The fall colors were just starting, but I imagine that Yosemite will be spectacular in a week or two. Look at that maple in the bottom right of the picture below.
We were amazed that the waterfalls were still flowing this late in the year, even if at a fraction of their spring volume, so we got lucky there. Maybe in the spring, Yosemite will make a better impression when the water is flowing full bore.
Unfortunately, you can't escape the fact that Yosemite also features 4 million visitors a year, and it seems like all 4 million try to crowd into the Valley. It also seems to be staffed by volunteers, and most people in uniforms that we encountered had only superficial knowledge of the area. It was quite a change from Glacier, Yellowstone, and the Tetons, where every person in a uniform that we spoke to seemed to have a geology degree. The ranger-led presentation we attended at the Lodge on the geology of Yosemite was great, and the presenter obviously knew her stuff, but she was the exception rather than the rule. We have obviously been spoiled by the high caliber of the staff in the aforementioned Parks, so Yosemite's volunteer staff were a bit of a let down.
When we first arrived in the Yosemite Valley, we went straight to the campground reservations booth to check out the waiting list for a campsite on a Tuesday morning in the "off season". Unfortunately, the off-season doesn't really seem to exist here at the moment, and the list was about thirty names long before noon. Next, we checked out Camp 4, which showed as "open", but when we got there, it looked more like a gathering of the Rainbow People than a campground (and to be clear, I'm not saying that it is a gathering of Rainbow People, just that it looks a lot like what I encountered at "the Slab" in Ocala one March when I stumbled onto a gathering of Rainbow People). We bailed quickly on the Valley, and headed south to Wawona. This turned out to be the right move. The Wawona Campground was open, and clean, with plenty of sites available in the early afternoon. It was entertaining to get back from a day of hiking, and sit in our campsite enjoying a freshly cooked hot meal of white chili or black beans and rice, and watch a few dozen cars and RVs who hadn't hit the campsite lottery in the Valley race around the Wawona campground trying to find an empty spot. We ended up sharing our sight with fellow tent campers every night - once with a nice young couple from Israel, once with some hard drinking Dutch, and once with a couple from California.
Despite this evening rush, Wawona was a good spot to pitch the tent for the week. There was a Pioneer History Center less than a mile down the road. The Wawona Hotel next door had wireless access, and a restaurant if I needed a night off from cooking. There is also the Tenaya Lodge just outside the park, where we enjoyed a hot meal and a fizzy soda one night when our son was feeling a bit green around the gills due to the time spent driving back and forth on the winding roads of the Park. Glacier Point was about an hour away, as was Yosemite Valley, so most days began and ended with the same drive, and three days of this and a recharged Nintendo DSi gave him a brush with car sickness that was miraculously fixed with an orange soda and a cheeseburger. Finally, there were good hikes and the Mariposa Grove seven miles down the road from Wawona, which, while crowded, were nothing like the trails in the Yosemite Valley.
We had previously been through the Muir Woods north of San Francisco and seen the coastal redwoods, but the four-mile hike through the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias was stunning. The parking lot and the lower trail is crowded, but few people actually hike up the path to Upper Grove at the top of the trail. There is a tram that runs up and down a paved road, but it runs infrequently enough that we hiked in almost complete peace and privacy to the top.
When you reach the top, near the "museum", the giant trees scattered about with bright green spaces between presents a scene that tops anything we saw in Muir Woods.
If you look carefully, you can see my wife at the bottom left of the picture above, and of course, the "museum" is in the center background. This is truly one of those "places of power", where you stop and stand in awe of what surrounds you.
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