Dave & Meredith’s Travel Blog

I know "Yosemite" is a funny-sounding word, but with all due respect to Warner Bros., I don’t get the connection.  I’m pretty sure Sam would not have prospered in Yosemite.  There weren’t many people for him to rob or claims to jump.  Although, there were plenty of varmints to shoot, so maybe that’s it.

Sam is a bit different from Yosemite’s other famous men.  Let’s compare:

Exhibit A: Yosemite Sam

Exhibit B: Conservationist John Muir 

Exhibit C: Photographer Ansel Adams

Exhibit D: Grizzly Adams (no relation to aforementioned Ansel)

The first thing we should look at is facial hair.  At first glance, it seems that Yosemite Sam fits in with this crew of famous Yosemite men.  However, upon closer examination, we see that Yosemite Sam simply has a giant mustache, while the others have beards.

But the differences run even deeper than that.  They all wear different types of hats, for starters. 

Now let’s look closer.  We’ll start with John Muir, one of the most influential environmentalists and conservationists in American history.  The only thing Yosemite Sam was interested in protecting was his pride, and he repeatedly failed at that.  How about Ansel Adams, an avid nature lover and an American photography icon?  Yosemite Sam is an American icon too, although mostly on the mud flaps of semi-trucks.

It is Grizzly Adams that Yosemite Sam most closely resembles.  Grizzly Adams spent most of his life in the mountains of California, capturing animals for zoos and circuses.  His claim to fame was making "pets" out of grizzly bears and wrestling them.  Idiot.  I never saw Yosemite Sam wrestle a bear, but he did go after Bugs Bunny quite often, and there was that one episode with the shark ("Down! Ya shark-livered varmint!").

Maybe he fits his name after all.

- Meredith

Here is the view from our tent in Yosemite NP:

We camped at the Upper Pines campground in Yosemite Valley near Curry Village.  It was a beautiful site, despite all the rain.  We didn’t see any bears in our campground, though the rangers say that they are spotted there almost every night.  We put all our food and other items with a scent in our sturdy bear locker, so no issues.  We never once used the $2 bear whistles I bought before the trip. 

- Meredith

She failed us. Our tent valiantly tried to withstand the ravages of a wind and dust storm in Monument Valley and redeemed herself later in the trip from the status of “Stupid Tent.” But she was no match for the heavy rains of Yosemite. She achieved the status of some old thing that wasn’t actually that great and the people involved with it struggled and suffered but much later they look back on it with affection as if they were old friends that shared hard times together. And they refer to it with a folksy nickname. Let me explain.

We pitched our tent in Yosemite like we did at any other park and the rain hitting the fly blurred into a soothing white noise as we drifted off to sleep on our first night. Around 2am, I woke up feeling a few places on the floor and my sleeping bag were wet. I thought it was no big deal until I heard drips falling. I turned on the light and saw that the entire top ridge of the inside of the tent was a tsunami of drips waiting to drop onto us. It wasn’t going to get any better and might get worse. It was chilly that night and I have a down sleeping bag which would be useless if it got wet. We had to make the call so we came to grips, got up, grabbed our sleeping bags, and camped out in the car once again. At least this time there were no fierce winds rocking the car and keeping us awake.

In the morning, we climbed out of the car to inspect the damage. Our first peek into the tent looked like this:

The picture is a bit small but what you should see are a) several pools of water on the tent floor and b) completely saturated tent fabric. I admit my weakness to the public: at this point, if Meredith had hinted that we could spend the remaining two nights in a lodge, I would have encouraged it. But Meredith was hell-bent on embracing the wilderness experience. Sigh – foiled. So we drove over to Curry Village and the mountaineering shop there. We told the helpful guy there what had happened and we agreed that the sensible next step was to try rigging up a tarp over the tent. So we bought a super-duper tarp and 100 feet of cord and drove back to the site. We spent the next hour or so rigging up something that Rube Goldberg would be proud to put his name on. In the middle of the tarp-raising, a ranger came by and said it was “one of the more … interesting … approaches” [pauses are accurate] to putting up a tarp that he had seen. We attached some sides of the tarp to several trees, one side was staked into the ground, there was a picnic table leg involved somewhere, and a large mess of tangled cord (the latter was dense enough to double as my Early Warning Bear System). Here’s the final result:

We left the site at noon and drove around the park, hoping the tent would dry out in time for that night and, when we got back that evening, it had. I was surprised although I reminded myself that I’m an engineer by training and that means I’m a Professional Problem Solver so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised after all. We spent the night in there and no water fell on us. Operative word: Fell. When I woke up in the morning and shifted around, the tent floor under my mat was soaked. Hmmm. We were still dry but I got out of the tent and looked around. It had rained so much and so steadily that the ground was saturated. Our tent was a floating island in a small pond and the water was eager to find any way up through our floor.

We conferred and decided that we’d go eat breakfast in the Village and look at the weather report online. If the rain wasn’t going to stop, we’d leave a day early since we didn’t want to hike in this and we’d seen what could be seen of Yosemite from a car. It turned out that the weather wasn’t going to break so we drove back to our tent and broke it down. It’s no fun packing up a soaked tent.

And thus this post’s title. We struggled a bit with the folksy nickname. Ol’ Soggysides reminds me too much of Old Ironsides (“Huzza! Her sides are made of…soaked nylon!”). Ol’ Soggytop reminds me too much of a famous bluegrass song (“Soggytop, you’ll always be, cold and damp to me. Good ol’ Soggytop. Soggytop Yosemite”). I admit that Soggy Bottom is reminiscent of Foggy Bottom in Washington DC but most people won’t make the connection. So there it is: Good Ol’ Soggy Bottom. She’s like an old friend to us now.

- Dave

We moved south again after our visit with Eddie and Amy to spend three nights in Yosemite National Park. 

We left Lake Tahoe later than we planned, but it turns out our timing was perfect!  As soon as we had reached the floor of Yosemite Valley, just around dusk, we spotted…a bear!  Actually two.  We saw the first bear right by the side of the road.  We stopped the car a short distance away and signaled to the oncoming driver to stop.  We all proceeded to watch the bear cross the road.  We thought it was over after that, but then the bear came back across the road with a cub following her!  The mama and cub hung out at the side of the road together for a minute, and then they ran off into the woods.  What a welcome to Yosemite!

Sorry, no pictures of the bears.  Dave was driving, and it happened so quickly, we couldn’t get the camera out in time.  They were black bears (no more grizzlies left in California, sadly).  We didn’t see other wildlife while at the park (other than birds and squirrels).  Perhaps they were trying to hide under rocks to stay dry. 

I suppose now is a good time to mention that it rained while we were in Yosemite.  A lot.  There were a few moments of light showers when we were able to do a little touring of the park, but most of the time, we experienced steady, heavy rain.  In fact, it was fairly difficult to see the features of Yosemite because the main valley was often filled with clouds.  This did have one positive side-effect: waterfalls.  By fall each year, most of Yosemite’s waterfalls are dry.  However, because of the rain, those falls that had been dry before we arrived were running nicely by the time we left, and those that were at a trickle when we arrived were rushing torrents by the time we left.

So, the photographic opportunities were a bit scant for us in Yosemite.  That’s okay.  It’s not a very photogenic park anyway.  No one ever got famous by taking pictures of this place.*  Here are some shots Dave got when the clouds were somewhat cooperative:

Yosemite Valley including El Capitan (left), Briadalveil Falls (right) and a very faint Half Dome in the distance

Half Dome towers above Mirror Lake and Yosemite Valley

 Half Dome shot from Glacier Point; while it rained on us, it snowed on the peaks in the distance

- Meredith

* With the possible exception of Ansel Adams.