We spent that first day in the valley. It was amazing, though most of the waterfalls were dry. The second day, we embarked on the Half Dome hike. A 17.2 mile roundtrip monster that takes you from the valley floor up some 4,000+ feet to the top of Half Dome. The most remarkable thing is that some 500 people per day manage to pull off that hike, including some remarkably, um, ``fluffy'' people.
Unfortunately, our feet weren't as well prepared as we thought. Nevertheless, we left the next evening on our 5 day backbacking trip, starting off with a half dozen blisters between the two of us. I'll let the pictures tell the story of the hike, but here are the basics. We took 5 days, hiking traveled about 40 miles that took us on a loop around the southern part of the high country. We hiked and camped betweent the 7,500 and 10,500 feet, which made for warm days and cool nights (and made us thankful we'd been at at last 5,000 feet for the previous 4 days). The most eventful thing happened the second day, when we hiked a mile past our trail fork. By the time we realized it, we were in no mood to backtrack, so we took the advice of some hikers we saw and blazed our own trail, following a dry riverbed that cut between two mountains then fell 700 feet to the valley where the trail we were supposed to be on was. It was...adventuresome. We saw all sorts of large mammal tracks and scats, and had to work our way down a rather serious dropoff at the end, but made it afterall. Probably wouldn't do that again. . .
Click a picture to see a larger view.
