Lower Pines Campground, Yosemite Valley

Patrick and Sarah moved across the street to Lower Pines Campground. Tough to get four nights in a row in one spot. Luckily, Lower Pines provides us with a gorgeous site tucked into the trees with much more room at the site and between sites as we have a spot on the outside.

Angus, Maddie and Gordie are off on the most magnificient and stunning hike of the trip! A 14-16.3 mile hike up to the top of Half Dome! They left a little past 5am with lots of water, food, water purifier and gloves to tackle the last 750ft. up the cables to the summit. This will be a memorable day for the crew! From the new campsite we can see the top of Half Dome, spectacular!

For those of you who do not know, getting reservations for things in Yosemite is nerve wracking! To get campground reservations you wait for the period of time you would like to camp open up for reservations, in our case it was April 15th for the August 15-September 15 window. Then, you have the whole form filled out online and you keep clicking refresh, refresh furiously at exactly 10am EST/7am PST praying you will get a campsite. This day and time came about on a Wednesday 15 minutes before Sarah's Spanish 2 Advanced class let out. Having read online that campgrounds fill within minutes, Sarah got her class involved in a project and began clicking away. Shh! Don't tell on her! The campgrounds filled up so fast that we could only get two nights in one campground! In a panic, Sarah started the whole process again, nervously shaking as she tried to fill out the form as quickly as possible and clicked again. Luck was on our side and two more nights were avaiable at Lower Pines. There must have been an audible sigh of relief and exhilleration as one of Sarah's students questioned "What concert did you just get tickets to see? You look really excited, Sra.Carps!" Sarah explained it was campground reservations and the students laughed saying only Sra.Carps would get this worked up over a campground. It's important stuff!

As for Half Dome, well back in the day you got up early, put on your boots and up the trail you went. Now, you must have a permit to go up the last portion of the trail. With only 225 permits issued a day via a lottery system and a possible 25-50 issued two days ahead via another on-site lottery, the stakes were high. Only 35% of applicants received a permit. We entered the lottery and waited until they posted the results on April 12th. Luck was with us once again and we got our first choice of hiking days, today! It was a meant to be. Looking forward to hearing from the hikers upon their return. They'll be getting a huge spaghetti dinner to fill them up.Read more