curry cabin fever

April 18, 2011April 9, 2021 mike 1 Comment camping

I think most people know that I love to be outdoors. One of my favorite places to go is Yosemite. People come from all over the world to visit Yosemite and for good reason– there’s few places in the world with so much amazing scenery packed into such a small place. The problem with Yosemite is that it’s a victim of its own popularity. It’s hard to get a campsite or cabin in the valley, and its hard to get permits nowadays to do some of the popular routes like Half Dome or the popular wilderness routes. This year I got lucky and found a cabin tent at Curry Village. Since it’s still early in the season, half dome was still closed, and many of the higher trails were closed due to snow, but we still had an awesome time.

Curry village feels sort of like military barracks or a refugee camp. The floors of the “cabin” are wood, but the walls and roof are canvas. We found that they don’t really hold in heat well, which made it freezing cold at night.

On Saturday we went on a short hike to Mirror Lake. From the picture it’s pretty obvious why it’s called Mirror Lake. The water here is perfectly calm and clear, which makes for a perfect reflection of the mountains that tower over the Yosemite Valley.

Near Mirror Lake there’s a small clearing filled with rocks. We spent some time stacking rocks there. Sam got his stack the highest, getting it to about head height, which was pretty good, but tiny compared to the trees and mountains that towered over us. I think that’s why I enjoy the mountains so much. It really puts things into perspective. We are tiny compared to the unsurpassed glory that’s revealed in nature.

Also at Mirror Lake we found some boulders to climb. One thing I learned is good shoes are really important. Jason was wearing tennis shoes, so he didn’t have enough traction to make it to the top. We all had a good laugh as he sat clinging to the side of the boulder.

The one problem with Curry Village is that cooking is not allowed in the village. We ended up having to drive out a few miles to find a picnic area to grill at, but it was totally worth it. Food always tastes better when cooked outdoors.

In the morning we hiked up to Vernal Falls. The trail we took was AMAZING, taking us to a view above the waterfall before dropping us down right at the waterfalls edge. This is another area that makes you feel tiny, those specks to the right of the waterfall’s edge are people.

The hike down from the waterfall was amazing as well, steep stone steps carved into the mountainside, which takes you through the mist from the waterfall. The funny thing was, this portion of the trail was technically closed, we had to hop a gate to go this way, but it was actually much safer than we had taken to get to the waterfall, which was still snowed in at parts.

One thing we noticed at Yosemite is that the twenty to thirty year old Asian female demographic was very very underrepresented (with four Asian males between twenty to thirty we would notice….) I don’t really understand why. Do Asian girls just not like outdoorsy stuff in general? Sam’s working theory is that Asian girls are vampires who don’t like to stay in the sun. From my experience, this seems to be true.