YOSEMITE IN THE SNOW

I’ve been to Yosemite National Park four times now. Each time I visit California, I seem to be drawn back by its beauty and its splendour and, despite the fact that in all of my visits to that most Golden of States, I’ve never made it “All the way to Reno”, nor have I ever made it to Hollywood (“Schweetheart...”), I keep on returning to that most magnificent of nature’s cathedrals every time I get the chance to.

Hmm... Perhaps I’m less obsessed with film than I thought I was...?

I seem to enjoy photographing the place, too. I mean, I’m no Ansel Adams, in fact my photographic skills could be given a good run for their money by the average high street passport booth, but when the landscape is doing so much of the work for you and there’s always something new to catch your eye, then I suspect that it’s very easy to persuade yourself that you can never really have too many pictures of such a wonderful place, even if those pictures can never hope to capture the sheer scale of it.

No matter how many times I’ve tried to explain it, or indeed when I try to picture it in my own mind, I can never quite get across just how tall those granite walls of the valley seem when you’re standing right there looking up at them. I always have to remind myself to imagine something quite astonishingly high and then double it, but still I fail to really grasp the image until I’m actually in the valley itself and the pictures still just can’t seem to do it justice. It’s almost as if there’s simply far too much of it for the human mind to get hold of and it’s working on a simply different scale to the one that we simple humans operate within.

Ironically, before I went to the park for the first time, my main reason for even knowing of its existence was probably due to its appearance in that most unloved of “Star Trek” movies, number five, in which it played a featured role. I don’t suppose it’s the most shallow of reasons for wanting to visit a place, but I imagine that it’s right up there. Strangely, my obsession with that most iconic of bridges, the one spanning the Golden Gate comes from a long time before the “Star Trek” movie in which it most features, so I may not be quite as shallow as I think I am.

My first visit was on my first visit to the U.S. of A, way back in 1996 at about the same time of year as my latest venture. Back then, I had a traveling companion to guide me (who was the mother of a friend of mine) and we drove right on up there on one snowy day in late February - in a leap year - and I was totally blown away by the place…

Back in those days, of course, I was far more devil-may-care than I am now. I probably still had sap in my veins, but I didn’t worry about such trivial issues as whether snow chains would invalidate my hire car insurance (maybe back then it didn’t...), I just went to a garage, rented myself a set, pointed the car in the general direction of the park and drove. The snow was inches deep on the ground and I kept on parking the car and leaping out to take ridiculous quantities of photographs because another, more astonishing spectacle would keep on coming into view whenever I thought that I’d seen it all.

Sadly, as this was still in the days of film, and I’ve never been the most technically adept of photograph takers, many of my pictures turned out to be rather disappointing when I got them developed at Boots once I was home, but they were still enough to remind me of that rather splendid day in the snow. Interestingly enough, the driver of the tour we made of the valley on this trip mentioned the floods of 1997 which washed away much of the valley as I saw it that day, which was quite an odd feeling, to be honest.

When the beloved made it possible for me to return to California, something which I’d almost given up hope of ever being able to do again, by way of her present to me on my fortieth birthday, Yosemite was pretty much at the top of our “things to see” list, possibly due to those pictures I had not being quite as dreadful as I once thought they were, and we had a spectacular late summer’s day there investigating Mariposa Grove, Glacier Point and that wonderful valley floor itself. My main memory of Glacier Point comes from realising that the tiny trees that I could see far, far below me were the same giant redwoods that I would be looking up at later from the valley floor below, and the fact that when I looked at the distant peak of Half Dome through one of those little pay telescope contraptions, I became aware that the tiny dots that I’d seen moving about at the very limit of my eyesight were actually people walking about on the top of it which quite drew my breath away. Even looking at them standing so close to that sheer drop from that distance was enough to give me the collywobbles...

The third visit was our rather “flashy” flying visit we made when we used passing through the park as the route up to the mountains when we went to visit the ghost town of Bodie. In late September it is still the quickest route through the mountains until the Tioga Pass is closed, as it usually is, from October to March, and so it seemed wisest to pay the entry fee to the park and use that rather spectacular road to reach our goal up at Lee Vining, even if it seemed terribly self-indulgent to go to Yosemite and not really spend any time there. We did stop for a coffee on the way back, but the whole “Oh, we just popped into Yosemite Park for a coffee” thing just seemed so wrong, somehow...

Naturally, over the years, and because of the Ansel Adams prints we have on our walls at home, I had constantly gone on to the beloved about how wonderful the park had looked in the snow during my first visit. She, of course, had been blown away by the place in the summer, but I always had that particular trump card up my sleeve: “Ah yes, but you’ve not seen it in the snow, have you...?” So, when we arranged our most recent visit to California, going up to see “Yosemite in the snow” was pretty much at the very top of the beloved’s agenda, and that’s precisely what we did.

On February 29th this year we set out to spend what we hoped would be a snowy day in Yosemite Park. What we didn’t know at that time is that it hadn’t actually snowed in the park in any significant way since November and the Tioga Pass up to the mountains had remained open up until at least December which was, quite frankly, unheard of. You can believe what you like about the truth or otherwise of Global Warming, but, in the natural world, the evidence is starting to stack up. We, of course, were oblivious to all this but, having read the small print in our insurance documents, we decided to take the YARTS bus up to the park instead of driving ourselves. It might take a tad longer, and you would have to get up early and travel with the various members of the park workforce, but it was worth it as the bus was an air-conditioned beauty, and the ticket included your entry into the park itself. All-in-all, a bit of a bargain, really.

In the end I was rather pleased we did, especially as we had to traverse a couple of temporary bridges that had been built after a recent land slip had wiped out what looked like about half a mile of the road on the drive up. Happily for us (if not the poor put-upon driver) the snow started to come down in torrents as we got closer to the park, and the bus needed to have its snow chains fitted, which was not all that simple a job to the casual observer like me. The bus duly pulled into a lay-by and we watched as the driver dutifully went through the complex procedure of attaching them to a massive air-conditioned vehicle full of passengers, having to back up over them to get them under the tyres, but yet about ten minutes behind schedule, we were back on our way with the regular but satisfying clunking of the tyres on the roadway to keep us alert.

We had become very conscious of the dangers inherent in dealing with the powers of nature when we had to cross that temporary bridge across the valley to divert us away from where that rockfall had totally obliterated that stretch of the old highway, and even more so later on with tales of chunks of the Yosemite valley itself crashing down unexpectedly. For the first time, I actually felt rather uneasy as I walked around if I thought about that too much. Later on, those tales of the floods that washed away much of the valley that I saw in 1996, and tales of sudden rockfalls crushing cars kept us on our toes. But, to a certain extent, that really didn’t matter. Against all of the odds, we did get our day of Yosemite in the snow. In fact, it turns out that perhaps we couldn’t have picked a better one .

Granted, the valley walls were all but invisible from any distance because of the clouds and the mist, and walking around in a blizzard for a few hours did make us feel a bit cold and wet and caused the cameras to fail a few times, and thee were deep icy puddles for the unwary foot to accidentally step into, but we still managed to have a pretty fabulous day, and we took far more pictures of the place than any normal human being should ever really need.

Anyway, at the top of this piece is just one of those pictures, taken on that snowy last day of February this year. There are plenty more, I can assure you, and I might just spend a few days posting a few more of them for you to have a look at if I can’t think of anything else to write about. They still don’t really do the place justice, however, but I suppose that’s only to be expected. After all, if a picture can speak a thousand words, just think what the real thing might have to say.