Daniel Ford

Spent the weekend camping in Yosemite Valley.  Hiked the Yosemite Falls trail on Saturday; the trail takes you from the Valley floor right to the top of the falls.  It is about 6km, straight up.  The Valley doesn’t seem like a particularly deadly place, but two people died hiking the trails when I was there, one on the Yosemite Falls trail that I hiked, and one on the Mist Trail.  The first apparently tripped and hit his head on a rock, the second slipped and fell from the trail.  I’ve been on both trails multiple times and never thought them to be perilous.  I  had planned to spend Sunday afternoon relaxing around Mirror Lake, but early Sunday morning the weather turned extremely nasty with high winds (50-80kph), heavy rain and then snow.   There wasn’t much point sticking around so after packing and being warned by the Rangers that Route 120 out of the park was covered in deep snow, I headed out south on Route 140 along the Merced River.  This is an interesting route that takes you deep into farm country in the California Central Valley.

After a bite of lunch at the Merced In-N-Out Burger, I headed west across the valley.  The warmth of the lower elevation melted away the chills of the snowy morning and the miles went by with ease.   The land is flat making it easy to see for eighty or ninety kilometers North or South.  The sky was dotted with a parade of  dark clouds all heading towards the mountains to add to the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada.  A few could be seen in the distance dropping heavy showers in the valley, but they all missed me.  I then drove past the San Luis Reservoir, and was surprised to see, for the first time ever for me, that the reservoir was full.  Usually the water level is quite low beneath a “bathtub ring” around its shore, but they had a particularly wet winter in California, and it shows.  Once past the reservoir, I headed through Pacheco Pass and into Coyote Valley and then North to Silicon Valley.

After some dinner with some friends at the Willow Glen Willow Street Pizza it was off to the San Jose Airport for the flight back to New York.