Monday, October 15, 2012

Yosemite Trip and Climbing El Cap...base routes

With a few scheduled days off and a well placed Chemistry building power outage on Saturday, Chesy and I decided on a short trip to Yosemite or as my Chinese lab mate calls it "Yost_mite". So I jetted home from work on Thursday evening to get our "anodized nik naks" in order and head out.

Don't forget the knife for killin bears

Flash forward 5 hours: As awoke from a dreamless sleep at a random Nevada rest stop (more like dirt pullout with a 40 gallon drum for a trash can) the rain was pouring effortlessly on my car. I wrestled off my sleeping bag and we were off again; a few hours from the park. Soon enough the sun revealed itself along with the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains. Now on any other day this phenomena would leave me excited and breathless, but after 7 hours of driving, poor sleep, and a few too many Red Bulls all I came to realize was that the pass to Yosemite would be closed. Of course as Chesy and Travis luck would have it this was indeed true. Abridged Version: we drove the long way (6 extra hours) around. 

It's ok though, gas was real cheap.

As we arrived into a socked in park 6 hours later than we expected we were greeted with beautiful vista views of dense fog, moisture, and dim headlights that you couldn't really see until it was too late (at least we still had our senses of humor). Things did clear up quite a bit later that night.

Avatar!

Look at that enormously active waterfall! Well pretend.

Blue cloudless skies and mild temperatures greeted us the next day. I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.



Chesy on El Cap (actually a True Statement) but not as cool as it sounds. 


 Quintessential Half Dome pictures


A full day ending it with an easy out up Munginella


View from our tent

Running to add icing to the cake. 

As William Nelson once said "I just can't wait to get on the road again"




1 comment:

  1. Magnificent views,spectacular photos (thank you for sharing them)..glad the extra 6 hours drive did not ruin the fun and that you made it safely back home!

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