5 Motivating Reasons to Visit Yosemite
We are posting this great article from Sierra Trading Post interviewing Annie Yearout aka Outdoorsy Mama about some of the best things Yosemite visitors can see, encounter, feel, and experience in and around the park.
Photo and text credit: http://hub.sierratradingpost.com/
We asked Annie Yearout, a Northern California resident and author of Outdoorsy Mama, to share a few of the things she likes to do in Yosemite National Park. She quickly offered up these five reasons visiting Yosemite will blow your mind.
1. El Capitan
The jaw-dropping, constant attempt of climbers to defy gravity and become arachnid spider-humans who scale the 3,000 feet of El Capitan's massive granite wall using merely fingertips and toes puts El Capitan at number one on this list. El Capitan is always headlining national and international news with the world's best climbers trying new, death-defying routes that has us all biting our fingernails to nubs and checking our news feeds for the latest update on their progress.
2. Half Dome
Rising like a shark fin in a sea of Sierra peaks, Half Dome has a world-renowned reputation as a top-ten hike on everyone's bucket list. If you're lucky enough to get a slot in the lottery to make the 14–16 mile round trip to the top, you'll hit the famous cable route in the last 400 feet. Stories of unprepared tourists in flimsy tennis shoes and old photos of the cables crammed with lines of people snaking up and down make this final push a mountaineer's dream and nightmare, which is exactly why the National Park Service now issues permits to control the numbers.
3. North America's Highest Waterfall: Yosemite Falls
Plunging over 2,400 feet from the pinnacle of Upper Yosemite Falls to the mist-filled, boulder-strewn trough at the base of Lower Yosemite Falls, North America's highest waterfall does not disappoint. There are hikes of all levels to take in the grandeur, from a simple flat family loop at the bottom to the full 7-mile round trip to the top with 2,700 feet of elevation gain. If you're lucky, you'll catch a massive Yosemite rainbow in the spray.
4. Epic Mountains Are Calling, John Muir Style
Hikers and backpackers and climbers live for it. It's the magic. The goose bumps you get after you grunt and sweat up countless switchbacks and reach the top of the highest waterfall in North America. Or when you look out over the most spectacular, desolate, snow-covered Sierra Nevada wilderness. It's the massive granite rocks. The epic scale of human to nature. It's the reason we hike. Yosemite has it. Boom.
5. The Birthplace of the National Parks Movement
Protecting wilderness is vital. We are fortunate that President Abraham Lincoln was such a smart guy: in 1864 he signed the Yosemite Grant Act, the first land grant designed to protect wild land in the United States. That grant is credited as the birthplace of the national parks idea, where visionaries like Lincoln, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt joined together to conserve 1,500 square miles of land that now make up Yosemite National Park and helped seed the start of parks throughout the nation. This year, Yosemite is celebrating the 125th anniversary of the establishment of the full national park as we know it today. Get out. Explore. Enjoy.
