A new experience! My first visit to Yosemite today. What an extraordinary experience being in the land of John Muir and Ansel Adams.
Muir was a sort of Wilderness Yogi, a visionary, who put his passion behind creating Yosemite as a park for us and for posterity.
I was blown away by the scale of the granite mountains and bouldered river beds shaped by glacial movements over ages.
To see the shiny, vertical rock faces with tiny figures climbiyng them was truly breathtaking. Ages ago the original rock climbers took 47 days to scale El Capitan; a more recent team took just over two hours, we were told by our guide today.
This park is for everyone. I saw mothers and infants today, an older sight-impaired woman, the morbidly obese, cyclists with all their paniers bulging with camping gear, beauxoup de francais, and a couple of Aussies with American accents.
We’ll come back tomorrow for another taste of this amazing spiritual centre, weather permitting – a storm is brewing.
“To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual poet and the goodness of the sky make them as near as a circle of friends.” – John Muir, naturalist, writer, activist.