The park, of course, covers hundreds of square miles of mountainous terrain, and if you were to drop three and a half million people into it at one time, there would be plenty of room for all of them. Given that these millions of visits occur over the span of a year's time -- more precisely, over half a year's time, primarily during the summer and autumn months, averaging out to some 20,000 people a day -- what's the problem? Simply that Yosemite has its own crown jewel -- Yosemite Valley, a tiny sliver in the western part of the park -- and it is here that our three or four million visitors tend to congregate. As I can attest from my own experience, a wanderer with a backpack can travel for several days in the rest of the park without so much as seeing another human at a distance. But Yosemite Valley, on a summer weekend, can resemble downtown Manhattan at its worst. In fact, when I visited the valley in 1982, an Esperanto-speaking close friend of mine told me that the activity in the day-use parking lot reminded her of her home in Shanghai...
There are reasons for its attraction to human visitors. Here is where you can see the highest waterfall in North America (if it's not a dry year...). Here is where you can see sheer cliffs of solid granite three thousand feet high. Here is scenery made famous by the black-and-white camera artistry of Ansel Adams. Here...
None of us had been to Yosemite in two years. My wife hadn't been there in more than a decade. My son had never been there. So we decided to spend a day driving up there to see the waterfalls in spring spate. And I, my daughter Esther and my son David spent two hours making the short round-trip walk from the valley up to the bridge below Vernal Falls on the Merced River, just southwest of Yosemite Valley.
Follow the road through farmland flat as an ironing board for some twenty miles, through the towns of Escalon and Oakdale. Pick up gas, Twinkies and other necessities in Oakdale; this will really be your last good chance before you reach Yosemite Valley. Then continue east through land that now begins to gain character, first with grass-covered low hills, then with small groves of oak. Keep a special watch for the interestingly stratified bluffs off to your right; and note that now you can see the Sierra foothills, plain ahead of you.
Right after passing a motel called the Table Mountain Inn, on your left, you will turn right; the road ahead is no longer highway 120 and leads to Sonora. You wind over a couple of ridges, pass a huge timberyard, and in three or four miles join with highway 49 at Chinese Camp, so-called because of the many Chinese who lived here almost 150 years ago. Just to set the record straight, by the way, these were not the Cantonese who helped build the Western Pacific railway and whose descendants for a century made up much of the Chinese-American population of our western states; these were itinerant gold-miners of 1849, not much if any different from their American and European counterparts who swarmed into California to get rich, and who swarmed right out again when word of other big strikes -- in Chile and Australia, for instance -- reached the sometimes disappointing American diggings.
120 and 49 run together for almost a dozen miles, during which you leave farmland behind and enter more mountainous terrain, winding along the hills on the north shore of Lake Don Pedro, a relatively recent reservoir now dotted with houseboats. At the east end of the lake you'll pass the hamlet of Moccasin, notable for the huge penstock running up the ridge behind it and for the fish hatchery down to your right. Highway 49 cuts off to the south here, but you continue on east, and in about half a minute you come to a choice of routes, both of which lead to the same place -- the Coulterville Grade and the Old Priest Grade, which turns off the main road to the right.
The Coulterville Grade climbs about almost 2000 feet in about six miles, winding in and out of side canyons on the south side of the main canyon. You can cut this distance in half by taking the older Old Priest Grade. Unfortunately, being half as long it is also twice as steep. The choice is yours.
At the top of both grades you pass through the tiny village of Big Oak Flat; a historical monument will inform you that this was originally named "Savage Diggings" after the man who founded it (it does not mention that Major James D. Savage of the Mariposa Battalion, by trade a successful shopkeeper with lucrative sidelines in scamming gold dust from Indians and rustling cattle up and down the valley -- he is also reported to have had as many as 33 wives, which made him either the luckiest or the unluckiest man in the world -- led the first Euroamerican incursion into Yosemite Valley).
Beyond Big Oak Flat and its more modern and successful neighbor, Groveland, you continue to climb, first through a long stretch of meadows with burned-over forest land, then along the south "Rim of the World" (enjoy the view from the vista point), finally up through red-fir forest marking the approach to the park entrance. When you reach it, you must pay $5 to enter. Stop for a moment at the entrance visitor center, on your right.
The road continues to climb to more than 6,000 feet, then drops, first to Crane Flat, where highway 108 across Tioga Pass takes off to your left (closed for more than half the year by snow), then down toward the valley itself. Evidence of another major forest fire stretches out all around you as you approach the valley, the approach to which is heralded by a series of three tunnels, one of them very long and very dark. Eventually you join with the road coming up from Fresno and are in Yosemite Valley itself.
Village and hotels are in the northeast corner of the valley, but you want the day-use parking lot, which is almost as far east as you can go. Drive east along the south side of the valley, trying not to wreck your car as you crane your neck to watch the three-thousand-foot sheer wall of El Capitan on your left and, in season, the raging torrent of Bridal Veil Falls on your right. When you see the slow-motion white spill of Yosemite Falls over across the valley on your left (stop and visit it when you are leaving) you will be approaching the east end. Just follow the day-use lot signs from here and you will find the area you want to the right of the road, just south of a huge meadow from which visitors stare at the towering monoliths of Glacier Point, Half Dome and Basket Dome.
From the southeast corner of the day-use parking lot, head east along the service road that marks the northern boundary of Camp Curry, a collection of white canvas tent cabins mounted on wooden platforms that command high premiums during the summer among those who would prefer not to pay the even higher premiums commanded by the valley's Lodge and Hotel. You will immediately find yourself in a beautiful, sunny little wood of mixed cedar and pine.
You can walk on the road if you want, but there's a blacktop walkway just to the right -- though it's not always easy to see, hidden as it sometimes is beneath a layer of long pine needles. The walk through the woods is about half a mile long. You pass occasional granite monoliths, some of them a couple of feet high, one or two a good 20-25 feet high; children like to practice their rock climbing on these. The path also crosses occasional rivulets of water on wooden bridges. From time to time you can see the south wall of the valley -- the 3200-foot cliffs of Glacier Point -- just to your right through the trees.
Eventually you will come to Happy Isles, with a well-appointed set of rest rooms and (in season) a refreshment stand -- in summer you have to stand in long lines here -- and a visitor center. Two years ago you could wander around through this area to your heart's content, but reforestation is going on apace, and visitors are now restricted to selected paths, most of them paved. Follow one of these to your right, toward the refreshment stand and visitor center. Watch for a bridge across the Merced River to your left -- this marks the start of the trail to Vernal Falls, Nevada Falls, Little Yosemite Valley, Lake Merced, and points beyond.
On July 10, 1996, high on the east side of Glacier Point above Happy Isles, a two-hundred-foot-long slab of granite exfoliated and plunged two thousand five hundred feet into the forest at Happy Isles. The shattered slab and, more importantly, the air blast ahead of it levelled much of the forest in this beautiful valley, sending trees toppling outwards over a fifty-acre area, a phenomenon reminiscent of the 1908 Tunguska Meteor in Siberia. The nature center was damaged and the snack kiosk was totally demolished. One person was killed and a number injured (as of last report as I write this, the area was still being searched for possible additional casualties).
On New Year's Day, 1997, heavy rains from a chain of storms sweeping in from the warm Pacific, coupled with runoff from melting snow, led to major floods in Yosemite Valley, floods that destroyed much of the valley's infrastructure and undermined or blocked all the roads into the valley. As of this writing, it is not clear when the valley will be back to "business as usual" -- if ever. It appears now that for much of 1997 casual visits to the valley will not be possible -- even day visitors will have to make reservations ahead of time.Actually, you have your choice of two bridges. The first and most obvious is short and sweet. But if you follow the river's verge upstream for a hundred yards, you'll come to the second bridge, which is the more interesting of the two -- it is not actually one bridge but three, linking the two banks together via the rocky Happy Isles themselves. I recommend this one. On the other side of the bridge series you'll find a stone staircase that leads up a few dozen feet to join the main trail, on which you turn right.
The trail here is paved, all the way up to Vernal Falls Bridge, though in places the paving has deteriorated to the point of non-existence. In a few yards you'll come to a "Bear Encounters" warning sign on your left. Stop here to contemplate the delights of the language problem as you read the sign. The left side is an English-language discussion of the danger of bears in Yosemite (usually to your ham sandwich, not to yourself) and how to avoid being accosted. On the right, the thoughtful park authorities have repeated the advice in other languages for the benefit of French-, German-, Spanish- and Japanese-speaking visitors; but, due to lack of space, they've emphasize the dangers and pretty much omitted the precautions. I watched one Japanese couple approach this sign from below, read it, and then turn around and go back, looking frightened to death by the thought of being devoured by raging Yosemite black bears.
For those who have the courage to pass the sign, the most immediate landmark is a little spring to the left of the trail, its water temporarily captured by a rock wall. If you are carrying a water bottle filled with tap water from home, dump it -- while not biodegradable, it's also not particularly dangerous to the environment -- and refill your bottle from the spill from this little pool.
You follow the trail steeply upward for over half a mile. The Merced River, so placid down in the valley proper that visitors often drift along it in rubber "flotation devices," rages along here, plunging over rocks and occasional fallen trees, easily visible far below you to your right. On the left rocky bluffs tower above you.
As you walk, look for any possible signs of painted rocks to your left. In late 1973 a well-intentioned but short-lived TV series, "Sierra", about a fictitious "Sierra National Park" (intended as a combination of Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks), had its pilot produced here. While making the pilot, the people in charge felt that the granite along this trail did not look natural enough, and so painted some of the rocks to make them seem "more natural". I didn't notice any sign of this in 1996, so perhaps the paint wore off with time. A dummy thrown down the bluffs from above -- four times; the first three takes apparently weren't satisfactory -- made even less of an impact on nature. The show itself made the least impact of all; it lasted half a season, at most.
For the most part, the trai climbs through forest, but there are at least two stretches where it crosses open fields of light-colored granite. The sunlight here can be very oppressive. If you are here on a sunny day, either use heavy sun-block or cross these areas very quickly.
At one point you'll get a good view into the side canyon of Illilouette Creek, on the other side of the Merced; in season, a beautiful little cataract, not as impressive as the huge waterfalls of the main valley but nonetheless attractive, cascades down this canyon. It is actually bigger than it looks; halfway up, it sends up massive plumes of spray into the air as it hits in a little hanging sub-canyon, and those tiny plants growing alongside it up there are full-sized trees.
After crossing the last stretch of granite and climbing a few yards further, you'll drop down through fairly heavy forest to the Merced itself, where a massive wooden bridge crosses it. This is the Vernal Falls Bridge, though the Falls themselves don't come into view until you're more than halfway across. Many people like to stop here to take photographs. There are better viewpoints further up, but if you're going no further, take your pictures now.
The far side boasts rest rooms, a water fountain, and granite slabs on which to play. We went no further on this walk, but next time -- well, this is the takeoff point for the back country, or for the top of Half Dome (in season).
Don Harlow
| Map will be added later | Map description will be added later |
You see, bears like to eat. A bear will range more than twenty miles in a day looking for a beehive, or a log under which succulent grubs may be found. Or -- in the case of Yosemite's bears -- an unguarded ham sandwich, an ice chest with no one sitting on it, or a car with the window left open and a sack of fritos in the back seat.
As far as I can tell from my own experience, Yosemite's bears have a well developed sense of property. If you are holding it in your hand, it is yours, and they will not contest with you for it. If they are holding it in their mouths, it is theirs, and you attempt to recover it at your peril. If it is unattended -- meaning, you are more than a foot or so away from it -- it is up for grabs.
Once, up in the back country at Lake Merced, I left my backpack leaning against a tree while I went over to a nearby stream to watch the antics of a mother bear and her cubs. One of the cubs, seeing the backpack unattended and already old enough to know what it probably contained, took off for it at a dead run. Luckily, I could run faster, and managed to get between cub and backpack, at which he gave up the attack; the mother bear watched the whole procedure with some interest -- but no belligerence; I had not, after all, attempted to chase directly after the cub and grab it. Had the cub reached the backpack, though, I am not sure it would have been entirely safe to try to recover the pack.
The black bears of Yosemite are not particularly dangerous to your life or limb -- no more so than any quarter-ton animal can be. But they can be dangerous to your foodstuffs. Keep everything locked up in the trunk of your car; it is not only foolish to leave it out where bears can get it (and they will!), it is also illegal. If you are backpacking, try as much as possible to follow the rules about bear-bagging food (apparently they now make bearproof canisters that you can carry food in). Be careful -- but don't ruin your Yosemite experience by being scared. There's no good reason.
Don Harlow <donh@netcom.com>
