Our 5 AM alarm felt like you’d imagine it would. This better be one nice F-ing forest.
We stumbled our way through dressing six sleeping children, and woke them up just enough not to choke on the bagels we offered force fed them.
We loaded up the cars and were somehow still on track to arrive by 6! Or so we thought. The mapping we did last night wasn’t lining up with the mapping we did that morning. Our phones were now telling us that our expected arrival time was 6:05 AM. Not good. Those five minutes were the difference between getting into the park and trying to explain to six groggy kids why their dad, mom, and four other grown adults didn’t bother to check if permits were required. Also what’s a permit?
It’s not like the winding cliffs we were driving through allowed us to make up much time. So the drive was a quiet one, to say the least. I was white knuckling the steering wheel, Aimee was staring down our arrival time, and the kids were just trying to figure out why the hell we got them up so early.
Eventually we started to see some evidence that we were getting close. We breezed right past the “Estimated Wait Time: 90 minutes” sign, and tried not to think about how many miles that translated to. When the “60 minutes” sign came up just a few seconds later, we shuddered at the thought of trying to get in at a slightly less ridiculous hour. Maybe we did actually make the right decision. But it was 5:57, and the entrance was still nowhere to be seen. Too soon to pat ourselves on the back.
Then, a few seconds later, we saw the iconic National Parks Service fee stations come in to view. I tried not to let my excitement translate into quadrupling the speed limit. We might actually make it.
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| Photo: National Parks Service. There was no was I was going to slow down to take a picture. |
We rolled up to the window, saw that the booth was empty, and kept on driving through. The initial response was confusion. “Was that it? Are we in?” Then shock. “I think that was it. I think we’re in.” Then unencumbered, 6 in the morning, who-needs-coffee excitement. We all spontaneously pulled our cars over, got out, looked at one another and started cheering! We made it! Through half-open eyes, the kids didn’t quite share our joy (in fact, Quinn started crying as the commotion woke him from his haze). But we’re hoping they’ll appreciate it eventually.
The park itself was spectacular. That was obvious from the first moments we arrived, even as we spent the first hour simply driving across the western half into the more iconic Yosemite Valley. Because we had to be in the park by 6, we didn’t have the luxury of driving in through the main entrance. But having a sunrise view of some of the lesser known sections was a treat in itself.
But once we got to the heart of the park, we realized that we had absolutely no idea what to do next. With the usual pre-vacation hubbub of kids, jobs, international flights, and road trips required just to get to this point, we had done next to no planning about what to do once we actually got here.
So we walked up to a group of park rangers heading off to their posts and asked almost literally, “What should we do here?” The rangers paused, but didn’t let their faces betray what I’m sure was at least a small amount of judgement. True professionals. They gave use a few tips, and snapped a photo for us. This one, in fact.
When I look back at this photo I think, 1. “I shouldn’t still look that tired. We had already been awake for three hours,” and 2. “So that’s when Mimi’s cat phase started.”
For some context, the typical Yosemite visitor started planning their trip months—occasionally years—before their visit. Permits are in short supply and sell out seconds after they’re released. Many visitors go on multi-day backwoods adventures, and a handful brave the world-class climbing walls. We just found out where the entrance is about an hour ago.
In fact, we had even called the park “Yellowstone” several times that morning. Out loud. In public. In fact, the shuttle driver called us out with a smile on her face when we said that while trying to figure out which stop we should get off at. I’m just glad I didn’t ask where the geysers are.
Through a combination of kindness from the shuttle driver, advice from the rangers, and pity from other guests, we made our way to a delightful little hike up to a stream-fed lake with stunning views of the iconic Half-Dome cliff face. But first we had to actually get there. At that point, the kids had been up for four hours, which is just two fewer than what they slept the night before. That said, they did great. Every 100 feet or so, they’d ask one of us to carry them. But we told them that the Earth Giants would wake up if they heard any whining.
I never thought I’d say this, but thank you, Frozen 2.
As we knew they would be, the views from the top made the effort to get there seem trivial. The kids spent the next hour playing on the world’s most scenic playground.
After our hike, we dropped by the Yosemite medical clinic, but for the best possible reason. A friend from our Whiteriver days is now the clinic’s nurse practitioner. (Yes, the job seems as idyllic as you might imagine.) She and her family live inside the park, and she takes care of the various bumps, bruises, infections, and other maladies suffered by park guests and 2,000+ employees. She had been giving me the hard sell to work there for the past six months, and to be honest, the sales pitch became infinitely easier once I experienced the park in person.
By lunch, our kids were fading (Aimee and I had hit the wall at least an hour earlier). So we headed back to our little mountain retreat and spent a delightfully lazy afternoon napping, playing games, and otherwise taking it easy.
Turns out, it’s quite a nice F-ing forest.
