Natural Beauty

Natural beauty is such a funny thing. You hear it all the time, but how many of us really appreciate it? Well, I can tell you that going to Yosemite national park is some serious natural beauty. The trees. The prospect of crazy bears. The cliffs to dangle your feet from. It's all there and it's all natural.

I drove a good six hours into the park with the traffic and all. I'll admit I was tired at first, but nothing some serious caffeine can't fix. After that, it was hiking time. Janssen and I took it upon ourselves to talk to the people next to us and figure out some trails, which directed us to the park ranger. After listening to him talk and point out various trails, we decided to just drive to the nearest trail parking lot and go. Boy did we go. At first we were just walking and climbing random rocks along the path, but then we found the high cliffs. The ones where you could let your feet hang off the edge. Heights that you would look over the edge and see thousands of feet below you. Breathtaking. When I get the chance I will upload some pictures for everyone. They're on someone else's computer at the moment. After spending a significant portion of time feeling vulnerable and tiny, we started hiking downhill on a trail or hike or maybe something we made up. In any case, it was all downhill. This means that when we decided to turn around and come back it was all uphill. Not as fun. What made it worse was by the time we had really started the uphill we had about no water. Really not as fun, but taking a break in the shade and being able to look out and see so many gorgeous sites helped to alleaviate the pain. We made it to the dome where we were able to look all around us. Gorgeous. Everyone should go and see this. The pictures we took are beautiful and were quite fun to take :)

That ended our long hike and we went back to the campgrounds. Our evening consisted of cooking canned food, drinking, and meeting some exceptionally nice people who hooked us up. More on that if you ask me personally ;) After trying to go to sleep in the tent and realizing that it was freezing and maybe we could hear bears or were imagining it, Janssen and I decided to sleep in the car. Not the most comfortable, but warmer than before. This ended Yosemite and the beauty that it is. Now for more stories....