Yosemite National Park ~ Wednesday, June 1, 2011

On the first day of June, 2011, we trekked to Yosemite National Park. Scott who reads a lot, had for years thought that Yosemite was pronounced Yosahmight, with the 'o' being a long vowel. He didn't know it was different and as we began to talk about visiting Yosemite before coming to California, he thought that was a different park than the Yosahmight one he had read about. He has been good-natured about the teasing, so in our house, we call it Yosemite and occasionally call it Yosahmight just for fun.
It was quite a drive, about 3.5 hours. We left the house around 5:20 am with bright daylight and arrived home last night at 10:45 pm. A long day, but a fun one. Scott is taking a writing class from Beth Hempton (http://www.classesbybeth.com/) and he has been doing pretty well keeping up with his assignments using Jeff's computer. He had one due on Yosemite day and had been working on it over the weekend quite a bit. However, Tuesday, Jeff had his computer with him in Sacremento all day (he had meetings with Cal-Trans, the CA DOT) and Scott did not get finished on Tues. night. So, on the way to Yosemite he worked on his paper amidst many curvy roads. It's a good thing he doesn't get car-sick. We did not have internet connection most of the day so he couldn't send it in until last night but we were all so exhausted that the editing and sending had to be done today (Thursday).
About as soon as we got into the park, we saw this brown bear on the side of the road. We are unsure exactly what kind of bear this is though, because later, we heard that only black bears live here. Huh?? Several diffferent rangers mentioned this. We're still wondering about this.

The famous Yosemite Falls. We took a short hike to the lower falls.

Yosemite Falls from a distance.

Riding the shuttle from the parking lot to the visitor's center which was not too crowded. By lunchtime though, the park was very crowded.

Walking back down from the falls.

More pictures of the lower falls.

Jeff and I with our little bundle of joy who is all bundled. The "high" in Yosemite today was 55 degrees.

Here you can see both the upper and lower falls but cannot see the third one unless you hike pretty far up.

Jackson loved these miniature stop signs, just his size.

Grassy meadows, now protected, where cars and people used to get stuck in the bog and camp out. Behind us is Half-Dome, a large granite monolith that climbers all over the world come to for a climbing challenge.

This little gal went through 4 sets of clothes during the day; it's a good thing we came prepared. Here she is in the middle of a change.

2 hikers we saw. They are carrying empty apple juice containers on their backs. We suppose they are using them for water.

Climbers on El Capitan; the world's largest granite monolith at 3,593 feet high. You can barely see these climbers and we used the furthest zoom lense on the camera that we had. The only way we could see them well was with binoculars.

In the southern part of the park, there is a huge amount of great sequoia trees. Here is an old one that army soldiers in the late 1800s used to ride their horses on.

Amazingly, this is a pine cone and seeds off of a great sequoia tree.

This particular tree, the California Tunnel Tree, has been driven through in years past.

The seed cone of a sugar pine.

2 deer cross our path.

At the pioneer center, we saw a whole barnful of different wagons used in this area. Here is the "Sprinter" wagon, known then as a "Matha". This 11-passenger one would have had to have been our transportation if we had lived in that time.

Mosquito spraying wagon; they did this back then too, just like today.