Yosemite revisited, again

©2012 Lydia Hinshaw

Breakfast in the meadow

Iceberg impersonators

  YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, CA -- We returned here last week for the third time since we worked in Yosemite Valley in 2008.  And for the third time we did not revisit the tourist-choked valley itself.
 Thus we avoided the annoying and time consuming events that always bracket such visits: The parking-place search and, hours later, the search to find the car again.   
 Instead, we camped for two nights at Tuolumne Meadows campground, where the low temperature was 32 degrees Sunday morning and 44 on Monday.  Wednesday, the campground closed for the winter, as hard freezes and road-closing precipitation can happen any day now at nearly 9,000 feet.
 The campground is heavily treed and therefore shady most of the day.  Across the road in the meadow, though, the sun arrives early and warms things up quickly.  So it's common for campers to carry food out into the meadow and eat breakfast there, using several handy slabs of granite for seating.
 Sunday morning we went on a short hike to Elizabeth Lake.  We chose this hike because the trailhead is in the campground and we did not have to move the Magic Bus.
 We prolonged our outing by hiking around the lake, and discovered an area that looked as if it were littered with large chunks of ice, the sort of thing you see at the toe of a glacier.  But it's far too warm for that here.  Once we got closer, we confirmed that the "ice" was actually unusually white rocks.