Beauty and Terrors of Yosemite

Ok. Stop. At least I tried. I swear, the blog is not goin to be poetic or anything like the titile. It just came to my mind. So, right now, I am at the airport in Las Vegas. Honestly, this looks like a casino with airport rather than airport with casino given how many casino stuffs there are. Immediately, after I landed (which was my first time in LA) I saw the slot machines? I don’t know what they are called. Which was crazy, I hadn’t heard about this and it was surprising to see them in the airport at first. 

Airports are like little peek ways of the city that you are traveling to. If you go to California airport, you immediately see how inclusive the airports are, there are yoga centers in airport lol which was funny. There’s a man sitting right beside me, and there’s Chili’s right in front of me, I have been sitting on the same spot at the airport for a while now deciding what I should get in Chili’s and pretending to study ADM. I don’t know man too confusing. I am also in this spot because I am charging my phone.. 

Ok, now let’s talk about Yosemite.

So, for this trip we booked an awesome airbnb which was situated on one of the hills. It had these giant window glasses and you could see everything outside very clearly. We were a group of 17 people there, and even with all of us in the same room, it didn’t feel like there were a lot of people there, we needed to scream in order for the people in the other side to hear us. But wait.. let’s go a bit back. 

I haven’t really talked about our trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park. I’ll just summarize it here, the spot we were at was cool, the scenes at the national parks especially Grand Teton was grand. It was snowing as we were walking on one of the trails and man oh man did it look like heaven. 

Also, the road from Grand Teton to Utah was equally beautiful. You couldn’t have seen grasses greener and fresher anywhere on the planet than that. Also, I saw this horse, which was right underneath this mountain, and there was greenery all around. I wish I had captured that scene. I am pretty sure, if I have some money I’ll buy some land near Grand Teton. 

So, yeah we came from Grand Teton to Utah and then left to California. I met Ashlee’s grandparents who for some reason really liked me. I love the atmosphere there. It almost feels like Mamaghar. And this time, it felt like we are celebrating Dashin. We made some Sail Rotis, goat meat and played cards. The only thing that was missing there was some jamaras, Tika and the month of October. And some dakshina. Lol. 

Me and Ashlee dd went there on Monday, we worked from home from Monday to Friday. We had a little party on Thursday night where we had some beers ( if you know me I hate beer, I drank Mike’s Hard instead). One of our friends had her birthday so we also surprised her. Also, they have this dog whose name is snow. He is a mixture of bull dog and German Shepard (I believe) but he’s big. He was excited to see us. Glad he still recognized me after a while. I didn’t want to be eaten alive lol. 

After that we can finally start the story of Airbnb now. So Friday I finished my work a little early and we left around 12. It was a 3 hour drive. The spot we had was around an hour away from Yosemite. Friday we decided to have a little party. Get some goat meat and chicken grilling and dance to the music. And we did just that. It was fun. We also played some beer pong. Our grandparents were also there with us, at first everyone was trying to hide the beer bottles but then it didn’t matter after a while. 

Oh, there was also a poker table there. So, as you guessed we didn’t play poker. We played open flash. lol. I was desperately trying to get three aces but I didn’t. So, after eating and partying, we ended the night by playing Mafia like game. I was the host, and we played a few rounds. We slept around 2,3 in the morning. 

Saturday

I woke up pretty early. It was around 5 when I woke up. Our grandmother was already awake, and had made some tea. So, I had some tea with her. The morning air and the view was gorgeous. Grandma, told me about how she had already had 7 kids by the age of 27 and how she used to farm and stuff like that. Saturday was a little chill. We didn’t have a lot of activities planned. We were just thinking about going to Yosemite National Park. We went there, fell in love with Yosemite, and we found out about this hike to the Half Dome. It was a lottery based hike so we couldn’t just get there. We couldn’t get the tickets for Saturday and luckily 3 of us got the ticket for Sunday so we decided to do that hike on Sunday. 

Saturday, we went there and did a little hike to mirror lake. It was beautiful. We took some pictures along the way and returned home that day. We had a 8 mile hike (we thought so) the next day so we all slept pretty early. 

Sunday

We all thought it was going to be an easy hike. It was just 8 miles (we thought so) and according to the websites it could take from 8-12 hours. We thought we could do it in 8 hours. 1 hour per mile should be good right? So we started the hike around 11:00 am. The view along the way was wild. It was almost like a scene from Bahubali. The waterfall and the surroundings was breathtaking. Literally. We were walking uphill most of the time. I would divide the hike into 3 parts. 

1. The Waterfall. 

This was the first part I would say. Reaching up to the waterfall was easy as fuck. It was so because we had just started and had full energy. Although it was uphill mostly, it was pretty easy. We then reached the viewpoint where we could see the stream fall. Sorry, I am not that good at describing these things. 

2. Another waterfall lol. 

So, from there there was another waterfall that we could watch. So, we went there too. Nothing bad. We still had energy. 

3. The stairs of hell. 

The view was solid. The climb was also not that bad, you’ll know why I named them this later on. 

4. Best part of the trip. 

This was the only flat part of the trip. This is like the mystical places that you see on movies. There were pines trees, and you could see the Rocky Mountains on both side and a stream of river flowing on the side. This part of the trip was absolute paradise. 

5. Forest. 

We really started to get exhausted at this point. Even before we were already tired but it was too much at this point. We only rested for like 2,3 minutes along the hike and we were walking non-stop. So, it was starting to show up. I literally slept on the ground. I could no longer walk. We took many rests along this way, Asked a lot of people who were coming down form the hike how longer would it take for us to get there.

6. Almost Close to the dome

So after the forest like thing, we almost reached to the top of the mountain. The view from up there was surreal. We felt like we almost climbed a mountain. It was like Kailash Parbat (i would say) it was covered with clouds and cold. The land was almost flat for a short distance and you could just see the edge of the cliff. Everything else was covered with clouds or fog. 

7. The stone hill ?

So, we were almost there. We met rest of our friends there. Others were pretty active and one of them was an athlete so I think the hike was not too bad for them. They had waited almost an hour for us at that point. They had completed the hike and were on their way down waiting for us. We all met there, took a picture and they went down while we went towards the top of the dome. 

We had to climb these crazy uphill stone walls. I climbed up until the point where there were stairs. From one one point the stairs were no longer there and you had to walk on stone hill. I didn’t have proper shoes with good grips on. If you feel off that cliff, you’d probably die. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to write a blog. So, I stayed there on the top of that cliff while the rest of my friends (3) went to the top. We (2) of us stayed here. There was this small groove in the rocks where we could sit. It was awesome. I felt like an eagle with the nest on the top of the hill. The view was wild. Just sitting there on the top and observing the Rocky Mountains was crazy. We took pictures and descended down. It was about to get dark. 

Now we thought the hike down would be easy and up until a point it was until we reached the stairs of hell. Guys, it was dark, we had only 2,3 percent of battery left, we didn’t have flashlights, I couldn’t properly walk downstairs and there were 5 of us. The stones were slippery, if you took a bad step and fell, you could be thrown into the river. It was crazy. I am not even exaggerating it. Maybe it would have been easier if there was still daylight. As it started getting darker, we were worried about us being able to make it past that stairs. Without any light there was no way we could make it past that. So, we took one step at a time. I had holding  my friend’s hand who was carrying the light and providing support as we walked down the stairs. PJ was leading the way with another light, and we just took one step after another. It was so fucking long. The Stairs. It didn’t feel that way when we hiked up top, but it was. Man! At certain point I was scared if we could make it to the bottom. But, we pushed, one step after another. We didn’t have any water left. Our mouth were dry, foots were sore and had a iPhone with 1% battery left and we relied on it’s flashlight for the rest of our trip. 

But to just conclude we made it through. We came back. It was almost 12 or 1 I forgot when we met our friends in the End of the hike. My legs are still sore. But I am super stoked that we completed that hike. It was almost 16 miles of hike. We had ignored the “Hard” label on that hike and completed it. One thing I realized is beauty doesn’t lie in the things but it is often a state of mind. The same rocks that once were beautiful were now literally the thing that we wanted to get away from. Anyways, it was awesome. It was fun. We made it back alive. Lol. 

Oh also we saw a deer on the way down. 

And now I am in the LA airport, I have been here since 11 in the morning. I have still not decided what to get from Chilis, the line there is getting longer. It’s almost 6:21 pm now. My flight leaves at 11:00 something. I think I will finally stand in the line there and try to decide and get something. 

- Until Next Time

Handsome Charming Man.