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Showing posts with label Yosemite National Park. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yosemite National Park. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Hiking in Yosemite National Park (CA) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget






Hiking in Yosemite National Park (CA) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


Every spring when my daughter was small, my family would go to Yosemite National Park to see the Bridalveil Fall with its gushing waters from melting snow and hike among the giant sequoia trees.

It always seems to take forever to get into the park, but once we did, we headed straight to see Bridalveil Fall and the towering block of granite called El Capitan, that is famous as a screensaver on computer screens.

“El Capitan over there is granite,” I told Florence.  “It’s like the rocks out at Point Lobos in Carmel.  It’s an igneous rock.”

“That means a volcanic rock, right?” she asked.

“Yes.  It’s made from magma, also known as lava,” I said.

Florence knew all about volcanoes and igneous rocks from her class trip to Mount Lassen, a visit to a Stanford University geology professor’s lab, a visit to Stanford’s geology library, and her project on volcanoes that she did for the Monterey County Science Fair.

I would often show her photos from books of Ansel Adams photos of the Park in black and white before we visited.  “These mountain faces were made to look this way by rivers eroding, or wearing away, valley floors and by glaciers covering and then retreating from the area,” I said. 

Adams’ photos are very good at illustrating these points, because there are no distracting colors from flowers, for instance.  His photos of Yosemite Valley and the Tuolumne Meadows, which is described as a sub-Alpine meadow surrounded by majestic peaks and domes on the Park’s website, show depth and height with just black, white, and gray. 

Every visit to Yosemite required a visit to the Yosemite Museum where we could look at photos of the Miwok and Paiute people, who originally populated this region.  During tourist season, there is usually someone weaving baskets in this museum.

Finally, we would be off to the Mariposa Grove to walk among the towering sequoias in the dry heat of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

As we walked through the sequoias, I would tell Florence, “Did you know that in the Brazilian Rainforest, they say that there are tons of animals that live in the treetops that never come down to the ground.  That might be the same here.  What do you think might live in the tops of these trees?”

“Bugs, spiders, squirrels, and birds,” Florence replied.  I thought she must have started a biology unit at school for the rapid response she gave me.

I stretched my arms upward and said to Florence, “I am tall like a sequoia.”

“You’re little,” said Florence.

About six miles into Mariposa Grove, we would collectively decide that our legs hurt and we were tired.  “I love Yosemite, but you could also call this place ‘Yosemite Sore Legs,’” I said.  I thought that would be a good title for a cartoon series.

Once we hiked back six miles, we would eat a picnic lunch.  Laurent would tell me before each Yosemite visit, “Don’t bring the wicker picnic basket.  We’re going hiking.  Just bring the cooler.”

One thing I would not give up was using a nice, cotton tablecloth to cover the picnic table we would eat on.  In addition to looking nice, the tablecloth cuts down on insects coming to get your food from under the table and you do not have to eat on a table that might have bird droppings on it.

I would usually make ham and cheese sandwiches on a baguette with Orangina and water to drink.  We had Nutella to eat on baguette slices as dessert.

Before leaving the park, we would stop and look at the cross-section of a sequoia tree that had been cut down.

I would trace out a thicker band in the trunk and say, “Thicker bands show the years where there was lots of rainfall.  Thinner bands show the years where there was drought, or little rainfall.  Can you find some years with a lot of rainfall?” I asked Florence.

She would point some out.  Then, I’d ask, “What about drought years?”  She found those, too. 

After the sequoia trunk lesson, we would head home and stop in town to buy bear claw muffins to get some gooey carbohydrates after a workout in the woods.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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