Yosemite Day 8
Our decision is made. We’re going to do the whole drive back to Tucson in one day to maximize our time in the valley. We’re not leaving until tomorrow morning! Woohoo! So what to do with this last glorious full day? Well…
I’m not at all exaggerating when I say that the first time Silas saw Yosemite Falls he wanted to hike to the top of it. He made this very clear to us, each and every day of this trip.
“Can we hike to the top of the falls today?”
– No.
“How about today? It’s a rest day! Can we do the hike?”
– No.
“But I want to! Why can’t we?”
– It’s too far. It’s too steep. Maybe when you and your brother are a little bigger.
“Can we do it today? It’s Thanksgiving! Let’s do a Thanksgiving hike to the top of the falls!”
– NO! We said NO! NO MEANS NO!
We decide to make this last day a ‘kids day.’ We let them pick. Climbing? Sightseeing? A walk? And you can of course guess what they said (because at this point in the trip Silas has badgered us so much that he’s now got Ivan badgering us too! Grrr). Alright, alright. We all compromise by deciding to do a portion of the hike and then they can see how steep and strenuous it is and we’ll just turn around. Just a short out-and-back. Agreed? Agreed.
Meanwhile I throw lunch and some extra water in the pack and make everyone take along their down jackets. ….just in case. You all know where this is going, right? heh heh. 😉
Heading up…
We make it to the top of the lower falls (base of the upper falls). Kids are psyched and fresh as daisies.
Higher…
Higher still…
Yep. You guessed it. The top.
We did shoulder them a bit near the top, not because they were tired (they actually protested at this!), but because we wanted to ensure they didn’t GET tired with so much more to hike. For those not familiar with this classic trail, let me just share some stats straight from www.nps.gov:
Distance: 7.2 miles (11.6 km) round trip
Elevation: 2,700 ft (823 m) elevation gain
Difficulty: Strenuous
Typical Time: 6-8 hours round trip (It took us 5 hours. Bam!)
And now the boys are chatting about wanting to climb El Cap. Uh oh.
posted by arr
This entry (Permalink) was posted
on Monday, December 5th, 2016 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Bouldering, Cute Kids, Yosemite-California.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0
feed.
You can leave a response
, or trackback
from your own site.
One Response to “Yosemite Day 8”
December 16th, 2016 at 5:04 pm
I <3 everything about this…
Leave a Reply