Saket Vora

This past week has been a blur so I’m finally getting around to posting updates.

Two weekends ago, I finally made it back to my favorite national park: Yosemite. I was going to go with Jordan but he had to pull out at the last second, and Nader blew off my trip because he wanted to do his own thing. No worries — I still had a fanstastic time. Terrell brought along two friends of his from NC State so I got to meet new people. Tim Mowrer is a Park alum (c/o 2004) and just made it back to the States after spending more than a year in Indonesia on a National Geographic project to capture the very elusive “orang pendek” on camera. He’s up in San Francisco now working at Havok, which codes physics simulation engines for games. I actually met Tim for the first time on Friday night when he took the Caltrain down to crash at my apartment before leaving at 4am Saturday morning for Yosemite. Terrell and his longtime college roommate Jonathan Simpson left Friday afternoon. Jonathan had flown in from College Station, TX just for the weekend.

Tim and I took off at 4am and got to the park right on schedule. I tried calling Terrell so we could find a campsite for the four of us, but no dice. We made our way to Camp 4, the “climber’s camp” and the only one that is first-come first-serve in the Valley itself. Turns out Terrell was waiting in line just 10 people down! The check-in process was agonizing slow (1.5 hours to process 34 people? Seriously?) but we finally got our tent and gear pitched. We swung by the deli before starting our hike, and met a most interesting person while waiting in line: Krupali Tejura. She saw us exchanging business cards and saw we were from the Bay area and that she knew friends at Google. That started a fun conversation and she and her friends ended up joining us for lunch. She finished medical school at Emory and is now a radiation oncologist in southern California. It was pretty cool — we namedropped Radiohead, Alton Brown, and Kiva.org over the course of lunch. Oh, and she really likes Barack Obama. :)

Despite starting much later than we anticipated, we started the Four Mile Trail, which goes up ~3200 feet from the Valley floor all the way to Glacier Point.  On the way to the trailhead though, we spotted a black bear! It was so close to us, and climbed a tree to eat a few apples.

Black bear!

The hike was great, with view of the valley. One fact quickly emerged: there was an undeniable haze throughout the valley. I mused that it was due to the recent fires we’ve had up in northern California. (Little did I know that there were in fact forest fires right near Yosemite Valley, ultimately causing power outages at the lodge on Sunday morning).

A hazy valley

Stopping by a creek along the trail

Jonathan and Tim at a vista point

We made it up to Glacier Point around 5:30 or 6pm, and got to look again at the magnificent Half Dome. There was too much haze/smoke in the air to make the rocks turn purple like they did last year.

Half Dome

A look at the valley behind Half Dome

We thought there would be a shuttle bus back to the Valley, but none came. Our cell phones were out of reception, and a payphone only took calling card (what?!). So we finally figure out there isn’t a bus coming, and we had 1 hour of daylight left. We started heading back down the Four Mile Trail, and got maybe halfway down when we were in pitch black conditions. Fortunately we had two small flashlights with us, and proceeded to slowly make our way down switchbacks and rocky trails with poor visibility. We certainly hadn’t done this before!

We finally stumble back into Camp 4 well after quiet hours, but we were relieved to find the campfire in our site at full flame. A group from SoCal was celebrating a birthday party. We brought our cooler to share some drinks, and they shared some food, and we had a good time chatting and socializing before going to sleep.

The next day Terrell and Jonathan had to leave early to make a plane, but Tim and I decided to check out the Lower Yosemite Falls and Bridalveil Falls and drive up to the Tuolumne Meadows. En route to the falls we came across a rattlesnake.

Tim scouting things at the Falls

Granite cliff faces

The drive to Tuolumne was against shrouded in haze, but the Tenaya alpine lake was quite nice and you could see the backside of Half Dome. Unfortunately, my camera batteries died and didn’t have spares. We were facing a good 5.5 hour drive back to the Bay Area, so we turned back and started to head home.

Last trip’s Tunnel View:

This trip’s Tunnel View:

It was remarkable that we could talk about so many things — Tim’s experiences in Indonesia, photography, cultures, NC State, the Park program, etc. We stopped at a delicious local pizza place and after barely having enough money to cross the Bay Bridge toll after dropping Tim off at Berkeley, I finally rolled into Palo Alto at 1:30am Monday morning. What a great trip!