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As They Are: Exploring the National Parks

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Yosemite National Park: In the Valley

Bridalveil Fall

Sean and I were back in Yosemite Valley around 3:30pm on Friday, May 27. We decided to see out the afternoon by going to the Valley Visitor Center and then taking a walk. My hope when planning the trip was that we’d spend one full day in the valley, perhaps parking the Jeep at Bridalveil Fall and then walking the trails all the way as far as Mirror Lake. That and any hikes up from the valley floor, such as Yosemite Falls Trail or the Mist Trail, were victims of Sean’s lingering cold. But he had been a trooper throughout the trip, and the late May weather was glorious, so we sallied forth to see something beautiful.

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Yosemite National Park: Tioga Road

Pothole Dome and Tuolumne Meadows

It was the morning of Friday, May 27, and the National Park Service had reopened the Tioga Road through the Yosemite High Sierra. The road had originally opened for the season the week before, but a storm front that had passed through over the previous weekend had forced its closure. As the week had advanced, we’d waited for it to reopen. And then on our final full day in the Park, it did.

There was no question but that we would do a scenic drive along the Tioga Road. When I had been to Yosemite as a youth in July 1993, the northern part of the Park, including the famous road, had been closed because of a manhunt for an escaped convict. And with the delay in reopening the road, I’d almost missed seeing it again. But soon we were in the Jeep and ready for one of the most famous auto routes of the National Park system.

Image: Sean M. Santos

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Yosemite National Park: The Mountains of California

Gray’s Lupine

Go where you may within the bounds of California, mountains are ever in sight, charming and glorifying every landscape.

– John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894)

Along Big Oak Flat Road on May 26, after our day above the south rim of Yosemite Valley, we stopped to have a look at the wildflowers. The area the road passed through had burned in the late August/early September 2009 Big Meadows Fire. The fire, which began as a prescribed burn, escaped and burned 7,425 acres of mid-elevation forest west and north of Yosemite Valley.

In the seven years since the area was burned, a robust chaparral ecosystem has replaced what had been pine forest. The upshot is that this western section of Yosemite National Park, even at an elevation around 5,000 feet, feels like “California,” like the chaparral of Los Angeles or elsewhere in the state. There may be many high-elevation plant species that are the same as those found in the Rockies or the Cascades or Alaska even, but this chaparral was a reminder that Yosemite National Park is a California park and that these are the mountains of California.

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Yosemite National Park: Taft Point

Taft Point, Yosemite Valley, the Merced River, and El Capitan

We completed our hike to and from Sentinel Dome at about 3:15pm on Thursday, May 26 and immediately set off on a hike to Taft Point. Like the Sentinel Dome Trail, the trail to Taft Point was only 1.1 miles one way from the parking area. Unlike the route to Sentinel Dome, however, this trail descended about 320 to Taft Point. All told, between the two hikes, we covered 4.4 miles and a vertical rise of 860 feet. Not bad, particularly with Sean still feeling under the weather.

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Yosemite National Park: Sentinel Dome

Sentinel Dome

After our visit to Glacier Point and a bit of lunch, we decided to spend the afternoon of Thursday, May 26 doing some hiking on trails along Glacier Point Road south of the Yosemite Valley rim. Our first destination was the trail to the top of Sentinel Dome, at 8,211 feet the highest overlook on the Yosemite Valley rim save for Half Dome.

The top of Sentinel Dome is most easily reached by a 1.1-mile trail with a 460-feet vertical rise from the Taft Point/Sentinel Dome Trails parking area.

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Yosemite National Park: Washburn Point and Glacier Point

Half Dome and Clouds Rest

Thursday, May 26 dawned cool and bright in Hodgdon Meadow Campground. Sean was still fighting his cold, so we decided that instead of a long walk in Yosemite Valley, we would take the recommendation of our campground neighbors and drive up into the high country south of Yosemite Valley to one of the most famous vistas in the National Park system: Glacier Point.

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Yosemite National Park: Thunder, Hetch Hetchy, and John Muir

Hetch Hetchy Valley

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 25, after visiting Merced Grove, we drove Big Oak Flat Road to Yosemite Valley. Our intention was to get some lunch, check out the visitor center, and perhaps wait out the rain that was forecast.

To get to the valley, we had to drive most of the length of Big Oak Flat Road, which connected our campground (Hodgdon Meadow), Merced and Tuolumne Groves, Crane Flat, and Tioga Road to El Portal Road at the entrance to the valley. All told, we’d drive the length of Big Oak Flat Road some ten times while we were in Yosemite. (Vistas, overlooks, and patches of wildflowers along Big Oak Flat Road will be peppered throughout the Yosemite posts.)

Along Big Oak Flat Road

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Yosemite National Park: Merced Grove of Giant Sequoias

After breakfast on Wednesday, May 25, we climbed into the Jeep and drove the short distance from Hodgdon Meadow Campground to the trailhead for Merced Grove. Merced Grove is the smallest of the three Giant Sequoia groves in Yosemite National Park. The largest and most famous, Mariposa Grove, was closed for restoration until 2017 so we would be making our first acquaintance of the Giant Sequoias at Merced Grove. Happily, while Merced Grove has only about twenty mature Giant Sequoias (compared to Mariposa Grove’s five hundred), it is the least visited of the three and the most likely spot to have some seclusion among the big trees.

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Yosemite National Park: At Hodgdon Meadow Campground

Ponderosa Pine

After our first encounter with Yosemite Valley on the evening of Tuesday, May 24, we needed to chase the setting sun through occasional spits of rain northwest to Hodgdon Meadow Campground, where we would pitch our tent for the next four nights. Hodgdon Meadow, located some forty-five minutes from the valley off of Big Oak Flat Road, is in the vast portion of the Park beyond the frenzied hub of activity in Yosemite itself. It is also in what became a National Park over a decade and a half before the valley.

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Yosemite National Park: The Valley Where the National Parks Were Born

Yosemite Valley, from Tunnel View

No photograph or series of photographs, no paintings ever prepare a visitor so that he is not taken by surprise, for could the scenes be faithfully represented the visitor is affected not only by that upon which his eye is at any moment fixed, but by all that with which on every side it is associated, and of which it is seen only as an inherent part. For the same reason no description, no measurements, no comparisons are of much value. Indeed the attention called by these to points in some definite way remarkable, by fixing the mind on mere matters of wonder or curiosity prevent the true and far more extraordinary character of the scenery from being appreciated.

– Frederick Law Olmsted, A Preliminary Report on Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove, 1865

On June 30, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias to the state of California. This was the first time that a tract of land was set aside for the enjoyment of the people simply for its breathtaking scenery and the uniqueness of its natural features. This act and the two Supreme Court decisions over the next sixteen years that would uphold it and clarify its provisions established the legal precedent from which descended all federal and state parks in the United States as well as the export of the concept across the globe. Yellowstone became the first National Park eight years later only because the astonishing geothermal features of the Yellowstone River watershed were located in a territory and there wasn’t a state to grant the land to. Although the Yellowstone precedent ensured the enduring federal protection of land, Yosemite is the birthplace of the National Parks.

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Yosemite National Park: Through Los Angeles to the Sierra Nevada

After a gruelingly stressful month or so for each of us, on Friday, May 20, Sean and I bid our cat Elsa goodbye and hopped in an Uber Taxi to Chicago O’Hare International Airport. We were more than ready for eleven days in California.

We arrived two and a half hours early for our 9:15am flight because the TSA lines at O’Hare had been so bad in the previous week that they’d made the national news. Turns out we needn’t have worried. From the time we got in line until the time I had retied my boots was a cool sixteen minutes. A local news crew was there filming the lack of lines at security.

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Yosemite National Park: Planning

Mount Watkins (left), Tenaya Canyon, and Half Dome, seen from Sentinel Dome

By the time Sean and I launched our National Parks adventure in 2011, we had driven through Cuyahoga Valley together and he had previously visited one Park (Dry Tortugas) and I had visited four (Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Shenandoah, and Badlands). In the intervening years, Sean had picked up Badlands during our 2014 trip to the Dakotas.

When he asked what I wanted to do for the National Park Service’s 2016 Centennial, I said that I wanted to catch up and calibrate so that by the time the year ended we’d both have been to the same Parks. No longer would we have to say, “I’ve been to eleven and he’s been to nine” or some such. Focusing on the four catch-ups and adding on some logical companion Parks as we went meant visiting eight Parks in 2016, ending the year at a twenty-two Park total, not bad for the first five years of the sixteen-year journey.

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Pinnacles National Park: Species List

California Quail

For a short visit to a relatively small park, our weekend camping trip to Pinnacles National Park afforded Sean and me with ample opportunities to see wildlife, from the endangered California Condor to many other, more abundant species. As I’ve written before, the park is a jewel for its scenery certainly, but also for its wildlife. I’ve spent quite a lot of time since we returned from the trip identifying species (particularly the birds) from photos we captured or notes we made. Obviously we saw more species than what’s listed here (with a nod to butterflies and other insects), but I’m pretty confident of the accuracy of what is on this list.

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Pinnacles National Park: South Wilderness Trail

It was Sunday morning, June 2. Sean and I were booked on a flight home to Chicago from San Jose at 1:55 that afternoon, but now, at not quite 7am, we were ready for our final hike at Pinnacles National Park: South Wilderness Trail.

South Wilderness Trail is 3.25 miles one-way with little to no elevation gain. It follows Chalone Creek south from a junction with Bench Trail not far from the Pinnacles Campground. Ironically given its name, it does not actually pass through much of the park’s federal wilderness area as designated by the Wilderness Act. The trail, although relatively easy to follow, is less maintained than many of the other trails in the park.
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Pinnacles National Park: At Camp, Part Two

Tule Bluet Damselfly

After our long morning hike on Saturday (June 1), we were back at our campsite by early afternoon. We lunched on tortillas filled with peanut butter and potato chips. We were considering an evening walk, but for the afternoon, we decided it was time to relax in the campground, particularly since it was so hot. (We’d learn later that it hit 104 degrees in the park that afternoon.)
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Pinnacles National Park: Condor Gulch Trail

California Condor

For our Saturday (June 1) hike, we wanted to explore the Pinnacles formations from the east side of the park. The logical choice was to hike to at least the overlook on Condor Gulch Trail. Several options presented themselves to us: we could drive to the trailhead or we could hike there from the campground. We could do the trail as an out-and-back or we could link it to other trails as a grand loop. Ultimately, we decided to hike to and from our campsite, linking Bench Trail, Bear Gulch Trail, Condor Gulch Trail, and High Peaks Trail into a marvelous 8.8 mile hike with a 1,350 foot elevation gain.

We set out around 7:45am on Bench Trail, which connects the campground to all the other trails in the park. The first section of Bench Trail followed both Sandy Creek and the park road into the heart of the park, passing by grasslands in various stages of restoration.

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Pinnacles National Park: At Camp

It was Friday afternoon, May 31. We’d finished our hike into the High Peaks at about 1:45. Now we needed to drive around the south end of the Gabilan mountains to the park’s east entrance in order to reach Pinnacles Campground.

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Pinnacles National Park: High Peaks

After the delight of Balconies Trail, we were ready for more hiking. This time we’d head up into the heart of the Pinnacles formations. The Juniper Canyon Loop is a 4.3-mile hike with an elevation gain of 1,215 feet. For the first half-mile traveling south, the trail climbs gradually through riparian woodlands in Juniper Canyon. Then it climbs steeply in a series of switchbacks, eventually ending at the High Peaks Trail. The High Peaks Trail winds through the formations themselves before the Tunnel Trail leads back to Juniper Canyon for the descent.

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Pinnacles National Park: Balconies Trail

Balconies Trail, a 2.4-mile loop with an elevation gain of 200 feet, is a perfect introduction to Pinnacles National Park. From the oak savanna near the parking lot, it winds through chaparral areas before entering a canyon carved by the West Fork Chalone Creek. The trail climbs in a series of switchbacks up the lower part of the Balconies cliffs before looping around and passing through Balconies Cave. The relatively short trail passes through three (arguably four) of the five habitats in the park. It offers sweeping vistas, great bird watching, and a scramble through a talus cave.

We always intended our visit to Balconies Cave to be the first item on our to-do list at Pinnacles, preferably as early as possible on Friday so that there would be relatively few other visitors.
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Pinnacles National Park: Flying to the Mountains

It was storming intermittently in Chicago on the evening of Thursday, May 30. Our flight to San Jose was delayed 1.5 hours, so we sat at O’Hare munching on Frontera Tortas and watching the other passengers get increasingly anxious.
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Pinnacles National Park: Planning

Pinnacles National Park is a jewel.

It was established as Pinnacles National Monument on January 16, 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt, only the twelfth National Monument created under the presidential powers conferred by the Antiquities Act of 1906. Originally, the monument only protected a little over 2,000 acres at the heart of the park, the pinnacles formations themselves. Since then, the monument has been expanded five times, once by congress and four times by executive order, as the ecological importance and recreational value of the areas adjacent to the monument were recognized. The most recent expansion was in January 2000, by executive order of President Clinton as he left office, largely to preserve the watersheds of Pinnacles’ creeks and streams.

Pinnacles now comprises over 26,000 acres in the Gabilan Mountains of central California. In 1976, just under 13,000 acres at Pinnacles were set aside as federally-designated wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964. Because of the wilderness designation, California highway 146 does not bisect the park. In order to travel from one side of Pinnacles to the other, visitors must drive about 1.5 hours to the south of the mountains through King City in the Salinas Valley.
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Joshua Tree National Park: Hiking to 49 Palms Oasis

The access road to the 49 Palms Canyon Trail is directly off of the Twentynine Palms Highway. It is one of a cluster of park features that are accessed from the north via special roads and entrance stations.

The trail leads into a steep canyon to the 49 Palms Oasis, a natural oasis caused by water seeping up through the earth creating habitat for native California fan palms and other plant life. The hike is a three-mile roundtrip with a vertical change of about 350 feet.
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Joshua Tree National Park: Arch Rock and After

After our sunrise visit to Cholla Garden and Ocotillo Patch, we headed back up Pinto Basin Road through Wilson Canyon, leaving the Sonoran behind and climbing into the Mohave.

We pulled into White Tank Campground, trying to make our way slowly and quietly so as not to disturb the car campers. We parked at the trailhead for Arch Rock Nature Trail, a short, .3-mile trail through a spectacular jumble of formations.
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Joshua Tree National Park: Sunrise in the Sonoran Desert

Our alarms went off at 5:30am so that we could pull on clothes and hats and jackets (it was 46 degrees) for the 45-minute drive into the park to the Cholla Cactus Garden in Pinto Basin. Sunrise was at 6:48am, but we didn’t want to have to rush through the dark desert.

We turned off of Park Boulevard onto Pinto Basin Road, which was closed due to the wash out not much further than our destination. The road turned east, and we stopped at a pullout above Wilson Canyon as the first light hit the granite formations and flooded the sky beyond.

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Joshua Tree National Park: Sunset

From the beginning, the framework for our quick trip to Joshua Tree had been to watch the sunset in the Mohave Desert and sunrise in the Sonoran. We finished our walk through Hidden Valley at about 4pm, so we had a couple of hours to drive out to our motel, check in, and drive to Keys View in the Little San Bernardino Mountains before the sun set at 6:21pm.

Back in Joshua Tree, we turned east onto the Twentynine Palms Highway. About ten minutes later, we pulled into the Harmony Motel on the western outskirts of Twentynine Palms, California.

The motel’s tiny office is filled with U2 memorabilia since the band stayed at the Harmony while they were working on their 1987 album, The Joshua Tree. The motel’s current owner is Ash Maharaj, originally from South Africa, who purchased the motel seven years ago. In February 2011, she completed the restoration of the Harmony’s original sign, and her stated intention is to restore the entire motel.

As she showed us to our room, she warned us to be sure and shut the door behind us right away because it opened literally into the desert.

The Harmony Motel’s pool area.
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Joshua Tree National Park: In Hidden Valley

Hidden valley lies near the heart of the Mohave Desert section of Joshua Tree National Park. If a visitor had only a couple hours to spend in the park, the mile-long nature trail here would be a great choice.

The small “valley” is actually an area virtually surrounded by the park’s famous granite formations. It had been used in the previous century as a natural holding pen for rustled cattle, but in the months before Joshua Tree National Monument was established in 1936, longtime area resident, Bill Keys, dynamited an access path into the valley.

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Joshua Tree National Park: Going to the Desert

After flying to Orange County on Wednesday, a four-plus hour flight after work, we crashed with Aunt Judy and Uncle Tom, who had taken me to my first National Park over nineteen years earlier.

The weather forecasts for earlier and later in the week at Joshua Tree had called for daytime highs of 95 degrees, but the two days we planned to be the desert saw forecasted highs in the mid-70s and lows in low-50s. Although intellectually we’d been prepared for cooler than expected temperatures, we were still surprised that we were to have the same weather in Joshua Tree as at Isle Royale. It was all the more unusual considering that many of the campgrounds at the park, closed throughout the summer because of soaring temperatures, had just reopened for the season a week earlier.
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Joshua Tree National Park: Planning

Almost as soon as we arrived home from Isle Royale in August, we had to begin thinking about Joshua Tree National Park, which straddles the Mohave and Sonoran Deserts in southern California. Sean and I were invited to my youngest cousin’s wedding in Orange County in early October. My aunt and uncle’s house was only a two and a half-hour drive from Twentynine Palms, the gateway to Joshua Tree.

Although the wedding festivities would happen over the weekend we decided to fly out to Orange County on Wednesday evening, so that we could spend Thursday afternoon through Friday morning at the park.
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Next Up

Reservations secured.

The next park could hardly be further from the north woods of Isle Royale:

Joshua Tree National Park.

October.

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Yosemite National Park (1993)

A year after we visited the Grand Canyon, the same group of five (Aunt Judy, Uncle Tom, Jenny, Amy, and me) spent a weekend at Yosemite National Park. This time, happily, we were joined by my cousin, Andrew, and our Grandma.

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