Yosemite N.P. - Wawona

Well, we just absolutely loved our visit in Yosemite. There are tons of hikes to tell you about and a thousand pictures I could share. But I won't do that to you! I figured it would be best to break down my posts into the different sections of the park and just highlight certain things. Yosemite is huge, and unfortunately we did change our plans slightly and never made it to Hetch Hetchy. We decided to save that for another visit. We'll be back - there were too many hikes left unexplored.

Most park visitors who go to the Wawona area, which is south of the famous Yosemite Valley, go to see the big trees. The Mariposa Grove offers a tram or a trail system that winds around this grove of giants. After having recently been in Kings Canyon and Sequoia with those big trees, we were a little underwhelmed by these trees. We think the other parks had bigger trees - taller and thicker. But that could be because the wow-factor was taken away. No matter what, the trees are still impressive and the walk through the grove was nice.

We went up to Wawona Point, which is in the Grove, hoping for the spectacular view of Wawona Valley that I had read about. As soon as we crested the ridge, the clouds rolled in. So much for the view! But it is really interesting watching clouds roll over the surrounding hills and lift up from the valley below. We got bits and pieces of a view, but not in its entirety. Still beautiful - like the Pacific Northwest.

We also took advantage of some of the short hikes in this area, such as the Meadows Loop and the Swinging Bridge. This picture was taken from the Swinging Bridge - the clarity and the colors of the water were so striking. We had a lot of fun just playing around on the granite rocks in this area, we actually didn't even do the whole trail.

A longer hike we did, that we would highly recommend, was the Chilnualna Falls trail. It's about 9-miles or so. One thing we learned is that determining actual mileage of hikes in the park is nearly impossible. It depends on what you read - book, brochure, map, trail sign, whatever - they never say the same distance. We like to know because we are still determining our own hiking pace, and we like to know how long it could take for the hike, how much food/water to carry, and so forth. Some trails varied as much as 0.5 mile to 3 miles. That can be a big difference! Anyway, the entire trail for Chilnualna is worth it. There were several cascades or waterfalls along the way. The final destination is pictured here - a series of 5 cascades and pools:

I've seen pictures of when the water levels are much higher, and you can't see the rock formations and pools. I liked seeing it this way. The water is only running about 28% of normal for this time of year, so we were lucky to even have waterfalls! One of the reasons why we liked this hike so much was that we had no expectations for it. It wasn't recommended to us, we hadn't read much about it, and so we were pleasantly surprised at every turn. We took our socks and boots off on several occasions to soak our toes in the icy water. The "pain-factor" kicked in in about 5 seconds. The water was so cold, your body didn't have time to get numb - it just went straight to pain. Splashing the water on was refreshing, but soaking the feet was intolerable.