Yosemite

I was almost going to pass on Yosemite but very glad I didn't. Flying up from LA to Portland I'd see Half Dome from the plane and that was my goal - an 8000ft high granite boulder. I'd read a little about the problems with bears in Yosemite and their taste for just about ANYTHING that can produce an odour, but it hadn't hit me as a major issue until I spoke to my friend Tin who has spent a lot of time there climbing. The general gist of what he told me was that if I wanted some delightfully random panel work, perhaps some unconventional door removal on my car, all I needed to do was leave a small piece of chocolate or fruit in the car and leave it overnight. Given I was driving a very neat, very new, borrowed VW beetle I decided against testing the theory. Before I even got near the park I searched the car for anything that might produce an odour and stuffed it all in a single bag to put in one of the bear-proof lockers, fully expecting that as soon as I pulled into the car park, a mountain lion was going to attach itself to the roof of my car and I would have to run for it, performing a commando roll through the legs of a waiting grizzly bear while a bald eagle clawed at my face. When I arrived, I was immediately surrounded by killer deer, an evil squirrel posse and an intimidatingly overweight marmot, they all had venom in their hearts and probably rabies. I barely survived.



Had a 5am start to hike Half Dome. It's a long days hike up and down, but in the end I realized the early start was good not because the hike was long but because you spend so much time taking photos. As you climb away from Yosemite valley, every switchback opens up an incredible view so you stop and take a dozen photos. The you climb a little higher and take another 20 shots because this has to be the best view, then you climb a little higher and take another 56 photos because it can't possibly get any better than this...and so on and so forth. Here is a selection from the couple hundred snaps of the day:

The hike up half dome is OK as a really long day - about 27km round trip with 1500m climb from the valley floor. Walking through pine and cedar forest all the way until you get onto the granite. The last few hundred metres is up a line of hand cables which are usable but a bit intimidating for some people who just sit out at the bottom. A hiker was killed a few weeks ago when he climbed outside the cables to take a picture and, with a heavy pack on his back, lost his balance. It's more than steep enough for that to be a problem, but if you stay inside the cables and focus on what you are doing it's fine. That said it was interesting that in this age of life by litigation, a setup like this which can reward stupidity with a rather alarming surprise is still maintained by the national park service each year. Most places would tear the cables down at the first incident and tell people to proceed at their own risk with their own equipment. Not sure if the pics above do it justice but it is as steep as it looks, if not more.

The next day I drove around Yosemite valley and had a look at El Capitan. I'd seen so many pictures of this piece of rock in books and magazines, lost who knows how many hours of my teenage years to day dreaming about it that seeing it in front of me was rather surreal. That might just have been left over delirium from the previous days hike though... I decided to drive out of the south entrance of the park and see Mariposa Grove - one of 70 remaining stands of Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada range. These are not the tallest trees on the planet (though they can still grow to 80m), or the widest girth (that goes to the Kauri)or even the oldest lived (but they do live to 3000+ years), but by sheer volume, Giant Sequoias are the largest living things know to man. They grow much like humans, reaching their peak height in the first quarter of their lives and then slowly shrinking and putting on weight all over for the remainder. A trail takes you through the grove and you begin by walking past the young trees – 700 to 1000 years old - but you soon reach the Grizzly Giant, a 2700 year old behemoth.



It strikes me as disrespectful to try and put words to such a noble being using a language that didn't even exist when it was a sapling. I stood there trying comprehend how immeasurably old this living thing is, what it has seen and overcome, and my head wanted to explode. It's one thing to look at a huge piece of rock that has been shaped for a million years - it was as dead then as it is now - but here was a living, growing organism that is older than Christianity, it was fully grown before work even began on the hanging gardens of Babylon, it was 1000 years old when the Mayans began building all their temples. I turn 30 next month and I'm happy with that, but if I live to be 130, my life will have lasted a matter of days in the shadow of a Giant Sequoia.