We left San Francisco and headed east to the Sierra Nevada! We got to the park and decided to drive around a bit in the evening before settling at the campsite.
We immediately got a great view of El Capitan!
As if we weren’t already nervous enough about bears, we got this reminder on our way to the visitors center!
We stayed at Crane Flat Campground, which we were super lucky to get the reservation for. This is one place where you need to book at least 3 months in advance. Obviously, it would have been nice to camp in a more central location to the park, but I think it turned out alright, because the campsite was a lot more spread out and relaxed. The ones in Yosemite Valley looked pretty crowded!
When we went to the bathroom at our campsite for the first time, we found another cool surprise. None of us knew that the squirrels and other rodents in California often carry the plague. At the time this was both a hilarious and disturbing discovery. As if I needed a reason to hate squirrels more!
This was our first time camping as a whole group in bear country, so cooking was kind of stressful because you can get fined about $5000 if they catch you with any food out of arm’s reach. It’s actually harder than we thought, but we didn’t have any problems while cooking.
That night, though, the lighter sleepers among us woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of bears testing the bear boxes by banging on them. That sound, fortunately, carries quite far so everyone knows there’s a hungry and curious bear around! Luckily, I didn’t wake up, but those that did had a hard time going back to sleep after that.
The next morning, we headed to Yosemite Valley to do our hike we planned. I think we did Valley Loop Trail, which goes all around the valley. We also added a detour to see Yosemite Falls at the beginning.
After seeing the falls, we headed down the valley along the trail. It was a flat trail, since it’s in the valley, but we got some nice views of Half Dome!
We also walked right under El Capitan again. We were talking about the documentary Free Solo, and we finally watched it only recently, but it really felt insane standing at the bottom that anyone would climb up it with no ropes!
Eventually we started heading back towards the trailhead and we saw the other side of the valley.
Our feet were really sore by the time we finished the trail. It was really hot and so we decided that the best way to feel better was to change into our swim suits and get in the river. This was especially nice, because we didn’t have showers at our campsite.
The water was so, so cold. I didn’t manage to stay in that long, but it was nice to get out of our boots and sweaty clothes. We had a snack on the bank of the river.
Then we headed back to the campsite to build a fire, have some beer, and hope that no bears would visit us this time!
Sadly, that’s all the time we had in Yosemite, but we decided to leave the park via Tunnel View to get a different perspective down the valley. It was pretty stunning!
Our next stop was Sequoia National Park, which we decided to get to via Kings Canyon. We didn’t really plan to spend much time there, but based on what little we saw, we wish we had spent more time there!
Then we got to our campsite for the one night. It was pretty chilly, but we had a nice evening. But once the sun set, it started to get really, really cold!
We also found out that Sequoia is actually worse for bears! Fun!
I don’t think any of us slept that well because of the cold. We weren’t really prepared for how cold it was. When we went to the visitors center in the morning, we asked the ranger what the low temperature the night before was and he said 29F (which is about -2C)! No wonder we were so miserable! Honestly, we were lucky we all felt fine in the morning.
So, after our rough night, we went to the General Sherman area to see the really big sequoias!
Unfortunately, I don’t have too many pictures, but what can I say other than the trees are really big? I mean they are way bigger than you think they will be. It’s really hard to actually process how big they are.
We then headed out of the park and towards the desert! Our destination was Joshua Tree, but in order to get some food and break up the driving, we decided to spend the night in Bakersfield. It was weird stop, but we made our own fun and ended up finding a great vegan pizza restaurant and had a cozy night at our motel! The next morning, we headed out into the desert!
