Yosemite National Park, California

September 18, 2025

If we were YouTubers or were otherwise monetizing our blog for advertising dollars (ha ha, right? 😉), we would have created a more click-baity title like "Bonus Sneak Preview" or "Insiders Only Bonus Post" to signal that we are publishing this post a little out of order. Or, if we were really nefarious (but not particularly creative), we would have named it "You've Been Lied to: The Dark Side of Yosemite" just because that would maximize clicks. But since we are happily not subject to the dictatorship of the almighty click, we can name our post whatever bland and utilitarian title we want 🙂.

So, we are indeed publishing this post out of order, but it's mainly because we crammed a two-day visit to scenic Yosemite within an 8-day stay in the no-slouch region of the Sierra-Nevadas near June Lake, California, and we knew there would be way too many pictures for one post. So, as not to bog down the reader with an unending barrage of photos of mountain after mountain, and to keep within the technical capabilities of the blog software, we created a separate post just for Yosemite...

We begin with a beautiful sunny Wednesday, where we said good-bye to the camper and headed over the Tioga Pass for a two-day, one-night interlude in Yosemite National Park.

Passing Grant Lake on our way out of our campground. We ended up following these two cars all the way to Yosemite.

The scenic haul up through Tioga Pass

Getting closer to the entrance of Yosemite

Our first day's sightseeing began in the northeastern region of Yosemite along Tioga Road, from where we gradually made our way toward Yosemite Valley. Since we only had two days and had a lot of ground to cover, we opted not to do any hikes longer than a couple of miles. We probably left a lot of nice scenery on the table, but them's the breaks!

Stroll through Tuolumne Meadows

Tuolumne Meadows

It's apparently very attractive in the spring and early summer when it's green and the wildflowers are blooming

The remains of an old spring house over Soda Springs, where we saw carbonated water bubbling up in the puddles

It's just a rock, but Julie thought that its shape mirrored the rounded mountains in the distance very nicely.

Parsons Lodge

From the NPS: The Parsons Lodge is a memorial to Edward Taylor Parsons, a New Yorker who joined the Sierra Club about 1900, and eventually became the club’s director from 1905 to 1914. Parsons was heavily involved in the losing fight against the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley to provide a municipal water source for San Francisco. Parsons died in 1914, and in memorial, the Sierra Club established a fund to build a club meeting house, library, and headquarters in Yosemite. The site at Tuolumne Meadows was chosen for its accessibility to park backcountry and its location near Soda Springs, a location that the Sierra Club wished to safeguard.

Moving onward

This beach at the incredibly attractive Tenaya Lake is a giant slab of granite.

We sat at this spot for quite some time, and only saw a couple of people the entire time.

The lake was scenic enough that we could have walked the entire shore and had a blog's worth of pictures. Having to pace ourselves, we only made it part way around.

We discovered quite a few secluded beaches, but we figured they would not be secluded at all in the summertime!

By the time we got to famed Olmsted Point, the skies were filling with wildfire smoke. On a clear day, you can see panoramic views of Half Dome and many other granite domes and peaks. But today, not so much. Julie decided to take the opportunity to get a nice picture of a tree instead.

Olmsted Point is usually the setting of vast vistas of granite peaks. Today, it was the setting of a nice tree.

It was getting toward lunchtime, and we wanted to find an "epic" setting for a picnic. The smoke only got worse the farther we drove along Tioga road, so the pullouts that would normally have views had nothing enticing going for them. Plus, this section of the road went through a burn scar which is not our favorite type of view anyway. So, we went to the one official picnic area between Olmsted Point and Yosemite Valley. The picnic area turned out to be pretty run down and overgrown with 3 or 4 decrepit picnic tables (the nicest one being taken) and adjacent to a mostly dried-out creek. It did have the cleanest pit toilet we have every seen, so we took advantage of that and moved on.

We ended up pulling over near a small canyon where we scrambled down to a pleasant little creek and had our "epic" picnic in peaceful solitude, if not amidst jaw-dropping scenery.

After lunch, we walked along the little secluded creek for a while.

Next stop along the journey toward Yosemite Valley was the Tuolumne Grove of giant sequoia trees where we walked down a fairly steep road (no bikes allowed, unfortunately) to get to the "grove". When we finally arrived, we saw a pretty impressive tree.

The road down had pleasant "peak-a-boo"views through the trees. The smoke had cleared nicely by this time (at least in this part of the park).

This was a pretty impressive sequoia.

There were some giant pine cones at the base of this giant tree.

Further on, we came across a dead tree you could walk through.

And that was pretty much it. Rick said he could see a couple more large trees deeper in the forest of smaller trees, but they didn't look all that big to Julie. We decided that it was perhaps worth the trip down to see two or three large trees, but it definitely was not worth the trip back up. We might be a little spoiled because we have previously been to Muir Woods near San Francisco, and there were a lot of amazing giant redwoods to see there without having to walk a mile down (and back up) a steep road.

Back at the top at the trailhead, we noticed an exhibit that proved wrong our assumption about the giant pine cones. The pine cones we saw that happened to be near the sequoia tree were actually from a sugar pine. Here is an actual sequoia pine cone:

The biggest trees in the world (by volume) have one of the smallest pine cones--go figure!

It was getting later in the afternoon, and we figured the crowds in Yosemite Valley would have died down enough for us to find a place to park for the night. Since the smoke had drifted away, the approach to the valley was quite nice.

Our first clear view of Half Dome and El Capitan in the distance

Looking down on Yosemite Valley

The oft-photographed vista at Tunnel View

We were surprised to notice that Bridalveil Falls actually had water flowing. (It often is dry this time of year.)

Some nice strangers offered to take our picture.

We sat for quite a while enjoying the view on our little piece of wall at the side of the road with countless hordes of other people doing the same. The temperature was perfect, and a little slice of shade shielding us from the warm sun made it all the more pleasant. After realizing that Bridalveil falls appeared to have some water flowing over it (something we didn't expect), we decided to pull ourselves away from this view and take the quick drive over to see the falls from a closer vantage point.

We didn't have time to hike close to Bridalveil falls, so we just walked to the viewpoint. The amount of water that managed to make it over and down the falls was highly dependent upon how much the wind was blowing at any given time. Sometimes, all the water appeared to blown away completely.

This picture was taken during a relatively calm spell, and even so, it looked like the water hardly made it all the way down.

Since the weather was so nice and the lighting was great, we drove around a bit before checking into our accommodations.

El Capitan is quite imposing in person

The walk to one of the Yosemite Falls viewpoints. Hmm..wonder why nobody's there...

Yosemite Falls Don't see it? Neither did we. It's not unusual for the falls to dry up by late summer. There was a little bit of water flowing, but it is hard to see in this picture.

It was time to check into our lodging at Curry Village, and we figured that the parking lot would have cleared out by 5pm on a Wednesday night in September. We had learned ahead of time that the parking for the Curry Village cabins and "tent cabins" is shared with day use general parking, so if you don't arrive early in the morning or late in the afternoon, you could be out of luck. It was now late afternoon--who would still be here with no water flowing in the waterfalls, right? The answer is... a lot of people. We had to circle around a couple of times to find a spot that didn't require us walking half a mile to our rented cabin. We couldn't imagine what it would be like in high summer. We finally managed to find a spot tucked in amidst the van-lifers who were definitely NOT sleeping in their vehicles overnight.

We had reserved an obscenely expensive cabin with no bathroom because motel-style rooms or cabins with bathrooms were, at minimum, another $100+/night, and we figured that if someone dared us $100 to use a campground-style bathroom for one night, we would probably take the money (we are cheap like that). Our cheapness does have limits, however, and we had decided against the incrementally cheaper option of the "tent cabins". Upon seeing them in person, we knew we had made the right decision.

The "tent cabins" looked run down and felt like a refugee camp. We were glad we didn't rent one of those!

Our little cabin (on the left) was adjacent to the refugee camp.

Julie forgot to take a picture of our cabin, but this one is similar to what ours looked like. It was fine for us for one night.

We had the added bonus of staying here the same night as a school group.

Actually, it turned out there were four different school groups staying in the nearby tents the same night as us.

We were initially slightly horrified at the thought of being so close to so many rowdy adolescents in the nearby tents, but it turned out that they were actually pretty well behaved. The adults got them to bed and quiet by 9pm and they were pretty quiet when they got up around 7 or 7:30am (when we got up anyway). Kudos to the kids and their chaperones!

There were few dining options for dinner in Curry Village, and none of them particularly appealed to us and/or we didn't feel like waiting in a line. So, we checked out the small grocery store and got a couple of ready-made salads and a cold bottle of white wine. We found us a little table with a partial view of Half Dome, and enjoyed the surprisingly good salads, our wine (hidden in coffee carafes), and some other snacks we had brought along. It was actually quite a memorable dinner😊!

Our first attempt at a selfie--Half Dome is washed out.

After much coaxing to get the phone to expose better, Half Dome is at least visible, but the colors are off.

Sunset glow on Half Dome

As it was getting dark, we saw the tiny light of a climber spending a precarious night high up on the rock face. (It looks like a little white speck a little ways down from the right-hand peak.)

The overnight in the cabin wasn't too bad, aside from the fact that the mattresses were a bit old and lumpy. The temperature was just right, and despite the hordes of young teenagers within mere feet of us, it was surprisingly quiet. We had thought ahead and brought an electric kettle, so we made coffee and instant oatmeal for breakfast before checking out and heading out for the day's adventures.

The main advantage of overpaying for lodging in Yosemite Valley is being so close to everything. Now that we already had a parking spot, we could just keep the truck parked and go out on our bikes to explore. Some of you may be wondering why we didn't just camp in Yosemite with our camper. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) there are only a few sites in the campground that can accommodate a trailer of our length and they are very hard to get reservations for; and 2) the shortest tunnel into the valley has a posted height of 10' 3". The height of our trailer is about 13' 4".

Unfortunately, the beautiful weather of the previous day did not carry over to our second day. We instead had cloudy skies and a chance of rain. Despite the clouds, we had fun riding around the valley on our bikes, and since the waterfalls and rivers didn't have much water in them, we didn't feel like we were missing out by not going on those popular hikes.

One last bloom of the season

There was still a little water left in the Merced River.

The Swinging Bridge doesn't swing so much anymore.

The red carpet leading to the main entrance of the beautiful, historic, (and exclusive) Ahwahnee Lodge

As you can infer from the interior of this lodge, the accommodations are decidedly more luxurious (and pricey) than the refugee camp.

The Solarium

Not a bad back yard

The pathway leading to the guest cabins

Much nicer than we stayed in, and they probably have actual bathrooms too!

Mirror Lake without water (not very reflective at the moment)

There were lots of huge boulders strewn about the valley--perhaps the other half of Half Dome?

We searched for a picnic table to have our lunch on, but we couldn't find one. Eventually, we found this place where there were no people at all. And, once again, we had a view of Half Dome!

Finally found a picnic table!

A little fall color up against El Capitan

According to the weather forecast, the chance of rain was going to increase as the afternoon went on, and since we had a couple hour's drive back to our campsite, we left the valley not too long after lunch. The only way back was the way we came.

Olmsted Point had a bit more visibility today

One last picture of Tuolumne Meadows

Just outside the national park

Tioga Pass

Heading home

All in all, we enjoyed our side trip to Yosemite, and it was good to avoid the peak crowds of summer. If we lived far away and wanted to plan a vacation to go specifically to Yosemite, we wouldn't go in the late summer/early fall when the waterfalls were dried up and the meadows were brown. But since we were going to be in the area anyway, it worked out well for us. Perhaps someday we will come back another time in the spring.

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