I spent a weekend in Yosemite
Cabins, bikes, waterfalls, stargazing, and hikes ⛰️
When I was an intern living in San Francisco last summer, I really wanted to visit Yosemite National Park. However, due to COVID restrictions and a dry season with wildfires, plans fell through. This October, I planned a weekend trip to Yosemite with friends, finally checking off that bucket list item.
How I plan trips
I’m a pretty big planner: it’s easier to get others to commit to the trip when you have a well-thought itinerary. The first step was finding a place to stay. There are so many options, the most popular ones being Curry Village and Yosemite Valley Lodge, both of which are inside the park. I thought it would be fun to do an Airbnb cabin and booked us the “Explorer’s Retreat”, a cabin in Yosemite West which is located 30 minutes outside of the park.
As for plans, I asked ChatGPT for help. I asked ChatGPT to give me plans for a three day trip to Yosemite, and it gave me the perfect itinerary. With some adjustments to the itinerary, the suggestions were stargazing at Glacier Point, Mist Trail and Yosemite Falls, the Four Mile trail, and Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. Check out my full itinerary here.
Friday: Picnics and Stargazing
We spent Friday driving out of San Francisco towards Yosemite, the total trip taking a bit over three hours. Along the way, we drove by Edrea’s favorite village Mountain House, fueled up and got coffee in the rural town of Oakdale, and checked out Chinese Camp, which happened to sell Uranium?!?
Once we entered the park, we obviously put on Yosemite by Travis Scott on blast. We took our first day in the park easy and stopped by Church Bowl picnic area for some quick snacks. Little did we know, that was going to be our last meal for the day… That day, park rangers were doing a controlled burn to prevent wildfires, so our picnic included chips, ham, and Capri-Sun with a side of ash.
Driving on the valley’s steep and curvy road is one of the most thrilling things to do. If there is a F1 Las Vegas, can we get an F1 Yosemite 👀? There is one main road that carves around the valley and takes an hour to go from one end of the valley to the other. Along the drive, you’ll see all the big attractions Yosemite offers like El Capitan, Half Dome, and its waterfalls.
I highly recommend NOT driving a electric vehicle to Yosemite. We drove a Tesla. There was only one charging station in the park, and we would’ve saved a lot of time not charging had we drove a gas vehicle.
Stargazing at GP
The highlight of Friday was stargazing at Glacier Point (or “GP” - Kris). GP is the best stargazing spot in the park. We took a spooky drive to GP late at night and to our surprise, nobody was there. It turns out, that weekend was a full moon, which flushes out the view of the stars and our milky way.
With this setback, we still made the best of this experience. The moonlight lit up the valley and gave us gorgeous views of Half Dome, El Cap, and the entire valley all in one place. We settled down in a manmade stone hut lookout view, taking in the views and trying to spot the constellations. That night, I was just one spec in our vast world and universe.
Saturday: Food and bikes
We starved Friday night. Turns out, there aren’t many restaurants or grocery stores in the park, and by the time we got back to the cabin, everything was closed down. We lived off of whatever leftover snacks from our afternoon picnic and rushed to get breakfast at the lodge first thing Saturday morning.
Bring your own food to Yosemite 😭
Saturday’s activity was biking around the valley. Curry Village offers bike rentals and due to it being located in the heart of the park, it was easy to bike to almost any major attraction. Kris and I thought it’d be cool to rent out these low-riders, but we had instant regrets 15 minutes into biking. Low riders - not cool. Roman, Maggie, and Edrea rented normal bikes, avoiding the suffering. They didn’t have gear shifts and were quad killers.
Along our inner-valley bike route, we stopped at Yosemite Falls, one of more than 25 waterfalls in the park. Yosemite Falls is actually made up of three waterfalls; we hiked the Lower Yosemite Falls trail. The trail started at the bottom of the creek that the waterfall created, and we had to scale large boulders up the trail while trying to avoid falling in the creek. During this time in the fall, majority of the ice had already melted and the waterfall was depleting. Yosemite Falls has the greatest flow during May.
The biking adventures were exhausting, and we decided to call it a day early when it started getting dark. We stopped by the one grocery store in the valley, where Maggie forgot how to operate a door. Back at the cabin, the cookoff began. The guys and the girls competed on who can make the best pasta, where we ended up inventing a whole new recipe, curryghetti, a mixture of curry and leftover spaghetti noodles. We spent the rest of the evening playing board games and Super Smash. It was nice to disconnect from the internet for a while and enjoy good company.
Sunday: Sequoia Trees & KBBQ
It was our final day in Yosemite. We bid farewell to our cabin and headed out of the park. South of Yosemite West where we stayed at is the town of Wawona. A little more south of Wawona is the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. I thought of Mariposa Grove as our Sequoia National Park substitute; maybe we can do the real thing sometime in the future.
There is parking right in front of the Grove’s entrance, along with the trailhead. The Grizzly Giant trail is about 2 miles round trip and took us about half an hour one way. At the end of the trail is the Grizzly Giant, the oldest and largest Sequoia tree in the park. To give you reference on how large these trees are, some of them are wider than an airplane cabin. You could theoretically carve out one of these trees and live in it. It was really fascinating reading about all the different wildlife that lives around there, like the Brown Creeper (who named this?!?).
Everyone in the car passed out on the way back to San Francisco, and I don’t blame them. The drive back was gorgeous as we were able to catch the sunset and golden hour. There were alternations of vibes in the car from singing Taylor Swift songs to listening to a podcast on the Israel-Palestine conflict to passing out in complete silence. We finally reached Oakland and ended up refueling with some all-you-can-eat KBBQ.