YOSEMITE | Summiting Cloud's Rest and Taking a stroll through Giant Sequoias
So we've made it to Yosemite. The plan for the next few days is hike up to little Yosemite campground using the Mist Trail, see some waterfalls. We're gonna camp there for two nights. The plan for tomorrow is to do a big day hike up to Clouds rest and then back to the campground.
Then, in two days, we're gonna hike back down to the car. We hope we're gonna get up to the campground before sunset, because we got off to a late start today, so we only have maybe 3 to 4 hours up there and it's a pretty big climb to get up there. So fingers crossed we get there.
So we're just leaving our camp now. We're leaving our tent, and everything set up down here, as our kind of base camp for today. As we just do a a day hike up to Clouds Rest. The sun is just about rising in the meadow now. It's been hitting the peak of Half Dome for almost an hour now.
We're happy to be leaving most of our gears down at camp, because it's gonna be a pretty big hike today. I think between 16 and 20 kms and over a 1000m of elevation difference. Bringing a full pack up there would have been probably impossible for us. So we're slowly but surely grinding our way up this trail to the summit of Clouds Rest. The trail is a very slow gradual climb all the way up there. Which on one hand is nice, because there's no really steep section that will zap all of our energy, but on the other hand, there's no flat or downhill sections where we actually feel like we're moving fast.
But I think we're over halfway there now. So we shouldn't have any trouble summiting today. But we're starting to feel the elevation a little bit. The summit of Clouds Rest is over 3000m.
I think we'll be pretty out of breath by the time we get there. And we did spot a mother and a baby cub on our way up. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the camera out in time to film them, but they were so cute. Once they knew we were around, they kind of scurried off which is sad, but really cool to see. We just stopped at this little lookout to drink some water, eat a little snack and take a break.
We're getting really close only a couple hundred meters of climbing and probably less than a mile, maybe a kilometer. We should be there within an hour, I'd say. We've been up here for almost an hour and a half, just really soaking in the views, because they are magnificent up here. But if we want to get back to camp before sunset, we got to head back down now. It took us almost 5 hours to come up, so we're estimating between 3 or 4 to go down.
Let's do it. We made it down to camp in less than 2.5 hours. Which is less than half the time it took us to get up.
Overall, it was a really nice hike. Very strenuous. Probably... the most difficult hike I'd said we've done.
Ever. Not the longest, but the elevation gain and the high altitude made it pretty strenuous. Yeah, by the time we were on top, we couldn't walk for more than like two minutes without needing a break for a minute. Yeah the altitude was really taking its toll on us.
By the top we were struggling to make it up. We're both very impressed and have a lot of respect for mountaineers who go up twice that high. Overall, it was an amazing hike, amazing views.
We never thought Half Dome would look so small, but it does from all the way up there. The sun is almost setting now so, we're just gonna make our dinner and then go to bed. Hopefully it's gonna be a good sleep. We broke camp at 8 am this morning and we did not expect it to get that cold last night. We were hoping that this back country camping trip would be warm and the weather was looking pretty good in Yosemite Valley, so we thought it wouldn't be that bad up here. But looks like it got below freezing.
Again, we're gonna continue heading south. Hopefully, by the time we get to the desert in the south west, it'll be warmer. at night.
We're just heading down to the valley now, we're gonna hop into the van maybe go see a couple other things in the valley, but then we're gonna head out of the park and possibly go see some Sequoias!
2024-11-19 09:05
