Yosemite National Park

Friday, September 14
We started today with some excitement, a mother bear had run across the main road and the cub got stuck on the wrong side having not made it across. The cub was scared because of the traffic and actually cried out to its mother, who had climbed a tree on the opposite side. We left the scene and went to an Indian museum that informed us of the Ahawanee/Miyok Indians and their living customs. Then we went on an open-air tram tour led by a ranger. This was quite informative. Wouldn’t you know, that when the tram tour passed the spot where we saw the bears, now two hours later, they were still there. This time they were both in the tree – a neat sight to see. We completed the day with a visit to a Sequoia grove, where they have trees about 1,000 years old. The sequoias are impressive but in a different way than the redwoods. They aren’t as tall as the redwoods but they have a larger circumference, sometimes as much as 100 feet in circumference. I personally liked the redwood groves better because you were surrounded by huge trees, whereas the sequoias are spotty with other tree varieties mixed in. I understand why George Lucas chose the redwood forests for the Ewok planet because it feels like a foreign place. The sequoia groves feel like a regular forest with huge trees implanted in certain spots. Nonetheless, both are majestic and unbelievable. I can't post pictures because this connection is about as fast as dial-up. Hopefully, I'll be able to post in a couple of days.

Thursday, September 13
It turns out that the RV park we stayed at was sitting on top of the site of a town 150 years ago. The town was constructed to support a gold mine, which was within walking distance of the RV park. We decided that we couldn’t turn down the opportunity to go inside a gold mine so we took it upon ourselves to go digging for gold. The experience was nice, but we didn’t find any gold. The RV workers said that you can still find gold in the dried up creek bed that runs through the RV park and the gold panning is for real gold. The boys tried both locations but again no gold. I guess I’ll still have to work for a living. After our gold adventure we traveled to Yosemite National Park. All the national parks have something unique, Yosemite has the 2nd highest waterfall in the world (Yosemite Falls) and the highest in the US. It is also home to Yosemite valley, which is like driving into a canyon about 1-3 miles wide that is surrounded by majestic cliffs. It’s home to El Capitan (a completely granite rock), which is a climbers paradise, requiring 3-7 days to climb the 3000 foot face. We had hoped to take the short hike to the base of Yosemite Falls, but when we found out that the waterfall has dried up for the fall, we changed our minds. Yosemite had only 40% of their typical snowfall this winter, so many of the waterfalls and lakes are dried up, but that is typical for low moisture years. We stayed at a campground in Yosemite, which allowed us to attend a ranger program in the campground. Once again, the program was fantastic. We had one wildlife sighting today with two large bucks.