Into Yosemite Valley. Day 43

We started the day on top of Tioga Pass. We were so glad we had decided to get to the top of the pass the day before instead of doing it this morning like it had been in our original plan. It is always a relief to wake up to a downhill instead of an uphill!

This is just inside the entrance of Yosemite, finally here!

And the downhill was wonderful, of course. The elevation that had taken us 4 hours to get up the day before, took us probably 25 minutes coming down on the ther side. It was glorious. 

This is in Toulemne Meadows. Awesome. The meadows were beautiful and had delicate little ponds and streams running through them with mountains and tall trees all around. In the picture above you can see two guys sort of ahead of us on the road. They were trying to hitch hike, probably to another part of the park (it's huge, our entire and full day of riding was completely within the park), and jokingly held their thumbs out for us. We told them to hop on (also a joke, clearly that's impossible...) and I gave them a high five. People are fun and goofy sometime, it's great. 

And what we thought was downhill ALL the way to Half Dome (our destination in the park that night) was definitely not all downhill... at all. 

It seemed like we were always coming to "the last uphill before its all downhill" (ha!). And honestly if we hadnt been expecting it to be all downhill, it would have been a very normal climbing day. But also, I don't know what we were thinking! Yosemite is all mountains so we were bound to go up sometime. Regardless of our climbing expectation, it was an incredible ride. It was also great because we really did get to see a lot of parts of the park -- and parts that a lot of visitors never actually make it to, like Toulumne meadows that I mentioned and lots of other parts that are not in Yosemite Valley. And it was so so beautiful. 

We saw this sign which was pretty cool. Bears!!

And then we got to this sign... WE ARE SO CLOSE TO SAN FRANSISCO!! It would have been easy to turn right, but we really wanted to see Yosemite Valley. 

And the downhill into the valley was definitely ALL downhill. And was amazingly fun and frightening. We got going super fast, like above 30 or 35 mph, and cars would pass us and there was a huge cliff to the left the whole way. There was usually a small wall between us and the drop off, but at that speed it was kind of scary! But that wasn't the worst. The worst were the tunnels... Tunnels!! They were poorly lit because cars have headlights and do just fine in them, but we didn't have headlights! So there we were going over 30 and not able to see the pavement in front of us... AHH!! So we just had to trust the pavement. Luckily it was all smooth and there were no hidden potholes. If we had slowed down we might have had some kind of wreck with a car also.. Either way the tunnels were frightening. But there were only 3 or 4, and really only 1 that was long enough for us to be completely blind in. They were cool too though because we got to ride inside the mountain for a little bit!

^Alec headed into one of the shorter tunnels. 

And finally we were in the valley, surrounded by Half Dome, El Capitan, and the other rock formations that completely TOWER above everything. It's incredible. The pictures don't do the feeling you get from being below them, it's awesome! And it's crazy that people climb them... Alec was telling me about a guy the climbed Half Dome free solo (by himself and without ropes)... What?! That's amazing. We went hiking instead of watching the climbing movie the campground we were at was showing that night, but I hope I can watch it sometime. Cool stuff. 

Bear warning signs at our campground!

And I can't believe we didn't take any pictures of where we stayed! I don't know what was going on in our minds. We were really tired. Anyway, we stayed at a place called Curry Village. It's kind of a hotel/campground thing. There are individual tents (made of a canvas/rubber material sort of) that have a full bed and two twin beds in each. Each has outlets and a heater and a light and stuff, pretty cool. But no fans or air conditioner though. And I don't think I mentioned that it was HOT. The high in the valley was 105 I think, and it had to be close to that. And when we got to our assigned (rubber) tent at about 4 pm it was a sauna. We were SO happy that it had cooled off a lot by the time we came back later to go to sleep. But for the time being it was boiling inside there. 

You can actually see some of the tents behind me and that wonderful pine cone!

The formation of the tents was also pretty funny. I think there are about 600 of them also, by the way. But it was kind of like who ever designed the place grabbed a handful of those monopoly house pieces, dropped them onto a table, and that was the layout of the tents. Ha! They were really in no particular order, usually you could find consecutive tent numbers near eachother, but even that was a little difficult. But they weren't in any sort of row or repeating pattern, and all had random orientations, one's door opening directly to the side of another whose door opened directly to the back of another. It was kind of funny. It might have been worse and would have felt too regimented if they were all in rows or something. It was an adventure walking through the little tent neighborhoods. It was fun staying there. 

So we left to take COLD showers. They. Felt. Amazing. I usually take my showers just short of boiling, so for me to say a cold shower felt amazing is a very heavy statement. 

Curry Village also has a couple restaurants, an amazing ice cream place, a cool lounge with lots of comfy sofas and rocking chairs, and other decks and etc. So we hung out around there for a little while, ate some food, and then headed out to do some hiking. 

We took the park shuttle to hike to Mirror Lake first. It was supposed to be only a mile round trip, but we somehow made it more like 5. I'm glad we did though, the trail was fun and beautiful. Mirror Lake is a seasonal lake so a lot of it was dried up for the season, but the river that flows through it was beautiful and some smaller pools were formed as well. From our 5 mile detour we ended up on the wrong side so we had to walk across. And the water was so cool and refreshing, it felt incredible on our tired legs. (Alec mentions something about how amazing it felt about once every hour since we hiked out -- it's two days later now and he's still talking about it! On that note, sorry for the delays on the posts.)

After that we took a hike to the Yosemite Lower Falls right around sunset. They were really cool. Our pictures a little dark because of the lighting at dusk. It was great to be there, and by that time it had cooled off a lot so we weren't sweating buckets which was nice! 

Oh! And the coolest thing ever. We looked up at El Capitan (one of the big rock formations) at night and saw climbers' headlamp lights halfway up the rock!!! The formations are so big that most climbers take two days to make it to the top and sleep on the face of the rock. That would be so scary. It's so cool though. I would never do that I don't think, but those guys are incredible. Scary and so cool. 

The stars were also so bright and so beautiful. We're usually asleep by the time the stars come out, but I'm glad we were up long enough to see them in Yosemite. 

Daily stats:

Mileage:

Average speed:

Elevation gain:

Inside the valley,

Rock faces tower above,

Climber lights at night.