Photojournalist Betsy Parker, her friend Beth Rera, and Beth’s seven-year-old son John embarked some days ago on a cross-country horse-hauling odyssey—Virginia to California—to include a West Coast summer vacation tour. Since Betsy can be counted on for compelling copy and excellent photography, FHL went along for the ride. Betsy’s earlier reports may be found under the Horse and Hound drop-down menu/Travel.
I will compress the last three-and-a-half days of epic tourism into tidy note form. Any of these subjects is deserving of its own report, if not chapter, and in some cases a volume, but I’ll keep to the strictest of pyramid-style reporting.
Left Merced hotel midmorning Tuesday to get to Crane Flat in Yosemite—the only walk-in campground within the Yosemite National Park with any chance of getting a site without twelve-month advance reservations. Pretty drive in, through California farmland. We left the valley about forty miles out from the park and began rising steadily, through changing elevation/topography/flora and, I’m sure, fauna. It got downright breathtaking, with valley views and granite outcroppings after we entered the park proper (Yosemite National Park is surrounded by a million acres of National Forest.)
Got to Crane Flat at the stroke of 11: a.m., the earliest one could do a walk up and nab a space. We got the only space available. Twenty bucks a night got us a parking space, flat area for the tent, fire ring (with some nice dry wood someone had left) and a nearby WC. No showers, no trash bins. A lecture and warning about the marauding black bear and juvenile brown bear that had been pestering the campers nightly. More on them later.
We hightailed it ten more miles into the park’s interior to the Yosemite Valley, where all the big guys are: Half Dome, Sentinel, Bridalveil Falls, Vernal Falls, Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls, Cathedral Rock, El Capitan, Glacier Point, etc. are all there, as is Mirror Lake, and a number of lovely meadows, along with a ten-mile relatively flat driving loop/bike trails/numerous trail heads/and a nice shuttle network that takes you to the various points around the valley. It was achingly beautiful. Exposed granite all around, high peaks, plunging falls, stately spires, Merced Creek coursing thru the valley floor.
Those were the positives.
Negative was only the fact that we were not alone in our thought of catching Yosemite at the height of summer break. Shout out to Toby for warning me about the crowd factor, but the pull of those big rocks was fully irresistible and we parked it near the Village Store and went different directions. Beth and John found a Junior Ranger program ready to start. (John participated and earned a badge.) I pedaled away on my bike to circle the valley floor and get my bearings. I tied my map to the handlebars with a haystring that I found looped around my bike’s seat . (Gods know why that was there.) At least it provided a sure way to verify my bike on the bike rack wherever I stopped—the only one with green baling twine knotted around the brake line.
I did a couple of loops, walked around Mirror Lake, pretty but drying up. Checked out the start to the Vernal Fall trail. Nice, but I was less interested in falls than rock, plus this was the start to the Half Dome trail and I’d already determined that “12 miles — extremely strenuous” was beyond my capability for a big hike the next day. So I cast about for a suitably tough but eminently suitable scramble for Wednesday. I found it with the Granite Point hike. Five miles up with two-thirds of a mile vertical gain, and five back down. I had to crane my neck to see the top of the thing—big open faced slab of granite, the top of which is above tree line. Looked enticing.
Met up with Beth and crew at 6:00 p.m., and we went back to Crane Flat for dinner and overnight. Some neighboring campers told us about the black bear that came thru the previous night, but nothing disturbed us (Beth and John in the tent—thanks, Jennifer, it’s perfect—and me in the truck).
Up early Wednesday morning. The fire I’d laid was still warm. We got moving and over to the valley floor by 8:00 a.m. My vote for Tuolumne Meadow was vetoed. John and Beth took the bikes (plan for a raft rental after lunch), and I took a shuttle to the Granite Point trail.
I’ll keep it short and sweet, unlike my hike. The book said, “strenuous—four hours each way.” While I did up in two, and down in one, I do agree it was strenuous. Very. The vertical pitch was a bear, and the loose sandy soil on solid slabs of rock made it even harder. There were several places the trail leveled off briefly—a delicious respite—and there were heavenly views around each switchback. Cathedral spires were my friends to the south (I kept tabs on how high I was by checking against them), upper and lower falls to the north, and Half Dome was an ever-looming presence to the east.
I summitted at noon and celebrated with a squashed p,b, and j and a mushed banana. Still, it was a feast I’ll never forget—perched on the railing of the geology exhibit at the top of the point, with an interactive overlay-map showing all the visible peaks. (The placard said you can see fully one-half of the park from that spot.) I’d had the trail almost to myself. While there were tons of people at the top (there is a shuttle service that brings people up from the backside of the peak), I wondered if I may be giving in to my inner misanthrope as I shied away from the throng to retire to a quiet rock to study Half Dome. (The ants moving across its face were hikers who’d braved the cable lines to the top.)
After a rest, I started back down. Other than running into a park work crew headed by an auburn-haired young man who looked like he was channeling Erik The Red (wild beard, hair three-months overdue for a trim, and a look that was half Norse explorer, half California crunchy), I had the trail fully to myself until I reached the meadow at the bottom.
I hooked back up with Beth and John (their rafting was ruled out; John wasn’t old enough to paddle, so they’d just ridden the bikes and hiked Mirror Lake) at 6:00 p.m., and we headed back home. After dinner we turned in early. My left calf was sore and needed a stretch. No sooner had I turned over to fluff my pillow when the 400-block of the campground exploded in noise and yelling, car horns honking, and loud clanging of pots and pans. I figured the bear had returned, gauging by the shrieks and shouts.
The next campsite over flicked on their lantern, and I saw that Beth had turned on her battery lantern. I rolled over. The bear would surely scoot back to the wilds with all that noise. No such luck. The bear, later identified as a young brown bear (not a kodiak, but a California brown bear, much like our eastern black bears—herbivores, primarily) sauntered from site to site, checking who had left food unsecured. Seems like our friends in the 400s had not heeded the warnings to keep your eyes on your food, or else close it in a tightly secured bear locker.
I won’t belabor the point, but with all the shouting and excitement, all I could think of was Lord of the Flies and on the sad human condition that leads people to join in a whooping witch hunt rather than sit back reflectively and consider that it is us who are in their habitat, and that we’d better learn to habituate. It made me sad to hear all that noise just to shoo away a bear that was just trying to make a living.
We got up Thursday morning (today) and headed first to the short Bridalveil Falls trail to see the view—powerful—then
headed down the 41 towards Fresno, the Park south entrance, and the Mariposa Grove of Sequoia trees. We’d briefly considered a day at the Sequoia National Park, but, thanks to Bruce’s sister (who lives here in California) we’d been told that Yosemite is the king and queen of National Parks and that Sequoia would be a let-down after Yosemite. We split the difference and did a quick walk to see several dozen mature sequoias in the lower grove at Mariposa. These trees—a type of cypress–evergreen and the largest living things on earth—are magnificent. Spiritual in the same way the earth is especially sacred through Yosemite’s rock formations. Really worth the stop.
We headed south to L.A. and Beth’s student’s aunt’s house here in Palos Verdes. Ali and Dan hunt with the Santa Fe Hunt and live in what they call “the country” on a “farm”—an acre of land with a lemon tree, lime tree, avocado trees, banana tree, and more, eight horses, a riding arena and one twenty-by-twenty-foot paddock. It is a different style of horse-keeping. They have very nice racehorses (their trainer is Kristin Mulhall, whose dad Richard trained for one of the sheikhs), and very, very nice show horses (they have a horse in training with Hap Hansen that just qualified for the $100,000 Hunter Derby in Kentucky later this month). They are so California: he’s a former model (Lauren, Yves St. Laurent, Burberry’s, etc.) who cooks like a top chef (their brother-in-law was the late Chef Tell), and she is an excellent horsewoman who dotes, as he does, on their American Staffordshire Terrier that rules the household.
The house is amazing—California hacienda style stucco with red slate roof, open floor plan, all tiles, outdoor dining room and living room, big pool with water slide (John and the dog exhausted each other this evening), and an incredible view of the surrounding hills that block the Pacific by just a few blocks.
They’re sending us to Universal Studios tomorrow, then I think we might do Venice beach Saturday morning. (Dan said that it’s worth it for people-watching, plus it’s a great beach.)
To be continued….
August 12, 2010