Yosemite, Crowds and All

They say there are no undiscovered places left. Then again, we also hear it said that explorers never really “discover” anything anyway, because there are already people there who know about the place. Yet when I go somewhere new—even a place I've read a lot about—I usually discover that it's not much like I expected. Often this is a matter of fleshing out a fairly well-drawn sketch. But even this “fleshing out” can be of staggering proportions, like watching an opera after skimming the libretto. At other times I find that the impressions I've worked up in my head are simply wrong.

Take Yosemite. I had done some reading about the park, which is one of America's oldest, grandest, and most crowded. I had seen pictures. But the reality turned out to be something else again.

In the first place, Yosemite doesn't look very much like an Ansel Adams photograph. No photograph can do more than hint at the elegant flow of ever-changing rock formations that make up the Valley's towering walls. In fact, the formal excellence of Adams' photographs derives as much from the edges of the frame as they do from the sinuous domes, cliffs, ponds, meadows, and trees we're looking at. Adams also cultivates an exaggerated chiaroscuro, with cotton-white clouds, glistening cliff faces, dark shadows, and thickly-textured underbrush. All of this can be very beautiful, though little of it is actually on view at the park itself, which spreads itself before us in living color. In any case, immensities of scale are impossible to convey adequately even in a poster-sized print. Ansel Adams may be great. But Yosemite is far greater. You really have to go there.

*

We flew into Reno, spent the night camping in the woods above Lake Tahoe, and moved on to crusty Mono Lake the next day, with a stop at the ghost town of Bodie along the way. The next morning we crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada through the Taiga Pass and by 8:30 we were on a steep but well-worn trail through the pines in the Tuolumne Meadows region, heading for Cathedral Lake. A few minutes into the woods we came upon a young couple with carabineers jingling from their belts who were coming down from the heights. Presuming they had already completed the climb they had gone out to do, I said, “Boy, you two really got up early.”

“No, we just took the wrong trail,” the man said rather sheepishly.

Naturally this got me to wondering if we were on the wrong trail. But before long we met up with the first of several groups of backpackers coming down from three- and four-day trips in the vicinity we were planning to visit. All of the hikers we talked with had been coming to Yosemite for years, yet this had not in the least bit dimmed their exhilarated for the forests, meadows, and high-country peaks in the Range of Light. They showed us their routes on the map, or described the night when the wind rose to fifty miles an hour and the temperature dropped to 17 degrees. They praised the current cloudless weather, and one young man asserted, “The Lord blessed us with a very good campsite that night.” He even went so far as to show us where it was—in case the Lord is looking the other way when we pass by, I guess. We discussed with another hiker the relative merit of going to Lower and Upper Cathedral Lake—Upper was the clear preference for both its beauty and solitude. “But if you go to the upper lake,” the woman told us, “You have to take the turn for Squaw Lake (check).The sign doesn't mention Upper Cathedral Lake. You can make the half-mile side trip to the lower lake on the way back if you're still in the mood.”

We passed three groups of backpackers in all, and though it was still early in the morning, each group had broken apart as dictated by the pace of individual hikers. One woman told us her hiking companion was due for a hip operation in the coming week, and had fallen behind. I thought to myself, “Boy, you must be in a big hurry to get down!” but ten minutes later we ran into her ailing friend, and she was plodding along as contentedly as any porcupine.

We welcomed these opportunities to stop and chat and learn about the region, and we also stopped a few times on our own just to catch our breath—the altitude, you know—but for the most part we were alone as we made our way through the dappled light of the open airy forest. We dutifully followed the rusty sign directing us to Squaw Lake—thankful for that bit of advice—and after two hours on the trail, nearly all of it uphill, we arrived at the fringe of the meadow surrounding Upper Cathedral Lake.

As we circled this very small Alpine lake, which lies 9,700 feet above sea level, the single backpacker who had been sitting on the ground near shore rose and continued silently on his way. We were alone. The Echo Peaks towered above us to the east. To the north we could just make out the rounded tops of other peaks miles away in the distance.

We ate lunch on a finger of rock extending out into the lake, and sent a flock of mallards scurrying to the far shore in the process. Then we continued south through the scattered trees to Cathedral Pass. As the trail climbed higher other peaks came into view. We reached another meadow at last, from which point the trail began to head downward into the next valley. At this point we turned at retraced our steps to the lake, though the thought nagged at me for a while that perhaps we hadn't gone quite as far as we thought, and had we continued on through the woods at the far side of the meadow an even more spectacular view would soon have opened up. Next time.

As we made our way back through the woods to the highway we met up with day-hikers of every age and description who were on their way to the lower lake. We arrived back at the car with glad hearts and wobbly knees, happy to have had a stretch of peace and solitude amid the peaks.

Though most of the pictures you see of Yosemite are taken in the Yosemite Valley, most of the park is made up of such back-country wilderness. Having visited this zone ever so briefly made it easier to handle to congestion awaiting us below.

*

It takes ninety minutes to drive from Tuolemne Meadows to the valley, though it wasn't long before we arrived at the Olmsted Point pull-out, and got our first really good look, from above, at the swirling masses of exposed granite that form the valley walls as they disappear down into the bed of the Tanaya river—a region considered so dangerous that it's off-limits to casual visitors.

Continuing our descent through the woods, we finally swung back to the west and soon caught a first dramatic glimpse of the entrance to the valley.

The scene is awesome and forbidding. There is a moment of disbelief followed by the satisfying realization that this scene is real, and not a computer-generated special effect. The pleasure you feel as your eye takes in the scene lying before you extends to every nerve, and you feel ennobled, somehow, simply to be standing there. Though I'd seen pictures of the scene, I found myself thinking, “I've never seen anything like this before.”

Historians tell us that such reactions to dramatic vistas are relatively new to the Western world. Mountains did not become thrilling and sublime to Europeans until the seventeenth century or thereabouts. Such emotions have a much longer history in Asia. The eleventh-century Chinese painter Kuo Hsi, for example, writes, “The din of the dusty world and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, hazy, mist, and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks.”

For myself, I prefer clarity and long vistas to haze and mist. But matters of atmosphere aside, there is a deep connection between dramatic views and the human soul that is only fleetingly aroused by the ersatz grandeur we sometimes meet up with at the movie theater.

As we entered the Valley itself I was in for another surprise. Nothing I had read, and no photo that I had seen, prepared me for the shocking realization that Yosemite Valley is largely wooded. As you proceed down the one-way highway toward the campgrounds and lodges at the east end of the valley, there are meadows here and there that fleetingly expose the towering walls on either side, but for the most part the view is obscured by trees. The most inviting thing you see as you hurdle down the shady highway is the Merced River gurgling gently through the woods alongside the road.

There are people wandering about here and there throughout the valley. Cars are stopped at the pull-outs, buses and open-air trolleys pass, loaded with tourists, and on a hot summer afternoon the entire place takes on the look of a beautiful, but weathered and dusty, city park.

The sense of urban-ness intensifies as you proceed to the upper end of the valley, where there are traffic snarls at every turnoff, and Curry Village itself, with its closely-packed canvas platform-tents and hordes of American and foreign tourists eating overpriced fast-food and shouting to one another from their mountain bikes, reminded me of a refuge camp.

Camping

We pulled up to the booth at the entry to Upper Pines Campground and I noticed a sign in the window reporting that bears had wandered into the campground 312 times since the first of the year. The damage to vehicles as a result of these encounters stood at $379,000. The attendant asked me to read and sign an agreement that I would keep all my food in the bear locker at all times when I wasn't actually eating it, with a $5,000 fine if I screwed up. Nothing was to be left in the car—a passing bear might simply rip the car open—and certainly nothing in the tent.

Upper Pines Campground sits near the south wall of the valley, and by four in the afternoon it's in already full shade. There are several hundred sites arranged in thin loops among the towering trees. Underbrush is non-existent. Months earlier, sitting in front of my computer screen, I had applied all the analytic powers at my disposal to selecting the very best of the twelve sites that were still available. I finally selected 179. It was on the outside of a loop that seemed to be marginally more isolated than the others, and the site itself, to judge from the highly schematic map, appeared to have an unusually large empty space to one side of it.

Site 179 did prove to be unusually spacious, though no one would call it in any way private. A field of SUV-sized boulders stood on one side of it, isolating us from the next slot, and the slot on the other side remained empty until long after dark. Behind us the land sloped slightly downward through the well-spaced trees to a little valley that was probably wet in the springtime. We could see the next ring of trailers and tents in the distance fifty yards away.

I've grown to like the din of public campgrounds—the conversations, the banging of pans, the sound of barking dogs, of engines starting up. Everyone seems to be having fun. And who knows? Perhaps such sensations stir ancestral memories of the nomadic camps our ancestors lived it. As night descends the campfires come alive and families sit around in large circles on cleverly-designed camp chairs swapping stories about their cell-phone service, the pulling power of their SUVs, about other parks they've visited, and the wild animals they caught a glimpse of long ago.

The one thing that destroys this pleasant cacophony is recorded music, ($5,000 for failing to store food properly? How about $10,000 for playing a radio?) Fortunately there was no music playing while we were there.

Every site is equipped with a bear locker. And far from being a necessary inconvenience, they struck me as a significant enhancement of the campsite. Rather than chasing back and forth to the car for this or that forgotten or misplaced item, you simply open the heavy steel cupboard that's close at hand and take out what you need. The one drawback is the loud noise the doors make when you clamp them shut again.

Bears

At dusk a bear wandered into our loop from the north. We could hear horns honking and people shouting “Bear!” “He's coming your way!” Headlights came on. We hopped into the car briefly but didn't see the bear. Later we could hear faint shouts erupt in the distance as the creature continued his nocturnal rounds.

A few minutes after the bear's first appearance two very young men with Mountie hats on started to make the rounds, marching purposefully from campsite to campsite with their flashlights held high.

“Are you the people who encountered the bear?” they asked us. “Was it here that the bear jumped up on the picnic table?”

“We didn't see any bears,” I said. “There was a lot of shouting and horn-honking going on down that way.” I pointed, and off they went.

As we sat by the fire I could see flash-light beams streaking through the darkness in the distance as the rangers hunted their mischievous campground pest. I also scanned the open woods behind our tent myself from time to time with my little flashlight, looking for signs of the beast.

Well after dark our neighbors to the south finally arrived. It was a young Japanese couple. They surveyed the ground at their site for a good twenty minutes, trying to decide which spot was best for the tent. All the while the headlights of their SUV were streaming across the site and off into the woods. It took them another twenty minutes to erect the small blue nothing of a tent they'd brought. Both the man and the woman walked over to consult the instructions they'd left on the picnic table repeatedly, and a stream of chatter flowed back and forth incessantly between them. My sensitivity to inflections of Japanese being limited, I found it impossible to determine who was getting mad at whom, but in the end the tent got pitched and our young neighbors calmly lit a candle in front of a metallic reflector and set out their evening meal.

Just then someone in the large Italian family camping next to them on the other side started to shout, “Bear! Bear!” When I saw that the Japanese couple was continuing blithely on with their meal I decided I'd better go over and have a chat with them.

“You should put all this food in the locker,” I said to the man. “Right now. Also all the food in your car.”

When they were done stowing all their food I asked the man, “Didn't you hear those people shouting ‘Bear!'”?

“I thought they were joking!” he said sheepishly.

“There are plenty of bears around here,” I told him, suddenly the seasoned expert.

“But they don't hurt people, do they?” the woman asked in a very quiet voice.

“No, they're just after your food.” I replied comfortingly.

Hilary and I went back to poking our fire, but fifteen minutes later I noticed that our neighbors seemed to be discussing something important, so I wandered over to see what the fuss was all about.

“We haven't eaten, and... and we don't really know what to do,” the man said. “Should we drive off somewhere? Should we eat in our car?”

“Just get the food you need from the locker and eat it. The bears are gone. If they come back, stow the food again.”

“Thank you,” the man replied. “This is our first time camping.”

And soon they had their candle lighted again.

A very sweet couple. And what a story they now have to tell.

The Ahwahnee Hotel

The next morning we broke camp at dawn and drove through the park to the Ahwahnee Hotel for breakfast. There were people out jogging along the pathways already, and a lonely elk was feeding out in the meadow. In the half-light of the parking lot of the hotel, which butts up against the south wall of the valley, we came upon four young climbers wearing shorts and T-shirts. They were clipping various ropes, straps, and carabineers to their clothing, perhaps for an ascent of the face of nearby Royal Arches.

The long halls of the famous hotel were largely deserted. A gentleman behind the desk directed us to the dining room. There was one stout middle-aged man waiting for a table. As we approached I heard him asking for a waiter named “Dave.”

“I'll go and see if Dave is on duty,” the headwaiter said.

While we were waiting for the man to return I couldn't help asking, “So, is Dave a personal friend of yours?”

“No,” the man replied in a soft, melancholy voice, without turning to look at me. “I come here fairly often and I like to be served by Dave. We've developed a kind of rapport. You see, Dave's personal trainer holds the record for the ascent of Half-Dome. He made it up and back in just over two hours.” Then he shook his head as if in disbelief and added, under his breath, “A remarkable achievement.”

I dimly recalled from a remark in the guidebooks that the average time to ascend Half-Dome and return is thirteen hours. It isn't recommended as a day-trip.

Our friend was finally led off to a table—whether Dave was on duty remained unclear—and soon a young woman arrived to direct us to a table at the far end of the room. During our stroll she asked us, in the interest of that same outdoorsy cordiality that had inspired me to interrogate the stranger standing in front of me in line, what hike we were planning to take that day.

“I thought we'd go up to Sentinel Dome,” I replied.

I've worked here for two years and I've never made it up there,” she replied. “I hear it's great!”

In fact Sentinel Dome is one of the least heavily-travelled hikes in the park. I suspect this is because it is a very easy hike leading to very good vistas. What could be better than that? Well, even better vistas can be reached by car at nearby Glacier Point. And the difficult and time-consuming approaches to other great vistas are part of their allure. Going to Sentinel Dome at any speed is nothing to brag about. If a record is kept of the best time there and back, (which I doubt) it's probably under ten minutes.

Yet the hike sounded appealing to us because we were hoping to experience the immensity of the Valley from above without the crowds that invariable congregate at Glacier Point, but had neither the time nor the energy for one of the famous all-day hikes. The one-mile almost-level stroll to Sentinel Dome seemed to be the perfect option.

Our hostess seated us at a table in an alcove at the far end of the dining room. The golden tapestry curtains in the windows alongside our chairs rose to the ceiling thirty feet above our heads. Through the windows, beyond the tops of the trees, we could see the Valley walls in the early morning light. But to my eyes the elegant mission-style architecture of the dining room was even more awesome. Unlike most National Park Hotels, which look impressive from a distance but prove to be a little shabby on closer inspection, the Ahwahnee is perfectly appointed from top to bottom. Which is what one would expect, I guess, at a hotel where the rooms go for $300 per night.

We had just spent $12.50 for an interesting night in the woods, so we had no difficulty forking over $17.50 for the buffet breakfast, which included coffee, a glass of orange juice so big I had trouble finishing it, both lox and a chunkier style of smoked salmon, omelets made to order, waffles, scrambled eggs, with and without cheese, bacon, ham, sausages, an assortment of sliced melons that had been ripened to perfection, yogurt, granola, and on down the line. Once we'd had our fill we wandered contentedly out through the enormous lobby to a series of smaller rooms that ran along the end of it like apses. One of the rooms contained photographs from a bygone era of men and women enjoying themselves on skiing holidays; another had an exhibit of very fine Native baskets and fabrics; and the one facing the cliffs looked like the inner chamber of some English club, with paneled walls and wingback chairs. I half-expected to see someone sitting there by the fire with a copy of Hayclut's Voyages or Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy , but in fact the only man in the room was typing away madly on his laptop.

The route to Sentinel Dome took us out the Valley, past Bridal Veil Falls, and back through the woods on a higher level to the southern lip of the Valley wall. On the hike out to the dome we passed through a maquis of manzanita bushes studded here and there with enormous Ponderosa pines. (Or were they Jeffrey Pines?) We spotted a couple of nondescript pheasant-like birds feeding under the trees at one point. Just as we arrived at the dome itself, which looks like an enormous concrete helmet, we passed a man coming down from the top.

From that point, for a good half-hour, we had the place to ourselves. We made our way to the top of the dome and walked across to the other side, where we proceeded down as far as we dared toward the west-facing edge. We settled ourselves on the downward sloping side of the dome with 3,000 feet of empty space below us, looking east toward El Capitan and north to the dried-up face of Yosemite Falls, which bears a dark mascara-like stain left by the water that has tumbled down across it since time immemorial—in wetter seasons. The landscape was remarkable, to say the least. You want to give it a big huge, though it's difficult to conceive quite how such a thing could be worked out. On the other hand, the spectacular domes and valleys to the east were largely obscured by the dome itself, and once we'd stared out at the extraordinary scene of sheer rock and open space below us for as long as we could stand, and pondered the beauty and vastness of existence, and of ourselves, with various other fluvial and mundane notions passing near and then drifting on out of sight—and with a stiff wind blowing in at us all the while—we returned to the car and continued east toward Glacier Point.

The engineers of Glacier Point have done a good job of spreading out the experience, and the crowds, along several overlooks. You park and walk up past the inevitable and inviting gift shop toward the rim, where a succession of minor gathering areas succeed one another on the path to the coup de grace . What you see at each of these overlooks is a variation on the same theme. Two rivers have cut their way through the granite in the distance, sculpting the walls of the valley and the remarkable forms we know as Half Dome, North Dome, and all the rest. Those rivers are still running, of course, and it's easy to spot Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls as they drop from level to level—thin threads of white in the shadows far below. The most popular hike in the park leads from the campground up past these falls, then down the other side of the river on the return. Another hike, which we had planned to take but neglected to make the proper shuttle arrangements for, follows a six-mile route down from Glacier Point itself to the campground below, with spectacular scenery all the way.

Though the overlooks were crowded with an ever-changing assemblage of tourists, many of them speaking foreign languages, I did not find it difficult to make my way to the edge. Cameras were going off at a steady rate, and with good reason. It is not often that you come upon a vista of such grandeur, and it's amazing to consider that Yosemite Valley was not included in the original design for Yosemite National Park.

*

We spent the rest of the afternoon down in the valley getting a better feel for the park. We went to the Visitor's Center, most of which was closed for remodeling. We toured the Indian village, which was very interesting, even though the dwellings and customs on display reflected a native culture that had already been radically altered by contact with the Whites. We stopped at the Ansel Adams Gallery, which is simply a gift shop with some very expensive prints alongside the posters and note cards. We hiked up the valley to a museum of natural history in the shadows of the woods that happened to be closed. Then we returned to our new campsite at Upper Pines.

This remarkable site was on the banks of the xxxx River, largely isolated from the masses on the inner loops. The occasional shouts of “Bear!” we heard were well off in the distance. We waded in the river, sat on the ground on the legless “camp chairs” we'd brought along in a suitcase, and watched four crows wander among the golden stones on the riverbank. We ate. We sat around the fire. We slept. We were tired.

*

There are many levels of involvement with Yosemite. That's why the mountaineering office is next door to the gift shop. That's why the most dismal campsite in the Park, a walk-in tent-only site right next to the highway, is always full. This is the one reserved for climbers. Businessmen with laptops spend $300 a night to stay at Yosemite. Why? Tourists from Japan and Italy and Poland and India spend a fortune to come here. Why? Hike to Half Dome and back in two hours? What's the hurry?

Well, the beauty of Yosemite is unparalleled. And the opportunities for hiking are virtually limitless. During our two days in the park, Hilary and I saw a few things.

*

On our way out on the third morning we stopped at a pull-out near El Capitan to see something else. With a good pair of binoculars we could see climbers who had spent the night on a ledge one-fifth of the way up the face of that enormous rock. We were looking at daring, and aspiration. And tedium. And death. The unfathomable. The incomprehensible. Right before our eyes.

But my capacity for absorbing the sublime was wavering. And my hands were cold, standing there beside the highway in the morning sunlight.