Yosemite Backpacking Trip
Holy shit that was an epic 21.4 mile journey. :)
Okay, so this was my first time ever backpacking. I had to buy a shit ton of gear, so I spent the last 3 weeks searching for cheap equipment that would be decent enough to work. The trip was made in order to hike Half Dome, which is one of the most hiked mountains in the United States. In order to get to the top, you have to climb over 400 feet of extreme steepness on slippery granite, aided by these two cable lines that are stuck into the ground via metal poles and wood. Anyway, now that I have explained the goal of the trip, I shall go into the details.
Wednesday night at 10pm we leave for the 350+ mile journey to Yosemite. Sheldon drove the whole way, which meant I was able to sleep in the car, sort of. I got maybe 2 hours of sleep. The drive there is pretty insane. Once we passed Fresno, there are mountain roads the rest of the way. The first part is a highway, so it isn't too bad, but then once we actually entered Yosemite, there are 35 miles of slow mountain roads. As soon as we get there, we see a brilliant sign: "Road Work Ahead, Next 28 miles." At this point it is about 4am in the morning. We approach this dude who is holding a stop sign in the middle of the road. He informs us that only one lane is open, and that we have to wait another 25 minutes to pass. So then we stop and chill for a half hour, and then are led by a "pilot car" slowly through the road in the left lane. As we drive, the sun is starting to rise, and it is 6 am by the time we actually get to the valley.
At this point, our goal is to get Wilderness Permits. In order to stay overnight in Yosemite, you need these permits. Typically, you are supposed to reserve them 3+ months in advance, but of course we just planned this trip a few weeks prior, so we did not have them. Luckily, they hold a few passes for people who come in person and wait in line. So we find our way over to the wilderness permit place, and wait in line for it to open at 8am (we got there first!). They sell permits a day in advance, so we were planning to pick up permits for Friday, but they still had leftovers from the day before, so we were able to get a permit that started Thursday. We had reserved a campground in the valley, but cancelled it so that we could start our hike up to Little Yosemite Valley. After cleaning Sheldon's car out so that a bear wouldn't rip open the door and eat everything in sight, we started our hike with almost no sleep and 35 pound packs.
We took the Mist Trail up to Little Yosemite Valley. At about four miles, this is the shorter, but much steeper option to Little Yosemite Valley. This was by far the most difficult section of the trip for me (with the exception of the cables), and my shoulders still hurt thinking about lugging that pack (only a little weight is supposed to rest on your shoulders with these packs, but for some reason I couldn't get my pack to sit right). The Mist trail passes two waterfalls, Vernal falls and Nevada falls. Between these two waterfalls are stairs carved into the granite. Miles of stairs. I would not be surprised if there were one or two thousand of the fucking stairs, it was ridiculous. Eventually we made it up, and then hiked about half a mile to our campground.
The campground was beautiful, surrounded by hundreds of huge trees, with tall mountains on all sides. We set up camp and went to a close by river to refill our water. By this time, it was only about 3 or 4, but we were all exhausted. We hung out for a few hours, and cooked dinner with Sheldon's portable stove. We then slept around 630, right after I thoroughly destroyed Sheldon and Parker at Egyptian :)
Friday we woke up around 6 to start our journey to Half Dome (a great adventure to spend my 21st birthday doing :)). We went to get more water, and then headed off to the trailhead, which we got to around 735am. The hike to the base of the subdome wasn't too bad at all. Had some steep parts, but was mostly pretty easy. This early, the trail was pretty empty, since many hikers do the whole thing in one day, and start out early from the beginning of the Mist Trail. On our way, we passed a couple hikers who said they saw a bear (though we didn't see any during the whole trip). We also passed a pair of guys who were already coming down off Half Dome. They apparently hiked up starting at 1am in order to get to the top to see the sunrise o.O Once we got to the base of the subdome, there was a ranger to take our tickets (you need one on weekends, since otherwise it gets ridiculously crowded with 200 people on the cables at once some times). The way up to Half Dome from here was more stairs, similar to the Mist Trail, and then a small portion right at the top where we had to climb up without a clear path.
We got to the base of Half Dome, where there were a huge pile of gloves. Leather gloves are basically a necessity on the cables, unless you enjoy having your hands ripped open. So lots of hikers leave their gloves behind for other people. I had brought some safety gear for the cables, a harness with carabiners to attach to the cables. Maybe 10% of people use a set up like this, and I really didn't need it, but safety is cool. The only down side though is that using the carabiners made the climb take FOREVER, since there are a ton of poles on the way up (maybe 50-75), and at each of them, I had to hook and unhook the carabiners. Sheldon and Parker finished in like 15 mins, while it took me closer to an hour. At first I was locking and unlocking the carabiners every time I took them off between poles. About 2/3s of the way up after being really exhausted from having to contort myself in strange positions to fumble with the carabiners, I gave up on locking them, and just hooked and unhooked them. Almost definitely safe enough, and was so much easier. At the top, the view was amazing. There were maybe 10 people up there at the time. Half Dome is by far not the highest point in Yosemite, but it is higher than all the ones close by, so the view is amazing, and you can see for miles in every direction, including the multiple mile drop off of some of the sides. After eating lunch up here and calling a few people, we made our way down. Going down the cables was much easier and much more fun than going up. Partly cause I now wasn't locking the carabiners, and partially because it is a lot less work going down. I was terrified of going down before I did it, but actually doing it, it wasn't that bad. Sheldon and Parker went down backwards, but I thought it would be easier to go down facing forwards, so I did. At many points, my feet slid a bit, but holding on to the cables made that more or less irrelevant. Since it was almost noon at this point, the cables were starting to get a bit more crowded, so I had to pass maybe 20 people on the way down. One girl was freaking out massively on her way up, and asked me if it was worth it. I tried to reassure her a bit, but it was hard XD This other dude was climbing down on the outside of the cables, explaining how he was safe because of his really good grip. This dude had previously freaked out on the way up, so yeah, it was amusing because he's one of those egotistical manly men who is the type of person who dies on Half Dome o.O. Speaking of that, an average of maybe one person every year or two dies on half dome who climb the cable route (out of about 55,000 a year). Most of these are from people who do it in bad weather after being advised against it, or do dumb things like this guy, climbing on the outside of the cables :| From here, we made our way back to our camp, stopping at a small stream to fill up on water again. Some time on the way back, I tore the skin on one of my toes open, which then proceeded to rub against the inside of my shoe for the rest of the trip, blah.
This is the side of half dome I climbed. If you look closely, you can see a few people on the cables ^^
As soon as we got back, rain started. Rain while camping sucks, we basically just had to chill in our tents and wait for it to pass, which was lame because we were going to explore some. But at least we weren't doing Half Dome while it was raining, that would have sucked and been way more scary. After a few hours, the rain subsided. We ate dinner and hung out with like 15 people around one of the campfires, and chilled there for a few hours. There was one woman there who we had talked to a bit on top of half dome. Somehow, the conversation turned to him joking about how I should sleep with this woman because she has a new tent and lots of nice things, and she was like "Ha, he is young enough to be my son." I found this pretty amusing :P Around 930 we went to sleep (although it felt SO LATE).
At around 6 I woke up, and it was fucking freezing. And for like two hours I just sat around being cold, cause Sheldon and Parker were too tired to do anything and wanted to sleep more. At this point we spent a long time discussing what to do for a day. The things we considered were going to Cloud's Rest, but we decided not too when we realized it was over 1000 ft higher than Half Dome, and 12 miles round trip. All of the other interesting places to go were pretty far too, and we couldn't set up camp in the wilderness because we didn't have bear canisters (the campground we stayed at had bear lockers to protect the food). We thought about camping in Yosemite Valley, but knew that most likely there would not be an opening. Anyway, we decided that we would start by doing some off trail exploring. We wanted to find this place called Lost Lake about a mile away. Going off trail in Yosemite is a real challenge. The floor is covered in fallen trees of different sizes, and a lot of the area was marshy or otherwise muddy from the rain. Eventually we found our way there, but the lake was currently non existent. In its place was just a large marsh, but it was still very beautiful, and is directly under Half Dome. Next, we decided to climb up Mt Brodrick, which was right nearby. We went up about 2/3s of the way, which was just a gently slant, and filled up water from the rainwater that had gathered in a small pool up there. Sheldon decided to keep on going to the top, cause he was able to find a relatively not difficult way to do it. Parker and I stayed below while he did this.
Afterwards, we made our way back through the wilderness to our camp. We decided to head back down to Yosemite Valley and figure things out from there. As we were packing our stuff up, it started to rain a bit, but it stopped shortly after. We planned on taking the John Muir trail back down, since it was less steep, though longer, and just because it was something different. So we got about a mile and a half down the 5 mile trail with our heavy packs, when really dark clouds start to roll in. It fucking starts hailing, and we are being pelted for quite a while. Then add in some thunderstorms for good measure. In all my infinite wisdom, I did not prepare well for rain, having neither a poncho nor a water resistant jacket. Luckily Parker let me use his farmer's hat, which he found in the glove pile at the base of Half Dome, so I was protected to that extent. The 3.5 miles down was wet and very tricky. The ground was slippery, and the trail was much harder to navigate since there were giant puddles everywhere and a stream of flowing water going through most of the trail. At one point, we had to take a shortcut down one of the switchbacks, since a group of 5 mules had freaked out from the storm and refused to move. Eventually we got back to the bottom, and finally made it back to the car, where I still had to sit in my drenched clothes for a while.
Two hours later, we made it to Fresno where we got Chipotle, changed into dry clothes, and then life was a lot better :P We definitely weren't going to try to find a place to camp in Yosemite, because setting up camp in a thunderstorm would be a pain. I tried to convince Sheldon that we should find a random motel and then do a day hike somewhere between there at OC in the morning, but he wanted to go home, so we ended up doing that. It didn't matter much though, since we had quite an epic adventure already. :) We got home around midnight, and now I get to catch up on the school I missed and spend time cleaning all the dirt and mud off of my stuff. Fun times.
Now I just want to explore more of the world :) Come join me!
Okay, so this was my first time ever backpacking. I had to buy a shit ton of gear, so I spent the last 3 weeks searching for cheap equipment that would be decent enough to work. The trip was made in order to hike Half Dome, which is one of the most hiked mountains in the United States. In order to get to the top, you have to climb over 400 feet of extreme steepness on slippery granite, aided by these two cable lines that are stuck into the ground via metal poles and wood. Anyway, now that I have explained the goal of the trip, I shall go into the details.
Wednesday night at 10pm we leave for the 350+ mile journey to Yosemite. Sheldon drove the whole way, which meant I was able to sleep in the car, sort of. I got maybe 2 hours of sleep. The drive there is pretty insane. Once we passed Fresno, there are mountain roads the rest of the way. The first part is a highway, so it isn't too bad, but then once we actually entered Yosemite, there are 35 miles of slow mountain roads. As soon as we get there, we see a brilliant sign: "Road Work Ahead, Next 28 miles." At this point it is about 4am in the morning. We approach this dude who is holding a stop sign in the middle of the road. He informs us that only one lane is open, and that we have to wait another 25 minutes to pass. So then we stop and chill for a half hour, and then are led by a "pilot car" slowly through the road in the left lane. As we drive, the sun is starting to rise, and it is 6 am by the time we actually get to the valley.
At this point, our goal is to get Wilderness Permits. In order to stay overnight in Yosemite, you need these permits. Typically, you are supposed to reserve them 3+ months in advance, but of course we just planned this trip a few weeks prior, so we did not have them. Luckily, they hold a few passes for people who come in person and wait in line. So we find our way over to the wilderness permit place, and wait in line for it to open at 8am (we got there first!). They sell permits a day in advance, so we were planning to pick up permits for Friday, but they still had leftovers from the day before, so we were able to get a permit that started Thursday. We had reserved a campground in the valley, but cancelled it so that we could start our hike up to Little Yosemite Valley. After cleaning Sheldon's car out so that a bear wouldn't rip open the door and eat everything in sight, we started our hike with almost no sleep and 35 pound packs.
We took the Mist Trail up to Little Yosemite Valley. At about four miles, this is the shorter, but much steeper option to Little Yosemite Valley. This was by far the most difficult section of the trip for me (with the exception of the cables), and my shoulders still hurt thinking about lugging that pack (only a little weight is supposed to rest on your shoulders with these packs, but for some reason I couldn't get my pack to sit right). The Mist trail passes two waterfalls, Vernal falls and Nevada falls. Between these two waterfalls are stairs carved into the granite. Miles of stairs. I would not be surprised if there were one or two thousand of the fucking stairs, it was ridiculous. Eventually we made it up, and then hiked about half a mile to our campground.
The campground was beautiful, surrounded by hundreds of huge trees, with tall mountains on all sides. We set up camp and went to a close by river to refill our water. By this time, it was only about 3 or 4, but we were all exhausted. We hung out for a few hours, and cooked dinner with Sheldon's portable stove. We then slept around 630, right after I thoroughly destroyed Sheldon and Parker at Egyptian :)
Friday we woke up around 6 to start our journey to Half Dome (a great adventure to spend my 21st birthday doing :)). We went to get more water, and then headed off to the trailhead, which we got to around 735am. The hike to the base of the subdome wasn't too bad at all. Had some steep parts, but was mostly pretty easy. This early, the trail was pretty empty, since many hikers do the whole thing in one day, and start out early from the beginning of the Mist Trail. On our way, we passed a couple hikers who said they saw a bear (though we didn't see any during the whole trip). We also passed a pair of guys who were already coming down off Half Dome. They apparently hiked up starting at 1am in order to get to the top to see the sunrise o.O Once we got to the base of the subdome, there was a ranger to take our tickets (you need one on weekends, since otherwise it gets ridiculously crowded with 200 people on the cables at once some times). The way up to Half Dome from here was more stairs, similar to the Mist Trail, and then a small portion right at the top where we had to climb up without a clear path.
We got to the base of Half Dome, where there were a huge pile of gloves. Leather gloves are basically a necessity on the cables, unless you enjoy having your hands ripped open. So lots of hikers leave their gloves behind for other people. I had brought some safety gear for the cables, a harness with carabiners to attach to the cables. Maybe 10% of people use a set up like this, and I really didn't need it, but safety is cool. The only down side though is that using the carabiners made the climb take FOREVER, since there are a ton of poles on the way up (maybe 50-75), and at each of them, I had to hook and unhook the carabiners. Sheldon and Parker finished in like 15 mins, while it took me closer to an hour. At first I was locking and unlocking the carabiners every time I took them off between poles. About 2/3s of the way up after being really exhausted from having to contort myself in strange positions to fumble with the carabiners, I gave up on locking them, and just hooked and unhooked them. Almost definitely safe enough, and was so much easier. At the top, the view was amazing. There were maybe 10 people up there at the time. Half Dome is by far not the highest point in Yosemite, but it is higher than all the ones close by, so the view is amazing, and you can see for miles in every direction, including the multiple mile drop off of some of the sides. After eating lunch up here and calling a few people, we made our way down. Going down the cables was much easier and much more fun than going up. Partly cause I now wasn't locking the carabiners, and partially because it is a lot less work going down. I was terrified of going down before I did it, but actually doing it, it wasn't that bad. Sheldon and Parker went down backwards, but I thought it would be easier to go down facing forwards, so I did. At many points, my feet slid a bit, but holding on to the cables made that more or less irrelevant. Since it was almost noon at this point, the cables were starting to get a bit more crowded, so I had to pass maybe 20 people on the way down. One girl was freaking out massively on her way up, and asked me if it was worth it. I tried to reassure her a bit, but it was hard XD This other dude was climbing down on the outside of the cables, explaining how he was safe because of his really good grip. This dude had previously freaked out on the way up, so yeah, it was amusing because he's one of those egotistical manly men who is the type of person who dies on Half Dome o.O. Speaking of that, an average of maybe one person every year or two dies on half dome who climb the cable route (out of about 55,000 a year). Most of these are from people who do it in bad weather after being advised against it, or do dumb things like this guy, climbing on the outside of the cables :| From here, we made our way back to our camp, stopping at a small stream to fill up on water again. Some time on the way back, I tore the skin on one of my toes open, which then proceeded to rub against the inside of my shoe for the rest of the trip, blah.
This is the side of half dome I climbed. If you look closely, you can see a few people on the cables ^^
As soon as we got back, rain started. Rain while camping sucks, we basically just had to chill in our tents and wait for it to pass, which was lame because we were going to explore some. But at least we weren't doing Half Dome while it was raining, that would have sucked and been way more scary. After a few hours, the rain subsided. We ate dinner and hung out with like 15 people around one of the campfires, and chilled there for a few hours. There was one woman there who we had talked to a bit on top of half dome. Somehow, the conversation turned to him joking about how I should sleep with this woman because she has a new tent and lots of nice things, and she was like "Ha, he is young enough to be my son." I found this pretty amusing :P Around 930 we went to sleep (although it felt SO LATE).
At around 6 I woke up, and it was fucking freezing. And for like two hours I just sat around being cold, cause Sheldon and Parker were too tired to do anything and wanted to sleep more. At this point we spent a long time discussing what to do for a day. The things we considered were going to Cloud's Rest, but we decided not too when we realized it was over 1000 ft higher than Half Dome, and 12 miles round trip. All of the other interesting places to go were pretty far too, and we couldn't set up camp in the wilderness because we didn't have bear canisters (the campground we stayed at had bear lockers to protect the food). We thought about camping in Yosemite Valley, but knew that most likely there would not be an opening. Anyway, we decided that we would start by doing some off trail exploring. We wanted to find this place called Lost Lake about a mile away. Going off trail in Yosemite is a real challenge. The floor is covered in fallen trees of different sizes, and a lot of the area was marshy or otherwise muddy from the rain. Eventually we found our way there, but the lake was currently non existent. In its place was just a large marsh, but it was still very beautiful, and is directly under Half Dome. Next, we decided to climb up Mt Brodrick, which was right nearby. We went up about 2/3s of the way, which was just a gently slant, and filled up water from the rainwater that had gathered in a small pool up there. Sheldon decided to keep on going to the top, cause he was able to find a relatively not difficult way to do it. Parker and I stayed below while he did this.
Afterwards, we made our way back through the wilderness to our camp. We decided to head back down to Yosemite Valley and figure things out from there. As we were packing our stuff up, it started to rain a bit, but it stopped shortly after. We planned on taking the John Muir trail back down, since it was less steep, though longer, and just because it was something different. So we got about a mile and a half down the 5 mile trail with our heavy packs, when really dark clouds start to roll in. It fucking starts hailing, and we are being pelted for quite a while. Then add in some thunderstorms for good measure. In all my infinite wisdom, I did not prepare well for rain, having neither a poncho nor a water resistant jacket. Luckily Parker let me use his farmer's hat, which he found in the glove pile at the base of Half Dome, so I was protected to that extent. The 3.5 miles down was wet and very tricky. The ground was slippery, and the trail was much harder to navigate since there were giant puddles everywhere and a stream of flowing water going through most of the trail. At one point, we had to take a shortcut down one of the switchbacks, since a group of 5 mules had freaked out from the storm and refused to move. Eventually we got back to the bottom, and finally made it back to the car, where I still had to sit in my drenched clothes for a while.
Two hours later, we made it to Fresno where we got Chipotle, changed into dry clothes, and then life was a lot better :P We definitely weren't going to try to find a place to camp in Yosemite, because setting up camp in a thunderstorm would be a pain. I tried to convince Sheldon that we should find a random motel and then do a day hike somewhere between there at OC in the morning, but he wanted to go home, so we ended up doing that. It didn't matter much though, since we had quite an epic adventure already. :) We got home around midnight, and now I get to catch up on the school I missed and spend time cleaning all the dirt and mud off of my stuff. Fun times.
Now I just want to explore more of the world :) Come join me!