Yo-Ho, part 1
For those who may have wondered, people once actually said YO-se-mite, not Yo-SEM-i-tee. You're going to need to hold that thought for a few episodes.
It took us about 20 hours portal to portal to get from Marblehead to our abode in Yosemite's Housekeeping Camp. That includes:
Thanks to better living through chemistry, I remember almost nothing of the first three-fourths of the trip, despite having the middle seat. I woke up somewhere around the junction of Nevada, California and Oregon. Nothing much happened after that, except the pilot's perfect landing in thick Bay Area fog.
Boston could learn a lot from San Francisco's BART system. Single fares are expensive ($8.10 from the airport to the Embarcadero) but it covers a wide area. That fare is for a ride equal to a no-transfer subway ride from Park Street to Swampscott, and that line goes another 20-plus miles northeast, on a clean system with up-to-date rolling stock (they even grease the wheels). There are also discounts for regular users. BART could learn a couple of things from the T, though. The station signs are fairly small, not well-placed, and thus are useless to the new rider. Some at least of the operators need speech lessons, as in "don't mumble." T operators may at times lack grace, and may shout or snarl, but generally one can't accuse them of mumbling.
Riding the rails
We walked the three blocks from the BART Embarcadero stop to the Amtrak station at the Ferry Building. Arriving in the middle of the San Fran Farmers' market, we scored some excellent coffee and lunch goodies. The Ferry Building has been rehabbed as an indoor market that--for now--has a mainly local audience. Tourists seldom go down the Embarcadero further than Pier 39. The one defect I noted was one very overtaxed pair of rest rooms. This is also true at Quincy Market in Boston, but the latter's johns have more appliances, hence shorter waits. Usefully, the Ferry Building has commuter ferries: what a concept! Just south of the main plant is a small building that is the Amtrak bus terminal. Why a bus, we wondered? Why not a ferry? Well, perhaps because the bus was punctual, clean and took just 25 minutes to get us from the Ferry Building to Emeryville. Why Emeryville, and not Oakland's Jack London station? Chiefly because the San Joaquin, the train we took, goes North, then East, to leave the Bay Area, before it turns south into the Valley.
Having a choice, I begin to wonder who of our age would fly or when they could take the train? My spouse, who made the rail arrangements, says she needs to double-check, but it appears our Amtrak trip to Yosemite and back cost us $30.60 each, with the senior discount: the Logan van cost more. It may possibly have taken longer than driving a rental car from SFO, but I'm not sure of that. From what I've seen of California traffic in general, and Yosemite traffic in particular, the time (10.5 hours) may come out even.
The San Joaquin scenery is unimpressive. One trip in the valley is enough. Even the views of the Bay along the earlier parts of the trip were spoilt by the military-industrial detritus that separate the shore from the rails for miles. We were compensated by scoring a seat with table, basic but decent food and (I'm dwelling again) clean cars and professional train staff. (We were less lucky returning. The train was crowded with people coming up for the 49ers Sunday night football game and making a weekend of it, but we still had good seating, service and food.)
We got off at Merced, CA. Location is all. One is hard put to it to find much to be impressed with in this city of 80,000 or so. The cow-townish vista below gives the visitor a lasting first impression of the place.
Two things took one's mind off the unfortunate cityscape. First, the waiting room was full of hikers, proclaimed by packs and boots, of several races and nations. Second, the wait for the bus to Yosemite wasn't too long. (OK, was the bus clean or not? There will be a quiz.)
Into the Sierra Nevada
For a while, the trip to the valley is as agri-dull as any other trip in the valley. Dozing is the best use of one's time. Maybe half an hour on, the Sierra foothills appear; steep, tree-clad hills morphing in the distance from agricultural knolls, and wide spots in the road like Cathey's Valley appear.
In another half hour, the hills hit the large-hill to small-mountain status, and the bus hit Mariposa. This was once a mining town, and one must be comatose not to grasp that. Mariposa's Forty-Niner heritage whacks you in the face like a rubber chicken at every false false-front. No New England town has ever merchandised its past with more enthusiastic vigour than Mariposa. Over the next week I found out that this is where people paid to work in Yosemite go for a good time when they've overdosed on spectacular scenery, high prices and stupid tourists.
After Mariposa comes its satellite, Midpines, where the topography tilts toward small mountain. Then it's on to El Portal (there will be a Spanish quiz shortly), which has become a singular mixture of highly rural California and National Park Service (NPS) support facilities. Before reaching El Portal, there is a stark reminder of where one is. In 2006, part of this highway (CA 140) was buried under a vast rockslide. The rockslide is still there. The detour, over a one-lane temporary bridge, is still there. The question of what to do about the rockslide and who will do it is still there.
Our driver was well-informed and chatty, so we got the Yosemite executive summary as we slid from El Portal into the national park. Even though dusk was coming on, we began to do the "ooh-ahh" thing as he pointed out various world-renowned features.
By the time we reached Curry Village it was pretty much night in the Valley. The one amenity the bus from Merced lacked was a rest room, which added an edge of urgency to the following cell phone conversation between parents and child:
P: We're at Curry Village. Where are you?
C: I'm at Curry Village. Where are you?
P: Wherever the bus dropped us.
C: And that is?
P: How should we know? It's dark out!
C: OK, I'll look for you.
P: There are some signs for rest rooms. We're following them.
The confusion was speedily resolved and, after a couple of wrong turns, we found ourselves heading into the Housekeeping Camp.
The Moon Handbooks Yosemite guidebook says accurately that:
From the outside, Housekeeping Camp...looks a lot like a crowded inner-city slum in a developing country.
Not exactly: Housekeeping Camp has trees and more modern vehicles. However, arriving there after dark, at the rowdiest hour of any campsite, makes the simile stick in one's mind.
Why stay there, then? The camps are tent flies over a shelter that's concrete on three sides plus slab, so you're only vulnerable from one side. The sites have electricity, fire pits and a two-level bear locker, and it's as central as possible. Campgrounds are somewhat cheaper, but have no fire or cooking facilities, except what campers bring. Curry Village is in a similar price range, but has no cooking options and small bear lockers. It resembles a GAR encampment of the year it was founded (1899). Its "tent cabins" (read, tent on a platform) are very close together: so close that some critics snarkily comment that you can hear your neighbours fart.
Previously, I was dwelling on the cleanliness of the transportation. Hereafter, I will be dwelling on bears. They are not the most omnipresent pests for the Yosemite camper (those would be fools, squirrels and ravens, in that order) but they are the largest. The park is absolutely stiff with warnings and precautions about bear defence. They are not exaggerated. Patience: we'll get there. Here endeth the first lesson.
It took us about 20 hours portal to portal to get from Marblehead to our abode in Yosemite's Housekeeping Camp. That includes:
- A livery car from the house to Logan
- United to San Francisco (SFO)
- BART to the Embarcadero
- An elaborate Amtrak itinerary featuring a bus, a train to Merced, CA, then another bus
- Daughtermobile to the Housekeeping Camp
Thanks to better living through chemistry, I remember almost nothing of the first three-fourths of the trip, despite having the middle seat. I woke up somewhere around the junction of Nevada, California and Oregon. Nothing much happened after that, except the pilot's perfect landing in thick Bay Area fog.
Boston could learn a lot from San Francisco's BART system. Single fares are expensive ($8.10 from the airport to the Embarcadero) but it covers a wide area. That fare is for a ride equal to a no-transfer subway ride from Park Street to Swampscott, and that line goes another 20-plus miles northeast, on a clean system with up-to-date rolling stock (they even grease the wheels). There are also discounts for regular users. BART could learn a couple of things from the T, though. The station signs are fairly small, not well-placed, and thus are useless to the new rider. Some at least of the operators need speech lessons, as in "don't mumble." T operators may at times lack grace, and may shout or snarl, but generally one can't accuse them of mumbling.
Riding the rails
We walked the three blocks from the BART Embarcadero stop to the Amtrak station at the Ferry Building. Arriving in the middle of the San Fran Farmers' market, we scored some excellent coffee and lunch goodies. The Ferry Building has been rehabbed as an indoor market that--for now--has a mainly local audience. Tourists seldom go down the Embarcadero further than Pier 39. The one defect I noted was one very overtaxed pair of rest rooms. This is also true at Quincy Market in Boston, but the latter's johns have more appliances, hence shorter waits. Usefully, the Ferry Building has commuter ferries: what a concept! Just south of the main plant is a small building that is the Amtrak bus terminal. Why a bus, we wondered? Why not a ferry? Well, perhaps because the bus was punctual, clean and took just 25 minutes to get us from the Ferry Building to Emeryville. Why Emeryville, and not Oakland's Jack London station? Chiefly because the San Joaquin, the train we took, goes North, then East, to leave the Bay Area, before it turns south into the Valley.
Having a choice, I begin to wonder who of our age would fly or when they could take the train? My spouse, who made the rail arrangements, says she needs to double-check, but it appears our Amtrak trip to Yosemite and back cost us $30.60 each, with the senior discount: the Logan van cost more. It may possibly have taken longer than driving a rental car from SFO, but I'm not sure of that. From what I've seen of California traffic in general, and Yosemite traffic in particular, the time (10.5 hours) may come out even.
The San Joaquin scenery is unimpressive. One trip in the valley is enough. Even the views of the Bay along the earlier parts of the trip were spoilt by the military-industrial detritus that separate the shore from the rails for miles. We were compensated by scoring a seat with table, basic but decent food and (I'm dwelling again) clean cars and professional train staff. (We were less lucky returning. The train was crowded with people coming up for the 49ers Sunday night football game and making a weekend of it, but we still had good seating, service and food.)
We got off at Merced, CA. Location is all. One is hard put to it to find much to be impressed with in this city of 80,000 or so. The cow-townish vista below gives the visitor a lasting first impression of the place.
Two things took one's mind off the unfortunate cityscape. First, the waiting room was full of hikers, proclaimed by packs and boots, of several races and nations. Second, the wait for the bus to Yosemite wasn't too long. (OK, was the bus clean or not? There will be a quiz.)
Into the Sierra Nevada
For a while, the trip to the valley is as agri-dull as any other trip in the valley. Dozing is the best use of one's time. Maybe half an hour on, the Sierra foothills appear; steep, tree-clad hills morphing in the distance from agricultural knolls, and wide spots in the road like Cathey's Valley appear.
In another half hour, the hills hit the large-hill to small-mountain status, and the bus hit Mariposa. This was once a mining town, and one must be comatose not to grasp that. Mariposa's Forty-Niner heritage whacks you in the face like a rubber chicken at every false false-front. No New England town has ever merchandised its past with more enthusiastic vigour than Mariposa. Over the next week I found out that this is where people paid to work in Yosemite go for a good time when they've overdosed on spectacular scenery, high prices and stupid tourists.
After Mariposa comes its satellite, Midpines, where the topography tilts toward small mountain. Then it's on to El Portal (there will be a Spanish quiz shortly), which has become a singular mixture of highly rural California and National Park Service (NPS) support facilities. Before reaching El Portal, there is a stark reminder of where one is. In 2006, part of this highway (CA 140) was buried under a vast rockslide. The rockslide is still there. The detour, over a one-lane temporary bridge, is still there. The question of what to do about the rockslide and who will do it is still there.
Our driver was well-informed and chatty, so we got the Yosemite executive summary as we slid from El Portal into the national park. Even though dusk was coming on, we began to do the "ooh-ahh" thing as he pointed out various world-renowned features.
By the time we reached Curry Village it was pretty much night in the Valley. The one amenity the bus from Merced lacked was a rest room, which added an edge of urgency to the following cell phone conversation between parents and child:
P: We're at Curry Village. Where are you?
C: I'm at Curry Village. Where are you?
P: Wherever the bus dropped us.
C: And that is?
P: How should we know? It's dark out!
C: OK, I'll look for you.
P: There are some signs for rest rooms. We're following them.
The confusion was speedily resolved and, after a couple of wrong turns, we found ourselves heading into the Housekeeping Camp.
The Moon Handbooks Yosemite guidebook says accurately that:
From the outside, Housekeeping Camp...looks a lot like a crowded inner-city slum in a developing country.
Not exactly: Housekeeping Camp has trees and more modern vehicles. However, arriving there after dark, at the rowdiest hour of any campsite, makes the simile stick in one's mind.
Why stay there, then? The camps are tent flies over a shelter that's concrete on three sides plus slab, so you're only vulnerable from one side. The sites have electricity, fire pits and a two-level bear locker, and it's as central as possible. Campgrounds are somewhat cheaper, but have no fire or cooking facilities, except what campers bring. Curry Village is in a similar price range, but has no cooking options and small bear lockers. It resembles a GAR encampment of the year it was founded (1899). Its "tent cabins" (read, tent on a platform) are very close together: so close that some critics snarkily comment that you can hear your neighbours fart.
Previously, I was dwelling on the cleanliness of the transportation. Hereafter, I will be dwelling on bears. They are not the most omnipresent pests for the Yosemite camper (those would be fools, squirrels and ravens, in that order) but they are the largest. The park is absolutely stiff with warnings and precautions about bear defence. They are not exaggerated. Patience: we'll get there. Here endeth the first lesson.
Labels: travel, Yosemite National Park
posted by Uncle | 22:30
2 Comments:
Ah, bear locker. Is that there you kept yours until you needed it? Did you have bear races with other campers? Can you train them to act as porters on your hikes?
Patience: we'll get to that in a forthcoming episode. Now I know why writers got such a kick out of doing serials and dropping foreshadowing into each story.
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