On Sunday, July 15 [2022], Bold Bison continued an epic journey from West Coast client to West Coast client by flying from San Diego to Washington State. Patrick would only be there four days, but I would be there for over a week and a half. Along with a bunch of adventures and a lot of good work, I ended the trip with a day at Olympic National Park, the park that Sean and I visited just second on this whole National Park odyssey.
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On Saturday, May 28, we broke camp at Hodgdon Meadow Campground after four nights in Yosemite National Park. It was time to return to Patrick’s apartment in Los Angeles, and then on to other adventures in Channel Islands National Park the next day. Saying goodbye to Yosemite for the second time, I knew it would not be the last time. But likely our next visit will be with our kids someday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In his engrossing Wilderness in National Parks: Playground or Preserve, John C. Miles, professor of environmental studies at Western Washington University, traces the history of wilderness protection in the parks from their earliest days to the book’s present, 2008.
The history of the National Parks and other protected lands in the United States is the story of continually evolving ideas about how and why natural and historical areas should be protected for the common good. At its noblest, it is an acknowledgement that the people, collectively, own and administer the wildest, most beautiful and most historically important areas in the nation. The hows and whys of acquiring and administering these places is intrinsically tied to the concept of land held for the common good.
Almost 150 years ago, on June 30, 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a bill granting scenic Yosemite Valley to the state of California to be held in the public interest as a park (eventually the valley would return to federal control as part of Yosemite National Park). Eight years later, when Congress moved to protect the geothermal features around the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in a region that lay in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho territories, there was no state to give the park to, so by default it became a national park. The concept of the national park was born out of necessity.
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.
