Adam & Stephanie's Travel Blog: Vegas through Yosemite

Once again it's been a while since our last post, so we've got a lot of ground to cover here. Where were we? Ah yes, we were about to leave Vegas. On our last night there, Steph's uncle Ryan and his wife decided to take us out to dinner and down to the strip to "see the lights." After a good dinner at a Thai restaurant, they seemed a bit hurried to get downtown. It wasn't until the car ride down there that I started to put two-and-two together. Why are we in a rush? Especially since it'll be light outside for a couple more hours - what lights are we going to see? It was then that I realized that Jerry Seinfeld was in town for 2 nights only and Steph's aunt and uncle are also big fans. Sure enough they had gotten us all tickets, which was a sweet surprise for me. Seinfeld was of course great and the guy that opened for him, Tom Papa, was hilarious. Perfect last night in Vegas.

The next morning we cleaned and re-organized the Jimmy and headed off towards Death Valley. I am seriously wondering why this place is a national park. I mean, its pretty cool - lowest elevation in the country, interesting landscape, but come on. It's not like the place needs conservation from development or something. One of the factoids they give you is that it has more abandoned mines than any other national park. Really? Not only that, it was 125 degrees. No joke. It was ridiculous. I was happy to see it and experience it, then happy to get the heck out of there. We camped that night at Brown's Town campground in Bishop, CA (couldn't pass up a name like that).

As we drove up the hill to Yosemite the next day, we noticed a burning smell so, being totally paranoid about the car, pulled over to check it out. Of course the smell was the brakes of the cars coming down the hill, but while pulled over we noticed what looked like oil spewing out the bottom of the Jimmy. Oh great. I coaxed it back down the hill and ended up at a little auto shop being run by the most stereotypical Californian dude - complete with Ray Ban's and all. Nothing was leaking out anymore at this point, but they took a look at it and told me it was antifreeze. No, I assured them, I was sure it was oil. I guess the mechanic is used to dumb car owners so didn't exactly take my word for it - he was sticking with antifreeze and said to keep an eye on it. Unable to convince him that I'm not an idiot, I said OK and moved on. As it turns out, the car was running pretty hot again today and I noticed the leak again and it was antifreeze after all - oops! Anyways, on to Yosemite.

We found a campsite at Porcupine Flats campground, which was a good site despite no running water (much to Steph's chagrin). We spent the first afternoon exploring the upper part of the park - which is supposed to be the lesser visited areas. I guess this doesn't apply in the middle of summer. Just about every parking spot and pullout and any other place you could park a car was pretty much full. A lot of those were climbers taking advantage of the abundance of rocky slopes and cliffs the park has to offer. We checked out Tuolumne Meadows and I took a brief swim in the not-too-cold mountainside Tenaya Lake. Since we had the entire next day free, we decided to find a nice, long hike down into the valley where all action is. Despite the park ranger at the visitor center warning us that we couldn't possibly do it in one day, we decided on a 16 mile trek with the option to do a 4 mile add-on to the top of Half-Dome. Steph was actually all about this thing and woke up at 5 am in the pitch dark and 34 degree temperatures to get ready. We hit the trail at 5 til 6 and were off. Other than Steph wheezing as we went up the first hill, we made really good time and made it the 10 miles to the Half-Dome trail by about 10:30am. Since it was only 2 miles each way from here, how could we not do it? Turns out, there is 1800 feet elevation gain in those 2 miles, and the last bit you literally pull yourself up an extremely steep, bald granite face with a big steel cable. Not only this, but it is also an extremely popular day hike. We had to sit and wait for a few minutes at the steepest part of the slope - not a good place for a traffic jam. It ended up taking us about 3 and a half hours to make it up there and back, which gave us about 3 hours to make it the last 6.2 miles to the valley floor so we could catch the one and only shuttle back up to our car. This seems easy since it was all downhill, but after about 10 miles of it, even downhill can be pretty hard. By the time we got to the bottom we were hurting all over and of course had run out of water. Still, we made it all 20 miles in about 10 hours total. If we weren't so tired and sore we might have gone and rubbed it in that ranger's face. Needless to say we went to bed early that night.

We got up this morning and were so sore and tired that we basically packed up and took the quickest route to our hotel about 3 hours away in Tulare, CA. Yosemite was beautiful and we hadn't gotten to see much from the valley floor, but you just can't get in between Steph and a hot shower after she'd hiked 20 miles the day before. Tomorrow we'll drive up to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to check out some big trees. We don't plan to do much hiking. We have a hotel room tomorrow night too, so we should get consecutive posts for once. All pictures are uploaded to Picassa.