Yosemite Part III

 

 Day 3

We got up in the morning and packed up camp as usual.  By the second night  on the hard ground with only a very thin pad, I was having a pretty rough time sleeping.  So I tended to wake up pretty early in the morning.  So I just enjoyed the peace and quiet for quite a while until I was ready to stand on my feet again.  Then we pumped water and left for Clouds Rest.  I thought that the first day was steep but it turns out that was just a teaser.  I even saw Erin breathing slightly harder during a few portions of this hike.  Erin hiked circles around me so I felt better to see her finally having to work a little.  The first part of the day was steep but pretty even terrain.  At about halfway, we stopped and rested for a while by a really cool spot where we could view this gigantic wall of granite.  I couldn’t get a picture of it but as we stood on the ledge and looked out, we couldn’t see anything but granite all the way up and all the way up.  We couldn’t actually see the whole thing from where we stood but it just appeared to go forever.  The even more amazing part was the amount of trees and foliage that can grow right out of the rock.  (Guess Grandad has been right all along- you can grow just about anything in California.) 

While we were there resting and enjoying the view, we met the other group that kept on the same trail as we were on.  We lost pretty much everyone else by day 2 but we saw each other several times as we both persevered till the top of Clouds Rest.

	The last portion of the trek to the top of Clouds Rest was sort of scary for me.  Having a pack on threw off my weight distribution quite a bit so between that and the wind at the higher altitude, I was a bit nervous.  I made Erin lead the way because she made it look effortless.  Once at the top, we could see Little Yosemite Valley  and Half Dome (see map on previous post).  The top of Clouds Rest was about 9926 ft and within minutes, I went from sweating in our short sleeved shirts to being downright cold.  We made it to the top just after our friends so we stayed at the top and chatted before moving on.
We finally got close enough to Half Dome to just barely see the poles and cables going up the side and all the way to the top.  We really wanted to do Half Dome but because of where we needed to camp, we would have needed another day.  Supposedly, Half Dome is a little nerve wrecking and pretty physically demanding.  But once you get to the top, you can sit and hang your feet over the edge at the point of it.  That is not for the faint-hearted though.

 

Getting back down from Clouds Rest was the most painful part.  Unfortunately, I think this was what pretty much did my knee in for the rest of the trip.  After this I was in a lot of pain pretty much all the time.  It was like going down about 12 flights of stairs twice the height of normal steps.  They just kept going and going and going and going…  Well, you get the point.  Then once we were done with that, we though life would get easier.  But after we got down from Clouds Rest, we continued around it and joined up with the John Muir Trail (green trail on the map of the previous posting).  To our dismay, we ended up on almost 4 straight miles of very steep, flat switchbacks that also never seemed to end.  This is where I got all the blisters on my feet, including some underneath a couple of toenails.  I ended up losing those nails and they still haven’t grown back.  Needless to say, we decided not to take this same trail on the way back.  Instead, we took a little bit longer way around but it was a little less steep.  After hiking almost 7 miles that day, our feet felt like someone had repeatedly hammered on them for about 3 hours straight.  So we once again, found the stream and got our water so we could get off our feet.  For the first time, tried to clean up a little bit at the stream.  We were shocked at how dirty we had gotten.  Even though we were all wearing pants, our legs were caked with dirt all the way up to our thighs.  Erin wasn’t wearing hiking boots and  even after going home and scrubbing her feet, she still had brown toes.  Even after washing as much of our bodies as possible, we were dirty again in 5 minutes or less.  But it felt good for a minute. 

 

Purely by coincidence, everywhere we camped, we always had a nice big sitting rock.  At first it was pretty convenient.  But then we found ourselves just staying in bed later because we neither wanted to stand on our aching feet nor did we want to sit on the hard rock anymore.