Half Dome Hike Yosemite National Park, Ca. 27-29 July 2007

This was a trip organized by Ari from my Ice Hockey team. Our objective was to get to the top of Half Dome before sunrise - so we drove up Friday afternoon, took a quick nap, and then headed out of Curry Village a little after 11:30pm that night. After staying a couple of hours at the top watching the sunrise, the marmots, squirrels and people, and eating brunch we did the arduous hike back to Curry Village, and got back around 2:30pm. Since I had brought my bike, was in no hurry to rush back to the heat and traffic of the Central Valley, and Sunday was a very pleasant day, I biked all the way around the Valley .

Yosemite National Park is the oldest Park in the country - having initially been deeded to the state of California by a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in June of 1864. In spite of the fact that I was in Yosemite Valley only a month ago - see those pictures here, it was interesting to see how much the park can change in less than a month - and bicycling is definately the way to see the Valley. Yosemite and Cascade Falls - running pretty well in early July, had completely dried up. They had also done several controlled burns in the west end of the Valley. But it is still a beautiful valley. And there were lots of bears roaming - apparently the drought has driven them out of the high country. Surprisingly, there were not a crowds in the valley - there was plenty of parking everywhere.

Unfortunately, I had a camera malfunction, and it appears that well over a third of the pictures I took got corrupted. The pictures were taken with a Canon SD550 digital camera. If you can suggest better captions, or would like the full resolution versions of these pictures (some are ten times the size of the bigger pictures I put here) send me email.

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