Yosemite

I still havent given up on my blog... although updates dont happen very often, I am still trying and I am still writing :-)

So, San Francisco was the last, Yosemite was the second last - one of my favourites as well.

Its a national park about 3 hours drive from San Francisco, so you can imagine it gets very crowded during the weekend.. and thats exactly when we arrived.
Yosemite is a paradise for rock-climbers and women :-)) The rocks are perfect for rock-climbing, so people from all around the world come here to climb (women to look at the rock-climbers) ;)

As in every national park, you could spend weeks here, there is always something to do. We didnt have that much time, so took only a couple of trails. The longest we took was the "waterfall trail" - we saw two beautiful waterfalls while climbing pretty high. A reward after the first waterfall was a small lake with crystal clear cold water and a flat plateau where the water was just sliding down in a wide but shallow stream.

But when you come to Yosemite in the late summer, dont expect too many waterfalls. The biggest ones - Yosemite waterfalls were all dry. Luckily we didnt spend much hiking to the waterfalls, so the disappointment of looking at many rocks where you could see that something somewhere was a little darker (wet).

The biggest tour of Yosemite is the Half-dome tour. Its about 26km return hike, but you climb to the very top of Half-dome which is pretty amazing. The last few hundret of metres are made by ropes, where the terrain is so steep and smooth that there is no other way how to get there (see the picture) This time we didnt make it, but definitelly next time! ;)

Not to forget - Yosemite was the last park and the first bear we saw :-) It was eating some grass in the forrest near the highway not too much bothered by the photographing freaks surrounding it. It made a very nice pose of laying on the back and scratching its belly, though ;)