(written on the second)
Happy May!
I had a decent night sleep last night. No one bothered anyone that was parked there (there were probably four or five of us?). I’m still congested, and I’m coughing all the time, but I’m getting better at this point, gratefully, and I think I slept decently well.
I forgot to mention as I was driving back toward the spot that I stayed at, that I saw an absolutely massive pine cone in the middle of the road just a couple minutes before getting to the parking spot. It was dark, after midnight, I think, but I got out and picked up the pine cone which is probably 6 in in diameter at its thickest and maybe 14 inches long?
It’s huge. 🙃
Anyway, in the morning, I think I was the first one of all those parked there to get up and get moving. I dumped some trash in the dumpster, and I spent some time trying to put a new piece of bubble wrap in the side window, but gave up after a while because I wanted to get moving, and because the bubble wrap company put a label to hold the roll together that was so big that it renders useless probably two square feet out of a 20 ft roll. Pretty ridiculous to lose 10% because of poor packaging design.
I noticed a lot of the bubbles were already popped as well, so I ended up giving up and throwing everything inside and heading on my way, as I didn’t want to get into the park too late in the day.
On my way back down the road from the camping spot, I pulled over to pick up an aluminum can that had been left there, and while walking out to grab it, I noticed several more aluminum cans and trash, so I picked up most everything I thought in that immediate area and then headed out.
I was also on the lookout for more massive pine cones, but I didn’t see any that came close to being as big as the huge one that was just laying in the middle of the road.
Getting back into the park took a lot longer this time. Instead of maybe three cars ahead of me like yesterday, being first thing in the morning, there were probably 50 or 100 cars in a long line, maybe more than that.
Fortunately, the line went relatively quickly. 🙏
First stop today was Chilnualna Falls. I had hopes that it would be a beautiful place and uncrowded, as it’s out of the way of the normal big stuff that everybody goes to see. It definitely was uncrowded, and it was beautiful, although a little underwhelming from what I had pictured.
It wasn’t a very long hike, and it is amazing to see just how enormous The boulders are in the mountains here. It’s a normal thing to have boulders the size of cars on up to small houses.
I’ve always loved that about the Sierra Nevada mountains, the massive rounded rock formations everywhere.
Once again, on my way into the valley, I tried to find that waterfall cave, and once again, I passed the only one that might have been it but didn’t have the gumption to park way way up the road and walk all the way back to find out.
Maybe I will at some future date. I definitely would enjoy spending more time in yosemite. The first two times I went, it was basically just a one-day visit each time, maybe not even that the second time, , as I had an absolutely awful case of poison ivy, the worst of my life, that sent us driving from California all the way back to utah, cutting our trip short.
Anyway, so I headed back into the valley, this time skipping the tunnel view of the valley because it was an absolute Madhouse with cars and buses and crowds of people everywhere.
Definitely grateful I got to be there last night when there were so many fewer people.
I skipped bridal veil Falls, skipped taking any pictures at all on the south side, and ended up just enjoying the scenery as I drove all the way around again to the north side, parking my van in a little parking spot that I figured was the jumping off place for hiking to the base of El Capitán.
I locked my van and walked up the trail to the nose of El Capitán.
And I stayed there pretty much the entire rest of the day. 🙃
I walked up to the base of it because I wanted to see what it looked like from the bottom, and oh my goodness is it just magnificent. To stand at the base of something so huge, and to have it be this just massive face like it is… wow.
I walked down and around and then back up a little bit to wear some climbers had started climbing. I guess in my ignorance, I thought that if you were going to climb El Capitan you want to climb the whole thing, but of course, there are plenty of just regular climbing routes of however many pitches you want to go up and down in a day.
Of course, there are plenty of people who do climb the whole thing, and sometimes it takes several days of climbing to climb the whole thing.
In fact I forgot to mention that about last night, as I was standing there at dusk taking pictures before it got dark and I took the backpackers to their car, there were lights on the face in three different spots. One with climbers maybe a third of the way up. One with climbers may be halfway up, and one with climbers so close to the top it must have been so enticing to keep going in the dark.
Headlamps going, the climbers hooting and hollering from the cliff face above.
I hooted and hollered back. 🙃
Anyway, so today I was watching people climb, and knowing of the super famous free soloing experience where Alex honnold climbed El Capitan from bottom to top without any rope or safety harnesses of any kind, so I tried to find his starting place. I knew the name of the route was called Free Rider, and I could see routes lined out on far-away pictures, but I couldn’t see exactly where he started.
I hung out and watched some people climb for a little bit, having not gone rock climbing myself outdoors I think since my college days at byu?
Certainly, I’ve done some bouldering at heights that probably should have had equipment for safety, but I haven’t actually gone with rope and harness I think since college, but I might be forgetting some experience somewhere.
Anyway, I also spent probably an hour and a half online trying to find images of what the start of the route looks like. I was pretty shocked at how challenging it was just to find the start of a route that’s so famous. Why were there no pictures so that people could find it from the ground? This is like the rock climbing mecca, and that’s one of the famous routes.
🤷
Eventually, I found a video on YouTube documenting someone’s Free Rider climb, and it showed the perfect view of what the beginning pitch looks like, so I froze the frame on the video and went back to the spot where I thought it started and was able to match up the beginning pitch of Free Rider to the video, so I was able to visually map out Alex Honnold’s route up the largest wall on earth.
After finding that, and triumphantly sharing that with some other tourists that were there, I decided it probably would be a regret of mine to leave without actually having done a little climbing on El Capitán myself. 🙃
My shoes were absolutely terrible for the job, and the granite was slippery in spots, and my nerves were definitely awake, but I started bouldering up the side of the very bottom of the nose, where you’re dealing with a lot more bouldery type terrain before you get to the big unforgiving rock slabs where you’re holding on with the tiniest of indentations.
I climbed up and up and up, I think at one point getting higher than one of the first pitches that people climb. 🙃
I don’t know that for sure, as I would have had to have climbed up a spot that I wasn’t quite comfortable with given the shoes that I had. I almost made it to the very top of that bouldery section. I think I was within maybe 15 ft of the top? But I would have had to have crossed a steeply sloping spot that I probably could have done, but when you’re already really far off the ground, there are certain risks that I just… I’m not going to take.
I have no idea how high I got. I would have guessed maybe somewhere between 100 and 200 feet up, but from the bottom it didn’t look like much at all, so maybe it wasn’t as high as I thought?
It’s hard to tell when high up how high up you actually are.
I stayed up there for a little while, my absolutely massive sun hat catching the breeze a fair bit. After a while, the wind got so strong that I was starting to feel nervous about getting down in it, but I figured that it was better to try and get down now than to wait and have the wind potentially get even stronger. The wind was so strong that I ended up having to take my hat off, roll it up, and tuck it underneath my shirt to be safe.
I also needed to get down because I was going to be meeting with some of my nephews all the way up in Davis, and I had already stayed too long in the park, so I climbed down, which was a little bit of a scary experience in a couple of places. I couldn’t tell but it seems like I ended up having to go down a different way than I’d come up because I must have come up a way that was easy going up but looked bad going down, so I went down a place where I sort of hung and let myself down in one spot instead of climbing down.
There was a small group of people at the bottom that I think were a little concerned for me watching me try and make my way back down.
I don’t blame them if they were nervous, as I was nervous myself. 😅
Eventually, they left, and by the time I got down, I was the only one there at the bottom, but I was safe, and that was what was most important.
Took some videos and pictures while I was up there. Nothing like taking videos and pictures while you’re holding on the side of a rock out cropping. 🙃
It reminded me of that place in New Zealand on that waterfall that I loved so much where I went to the place where I was actually concerned for my life, crawling along the slimy Rock where one slip would have sent me down and over the side of the cliff into the river.
I remember taking video of myself at that point basically saying goodbye to the world if I died. 🙃
There’s probably a pretty good chance, that even had I slipped and gone into the drink that I would have survived anyway. There was a pretty gnarly churn in the river, but after that, it was basically just a slot Canyon full of water that emptied out into a lake a few hundred yards further down, or so, so I might well have survived, but it was certainly scary and I might not have survived had I slipped.
So I was reminded of that experience as I was there taking video of myself at the very bottom of the nose on El Cap.
Anyway, I got down, got myself a little lost on my way back to Rover, but eventually found my way back and started the long drive from Yosemite to Davis, where my nephews have been attending UC Davis.
I did stop in a few places to take pictures of beautiful scenery on the drive out before finally just getting and driving mode, leaving the park, and heading northwest toward Davis.
Arrival time was going to be about 7:15 p.m, and I spent pretty much the entire Drive chatting with Gemini in Spanish to help practice. I’ve realized that though my accent is decent enough that even Latinos think that I am from another Latin American country sometimes, my vocabulary is so poor that I’m probably not truly fluent?
I don’t really know what qualifies as fluent. If qualifying as fluent means that I can get whatever information I need whenever I need it from somebody, then yes, I’m fluent. But if fluent means that I don’t need help with someone telling me what the word is for something on a regular basis, then no, I’m not fluent.
Picked up my nephews at their apartment in Davis and headed to the same little Mexican restaurant that we took them to a year and a half ago on our first Great Western Road trip.
Chatted with them for a good while we ate, catching up on their lives and what they’re doing. Fun to see them exploring what they love. Walked around outside around and around and around the shopping complex where the Mexican restaurant is, and just talked and talked. Finally sat down on some chairs next to Greek restaurant, or whatever it was, and kept talking before finally giving them a ride home, taking some selfies, and bidding them farewell.
I wish my family weren’t so spread out everywhere. 😞
From there, I drove up to the little town of Woodland just Northwest of Davis, found a cheap gas station, filled up, looked up on free campsites.net to see if there was a place nearby where I could crash for the night, found a place at a casino Northwest of Woodland, and headed that way.
Once I got to the casino, it took me a while to find the parking lot where I was allowed to park. There were all sorts of parking lots all over the place, the casino and hotel property being absolutely massive, but every parking lot I went into had the same sign that said no RV parking. One of the notes on the free campsites.net site said that the place that we could park most recently was at the very top gravel parking lot, so I kept driving around until I found that gravel parking lot, and yes indeed, I found several other RVs parked there.
Grateful for a place to stay for the night, I opened my side window a little bit to get some breeze, as it was hotter than I expected inside Rover, and I crashed for the night.
I feel like I might be forgetting some things, but they are not coming to mind, so I’m going to call this good for today.
In honor of my experiences at Yosemite and El Capitan today, I free downloaded my Amazon Prime app, found that the free solo documentary was on sale for five bucks, bought it, watched it, and called it a night.
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful I was able to find the Free Rider route. It’s fun to be able to put places to events and things.
- I’m grateful that I was able to get down safely.
- I’m grateful that I didn’t run over that massive pine cone from yesterday, as I didn’t see any others comparable. Granted, I didn’t get out of the van and go walk around looking, but what I could see from the road, nothing was as cool as the one I already had.
- I’m grateful to be able to use artificial intelligence to help me practice my spanish. It’s absolutely phenomenal. I think about having once been a Spanish teacher, good gravy, this would have been a game changer for those kids.
- I’m grateful to have been able to meet up with my nephews and to chill with them. Such good kids.
- I’m grateful that I was able to safely get off the part of the nose of El Capitan that I climbed. After having been up there standing in certain positions that tensed my muscles, I didn’t even realize until I was going down that my quads were weakened significantly and already sore from being tensed so much. Makes it all the more incredible to think about someone climbing a 3200 ft cliff with no equipment, no place to just back out and say nevermind, no place to rest if your muscles start to cramp. The physical endurance required to climb 3,200 ft, in 4 hours, on a cliff, isn’t astounding.
Success:
- It sounds stupid, but this distracted driving is like my achilles heel. It is so hard to not multitask. I’m multitask in pretty much everything I do all the time. And if I’m going to be as safe as I can as a driver and obey the laws of the land which I profess to believe in doing, then I have to stop using my phone while I’m driving. I had some successes today, so we’ll count that.
Improvement:
- And as with the other days, my area of improvement is the same as my area of success. I’m still not choosing to drive without using my phone all the time. It needs to be all the time. So. Much. Time. Spent. Building. Bad. Habits
Loves! 🥰
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 