Sierras

Back to Nature

On July 4th, we arrived in the California Sierras. First stop was Yosemite National Park.

It's hard to describe how beautiful Yosemite is. Pinetrees growing on granite mountains covered in snow and waterfalls plunging into lush valleys... We followed the herds of tourist (Independence Day is a huge holiday in the US) into the park and saw all the familiar, easy accessable sights such as Bridalveil Falls, El Capitan, Half Dome, Mirror Lake, ...

But we also decided to go off the beaten path and hike all the way up to Nevada Falls. The hike turned out to be 11 kilometers long with a very steep climb of 600 meters... But we were rewarded with huge waterfalls, amazing views and rainbows!

 

The next day, we drove through Yosemite westward on a less frequented (but still busy) road. We stopped at Tuolumne Meadows... Just when we thought it couldn't get any better than the top of the Nevada falls, we saw five deer grazing the flowery meadows next to the cristal clear rivers with the snowy mountain tops in the back. Amazing!

So when we left the Yosemite mountains, we didn't have high expectations of what we would find on the other side. But again, we were amazed to see the strange landscape of Mono Lake, an extremely salty lake surrounded by craters with a big seagull population. The lake is gradually shrinking and strange limestone deposits called "tufah" were left behind hundreds of years ago. The side of the lake was covered with millions of little black flies which would fly away as soon as you approached. It felt almost as if a sea of flies was split in a biblical way when you crossed it. The seagulls of course cleverly found a way to scoop up the little flies.

 A little bit further North, we found a gold mining ghost town, Bodie, which used to house about 10,000 people. After the gold mine dried out, they all abandoned the town. Since shipping stuff was too expensive, they sold their belongings to the neighbours or just left it behind (this reminded us a lot of New Yorkers moving abroad). The ghost town is now preserved in a state of arrested decay... beautiful, creepy and intriguing.