USA ’22 – Day 5 – Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

DAY 5 – Yosemite (0 miles driven, 10.97 miles walked)

After the last few days of miserable drizzle and downpours it was nice to wake to dry weather and the prediciton of it being dry all day. It did somewhat remind me of the “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” song:

Wait a minute, it's stopped hailing
Guys are swimming, guys are sailing
Playing baseball, gee that's bettah
Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter

We made the most of it by heading off early in to Yosemite starting at a great little coffee shop where my education of Americans in the art of making tea continued!

Yesterday we had been recommended to go the walk to Mirror Lake so that was our first stop this morning. It was a couple of miles up a gently inclining track which we had all to ourselves. Having read lots of the warnings and seeing some particularly gruesome pictures on Reddit I was paranoid about meeting a bear and having to fight one off, perhaps unsuccessfully. This played on my mind as we walked up but fortunately the walk was bear free. Because of the time of the year there wasn’t any water in the lake but the views were incredible and it was well worth the hike up there. By the time we were done there were plenty of people on the trail coming up so we timed it just right.

After lunch we made our way towards the meadows at the base of the imposing granite rocks. We’d decided to make a short detour to the Lower Falls and had not been walking long when we spotted a coyote walking through the bush. Then just a couple of minutes later there was a brown bear and two cubs just crossing a bridge in front of us. Given my view on bears outlined above I should have turned and run but they were so beautiful that I was mesmerised. We watched as they strolled off in to the woods.

We continued our walk along the meadow path where there were a number of houses which were clearly private residences rather than rental places. These looked out on to amazing views from their front windows, although it must be pretty challenging during the harsh winters.

By now we had walked over nine miles and we were knackered and so headed out of the park having had a fantastic day.