Leon Turnbull Photography

My annual pilgrimage to Yosemite this year was mostly disastrous. But all was not lost.

I had big plans. Starting with Friday evening after work, I left immediately for Yosemite. I arrived right on time for my evening hike except for one thing: the road was too rough to drive any further. I could have walked from there to the trailhead but it was still a couple miles away, and it was getting too late. I would have been walking back in the dark and that is not anything I desired. I salvaged that evening though by going to one of my favorite spots, the confluence of the south and middle forks of the Tuolumne River. It is an amazing area with three magnificent waterfalls side-by-side-by-side. I love this location but it is not one I had intended to go to this time. I consoled myself by getting some new and different compositions of these waterfalls. More to come on this later.

The rain started at 1 AM, and it rained pretty much nonstop all night and all through the next day. I was sleeping in my car so I was dry, but not warm. I don’t know what it is with me and sleeping bags and the cold. My wife insists I am from Mexico although really I am from Canada, so you *might* think that the cold would not bother me. I bought a new sleeping bag for this trip which is rated at 20°F. So that means, I would think, that if it is 20°F then I would be snug and warm in my sleeping bag. Not for me! The temperature got down to only 46° and I was still freezing cold. The next night it was about 36 degrees. I will leave it to you to imagine how I fared that night.

When I woke the next morning I knew it was going to be a rough day for hiking, and I was right. My anticipated hike was going to be a glorious one, but I knew I would not be able to make it in the rain. I did try … however the snow level was at about 4700 feet elevation, much lower than expected, and my hike was at 6700 feet. I had no chance of getting there. I tried another hike at around the 4700 foot level, and I hiked about 8 miles in the heavy falling snow, but I did not get to any waterfalls. It was just too tough in this weather and I got very soaked. I had a big backpack trip still planned and now I somehow had to get everything dry before the next morning. The rain was not letting up either.

I arrived at Hetch Hetchy in the afternoon. My idea was to hike to Wapama Falls in the evening, and then the next day do the same hike again except all the way to Rancheria Falls. The reason for going to Wapama Falls in the evening was to photograph the waterfall in good light. This falls is in the sun most of the day and getting good photos of it is very difficult if not impossible, considering that the park is not open until well after sunrise and closes well before sunset (that, by the way, is one of my big pet peeves). It is also especially difficult to photograph when there is so much mist and it is raining, but that’s another story. I was the last one off the trail and back at the campsite just before dark.

I survived the night. It was a close thing. I wanted to sleep in the next day, take it easy in the morning, and then casually make the hike out to Rancheria Falls. In the morning I packed up my gear and was just about to load the big weight upon my shoulders when someone came by and told me that the dam was closed. There was a rockslide. What?!?! Are you kidding me?? I went down to talk to the Ranger who told me the slide must have happened during the night and they did not know when the trail would be open again. She said it was a big slide … yeah right. It was so big it did not even make the news. I could be wrong, but I suspect that it was just a small slide, and indeed if I had started my hike early in the morning before the park opened I think I probably could have gotten past it without any problems. In fact, there was another backpacker in the camp who was doing the same thing as I was. When I woke up he was gone, and I think he got an early start and was able to get by the rock slide without issues. Although perhaps he is the one that caused the rockslide. Who knows. Anyway, there was nothing to do but go home. Clearly God did not want me to hike to Rancheria Falls that day, but why I do not know, because it would have been awesome. I thought about going somewhere else, but I was tired so I just decided to head back home and try again another year.  At least I was able to get my annual pilgrimage lunch at the Pizza Factory in Groveland.