I was invited on a trip to Yosemite with my men’s church group. It was during the work week, which is a bit tougher for me. I somehow expected to have decent internet service in a national park, which should be an obviously stupid thought on my part. Thankfully, I prepared to leave pretty well so that it was not absolutely necessary, but it would have been nice to review a few docs, revise some work, and generally be able to edit Word documents meaningfully in the evenings after the day’s hikes. I realize this is all silly in a post about Yosemite, but, hey, that’s where my head was at, sadly.
That said, the trip was wonderful. Our group was awesome. We had two 10+ mile hikes and two 5+ mile hikes over the course of really four substantive days in the park. Day one – literally as we arrived – was a classic, the Mariposa Grove hike. It is only about 5 miles, out and back. In the high season, a tram runs to the Mariposa Grove, but in October, that’s closed. It’s an easy hike and, hilariously, we ran into almost our entire hiking crew coming back just as we were headed out. It was a nice, easy introduction to Yosemite, and the location is right on the North entrance, near the Wawona Hotel, where I have stayed before. Here are some pics from that first day, one compared with another I think I took in that grove as a child!
Day two, we took off on a much longer 12 mile (turned out it was more like 13) hike with about 1500 feet of elevation gain. Unfortunately, it was all on the way back. We did the Glen Aulin hike at the recommendation of a friend’s coworker. The coworker turned out to be wildly correct. The hike was wonderful. One basically descends across about 6 miles to a highlands camp. In the summer, the five highlands camps of Yosemite offer a sort of hut-to-hut backpacking experience. Each day you hike to the next hut, each evening, you stay in a semi-permanent tent and have a hot meal for dinner and set out with one for breakfast. It sounds just lovely. Glen Aulin is one of those camps, and is at one end of the highland camps backpacking trip. So, one could start there and end at Vogelsang. I have all-but resolved to try and get into the lottery for this type of trip.
In any case, the Glen Aulin hike is down, down, down, all along a flowing river. There are waterfalls throughout the 6 mile descent. It was highlight after highlight. Every guy in the grip kept gasping at the beauty. And, Glen Aulin is basically several tents about 40 feet from a 35 foot waterfall, and a small pool where the water collects before it continues down the stream. Here are some examples, just try and ignore my ugly mug.
