Once again I've had no time to write anything in a few days but I'll do my best to catch up!

Our next stop was Yosemite National Park where we planned to spend the day of the 2nd of June. Yosemite is one of the most famous and most popular national parks and I had been looking forward to seeing it.

The park is located in terrain similar to Sequoia/Kings Canyon in the Sierra Nevada mountains with Yosemite being located a few hundred kms further north. The landscape is mountainous with dense forest covering much of the slopes. There were large areas where the trees were dying off due to drought and beetles.

Our drive took us first up and then down into the Yosemite Valley. Along the way were awesome views of the Merced River and the famous Half Dome in the distance. The road featured a number of tunnels cut through the mountainside. We shared the road with a lot of cars and it soon became clear just how popular Yosemite is. We arrived in Yosemite Village and found it packed with visitors. There is a free shuttle service to move people around the valley and all of the buses were full.

Half Dome in the distance

We planned to do a short hike to Mirror Lake and caught the bus to get the start of the trial. As we got off the bus rain started to fall and it soon became torrential. We took cover under a boulder and waited a few minutes before deciding just to continue. Thunder started to boom and the trail became submerged. We were all soaked but the experience was pretty cool.

Mirror Lake

Peggy and Rez at Mirror Lake

We arrived at Mirror Lake to find it mostly empty. The rain had cleared by this point but we could still hear thunder in the distance. We had lunch on what would normally be the lake bed as mist began to swirl into the valley. We had quite far to travel to our next campsite so we soon set off back to the car.

We made a quick stop at Yosemite Falls where it rained heavily again and then drove back out of the valley and across the Sierra Nevada mountains. On the way we found a small traffic jam on the road that turned out to be caused by a bear busying itself in a nearby meadow. We joined the crowd and watched for a few minutes.

Bear viewing traffic jam

I thought that the terrain we drove through as we crossed the mountains was even more beautiful than the valley. The elevation is over 3000m above sea level at some points and there trees grow very stunted and cling to crags in the bare granite. The ground up high was very wet and swampy in places and bare and rocky elsewhere.

We had planned to stay the night at a campground close to the entrance to Death Valley National Park but had to adjust when we realised that that was still four hours from the edge of the park. Instead we stayed in a nice place in the Inyo National Forest near the Ski Resort town of Mammoth Lakes.