Yosemite, overrated?
Autumn in Yosemite — dry waterfalls, a bear family up a tree, and three nights under a sky that made Half Dome look modest.
I went in half hoping Yosemite wouldn’t live up to itself. Anywhere photographed this often, by this many people, ought to be smaller in person — and there’s a particular satisfaction in discovering the famous thing is merely fine.
I was wrong within about ten minutes.
We came in autumn, when most of the waterfalls have thinned to a dark stain running down the rock. It turns out not to matter. The valley doesn’t need water to be absurd.
It is busy. It’s busy for a reason, and I couldn’t hold that against it for long — though I did keep catching myself wishing I’d seen it before it became everybody’s establishing shot.
Two easy hikes
If you only do two walks here, make them Sentinel Dome and Taft Point. Neither is difficult — short, not much of a climb until the very end. Both end somewhere that feels like it should have cost more effort than it did.
Go to Taft Point for sunset. The light turns soft and orange and seems to come off the granite rather than out of the sky, and for a while the whole valley sits inside it.
I don’t have a better word for it than beautiful, which is the word I had been hoping to avoid.
The residents
Squirrels who had plainly stopped being afraid of anyone a long time ago. Ravens much larger than I expected, and no more impressed by us than the squirrels were.
Then, one afternoon, a mother bear with two cubs — close enough that a crowd of us started shouting, the way you’re told to.
The cubs went up a tree so fast it looked rehearsed.
Very good climbers.
After dark
We drove out to a different viewpoint each night. This is the part I came home still thinking about.
Half Dome under a sky like that stops being the biggest thing in view. Something that large has no business looking modest, and it did.
On one of the last nights we could make out headlamps moving up El Capitan. Small, slow points of light, impossibly high, hours of climbing apart from one another. Until then the walls had been scenery. That turned them into somewhere people actually go.
I’d go back in a wetter season, for the water. I’d also go back for the nights.