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11th Oct 2005
Yosemite
Tuesday, 11th October, 2005
Well it all starts to happen here at 6 o’clock and this morning it was with a piercing scream from one of our fellow campers … not sure what it was about but while much shorter than a car alarm, it had the same effect. Everyone is awake but no ones clapping.
We went down to the dining hall at Curry and the place was mobbed. Hundreds of people, mainly school children, queuing for their breakfast, interspersed with various crusty climbers who were keeping them in check in no uncertain terms. It was pretty clear pretty quickly that it was shape up or starve and the old rucking and mauling instincts soon kicked in until I had harvested a plateful from the dwindling supplies.
On the way back from the hall, the sun had begun to bathe the far side of the valley in light and the huge shaded cliff above us had a halo along its edge.
We set off fairly sharp and parked near Yosemite Village. From there we walked down to the Ansel Adams Gallery. Some quite nice books in stock and three of Adams’ original prints (at about $15,000 each!). Along to check out the Ahwahnee; its great stone and wooden structure set deep in woodland. Inside the rooms are large, very square and it has nothing of the character of say the McDonald Lake Hotel up at Glacier, though it is probably a lot smarter. A very quiet atmosphere inside with various people sitting quietly on the sofas, reading the newspapers … or a few of them working on laptops … (although there was no internet hook-up)
We drove along to what would have been Yosemite Falls, had it been falling and hiked around the trail – nothing too strenuous … probably a couple of miles or so. Past the falls and on the return leg, there was a little bit of interp featuring a picture of some people on a a Sierra Club outing from the 1940s, who were tracing an excavated mill laide. In the interim the track had been lost … it seemed slightly carelessly, as this should have been retained somewhere in living memory but from the shape of some fissures in a rock behind one of the people and a cursory look around, it was possible to re-take the image from nearby. This was the laide feeding a mill where John Muir worked for a couple of years as a woodcutter. It was his introduction to the area. Later on the trail was the site of the cabin he lived in at the time; no trace on the ground, and no photographic evidence of its remains forthcoming, so one has to rely on the plaque.
Along the road we parked beneath to towering El Capitan; 300 foot on near vertical granite and (very) careful scrutiny with binoculars revealed the climbers on various routes, each hauling their massive sacks of gear up behind them.
Anne had a hankering to touch the bottom of the wall and I had a hankering to avoid getting any rocks on my head from above, but anyway we took the short hike into the base of El Cap. A hot place with a good view back across the valley.
We also stopped for sometime at The Valley View; its just a roadside pull-off, but affords the most spectacular angle on the valley’s main features, there is also a marker nearby which shows the level of the floodwater of 1997 – a good 8 or 9 foot above the road suface and probably 15 above the present water level. It must have been a spectacular event.
By now the afternoon was drawing in a bit and we set off for Glacier point, by road, stopping at various locations on the way to photograph odd trees – particularly some large redwoods with a lime green lichen all up their trunks and arrived at Glacier at about 5.
I hadn’t realised but at Glacier Point you are directly above Camp Curry and literally lean over the railings and look straight down at the tent – I reversed the view when we got back down. Its at a height of about 8000 feet and was full of various people with exactly the same idea of watching, or recording the sunset. The breeze was starting up and as the valley filled with shadow and the shadow line gradually crept up Half Dome it became quite cold. There was one guy who had a massive pair of binoculars set up on a tripod and was watching the climbers. Two thirds of the way up, impossible to pick-up with the naked eye and only just possible through our own binoculars, a small team were working their way up the face.
One classic conversation took place within earshot; Man with binoculars happened to mention that someone had died on Half dome a couple of weeks before.
'Oh," says lady. "How did he die".
Man looks at her slightly sceptically (which is pretty advanced for an American!) ... "Well, I'm not sure, he probably slipped and wasn't roped on properly ..."
"Yes, but how did he die?"
"Well, perhaps he hit hiss head when he slipped and couldn't hold on".
"Oh" she says, the solution dawning "he hit his head". The fact that he then fell 1500 feet didn't seem to have been a factor in her mind. Staggering.
We waited while the face deepened in colour then faded to pink and finally to an eerie grey … rattling of film and pixels all the way. Its about an hours drive back down in to the valley and it was obviously completed in darkness. We stopped off at the Ahwahnee for a bar supper; not brilliant. It was OK but really lacked atmosphere, Anne had some form of crab cake and I had a turkey wrap – not much different to those you buy in Tescos … but 5 times the price.
Back at the camp and after a repeat performance of the car alarm trick … though slightly earlier and this time with my wife in attandance (which didn’t really help matters at all. In fact her first response was to run off leaving me to quell the situation once again!). After this incident, I took the batteries out of the remote key fob just to be on the safe side.
It was really good to be able to lie in bed an hour or so later and be able to tut-tut two separate car alarms, though the first time, we did faintly worry that it might have been ours.
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