Yosemite - Day 2

At dawn Sunday morning, we awoke, broke down the tent and stuffed down a breakfast doughnut or two. We planned on leaving immediately for Yosemite Valley, which was about 45 minutes from the Tamarack Flats campsite that we stayed at. We had just had just hopped in the car and were driving out of he campsite when an older women hobbled over to our car asking for some help. Being the helpful people we are, we agreed to give her a hand. Little did we know that this would become the theme of our day.

She said that she had hurt her arm when she was sleeping, so she told us she needed us to put some of the heavier items in her car. This was supposed to take "a few minutes" which was ok with us. Unfortunately 20 minutes later we were taking down her tent and rolling up her sleeping bag for her, but it could have been worse.

Finally we hit the road and went down to Yosemite Valley, which is kind of the ideal direction for our car. We walked around Yosemite Village for a bit and asked Ranger Barrett for a suggestion for a hike. He suggested hiking to Nevada and Vernal Falls because the torrential downpour of the previous night had increased the falls from weak trickles to fairly steady streams. We were pretty confident that two strapping young lads like us could handle a 7-8 mile hike, especially when we saw a stroller coming down the trail a few minutes into the hike. The pavement ended soon enough though and the trail got pretty steep. We passed some great lookouts which were pretty useless because of all the clouds. We reached the top of Vernal Falls and had some hiker take this picture of us.

Top of Vernal Falls
I look like a tourist.

We continued on another few miles to the top of Nevada Falls, which you can't see Nevada from.

I wish I could have seen Nevada.

Then we ate delicious lunch of turkey and cheese on onion rolls at the top of Nevada Falls. 

We could've gone higher but Farmington Tennis doesn't train you for cliffs like this.

And then we walked down.

But of course it couldn't be that easy. We took another route down and were about a mile and a half from the bottom when we saw a hike ahead of us take a spill. It was time for us to save the day again. Turns out Jared sprained an ankle, so we carried his bag/helped him get down the mountain. When we reached the bottom we  jumped on the bus, which took us back to our car which then sputtered four hours back to Palo Alto.

Overall, a pretty solid weekend.