Day 12 Recap

The nearest church to where we spent the night was about a 40-minute backtrack, so going was pretty much out of the question. We just woke up around 6 and headed into the park. We drove to the nearest parking lot to the visitor’s center to pick up a map or something. The visitor’s center was not open. It would not open for a few more hours, so we just started walking until we found a path that led to Yosemite Falls.

There are two basic areas in the park–the valley and the highlands. Most of the key buildings are in the valley, which is what the park is most famous for. Yosemite Falls can be seen and heard from just about any point in the valley.

Yosemite National Park is famous for its waterfalls. In fact, four of the thirty tallest waterfalls in the world are inside the park. None are taller than Yosemite Falls at 2,425 feet. The waterfall is fed almost exclusively by melting snow, so the most water flows over it at the end of May, when we were there. There are two main drops in the falls, as you can see in the first picture; the path we took led us to a good spot for viewing the lower part of the falls (though you couldn’t see the upper part). There was also an “unofficial path” that led right up to the base of the falls.

After that we just followed the signs in the park and drove to some of the main attractions.

We drove from there to Death Valley. About half of that drive was with the Sierra Nevada to our right. The western ridge of the Sierra Nevada is a solid line of mountains that is consistantly over 10,000 feet tall. The Rocky Mountains were taller overall, but they had a lot more valleys and individual tall mountains mixed with shorter peaks. There are a lot of roads running through the Rocky Mountains but only one highway runs through the Sierra Nevada south of Sacramento (where they really get tall).

When we turned away from the mountains, the landscape almost immediately became desert. As we drove toward Death Valley, we could feel the air getting steadily hotter around us even though we were sitting in the air conditioning. Ah yes, the air conditioning. To get to Death Valley you must first get over the mountains. These aren’t the nice, cool mountains like the Sierra Nevada; they are nice, 90+ degrees mountains. The car was having trouble with overheating on steep hills before this, but that was always in cool weather; opening the windows and turning the heater up was no problem. These hills weren’t that steep, but they were very hot. Even though we tried rolling the windows down and turning up the heat, the engine just kept getting hotter. I finally just had to pull over and let it cool down because nothing was working. Even after we stopped, the engine temperature kept going up until the gauge was as hot as it could go.

Since we knew we’d be waiting for awhile in an area without cell phone service, we did the only thing that made sense–we threw rocks around. We had a cliff to our right that had a lot of loose rock on the hill to our left. We played games, trying to see who could hit big rocks down at the bottom of the hill most often and how many times we had to hit a big rock on the side of the hill to get it to slide down; we threw big rocks down and we rolled big rocks down. I’m not sure how much of that was actually legal since we were inside a national park, but the most damage we did was a few smashed plants…heh, and I guess the loose pieces of rock that we pulled straight off the cliff and threw at the guardrail might count as damage too. This is about what it looked like where we got stopped:

As I said, the actual valley was hot. Again, you could feel it getting hotter as we drove down into the valley. Because the car was still trying to overheat, we had to go back and forth between air conditioning and heater. We guessed that it was about 110 degrees. When we got to the visitor’s center (which closed about five minutes before we got there), their thermometer said 112 degrees.

Death Valley was an interesting place. I can say that I’m glad we went there, but I can also say that I am never going back–at least, not in the summer.

From there we drove to Las Vegas, the city that is a microcosm of just about all that’s wrong in America today. Here’s a city sitting in the hot desert that uses far more water and electricity than it needs to. They play on everyone’s greed and lusts in order to get money from them–and that’s exactly why people visit. People want to spend their money on their greed and lusts. But at least they have cheap food! *thumbs up* I could use a horrible pun right now, but I’ll spare you. I guess there’s probably a reason why Las Vegas’s depression and suicide rates are so high.

We walked around at night for awhile. I took some pictures, but these are the only two that came out. The contrast from darkness to bright lights was too much for the camera, I guess.

Oh, and as a sidenote, while waiting to get our table at the restaurant, I was standing behind three slot machines and saw all but one person who sat down at them walk away with more than they started with.

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