8/20/14 Wednesday. Zero Day in Yosemite Valley

No miles hiked on the trail today.  There are no hostels or hotels in Tuolumne Meadows, no laundry or showers.  We have our resupply food packed in our packs and are required to store all edibles and 'smellables' in the bear box by our campsite because there are black bear in the area. 

After breakfast at the cafe we waited for the YART (Yosemite Area Regional Transit) bus that would take us to the valley and back for a fee.  We left our tents and some of our gear at the camp taking our packs and more expensive items with us.  The bus had cushy, comfortable seating and I enjoyed the ride down the winding road, we stopped at different campgrounds and trailheads to pick up passengers, getting to the valley at noon.  We had lunch and found places with electric outlets where we could plug in and recharge our phones, my solar charger and Peggy's Kindle while we ate and looked around the museum. 

We watched a movie about Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove of big Sequoia trees.  In the middle of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln signed a law protecting the Mariposa Grove and a small portion of Yosemite Valley.  Later it was enlarged but Lincoln began the process. I didn't know that! 

  I needed a pen for my journal  and couldn't find one for sale so Peggy yogi'd a pen for me from the sales crew. Nice!  

  We hopped a bus going to El Capitan where we found a ranger with a telescope focused on the rock face hoping to glimpse a climber that was resting on a ledge just under the nose.  We never saw the climber but the information at the site was fascinating, we could get close up views of the many routes and features on the rock face. 

El Capitan

Driving back up the winding road to Tuolumne Meadows we looked back and I caught a glimpse of El Capitan from a distance. It's the peak in the right corner of the photo. The evening light was beautiful.

Our tents were where we'd left them and darkness was falling.  Since we'd purchased sandwiches for dinner and ate on the bus we didn't have to cook.  As we were getting ready I heard someone say,  "Looky, is that you?"  I turned around and saw Candice who was camped to one side of us!  Big hugs all around, we were excited to see she'd made it to Tuolumne Meadows!  She'd arrived today and had called a friend to pick her up tomorrow, she'd hiked as far as she wanted, almost 300 miles solo!   she needed to go back to the other world where she'd gotten a job and needed to find a place to live.  We caught up as much as we could before darkness engulfed us and we stumbled back to our tents.  Tomorrow we planned to enjoy breakfast together before we set out on our separate ways.