Yosemite Sam

I have a lot to catch up on, so I'll do one post this morning and probably one later on. As you can probably guess from the title, I went up to Yosemite National park at the weekend. I never really realised that it was in California until some nutty American lady told me to go there in Fiji. When I got to Midpines (just outside the national park) where my hostel was, I was kindly informed by the driver that I had a quarter mile hike up to the hostel from the bus stop. In the snow. Yes people, all of you who have been calling me a jammy git for being in the heat and sun, rejoice. I froze my ass off. People kept telling me how they hadn't "seen snow like this at this time of year for nigh on twenty year". I consider myself lucky.

I did plan to do a snowshoe hike the next day, but the lazy German that ran it decided there weren't enough people to go so it was cancelled. Instead I caught the bus into the Yosemite valley and did some walking. It's a truly remarkable place. Although it was utterly freezing and I was hiking in the snow, I was stunned by the scenery in the valley. I took a hike in about a foot of snow out to Mirror Lake, which was mostly frozen over, but still impressive. From there I saw Half Dome (although at the time I didn't know that's what it was), a feature of the valley created as age old glaciers melted and took away the rock. After lunch I took a walk around the lower part of Yosemite Falls and as it started to snow a bit thicker I decided to head back and warm up by the fire. Something pretty odd happened later that night. I'm pretty wary of trying to explain it because I'm worried it'll sound like the ravings of a madman, but here goes. I bought a pack of playing cards in the park and we were cutting them to see who would go first in a game of Jenga (this is the high life people). Out of six of us, four people cut on the Queen of Spades. The other two cut the Queen of Diamonds. We shuffled the cards between each go, yet it kept happening. This in itself seems odd, but then every time (or every second time) we cut the deck we got the Queen of Spades. We took it as an omen that we should leave for Vegas right there and then. We didn't, it was cold and our driver was over the limit, but still, I thought that was worth mentioning.

The next day Ze German cancelled my hike again so I headed back into the park. This time I started on the trail up to the upper part of the Yosemite falls which is the highest waterfall in the US (at 2,425 feet or 739 metres) and the sixth largest in the world, made up of three separate falls: Upper Yosemite Fall (1,430 ft), the middle cascades (675 ft), and Lower Yosemite Fall (320 ft). I never planned to go the whole way up (it's a good 12 hour hike), but I thought I'd go for a reasonable amount of time and then turn back. What actually happened is I got as far as the Columbia Rock viewpoint and then found myself waist deep in snow. So I turned back. The next morning I left and headed back to the coast to the city of San Fransisco. Which I'll tell you all about later.