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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