The Mist Trail

The day before May 25, when I wrote this, I did laundry and returned the tent I was occupying with my kids at Houskeeping Camp in Yosemite where I found my older sister and her family had prepared tacos for us. My mood had improved from earlier in the day. I had a beer with my brother-in-law and his buddies. Later I had to come up with ways to both sit with the group but also avoid the smoke from the fire.

I ended up sitting with my boys as they finished their desert. I had to have a real talk with them about bedtime since most of the others were much older than them. They had heard about the “moonbow” over Yosemite Falls and I had to find ways to get their minds off of it. I ended up taking a long exposure of the view over the Merced River from the campsite and said that that was how it likely appeared. They relented once they acknowledged how much they wanted to go to bed. Once we had brushed our teeth and wound down, I dozed for a bit with the light on. I had tried and failed to find a beer. I shut everything down at midnight.

In the morning of the day that I wrote this, I woke at 5:45 am but let the boys sleep. We got up at 7:30 and headed to Curry Village where we rented bikes and got some breakfast. We went back to the campsite and had breakfast sandwiches. My sister convinced me to make sandwiches for the boys for our Mist Trail hike.

The boys were playing with dirt and riding around on their rental bikes. I found a couple of backpacks and when everyone in our camp was ready, I convinced the boys to get their bikes and wait with me on the road. Then a big group of us– nearly 25 people– went to Happy Isles to walk on the interpretive trail. Then we went to the Mist Trail and parked our bikes with a lock I had purchased at the rental shop.

As we headed out. I convinced the boys to lead the way to the Vernal footbridge as fast as we could. Only one person from the group caught up to us. At the bridge everyone took a group photo. From there, we tried to follow my older sister to the misty sections of the Mist Trail. However, after a few photos, she and her husband headed back.

From there the hike was really wet and while my boys were displeased at the atmosphere they managed. I had to swallow my concern over the danger on a few occasions but there were enough friends and family around that it felt OK.

Once we had made it past the dangerous climb above Vernal Falls, about 15 of us ate food with. I had the boys eat their sandwiches and a ton of snacky food. After that, we tried to get a photo of Nevada Falls. The group started to dissipate at this point but about 8 of us ended up climbing up the John Deere Trail.

One of my boys had decided to try to stay at the front of the group because he wanted to return to camp. It was cute because he kept asking where the top was. My other son had glommed onto a lady and her mom and spoke to her all the way back to the Vernal Bridge.

At the top above Vernal Falls, we rested a bit, but everyone wanted to descend back to the valley. It was initially steep but got easier. My boy in the lead, who saw me take one of the shortcuts, ran to catch up with me and that made me take caution because of the steepness. I started to take it slow because I realized he was exhausted. I suggested we count switchbacks as a way to monitor our progress.

At Vernal Bridge many of our companions said goodbye and the group was down to 5 – my boys, my niece, her boyfriend and myself. We concentrated on effective walking – the boys had to rest a lot and were occasionally not very happy. Also, the trail had a lot of narrow portions where tourists tend to bunch up so it was hard to pass people.

I noted that the spot where the trail follows the canyon northward for a short while can be very steep but it quickly got easier. I tried to hold the boys’ hands through a lot of it. Suffice to say, I was relieved when we started to unlock the bikes. We rode to Curry Village and said bye to my niece and her boyfriend before dropping the bikes off.

We had a snack and walked to housekeeping. My brother-in-law made the group pizza and later we had s’mores. We then made a plan to play video games on our ipads before going to bed.


This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.