And now for some Waterfalls! Yosemite National Park.

Reno, NV

We decided we had seen enough trees and that we needed some waterfalls in our lives, so we headed next to Yosemite National Park and the promise of spectacular falls.  And they did still have trees too. And supposedly bears. We started with a day in Yosemite Valley

Vernal Falls... way back there.

The valley has all the big famous sites that everyone associates with Yosemite. It's also so popular that visiting it in July is a little more like visiting a Disney Park than it is like really getting out and communing with nature on any level, minus all the Disney employees who are obsessively cleaning up after those who like to throw their water bottles, kleenexes and candy wrappers on the ground. Even at our arrival time of 10 am it was immediately clear that parking was already scarce, so when we found a spot, we parked and left the car in favor of the shuttle buses that circle the valley all day (and well into the night). We hiked first up to Vernal Falls, along with approximately 1,000 others, some of whom were actually pushing strollers up an admittedly paved, but very steep trail. Vernal falls was pretty... but the paved portion of this trail only took us to a bridge from which we could see the falls way off in the distance. Maybe we should have gone further. But we didn't. We also saw Yosemite Falls and Bridal Veil Falls, neither of which was a hike, but rather short walks. At each of the falls there were dire warning signs everywhere about what could happen to you if you dared to climb on the rocks around the falls or wade in the water and still people were crawling all over those rocks, it was a little detracting from the beauty of the falls themselves. We did hike to one other water feature, but it wasn't a fall, we went to Mirror lake where some of us waded blissfully in the cool water.  In most cases, bridal veil falls being the exception, we rode a packed bus to each destination, and hiked/walked with hundreds of others to our destinations.

Wapama Falls

Our goal for day two in the park was double fold: to ditch most of our fellow park visitors and to get up close to a waterfall. Hetch Hetchy came through for us on both counts. Hetch Hetchy is in the northern part of Yosemite, has its own entrance, and in comparison to Yosemite Valley is a lonely place. We hiked to Wapama Falls and only saw a handful of other hikers the whole way in and back. The hike goes first over the O'Shaughnessy Dam and then through an old train tunnel, which was a fabulous start. From there it is about 2.5 miles to the falls and a good portion of it was in direct sun and walking across ankle wrenching rocky trail. I admit I wondered, given the falls we had seen in the valley the day before if this was going to be worth it. It totally was. There are several bridges across the bottom of the falls and at least one of them was soaking wet and regularly getting splashed, we stood there a long time after our hot sweaty hike in.

We finished Yosemite on a third day by driving all the way through the park and over Tioga Pass on our way to Reno, Nevada, stopping at Olmsted Point and Tenaya Lake (because apparently I can never resist a chance to wade in ice cold water). We searched in vain as we drove for some of those bears the park kept warning us were there but which they obviously have hidden somewhere. Our wildlife sightings in our three days in Yosemite were restricted to deer, squirrels, blue jays, lizards and a snake. Cool, but bears would have been better.