Leon Turnbull Photography

I had big plans all made this weekend, but sometimes plan do not work out as expected. I wanted to go to Hetch Hetchy and stay overnight in the backpacker’s parking area, then hike to Rancheria Falls first thing in the morning in order to get there with good lighting conditions for photography. It was a great plan. All I needed was a permit. But the bloody darn Yosemite rangers would not give me one. According to them, I was not a backpacker, I was just a day hiker. What? Sometimes it sucks to tell the truth, but I really had no idea this would be any sort of issue for them. It was a perfectly reasonable plan, and I am sure I read that people have done this sort of thing before at Hetch Hetchy. With the park not opening until well after sunrise and closing well before sunset it is absolutely impossible to do any good photography in this area of the park unless you stay overnight. Why would they not give me a permit? I don’t understand, and it really irked me.

Anyway, this totally threw a wrench into my entire weekend plan, and it put a huge damper on an already bad  day. I did see four waterfalls on Saturday. The first one I saw was really nice but all the others were not so great, and the light was really bad for them, and some other waterfalls I was trying to see did not pan out either, and I got a tick bite, and my camera lens broke (for an unknown reason), and I got poison oak, and I lost my pack rain cover, and I almost lost my hat off a cliff. None of all those other things would have bothered me much, however, if the Hetch Hetchy plan had come to fruition.

Friday was different though. Friday was a great day, and I saw four waterfalls on that day as well, and they were all great ones. The first one was Diana Falls, pictured here, just a small 21 ft. high falls, and very easy to get to, but I had never been to this one before. When you are going to Yosemite, you don’t stop off at small baby waterfalls along the way usually, and that is why I had never been here before. But this time, I was planning to spend a lot of time out of the park before going into it at the end of the day on Saturday, so Diana Falls was first on my list.

It is a long drive down there from Sacramento, and I left work early. Still traffic was bad leaving the city. When I finally arrived at the trailhead, I saw 3 other cars there. Not good, as I was hoping to have the falls all to myself, but all the others I met on the hike in, so I was alone once I got to the falls. It is a bit of a steep descent down to the waterfall, slippery, and laced with poison oak (but this is not where I picked up the oak, I am certain). Those rocks you see on the right side were incredibly slippery. I scrambled up there close to the falls, and I had to be extremely careful or I would have slipped right into the creek. That would have been quite bad. Anyway, it is a very pretty little area and waterfall. I took my time here taking photos, then afterwards, hurried back to the car, to get in one more location before dark, which was triple decker awesomeness. Stay tuned for that.