Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Triple Waterfalls



Rojo and I had plans this morning for the reversal of our famous Yosemite Valley rim to rim trail from 2010. The plan was to park at the Mirror Lake bus stop again and then head over to and up the Panorama Trail, down the 4 Mile Trail, walking across the street and up Yosemite Falls and proceeding to cross the north rim to Yosemite Point going behind North Dome and coming down the Snow Creek Trail to Mirror Lake. Last year we did the opposite loop. However, the weather moved in last night and we had rain all evening and all morning and we canceled our big plans at 530am and made new ones for something also exciting: if the weather broke we would do the almost-famous triple waterfall day- Yosemite Falls then Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls. So after a pleasant breakfast at the Ahwahnee Hotel with my 38 week pregnant beautiful wife Laura, Rojo and I left for Yosemite Falls around 11am. It hadn't really stopped raining, but it wasn't very heavy and besides was mixed in with the torrential windswept falls spray being blown onto the trail. The top snapshot gives a small postcard view of the visibility from the summit. We then turned around and headed back to the car and drove over to the Curry Village backpackers parking lot and walked to Happy Isles. At the junction where the Mist and Muir Trail split a ranger asked us if we were prepared to get wet- we nodded and kept going. Because of the weather there was not the usual June summer crowd on the trails, but going up the Mist steps was like being in a car wash, or falling in the river. Nothing was dry, and we had never seen anything like that in the past ten years. Near the top of the steps for Nevada Falls was water rolling down places I had never seen also. We elected to return via the Muir trail because we were tired of being wet all day, the bottom postcard giving a good view of Grizzly Peak with Yosemite Falls behind it, and a neat perspective for the distance covered today.....granted we drove between the two points, however we were on top of the Falls several hours earlier and managed the triple waterfall day just fine. Another beautiful outing, another backyard boogie.

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