Day 11. Exploring Yosemite.

Today was our fist full day in Yosemite. The Charlotte Inn is 24 miles from the park entrance, it takes around 45 minutes to get there. We expected the park to be very crowded, considering a large part of all californians go here for their summer holidays. But there were no crowds at all, maybe because it is midweek and extremely hot. The occasional mobile home slowed us down, but other than that it was a very nice and scenic drive.

There are three roads in Yosemite, hwy 120-west from San Francisco, 41-north from L.A. and 140-west in between. Check out this map for reference. http://www.scenicwonders.com/images/yosemite_map_lg.gif . The last road is closed since last april, because of a mountain slide. In other words, there is no more road. We decided to go and see for ourselves, it should be the most quiet part of the park with only one entrance. We stopped at the roadblock, parked the car and went for a walk. We thought the closed part of the road would be just around the corner. We thought wrong. It was too hot, too dy, and too far to keep walking, so we headed back to a cafe at the parking lot. It turns out the mountain slide was six miles away! Good thing we didn't walk there in this extreme heat.

Since there is nothing more to do on hwy140, we drove back. Along the way we passed a relatively slow part of the wild river that runs through yosemite. With wild I mean, non crossable, ferocious, rafting wild river. We went for a swim, the cold mountain water was a welcome refreshment with outside temperatures still in the high 40's.



Half-dry we got in the hot car and drove to the central part of the park: Yosemite Valley. The way there offers some nice views, but this is were all the campsites and parking lots are. So it was full of tourists, filling the road, campsites and swimmable parts of the river. We were glad to get out to hwy41-south: we were driving towards the Giant 3500 year old Sequoia Trees. Again, there was a vista point every 5 miles, which offered a stunning view on the raw beauty of this park.



The Sequoia trees are indeed huge. The one on the picture below, is many thousands of years old and fell more than 300 years ago. Sequoia trees can survive this long, because they are extremely resistant to deseases and fire. Their soft bark and extreme height protects them from the most extreme heat. In fact, fire is their reason for survival: they depend on it to clear out other competitor plants and trees. Their only weakness are the shallow roots, which makes them sensitive to falling over in strong winds. Still they make for a great tree huggin' hippie experience.





The way back to Groveland took about three and a half hours, which should give you a nice impression of the size of the park. It got dark quickly, Bart was driving, the top was down, and I lay on the backseat watching the stars, Lenny cravitz' 'Calling all angels' was playing on the stereo, followed by 'dust in the wind'. The silhouettes of trees passed on a background of thousand of stars. It makes you feel both more alive and insignificant than ever before.

I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment's gone.
All my dreams pass before my eyes in curiosity.
Dust in the wind. All they are is dust in the wind.
Same old song. Just a drop of water in an endless sea.
All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see.
Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind.