Yosemite Part 1

Another exciting experience to share...another trip report. All junta who claim my posts are too long, I might as well warn you, this is one of "those". Ok, let's start at the very beginning. As you may have guessed by now, there is an ultra-enthu gumbal (gumbal=gang) here and we spend our time planning weekends and executing those plans! This weekend was Destination Yosemite. For the uninitiated, Yosemite (pronounced Yo-say-mi-tee) is a National Park about 200 miles from here. From the time I came here, everyone has been telling us that it is a must-see. I understand it is the Sierra-Nevada mountains that are up there.

The people involved are Renuka (aka Nunu/Nuke/Anoha), Kritika (aka Kiti), Jaggi (aka Jag, Jaggubhai), Ashwin (wonder why we haven't aka-ed him yet, for now let's say the driver) and keeping the group together was Ashish Garg (aka Gargi boy/Gangadharan/aog(read ugh)/God) and me (of course, I'm not going to tell you what I am aka!). We rented a minivan on Friday afternoon. We had planned to take off at around 2pm; we had a Caribbean party at work Friday afternoon and so, could afford to leave early. But surprise, surprise, it was 6pm by the time we hit the road. We reached Yosemite, quite eventlessly at around 10:30pm. The guys had booked a tent. We drove to the site, it was a canvas tent with a couple of beds, quite decent. Had dinner and slept tight in our sleeping bags. That is bear country and there were apparently some screams from the rangers who were trying to scare away approaching bears that night. But I slept blissfully through all of that.

We were up and raring to go by about 9:30am Saturday morning, after nice hot showers and sandwiches for breakfast. Would have been better if we were ready earlier, but what the hell - it's a vacation! We had planned to hike to Half-Dome, touted by many as "the" trail to hike at Yosemite. Look at
http://www.nps.gov/yose/trip/valleyhikes.htm#halfdome
for more info, Half-Dome is at the bottom of that list. We were at the trailhead by 10am and started up. It is an uphill climb almost all the way. You get to see the Nevada Falls plunge into the chasm at about 3.5 miles up the trail. It is a very scenic spot and most people stop the hike there. We sat by the water's edge. It is an uplifting feeling to stretch your legs and watch the river hurtle down, with the sun on your face and water lapping your feet. Oh yeah and the methi and aloo parathas helped too! :-) Not for long, we had a dome to climb, or atleast half a dome.

Left the Falls behind at around 1:30 and continued up. Till then, the climb was not too steep and we felt like we would make it. But alas, the worst was yet to come. There is a flat meadow for about half a mile after Nevada Falls which is the calm before the storm. After that for about 4 miles is a steep ascent through forest-like terrain. But we kept at it. We reached a sign that said "Half-Dome 2 miles" and were spurred on by that. Boy, was that sign misleading or what?! We kept going higher and higher and finally reached a point that seemed to me like it was 2 miles covered. Only to realize that there was this big rock face to climb over and only after that would we even get to the infamous cables that would take us up Half-Dome! That's the point where you start to detest your backpack and your legs feel like lead, been there? Well, as much as I wanted to, I wasn't about to give up then, not after that arduous uphill climb. So we took on the next climb up the rocky face, no trail or anything, just scramble up the rocks with some steps carved out of the boulders at some places. What makes it worse is the fact that there are people coming down and believe me, there really is no room for a two-way lane! The sun shines down harder in the mountains, and feeling hot and dusty we got to the cables. Now's the real fun....