Day 0: SFO -> Yosemite National Park
/1.2 Miles / Ascent +35' / Descent -31'
Merced Welcome Center, 4pm. Been travelling since 6am est. Only 4 more hours to go until Yosemite...
Yosemite is a bitch to get to.
Make no mistake about it - it's worth every ounce of effort and time, but it will try your travel mettle. Truth be told, if you can run the gauntlet to get there and still want to hike into the backcountry, then you REALLY want to be there.
Here's the deal: unless you live within driving distance there is no easy way to get to this place. Period. Since there are no car rental drop-off options in Yosemite, public transportation is your only option and it's a tangled alphabet soup. Imagine this:
Take a 6am flight from JFK that arrives in SFO at 10:30am.
Take the BART subway to the outside town of Richmond (changing subway lines once - ~1hr).
Get on an AMTRAK train heading south to Merced (~3hrs).
Hike from train station to Welcome Center and pick up YARTS bus to Yosemite (~3hrs).
Arrive at Yosemite at sunset (8:30pm). Stuff faces at only open restaurant. Find backpackers campsite in the dark.
Encountered these at a Circle K on the stretch from SFO -> Merced. This just did not feel right to us.
Thats what we did but we rented a car instead of taking the subway and AMTRAK. Jason, Katherine, Tyler and Lindsay got into San Franciso the day before and stayed in an Airbnb and picked me up the next morning at the airport on the way down to Merced. The fact that we couldn't find each other at SFO was a troubling harbinger (I was groggily waiting incorrectly on the departure level - Mr Wang was not amused).
Probably the nicest view of Merced (Bail Bonds store cut off intentionally).
Merced turned out to be a classic recession mash-up of charming historic buildings that housed low rent businesses (Bail Bonds on Maint St) or crowded by big box stores. Gustaf had flown to LA a few days before and had driven his rental car to Merced earlier that day.
I was changing and packing up my street clothes/non hiking gear in front of the Merced post office. I was making a mess on the sidewalk with clothes and questionable bits of gear spread out like a homeless person when I heard, "Excuse me, but there's no loitering here." Of course, it's California. I look up into the sun and there's this man looming over me in a wide brimmed hat and I'm getting ready to receive a ticket when I get a smile instead. I hadn't seen Gus in a while and he was already in his hiking gear and with his "cowboy" trail hat looked like a veritable National Parks Ranger. We hugged and I introduced him to the rest of the group.
Gus had already sent his package ahead to the hostel outside of Whitney so I did the same, while the rest sent theirs to Mammoth as they were only doing ~ 6 days of the hike. I wouldn't see a clean shirt for 17 days.
That was one of my tricks to save weight. One T shirt, 17 days. Jason had a very different philosophy: bring many changes of clothes, wash them frequently, screw the extra weight and smell like a daisy. I'm still not sure which of us was right.
Some mexican food, and then a wait at the Welcome Center for the 5pm YARTS bus. Everyone was in and out of the bathroom, as we didn't know if there would be one on the bus or if they would be easily available in Yosemite. Our anxiety was telling as the bathroom at the Welcome Center was not...welcoming. My first foray scared some homeless guy awake who bursts out of the stall leaving a green cloud of flies behind. I let Tyler give it a shot and charged my phone.
Admittedly not a great shot yet this view gets decidedly worse as the trip wears on.
Waiting for a bus is not fun. (Me, Tyler, Lindsay)
Actually, it sucks. (Gus, Kat)
Ah, the bus. It transports all types including a 50yr old homeless looking cat with a battered ruck and trucker cap sleeping on a bench. turns out he was a Yosemite trail crew roughneck.
The landscape from Merced on is surprisingly un-dramatic and so a few of us snoozed. Other passengers were a mix of visitors and workers, maybe a ranger. We perked up as we entered Yosemite through the tunnel that lends it's name to one of the most dramatic vistas and also the name of our starting trail head the next day (Pohono/Tunnel View). Suddenly you find yourself at the bottom of this glacier carved bowl revealing 3,000' walls of granite renowned in the climbing world with names like The Nose, Half Dome and El Capitan.
Grabbing shots from the YARTS bus. This is "El Capitan", one of the most famous rock climbing faces in the world at @ 3,000' straight up.
Yosemite Falls taken from the bus at 8pm. The scale of this park is almost impossible to register. That waterfall is 2,500' tall. That's 2.5 Empire State buildings...
The center and soul of the park, Yosemite Valley, is also it's most visited. It has two lodges, numerous car campsites, two "villages" and is surrounded on all sides by the towering granite icons that many know by name but might not knowingly associate with Yosemite: Half Dome, Glacier Point, El Capitan, Three Brothers, Crocker, Dewey, Taft. Mesmerized by the setting we arrived at Curry Village and stumbled around with our heads craning alternately up and in front of us, obvious to others that we were "fresh off the bus".
Classic touches abound in Yosemite.
All we we really wanted was to find Curry Village Pizza, to be our last prepared dinner for days. There was an eating contest of sorts. I finished my medium pizza with mushrooms but Tyler made a good show of it, plowing through his double cheese medium with gusto. This would haunt him later that night...
Camp Curry, dusk. The lodgepole aesthetic thankfully predominates.
Our stomachs numbingly bloated, we heaved on our packs in the crisp valley night air and headed in the direction of the backpackers campground at North Pines. Backpackers with Wilderness Permits (permits that controlled the quota of hiking flow in the park's backcountry) were allowed to stay at the backpackers campsite for one or two nights before or after their trip.
A note on the hierarchy of accommodations in Yosemite. First are the lodges for the "softees" that want to experience the park without giving up any of modern life's conveniences. Then there were the car campers which I was surprised to learn took up the vast majority of the park's campsites. These groups drive up to a reserved spot and pitch their tent fairly close to their car in a smallish plot, cheek-to-jowl with other car campers. It's a very popular method of camping here in the U.S., Europe and New Zealand. Us backpackers are essentially 3rd class citizens and are given a small area adjacent to the North Pines car camping site. In fact, it is not on any of the maps - I checked many times thinking I was missing something. I called the Wilderness Center to make sure it existed and they assured me it existed, yet it wasn't until a google search turned up a hand-drawn map (made by a prior backpacker) showing the backpackers plot that I had any tangible evidence of its existence.
The lost leading the lost.
I grabbed a couple of janky photo-copied maps at the visitor center and we tried to use them to get to the campground via headlamp. We could hardly get out of the parking lot. I'm serious. We are all fairly intelligent, but there were no lights or signs, or cell service and the maps really sucked...and we were tired. We found a river, crossed a bridge, followed some confusing signs, most of which were bear warnings, and wandered around the North Pines car camp and the adjacent ranch for 25 minutes until we gave up and found a small trail off to the side that had some flat areas. We all shrugged and decided to pitch our tents there as we were really spent. Just as we got started I noticed two backpackers coming down the trail and flagged them down. They told us the campsite was just down the trail, over a little bridge, and in seven minutes we were thankfully there. There were tents scattered over a relatively small area with some backpackers still up sitting around fire rings, drinking beers and shooting the breeze. The campsite host came by and explained the rules (put all of our food in the bear lockers, quiet after 10pm, etc and to register our group). We bumbled through setting up our tents and most of us fell asleep.
It was 10:15pm and we had all been on the move since dawn. It was a schedule I was going to have to get used to...
Jason getting ready to try to find North Pines backpackers campsite.
Gus looking cheery - he just had pizza. Later on the trek there was no pizza. Just endless granola and bad Pad Thai. Not cheery.
Feeling rather good at mile 0. Remember this photo when Gus & I finish on Mt. Whitney, 238 miles later.
