When you have exactly 24 hours to see Yosemite, you’ll want to make sure your gas tank and cooler are full and that your iPod is completely charged. You will also want to make peace with the fact that you will not be forging out heroically into the wilderness, all John Muir-like, with nothing between you and the raw natural world but a leather satchel and a vintage land camera. This is because Yosemite—albeit a wildly beautifully National Park—is within close proximity to metropolises like Sacramento, Fresno, and San Francisco. You may be there to appreciate the grandeur of the wilderness, but you will be doing it from your car windows alongside literally busloads of other people. And that’s okay. Just, you know, prepare yourself for this.


The vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley. If we had more time, you better believe we’d be sampling some of them liquid grapes.

Now, I piggybacked my Yosemite mission onto a quick roadtrip from Portland to central California to pick up my boyfriend. We booked the very last campsite in the entire park on a Friday night (I know because I called the Parks Department hotline) and planned to sightsee on a sunny summer Saturday (AKA prime tourist time). Also, because we had our dog with us (pups aren’t allowed off the valley floor due to large predators like grizzlies and such), we couldn’t ditch the crowds by hiking the hell away from them into the real wilderness—which is, normally, exactly what we would do.


After all that driving, all we wanted to do was throw a chill in the sunshine somewhere. Thank god for this, the mother of all river spots—right at the base of El Capitan. Not bad, eh?

All that being said, I will also say this: Yosemite is extraordinary. Even from the valley floor with the smell of tour-bus exhaust wafting on the breeze, the view is transportative. The sheer, 500-foot drop of El Capitan to your left, Half Dome to your right, with many more impossibly huge chunks of granite that form the Sierra Nevadas butting the sky for miles beyond. Waterfalls dumping down hundreds of feet into the dark shadow of chasms, the sunlight catching the overspray and exploding. I tell ya—all the other crap in your life falls away for a minute or maybe an hour and you just gape in awe at what this f—king planet is like.


All the parking lots to the trailheads were packed with double-parked minivans full of tots with ice cream dripping down their cheeks. But for every one of these, there was a quiet meadow off the side of the road filled with nothing but a pond and some wildflowers.


Me and my pup Lefty — one for the photo album.


Bridalveil Falls, left. Glacier Point, right. Totes worth the half hour drive from Yosemite Valley to see it from a distance like this.