Yosemite National Park (And Our Failures)

During a workation in late-summer 2022, we went to Yosemite National Park and stayed at Tanaya Lodge, literally as close to the park as you can possibly get without being in it. What you’ll be reading here is about what we learned on this trip, and why we’ll absolutely have to go back before we can cross this one off the list.

Yosemite is an amazing park, but unlike other parks we visited during the shoulder season, Yosemite really loses a lot in the late summer/early fall. A prime example is that there are no waterfalls. The waterfalls in Yosemite are primarily fed by snow melt and rain, both of which are nearly non-existent in the late summer. We also experienced a good deal of smoke, which made some of our pictures pretty amazing, but made hiking difficult since the smoke settles into the valley. The end of the season also saw a number of trail closures, limiting our options and ensuring that the ones that were open were pretty heavily travelled. Finally, the most important issue we ran across was the yearlong closure of the Glacier Point Road. This road is an absolute must-see at the park, some of the most famous views and trails leave from this road, it being closed would have been a deal-breaker for us if we were going for the park alone. We stayed at Tanaya Lodge, a beautiful facility that sadly we didn’t take any pictures of. This is one of the closes places you can stay without actually being in the park, but it was still a 45 minute drive to get to the loop where trails were open. I think we’d consider staying in the park the next time when you take into account that we encountered almost no traffic and it still took us a long time to get anywhere.

There were a lot of wildfires this year, and unfortunately the smoke settles into the valleys, we saw a lot of it from overhead as we flew in. On the flip side, we did get some pretty amazing pictures that might not have been possible without the smoke. The Tunnel View was the perfect spot for this picture straight down the valley, but it gets pretty crowded at sunrise.

The hiking was beautiful, if not limited. There were so many trails closed for one reason or another, and the flies were like nothing we’d ever seen before. Lots of folks had planned ahead and brought fly nets for their hats, we spent the day getting forearm workouts trying to swat them away.

No trip to Yosemite is complete without a walk through the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. This was our second time seeing trees like this in the last couple of years, but it really never gets old. A few of them had gotten a little singed from previous fire seasons. The walking path was easy but the only way in and out is via the shuttle, and the wait on those can be pretty long.