day 18 - mariposa, ca to fresno, ca

We spent the day exploring Yosemite!


The drive up was quite lovely. Mariposa is about 40 miles from the park, and it was nice and woody. We hit Sierra National Forest, which is right outside the park entrance, and followed a road that had a rushing river running alongside it.

Partway there, we saw the remains of a rock slide. Apparently they're pretty common in this park.

On the valley of the park, we got a nice view of more of the river, many of the park's large waterfalls, and several giant rock faces.





We took a small trail to the bottom of one of these waterfalls. Along the way we saw this fearless squirrel and a mule deer.


Here's the bottom of the waterfall:

We dropped by a visitor's area to get lunch, then decided to escape the valley floor because it was ridiculously crowded. 95% of the visitors who go to Yosemite never leave the valley floor, as it has a ton of amenities and a shuttle bus that takes you to a bunch of scenic sites. We decided to take a road that led above into the alpine zones to see the views.

The silvery stripe down the center of this next photo is the river we were following:


As we continued up in elevation, the land became increasingly rocky, and trees grew sparse:

Here's a view from a point about 8,000 ft high:

We also came across a lovely alpine lake here, where we took a break:

And this is Tuolomne Meadow, the largest alpine meadow in the park.


After driving the distance back towards the valley, we wanted to go see the stand of giant sequoia trees, but it was at the very south entrance of the park, so we sped down there. On the way we got this lovely, postcard-worthy vista, complete with a rainbow:

At one of the other scenic points, we saw this bear! It was pretty exciting. He didn't attack or anything.

More nice views:



Here's a striking bird, called the Stellar's Jay:

Finally, just after sunset, we got to the sequoia stand. It's hard to get a sense of how large they are from these pictures, but they are wide enough for eight people to stand around them holding hands.


We decided to stay the night in Fresno, and got some rest before heading up to San Francisco in the morning.