This is what Yosemite looks like at the top. My little GPS thingy said we were at 6666.something feet +/-26 feet.
If you look carefully in the background of this picture you can see evidence that we weren’t the only people to make it to the top. In fact there were a variety of people of all different ages up there. From the top you can’t really see too much of the humanization of the valley. Don’t get me wrong – Yosemite isn’t a very commercialized place, but there are roads and paved trails wide enough for wheel-chairs and bikes all over the place. When you’re more than 2000 feet above the valley floor though you can’t really see too much of that stuff – just a blanket of trees that stretches between the mountains, it’s fairly spectacular. About 1/3 of the way through my descent I was shocked back to reality by a guy in his forty’s wearing topsiders and holding a clear plastic “Subway” bag complete with the lunch-special-sized soda asking me how far the top was. My weekly pass into the park expires Friday the 29th at about noon, so if i wake up and decide to bail on work i can still make it there and not have to pay another $20. Due to some prior obligations saturday (read: work) that’s probably not going to happen, but I think we’ll be back there sometime soon.
Oh – and i guess this is the first offical day of this thing? Hi there!