Oh boy! Yosemite day one was a doozie! So many ups and downs! I have to preface this post. We left SeKi early so that we could get up to Yosemite and do some hiking before finding our campsite. Because we wanted to go early, we skipped breakfast and quickly packed the car, thinking we'd just grab something at a drive-thru on the way. Instead we found a Starbucks with free WiFi so we could download more books and music, and the boys ate at the Panda Express next door that opened for lunch at 10, so that ended up taking longer than it probably would have to have just had breakfast at the campground, cleaned up and then packed the car. Then we had to stop at the grocery store to restock on our supplies, but we had a hard time finding a grocery store in the part of Fresno where we stopped (we think the one we were looking for was closed down). Ultimately, we were quite delayed getting into the park. But there were still beautiful things to see, so we just went with it and our adventure started a little later! And now...for the highlights (and some major lowlights????). I guess every good adventure has to have some drama!
Yosemite Day-One Highlights (this one is going to be LONG!):
- Glacier Point!!! Oh my goodness! You are driving along a curvy, bendy, steep road, dodging huge shuttle buses that surely don't fit around those curves, and then there it is. It's like heaven opening and angels singing. What a view! It's absolutely amazing. Stunning! Awe-inspiring! Angel choirs sang in our heads frequently in Yosemite. I can only imagine John Muir stumbling upon this vista while rambling through the wilderness. He must have thought he had suddenly died and arrived in paradise.
- Final Sticker! Our last National Park sticker was placed on the Sears snail clam shell (the only clam shell that truly lives up to minivan worthiness). Also, I got my new favorite hat.
- Taft Point!! It was just a little 2.5 mile round-trip hike to see another stunning, angel-choir-singing view, as well as The Fissures. Yes, that would be fissures in the granite that had thousand-foot drops below. Don't fall in one of those! My job was to hold onto Tommy, Zac's was to hold onto Luke. The panorama from Taft Point was such a beautiful sight!
- THE DAMN STICK: Then, while walking back, my mom stepped on a stick in such a way that it flipped up, like stepping on the points of a rake causing the handle to whip up, but if this stick was a rake, it had a sharp part on the "handle" that stabbed right into her leg in the major vein leading to her foot. Apparently it didn't hurt that bad because she wasn't even fazed by it--as I watched it GUSH blood onto the ground in a puddle--literally gushing like a faucet!!! I am not being dramatic. I had to practically force my mom to look down at it because pain-wise it was "no big deal," and my dad was ahead, so I hollered for him to come help. He saw the wound and sprung into action. We got her settled on the ground with her leg elevated. My dad had tissues and an ice pack in his backpack, and using those, Josh's bandana for compression and raising her leg, we got the bleeding to slow and eventually stop. But OH MY GOSH! I couldn't believe it didn't hurt her more! My mom was totally cool, like she couldn't understand why we were making such a big deal of it...except for that her shoe was full of blood...and there was that puddle she had left on the ground.... Luke was distressed, Tommy was barely holding it together in his quietly stressed-out way, and, while trying to calm them down, all I could think about was how far from civilization we were. We were still about a mile from the parking lot, and, even at that point, so far from any real help. First things first, we had to get back to the car. We alternated a fireman carry with her hopping on her own, but the jarring from the hop made the bleeding start again. That's when we decided to send Ben running to the car for my dad's mega-first-aid kit for better supplies, and this really nice family hiked by and stopped to help us help her back to the parking lot. They had a college-aged son and the dad was not too much older than me, so they had better stamina than Zac plus me plus my dad. We all took turns carrying her out--with them taking longer turns. Speedy Ben quickly returned with the kit and we got her wound covered more securely. Slowly but surely we made it out to the car and thanked the family profusely for their help. At that point we decided to drive to Oakhurst for an Urgent Care. It was about an hour drive from where we were, but it was our best option.
- Brown Bear! We found a bright side to my mom getting stabbed by that stick: on the drive out of the park, we saw a brown bear looking for grubs in a meadow along the road. It had been Luke's one big hope--to see a bear in the wild, but not have one come visit us at our campground. If my mom hadn't been hurt, we would have been off that trail an hour earlier and that bear wouldn't have been having a twilight roadside dinner. Thanks, Nana! Sheesh.
- Closed?!? When we arrived in Oakhurst we drove to the Urgent Care clinic and...it was closed. Closed! What kind of Urgent Care closes at 6:30pm? "You can have an emergency, but please plan it between the hours of 7am and 6:30pm." It was a little after 7, and our options were to drive to Fresno or Merced to an ER or wait the night out and come back in the morning. My dad sat my mom at the picnic bench outside the clinic and took off the bandage to give the injury a good look and cleaning. At that point, the janitor from the clinic came out to the dumpster and, after filling him in on our situation, he suggested that if she could wait, she should come back when they opened in the morning rather than go to Fresno, where you could be waiting in the ER for hours and maybe be sent away if a gunshot wound came in (which apparently isn't a rare occurrence in Fresno). My dad and mom both felt she'd be OK, so we decided to just drive-thru for our dinner at Carl's Jr. and come back in the morning.
- Wait. It was the longest drive-thru ever. We were in that line for probably 25 minutes.
- Full Dark. By the time we were heading to our campsite it was nearly full dark. I programmed the address for the campground into my GPS and off we went.
- Completely LOST! To make a long, annoying, frustrating story shorter, the address I had for our campground was actually for the Bass Lake Camping Area Office--but I only realized that after returning to that location two times using two different GPS systems trying to find the right place. At the office, I took a picture of the map showing where our campground was and tried to follow the map, but the name of the road that was on the map was not its name at the turn we were supposed to take. The map showed "Sky Ranch Road" but at the turn it said "Road 237" or something like that. We had actually driven up that road once for a ways already, but it felt like we were going into the middle of nowhere and still didn't see Sky Ranch Road signs, so we turned around. I seriously did not know what we were going to do. There was no one to ask, nothing was open anymore.
- Kelty Meadows. Well, we finally decided to just take that road that felt like we were driving into the middle of nowhere and keep going to see if nowhere ended up being somewhere. And it turned out that driving to the middle of nowhere was indeed correct. Our campground was located there. In that middle. We drove along twisting, turning roads, through a burned section of forest that looked creepy in the night, not seeing a single car along the route, nor a person to ask if we were right in our direction, and towards the end, bumped along potholed dirt roads for miles--roads that felt even longer because of how slow we had to drive them. We had camp set up just before midnight and crashed into our beds, hoping that the bears wouldn't try to bust into the cars because we couldn't get even half of our stuff into the tiny bear boxes. Oh. And the camp host had the weekend off, so we weren't even sure we were in our assigned site. And I saw a million big fat spiders. And there were only smelly pit toilets. And I was worried about my mom. It was not awesome. I was not happy. I missed SeKi. And Adam, who keeps me centered when I am distressed.
- Good morning! But at least we discovered it was a beautiful campground when we woke up in the morning...the early morning...to the sound of cattle in the campground...that we thought were bears.
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| El Capitan on the left, Half Dome on the right. Nevada Fall above, Vernal Fall below. |
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| YNP joins Bryce, Cedar Breaks, Zion, King's Canyon, Sequoia and Seki--the last one! |
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| Fissures. |
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| It was fun finding these survey markers along the trails! |
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| Yosemite Falls in the background. |
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| The CUTEST! |
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| Our smiling wounded warrior. |
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| Yay!! |
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| Kelty Mdw at the top of the photo was our destination. |
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| Camping in the middle of nowhere as seen on the GPS. |
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