Yosemite National Park
Trip Start
Jun 14, 2008
1
14
28
Trip End
Jul 05, 2008
Where I stayed
Big Creek Meadow Ranch
Yosemite National Park, California
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
We left Harvey's and decided to head round to Emerald Bay, on the SW side of Lake Tahoe. We stopped en route at Regan Beach, a quaint little beach area where we took some photos. We took a convoluted route through the houses to get back on the main road, but we made it eventually. We found the best viewpoint for Emerald Bay Lake high above it and luckily found a parking spot. We stayed here for about 20 minutes taking photos and reading about some of the history of the area.
We left the Lake Tahoe region and started our journey towards Yosemite National Park. The roads are not at all well sign-posted by any stretch of the imagination and it wasn't long before we found ourselves on completely the wrong road. Admittedly it was a pretty fantastic road, climbing to around 8,000ft and with death-defying cliff roads with plummeting drops. Sarah called it a 'road for heroes'. Cool. We finally stopped and asked for directions (because we are not men) and discovered we had passed our hidden turn about 10 miles previously. Bugger. So, going back over the same dare-devil roads we finally found the turnoff we actually wanted. The road to Yosemite was very scenic and we pretty much had the road to ourselves. Of course, there was an awful lot of smoke about and visibility was quite poor - it spoiled what ought to have been a pretty amazing drive.
We went through a very varied terrain on our journey - California is so much more varied that I had previously imagined. We finally reached Yosemite National Park just before 6pm, having spent 15 minutes waiting to be escorted through some road works. We were entering Yosemite on the Tioga Pass eastern entrance We got a 7-day pass ($20) and entered the park. We travelled through vast granite canyons before pulling over at Tenaya Lake, with Mt Hoffmann to our right, to take some photos. We then continued along the Tioga Road without any further stops - the air was just too smoky and hazy and we were getting very late. We finally left the park at about 7:30pm and headed out towards our next accommodation, a little ranch called Big Creek Meadow Ranch.
We arrived at the ranch at 8pm, which was 2hrs after we should have checked-in. Oops. Fortunately the guy who lived there was very forgiving and still let us it! Our room was really cute and completely wooden (ceiling, floor and walls!). We had a nice bed and a collection of really kooky furniture. The ranch also had its own dog and two cats. We headed out to get a meal and ended up in PJ's Diner (along with about 20 fireman having dinner before heading out to fight the forest fires). I had a really nice pizza and mango smoothie. We made our way back to the ranch after that and turned in soon after.
