Day five:

The Groveland Hotel was built in 1849 and enlarged for the political bigwigs watching over the Hetch Hetchy Dam project in 1914. This reservoir brings water 200 miles to San Francisco. Renovated 15 years ago it is a antique place from the doors to floors, windows and furniture. The innkeeper has 17 rooms and a large staff: housekeepers, bar tender, kitchen staff, wait staff, plus they are running a theater in the back yard several nights a week. (You have to realize that the area has a Mediterranean climate and there is no rain from about mid-April until September or October. In this area, like San Francisco, there are also few bugs. So outdoor theater is a natural.) We had a fabulous innkeeper’s breakfast Thursday morning, stopped for fruit and a cooler at the main street grocery and then began our winding approach to Yosemite. Soon we were in the park and approaching Yosemite Valley (pronounced by some historically as Yo suh Mighty). I had to pull over at vista points time after time as fantastic mountainscapes appeared. Verbal descriptions are useless. Since the Tuolomne Grove Sequoias were on our way we thought we’d stop off there before getting down in the valley. It is a worship experience to walk down to the mile trail through redwoods and enormous Douglas firs in this old growth forest. The firs were majestic enough by themselves, but at last we got down the 10% grade to the grove inhabited by 26 of the planet’s largest and oldest living beings. Some of them are perhaps 30 to 40 feet around at the base and they seem to diminish very little as the tree rises to dizzying heights. The literature says there is more wood in a single giant sequoia than in an acre of pine. The trees rise to 275 feet in height. The lower limbs, far above, are seven feet across, and what looks like fallen trees on the ground around are actually limbs that fell a generation ago. A fallen giant will decay for a century. We viewed one on a trail that fell in the 80’s in a heavy snowstorm, toppled by gravity. It was over 3000 years old. There were many parts to the experience, the smell of the grove, the texture of the bark (it is almost spongy and as much as 2 feet thick), and the mysterious cathedral nature of the height. If you haven’t seen Yosemite in person, you need to get here as soon as you can. Make it a priority. Two days were not nearly enough. A week would have been better. We checked into the Alder lodge of Yosemite Lodge which looks directly at the over 2000 foot drop of Yosemite falls. The spray of water is huge this summer (normally only a trickle this time of year), because of a large snow pack from the winter, and so quite beautiful. As me to show you some of my 150 photos that I took there in just over 24 hours. In the evening, we caught a one woman show in the Yosemite Village Auditorium, a fabulous presentation of the story of a pioneer woman trying to decide whether or not to marry her fourth husband. She buried the first three. More about the park tomorrow.