elbows with fellow tourists during most of our hike, I've got nothing but rave reviews of the place. We all wish we could have the parks to ourselves. Guess I'd have to go back to Australia to have that.

But Australia's got nothing on Yosemite.