USA Trip Day 6 - Mariposa Grove
In honour of our massive lodge with its massive kitchen, I cooked pancakes for breakfast, which we had with bacon and maple syrup. After a leisurely morning getting our bearings and consulting maps, we headed towards Mariposa Grove with the intention of getting the tram up to Wawona Point, which the guidebooks we had bought said had amazing views. As we left the house, the clouds started to draw in and the temperature dropped significantly. When we arrived at the tram ticket kiosk, it was properly cold. We were warned that the tram would take us up an elevation of a further 1,000 feet and that we should be prepared for extra cold. K and Kir were both in shorts and I was in walking sandals, but we figured as we’d made the trip, we might as well take our chances.
As it happened, the Grand Tour bus was about to pass through Mariposa Grove so we were offered a seat in there rather than the open air tram. We were entertained for about 45 minutes crawling along in first gear as Sam the Big Fat Bus Driver regaled us with history of the park, trivia about the tree and stories of his pot-growing Vietnam Vet friends, before we elected to get off and make the hike up to Wawona point.
A word of advice here if anyone reading this is thinking of going to Yosemite and might want to look at the “Big Trees”. If you are in any sort of reasonable physical shape, by which I mean you can walk from the sofa to the fridge to get yourself another beer or walk up a flight of stairs without exploding, unless you specifically want an audio tour you DO NOT need to get the tram to the starting point of any of the routes. The guide books all suggest getting the tram to a certain point and then walking, but from the car park to the top point of the tram route is no more than 2 miles - uphill, for sure, but it shouldn’t take anything more than an hour to walk from the car park to Wawona Point and you’ll save yourselves $25 per person.
Anyway, we alighted from the bus and made the short walk up to Wawona Point. We’re very glad we did.
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The best bit was that it was practically deserted. The coach tours don’t make it up there and we’ve come towards the end of the season, so there are fewer people generally.
We then ambled down back to the car park, via the various Really Big Trees. On our way we encountered some of the local wildlife
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The Giant Sequoias are practically immortal. They will never die of old age, and fire rarely damages them - in fact, it helps them survive by thinning out the brush around them. The fire scar in the Clothespin tree goes all the way through and is 50 feet high, but the tree is still perfectly healthy
The Faithful Couple were once 2 trees, but as they began to encroach on each other’s space (it’s estimated that Giant Sequoias get approximately 18 inches thicker every century), they’ve merged into one.
There is a similar couple opposite that will do the same in about 500 years. The biggest tree in the park, at over 300 feet tall and 60 feet on diameter, is the Giant Grizzly. The funniest is this one below right. As far as I’m aware it doesn’t have a name.
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On our way back to the car park, we had one of those bizarre small world moments, running in to some friends from Leamington Spa who, in the real world, should really have been in the Jug and Jester. And then, just to remind us that we’re not in San Francisco anymore, it started snowing.
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