An amazing place

Saturday was an early start. We were picked up at 6.30am and were on the road by 7.30, before the sun was even up. The bus headed across the Bay Bridge to Oakland and into the San Joaquim Valley. This is a very large, very flat valley behind San Francisco, our destination was Yosemite National Park.

The San Joaquim Valley would be a difficult place to live. Seems like there was a lot of unemployment and a lot of migrant workers. The current economic environment would not have helped matters and the ever-present fog did not enhance the area's appeal. Once through the Valley, and after a fat breakfast of burgers, we started to climb the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The scenery started to change with high mountains and granite outcrops starting to become common. Finally after about 5 hours driving we arrived.

The Yosemite Valley was quite simply stunning. The pictures below do not do it justice, even when you are standing there looking at it you can't believe you aren't looking at a painting. The valley was carved in the last ice age and was not discovered until about 1851 as it is quite a remote place and you do travel through rough terrain to get there. It's surprising that while the Indians of course knew about the valley the Spanish and the Mexicans who settled this area at various stages didn't find it, it wasn't until the California Gold Rush pushed white people into remote areas that it was found.

The first photo stop was at a look out called Tunnel View, named because there is a road tunnel close by. This is the typical view of Yosemite with the big peak called El Capitan on the left and the half dome in the distance on the right and a flat valley floor covered in pine trees. I'm not going to try and describe it have a look at the pictures, the white bits you can see around to top of the valley are frozen waterfalls and there was some ice along the sides of the river but it wasn't that cold at all.

I was watching the news the other day and they were saying that last year the US had 125% of their average snow fall, this year they have had just 25% and everyone was commenting about how little snow there has been. Usually the valley would have had a lot of snow at this time of year.

We were dropped at the visitors centre and told we had about 3 hours before we had to be back. We walked around looking at Yosemite Falls, headed across the other side of the Valley and did a walk up one of the many walking trails. It sure was steep and being bear, coyote, and mountain lion country you tend to stay alert. We then headed back down across the meadows at the bottom of the valley for the trip home.

We arrived back in San Francisco at about 9.30pm. We managed to stay awake until midnight and that was that.

Tommorrow we hang out in San Fran for the day.

Happy New Year from all of us.Read more