April 8 through 13, 2019
1. Introduction and First Day
The genesis of this whole trip was to go see the “Frazil Ice” phenomenon at Yosemite National Park. This thing that I now essentially categorize as a “hoax” (although I guess it isn’t really, but it may as well be) “operates” only in a couple of not-sure-really-when early spring months, but at least in one impressive video that I had seen touts it as being something you can easily go and see if only you will go to Yosemite in March or April which is a lightly-visited time at Yosemite.
I have been to Yosemite countless times and only one of those times I did not go there in summer. I happened to go there one time with a girlfriend in the autumn before the snow season, and I admit that it was beautiful with autumn color and lots of falling leaves, but the storied waterfalls are at their lowest during that time so I was back to viewing summer as being the ideal time…but so do millions of other people, so there is that as a detriment to summer visits.
I also remember an earlier Yosemite, let’s say forty years ago, where things were pretty loose and free. You could come when you wanted, hike where you wanted, camp in the up-country where you wanted, and car camping (with RVs and the like) didn’t require reserving months ahead, and formal lodging wasn’t all that expensive (although the most “formal” lodging I ever used was with friends who didn’t want to camp, so we stayed in Curry Village—it is now called “Half Dome Village”--which is wooden-sided canvas family tent/cabins (we had five of us in one of them, which was extremely convenient) with community bathrooms and showers and a swimming pool and dining room. Oh, come to think of it, I also used Curry Village when some friends from Sweden came to see America and they stayed with me in California and I gave them the grand tour that included Yosemite. Curry Village was an easy and acceptable place to stay…anything that gets you into Yosemite Valley is good!
For this particular trip, though (the Frazil Ice trip), I was shocked to see what the prices were for the non-camping accommodations. I don’t know, maybe how a price strikes me is dependent upon whatever mood I am in at the time (do I feel rich, do I feel poor), but there is a sort of price level that when I see it, I think no, I think I will find another option. This is what happened to me looking at the cost of inside-the-park accommodations this time, I decided to stay outside the park for the first time in my life.
Let me interrupt this narrative to take a moment here to talk about entrance routes into Yosemite National Park. On the east side of the park, there is only one route in (coming in from Lee Vining), but be forwarned that this route is closed during the heavy snow period which is, I don’t know (it varies), let’s say from September to the end of May, perhaps? On the west side of the park, there are three routes into Yosemite, starting with Big Oak Flat Road off of Highway 120, which is the north entrance, the one you would use if you came in from the Bay Area and the rest of Northern California. This had been the main one I mostly used in my life, since most of my trips to Yosemite were generated from various places where I lived in Northern California.
The “middle road” is El Portal, coming off of highway 140, and presumably the convenient route for those visitors coming from Merced and thereabouts. I’m guessing that this is the least travelled route, but does have the nice feature of paralleling the Merced River, which I think is pretty and nice to see. I have a special love for the two rivers that come from the Yosemite watershed, the Merced and the Tuolumne. However, both of the other routes from the west will take you along the Merced river when you arrive in the valley, so I would say to reserve the middle road to use if you live in the Merced region or you have been into Yosemite enough times that you would like to try another route.
The “southern road” is Wawona, coming off of highway 41, the convenient route from Fresno and on south to Southern California.
No matter where you come from, and especially if this is your first time to Yosemite, I strongly recommend that you take the southern-most route to gain entrance to the park. If you are coming in from Southern California, this would be a no-brainer, that’s the route you would normally take anyway, but even if you are coming from San Francisco, take the time to go out of your way to take the southern route. To understand why I say to do that, look at this clip from Google Maps, below, which shows you these three different routes. Note that on the bottom route there is the notation “Yosemite, Tunnel View”. Notice that neither of the other two roads have that tunnel view. They just flow along and spill down into Yosemite Valley. Especially for your first time coming to Yosemite (in daylight), you must give yourself that phenomenal tunnel view. It is so spectacular that I will not even post a photo of it here (which wouldn’t do it justice anyway)—I want you to experience it yourself with your naked eyes. I’ve seen it several times now in my life, but I am not ashamed to say that the minute I saw it again this time, I burst into tears. I think that if it makes youcry, it is worth seeing. Well, maybe that is just me (outstandingly sensitive) and you are a stoic, but you still should give yourself that tunnel view.
Imagine this: you are going through a very long and dark tunnel—signs ask you to turn on your headlights and you better do it immediately, because in an instant you will find yourself in utter pitch black dark (it is a long tunnel) and you do not want to be totally blinded speeding along this mountain road. So, there’s the long tunnel with a tiny little sphere of light up ahead of you and finally you emerge from the darkness of the tunnel and BLAM right up ahead of you is The FACE OF YOSEMITE! Oh boy, what a rush!
Map Credit: Google Maps
Of course everybody, including huge busses filled with people, will want to pull over to take in this view and take pictures of everybody in their party, and you will want to, too. There is plenty of parking there for that purpose; definitely stop and take some pictures. I was happy to be asked by a group of six or seven people to take a photo of all of them, and it was cute to see six or seven little squares around all the faces across the width of their cell phone. I took a couple of photos of them and they were all pleased with the results.
Then one of the men very nicely offered to take a picture of me there, which I agreed to, although while they all looked really good, I felt kind of embarrassed to just be me alone standing there at the face of Yosemite. He took too photos, but I looked so bad in the first one that I deleted it, and the second one was not worth seeing (other than “I was there!”), but I kept it, even thought I doubt I will post it anywhere. By no means was this his fault, but the fault of the subject he was attempting to photograph.
If you can, avoid parking anywhere near a bus that may be unloading or loading…they will block you car in when you want to leave and it takes an eternity for them to get everybody off or on. This happened to me this time, which is how I know to warn others. Honestly, it is insane how many people those busses hold and how slow they are at getting off or on.
Okay, now back to me, looking for affordable accommodation outside of the park. It seemed to me that the most convenient and best priced accommodations were all along highway 120, the northern entrance to the park. As I studied that area, I happened to see Hetch-Hetchy reservoir on the map. Now this got me to thinking. A couple of months ago, my sister Virginia wrote me a letter, telling me about a good friend of hers who always wanted to go camping and constantly asked Virginia to come along on one of her trips, but Virginia wasn’t all that hot on that idea. What she said reminded me of something a female comedian had said, I wish I remember which one. The commedian said, “Hmm, so many people say they want to go back to the land. I don’t want to go back to the land, I want to go back to the hotel!” That was pretty much Virginia’s idea, too!
I actually like both, both the land and the hotel. But there is something you miss when you don’t actually go into the wilderness (ever) and I decided to write to Virginia about my own view of that special missing piece to “going back to the land”.
It was way back in my mid-20s when I used to backpack quite a bit and there was a couple that I liked to go with who were very adventurous and also liked to really live it up in the wild. The male of the couple was nearly an “ox”, very strong and could carry an astounding weight of things on his back that he was willing to share with others (such as me). He’d bring steaks to grilland glass bottles of champagne for the evenings. No “freeze-dried, just add to boiling water” backpacking fare for him…or for anybody who went with him. And both he and his wife loved to get off the trail totally and find their way over various mountain passes (pretty much restricted these days, but back then there weren’t millions of people tramping all over the wilderness, so one could “tread lightly”). It was a trip to be way up there in the lone mountains discovering for ourselves unknown lakes and having to find our way back via our compasses and some kind of a sense of direction. And we were well-fed and admirably “beveraged”!
One of those trips, I will never forget. We had come down from a world of the naked granite of the majestic mountains that are the backdrop of southeastern Yosemite where snowmelt was dripping and rain had been splashing into an immense meadow where the grass was wet and the ground was squishy and spongy. As we hiked along, there was more and more water under foot and then little rivulets of water, and then a full on river as we headed in the direction of the Nevada and Vernal waterfalls that we were going to be hiking down next to. I realized that we had come from the region where that water began that became those two iconic waterfalls, it was like we had walked through the time of the birth and growth to maturity of these waterfalls.
I understand now that Yosemite is the watershed for two rivers, the Merced, that was the river that became the Nevada and Vernal waterfalls and then flowed all the way out of Yosemite heading west, and the Tuolumne that flows north and west into the northern reaches of the park where it ends up in the Hetch Hetchy dam, unless it manages to escape through the dam’s spillway where it will continue to run wild across the width of California and through several other reservoirs until it finally flows into the San Juaquin River, which will, itself finally take itself into San Francisco Bay and then under the Golden Gate Bridge out to sea.
As I wrote my sister, I had become intrigued by the story of these rivers, because I remembered that the water that we drank, bathed in, swam in in our pools, and watered the landscaping of our property, came from that Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and still does.
So now as I was looking for lodging outside the park and finding what I wanted up along the northern entrance to the park, I realized that what I must do would be to go experience Hetch Hetchy (where I had never been before), and the more I thought out it, I realized that what I needed to do was make a video about this “journey of the river” from fields of mountain granite to inside our very own digestive tract. This video was meant to be in honorand appreciation of that.
I knew I had to do this in two passes. The first pass, I could do after seeing the Frazil Ice. Hetch-Hetchy was only half an hour’s drive from the motel I was looking at, and so was Yosemite Valley also half an hour from that motel. So it made perfect sense to make a reservation for that hotel…even though it was not in the park, it was equidistant from the two things I wanted to do at Yosemite.
The second pass involved the area of Tioga Road and Tuolumne Meadows, which during the time of my first pass would be closed tight due to heavy snow in that entire region. In fact, even now as I write this, that region is still closed and probably won’t open until sometime in June…it is hoped early June. So it was impossible for me to both see the Frazil Ice (that had to be in March or April) and go to Tuolumne Meadows, which is only open in the summer. Thus, the two visits, the one I have had and the one coming up this summer.
The quickest route to the motel I wanted was highway 120, which is the northern-most route, even though I was coming in from Southern California. But of course I wouldn’t skip the tunnel view road, so I decided to take the southern route into the park, find out more about the Frazil Ice from a park ranger, and then leave Yosemite Valley and take the road north out the park to my motel.
The efficient route from Los Angeles to Fresno, which is where you veer off toward the southern route to Yosemite, is highway 99. For some reason, I had long dissed highway 99, and it seems that generally people do. For some reason, I-5 is considered the “better” road. Well, I sure have driven I-5 enough for ten lifetimes. But this time, I really liked much better highway 99. I noticed that most of the way on that highway, there were three lanes in each direction, whereas I-5 is always strictly two. Both routes are heavy with trucks and the trucks are supposed to drive a slower speed than cars may, so if you are driving in the far right lane of either highway, you are frequently caught up behind a slower moving truck. This means that you have to pass them. But if you stay over on the far left lane where the trucks seldom venture, you will find yourself just as periodically “hogging” the “fast lane” for those who don’t really care whatthe speed limit really is, they are going to go way beyond it. And don’t fool yourself, if what you see makes you think either highway is empty of cops, guess again. They appear from out of nowhere. Maybe not right away, but it’s a long way north to whatever is probably your destination, so I find it more comfortable to just set my cruise control to the exact speed limit, which means that it bugs me to have it messed up by having to put on the brakes for a moment due to a slower vehicle up ahead of me, lose the easy momentum.
Having the three lanes on highway 99 alleviated a whole lot of that. The trucks pretty much stayed in the far right lane, I, following the speed limit, was usually quite fine in the middle lane, and then the speeders would have free run in the left lane. But on I-5, there was no way around it…one has to develop a “dance” of staying in the right lane but keeping an eye open on who is coming up in the left lane behind you. You can go along smoothly until you get closer to a truck, at which time you veer over to the left line but soon enough that you won’t make an approaching car in the left lane have to shut off their cruise control. It becomes an art of flowing in and out of these two lanes in such a way that neither you nor somebody coming up behind you in the left lane has to tap off their cruise control. And lost of times you will miss it (and, in my case, I will have to speed way up past the speed limit in order to get away from the angry car behind me and past the slow trick or RV on the right). Yeah, yeah, I know it is just a flick on the button on the steering wheel to turn the cruise control back on again, but I just dislike the loss of the smooth flow. Anyway, highway 99 was able to be much more relaxing due to their three lines versus I-5’s two.
After several hours, I approached Fresno and then ended up on a road, highway 41. Once I was outside of the city environs of Fresno, I was out in green pastures, and that is how it pretty much stayed all the way until the road became Wawona Road, where it was forest.
I was surprised by the beauty of what I was passing through on highway 41—so much green and delicious-looking pastures of happy cows. That definitely hadn’t been my impression from the past, and I got to experience that same surprise of green beauty a couple of days later when I experienced it again even better, in the rolling lush green farmland from Chinese Camp to La Grange, but not as far as Waterford (based on the route I took).
I mentally divided the width of the state into five zones from the Nevada border on the east to the I-5 highway to the west. Number 1, the eastern-most zone, is “lowland desert”, where moisture from the west is caught in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the next zone, number 2, which is high mountain land and very snowy in the winter and best for recreation (instead of living and working), such as skiing in the winter and camping and hiking in the summer. Then comes zone 3, what I think of as “old Gold Rush towns” although not all of them were actually places where one could find gold. Then comes zone 4, the one that surprised me, that I now saw as the wide open spaces of gorgeous green agricultural land. Then comes zone 5, these sort of terrible larger towns or smaller cities, sort of agri/industrial that then crowd up onto I-5. East of that I have not added to this “zone” concept, but it is all increasingly crowded and expensive urban areas that continue on west until you get to hills and mountains that separate the Bay Area, etc. from the ocean zone.
I honestly never really “considered” that lovely zone 4, how wonderful it looked, but then I realized that this was so beautiful, but generally “hidden” from me due to California’s “topsy-turvey” climate, which is rain in the winter, totally dryness in the summer, unlike the Eastern half of the United States where it rains in the summer and is dry (or snow) in the winter.
Most of the year, California is dry and dead and brown (unless irrigated) in all but the spring months due to this rain situation. But this particular year, the rains has been heavier than normal and the drought that had been so disturbing for so long ended, I think, a couple of years ago without actually being formally acknowledged until now in hindsight. What a little rain can do is remarkable, and all of “zone 4” showed it in perfect display this year. But it won’t always be like that, I am afraid.
As beautiful as the green pastures had been, the forest that I was now driving in was surprisingly “thrashed”. I couldn’t really understand it, and still don’t. What one would normally expect to be gorgeous forests looked instead like they had been decimated by fire, or abused by some sadistic logging companies, or maybe experimented on regarding some kind of attempt at forest management. Or maybe this is just what happens to a normal forest during an extremely heavy snow season. It’s just that this is something I had never ever seen before.
I have attempted to explain it to others, but without them actually seeing it, it was hard for them to understand what I was talking about. Below are two pictures I snapped from the car (there was no easy place to full over and take photos) and these don’t really do justice to the situation. I have some other ones to show later in the recitation (day two).
Photo Credit: Tom Osborne
Photo Credit: Tom Osborne
I asked the park ranger what had happened to the forest leading up to there, was this due to fire, or was it a new way of forest management, or what? His answer was very vague; he said, “Nah, I think the forest should be pretty much recovered now, that fire was several years ago.” Which really told me nothing, other than this damage could not be blamed on fire. But this condition was right outside of Yosemite National Park, so I would expect a forest ranger to know about it, but once inside the park, I didn’t see any more of that destruction appearance. I presumed that it did not have anything regarding how Yosemite manages its forests. However, I saw much worse “devastation” the next day in the area of Hetch-Hetchy, also notinside the park. So whatever it is all about, I guess it is going to remain a mystery for me for a while.
I also took the opportunity to ask him about the Frazil Ice and his response was, “What ice?” How many people had I mentioned this to without one flicker of recognition? And now the park ranger at the entrance gate to Yosemite also had no clue. I had hoped they would have even a whole newspaper about it, like they used to have, news about the park and what things were going on, signing up for guided tours, singing by the campfire, religious services in the chapel, and special events. But no, nothing, just a map of the valley.
From there it was forest forest forest until somewhere along the line, I began to see snow drifts on the side of the road. I should interject right here that I was not happy to see that, because the road now was also steadily going down hill. Where there was snow could mean that there would ice on the road, and that is not something I wanted to encounter, especially when doing down curving roads.
I had gotten tire chains to have in my car trunk because the Yosemite website was adamant that there still may be snow and ice dangers on the road in this season and you were absolutely required to carry chains and to install them if told to. I will tell you now that I never had to put the chains on, which I was happy about, but that still did not alleviate my concerns about patches of ice on the road. This continued to be a problem for me the two days I was in the Yosemite area.
Earlier that morning, just before I left for this trip up to Yosemite, I decided to watch a video on how to handle driving on icy roads. And what a frightening eye opener it was. I couldn’t believe that people could actually live in a place where they had snow in the winter, which is the vast majority of the country. No wonder it is so expensive to live along the California coast where you don’t have deal with that.
In the video, it was like bumper cars in an amusement park. Trucks and cars slip/sliding all over the place, on freeways, on overpasses, and any manner of other roads. They would be driving along normally and then suddenly, they would spin out of control and twirl around and crash into other cars which then continued the carnage with yet other cars. Really? This is a normal way to live?
There were several pointers of how to seek to avoid all that. One was to not drive faster than 45 miles per hour. Be especially careful when going over any bridge or overpass. Do not brake suddenly, or at all if you possibly manage it. The video gave the impression that if you could continue along at a steady rate that your tires could maintain their grip on the road, but any alleviation of that, especially if sudden, would wreck that helpful friction of tire and road and send you flying. Whenever that happened, do NOT suddenly brake to stop the spin, but turn your steering wheel in the direction of the skid and the car would straighten out. These rules didn’t seem too difficult to follow, but what about all those other bozos who would pay no attention to all of this, so even if you were doing the best you could to be careful, you still had dozens of other potential spinning tops all around you. As far as I was concerned, the best solution was not to be on that kind of road at all. But now on my way to Yosemite Valley, it was too late for that, I was now seeing snow and potential ice on the very road I was driving on.
“Spoiler”, snow and nice or no snow and ice, I did not actually have any problem. I followed to the very digit the posted speed limit signs which were catered to the road conditions. If the sign said 20, I drove 20. Most of the other people ignored all those signs, just sped past me at 40 or even 50 miles per hour. If there was clearly snow on the road, I drove steadily and made no sudden moves on my brakes.
It was actually pretty beautiful seeing the snow, even thought I considered it potentially treacherous. It surprised me how much of it there was in several places, but after all, the entire Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Road region of Yosemite was completely closed at that time due to heavy snow conditions, and even today in early May, is still closed and will be more nearly a month more from now. So yeah, they have snow in Yosemite and the winter and spring visitor should be aware.
Then came the wonderful tunnel and the glorious first awesome view of Yosemite. Then it was more forest, curving roads, and finally I landed down on the valley proper where all three westside entrance roads came together as one. I saw the Merced River and not one sign of anything like Frazil Ice showed in that water. However, that phenomenon was supposed to be for early mornings only, and by now it was around 4:00 PM. Also, apparently the Frazil Ice phenomenon was onlyin what is called Yosemite Creek, which is the water of the two waterfalls, Yosemite Falls and Upper Yosemite Falls. Something about how the water in those two falls suddenly freezes as they fall makes them into Frazil Ice when they enter the water of Yosemite Creek.
Having apparently no guidance from anybody, I decided to take the cross road that connected with the road that would take me up to where my hotel was, outside of the park. I would be seeing no Frazil ice that late in the day anyway, and as the temperature was falling which would to lead to more ice on the road, I figured the best coarse was to now drive on up out of the park and check into my hotel, have a nice dinner in their restaurant, and then relax in the hotel for the rest of the evening.
Driving along that road heading toward Oak Flat Road, it was fun to see all the people parked along the Merced River, taking pictures of the waterfall that could be seen from that vantage point—I think that is Bridalveil Falls, which I also think is the waterfall you see when you first see Yosemite when you burst out of the tunnel. Some people have some awesome photographic equipment and heavy duty tripods, taking their own “Ansel Adams” quality photos. Others taking selfies with their cell phones and others with more handy traveling cameras. Everybody seemed excited, happy, in awe, and I know how they felt.
I got to the intersection of Oak Flat Road and Tioga Road, the road that goes up to Tuolumne Meadows but tightly closed. I saw the blessed gas station also at the intersection. There had been times in the past when I had been thankful that gas station was there! For decades, it seemed, that was the only gas station for very far around. Even now, I am sure there are people who are thankful for its existence!
I had hoped that when I came to the exit booth from the park I could ask a park ranger from that side of the park what the deal was with the Frazil Ice, just how early would I need to be there to see it, did they have an organized tour, and so on. But instead, the booth was now closed for the day and that was that. Anybody entering the park at that time would be able to just drive through, but they would likely be caught when they left and could not present a receipt for their having paid. I suppose a person could time their comings and goings to what they expected would be closed times for the various entrance gates, but gee whiz, don’t waste your time on stuff like that, just pay your fee and enjoy the park!
As usual, now, with the weather being even colder, heading down to freezing as the sun was setting, I drove as carefully as I had coming down into the park. I think I was the only one doing that. I saw lots of wonderful pull over and view spots on that route that I figured I would take advantage of for photographing the next day after I saw the Frazil ice. I also saw quite a few huge busses, like I had seen up at the Tunnel viewspot. I thought to myself, brave bus drivers to drive these huge rigs filled with people down these potentially iced up roads, but I guess they are professionals and really know what they are doing. (I wonder, though, if I was just a bit too paranoid over this icy thing.) Also, let’s be thankful for people who do things like that, and in this case, they are enabling lots of people to come and enjoy Yosemite who might not otherwise get to.
I felt relief when I reached the top of the road’s climb and now was on the smooth, flat portion of highway 120. After a while, I arrived at my motel, the Buck Meadows Lodge:
Photo Credit: Tom Osborne
It was up here on a beautifully forested road. Everything felt nice and cozy. I went into what I thought would be the lobby to check in, but there was a sign on the door that said to go over to the motel next door to check in, the Yosemite Westgate Lodge, and much larger and nicer motel. I realized that the Yosemite Westgate Lodge had bought out the Buck Meadows Lodge. So I went over there to check in and then came back to get into my room.
Photo Credit: Tom Osborne
It was a nice, clean, cozy room with a heater that heated up nicely in about a second. However, it didn’t take me too long to realize that it had only one tiny chair and no table at all. Yes, I had free WiFi, but no desk to put my laptop on. Okay, so I used it on my lap as I sat on the bed. The bed was extremely comfortable, but not having a decent table and chair was not.
Oh well, this was only for two nights anyway. I walked over to their restaurant and got a booth.
The people in there were, as I expected, extremely friendly and very happy. There was just something about the whole place, the quiet highway it was on, the wonderful forest, the fresh smell for the air, the kiss of the nearly freezing temperature, and this cozy motel, all just combined to feel like a truly wonderful place.
The restaurant menu had several dishes that appealed to me right away, including some vegan ones that sounded very appealing even though I am not a vegan. I decided to have the short ribs that night (one of my main “go-to” dinners) and have the Panang Curry (a vegan dish) tomorrow. The short ribs, fries, mixed vegetables, and soup filled me up just fine, so I didn’t even look at dessert.
After dinner, I went back to the warm, cozy room and listened to a couple of podcasts on my computer while lying in the bed and after that, I set the alarm for a very early wake-up and then turned off the light and promptly went right to sleep.
END OF DAY 1
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