Yosemite Get Away

To celebrate our 12th anniversary, Pam and I decided to hike Half Dome. We'd heard of a few other people doing it and we definitely thought it sounded like fun. Back at BYU, we'd climbed Mt. Timpanogos twice - summitting once - and enjoyed the climb-a-mountain-at-night adventure.

We left home Friday afternoon on our way to Yosemite and stopped in Modesto for some dinner. Driving a bit blind, we wandered around Modesto until until getting the bright idea of calling our friends who'd recently moved from there. We got some nice restaurant ideas and had some of our best nachos ever before driving the rest of the was to Fish Camp. I had only started looking for hotels about 2 days before and everything in Yosemite valley was booked so we ended up at the Tanaya Lodge.

We had planned to get up at about 4am but after getting upgraded to a suite when we arrived (they were about full as well) we felt like we needed to enjoy our room and "sleep in" until about 5. Pam and I reached the trail head parking lot about 6:30 and took a quick picture at the base of the Merced (I think) river before heading up.

We took about 3 1/2 hours up and another 3 1/2 hours back down and got a few fun pictures on the way. The final climb up to the summit is assisted by some cables placed in the mountain side. It's quite steep and my favorite part was coming back down the cables. There were a few others on their way up so I had to stop a few times but otherwise I ran down the whole section. Fun, fun.

Here we are a the two falls we hiked past. Vernal falls is the picture above and the "Mist" trail passes close enough to get sprayed like a light rain. On the right is the higher up Nevada falls.