Yosemite -- Beautiful and Expensive

Yosemite National Park -- My family has visited dozens of great national parks through the years, from the Everglades to the Olympic, but Yosemite will always be my favorite. The scenery, even when stuck in heavy traffic, is beyond stunning. 

Get out and hike -- if you can find a place to park-- and you will never forget the experience.

As beautiful as it is, sometimes visiting there can be troubling. Particularly if you arrive during peak summer months or happen to be a low income family.  Be prepared to pay a lot, and be crowded.

With crowds,  cars,  past management decisions and global warming the park now can be a nightmare on a hot August day. 

 It is no bargain anytime for average American families. 

And beyond the reach of the truly poor. 

A minimum wage worker in America would have to spend a full day's wages, even  bringing a picnic, just to be there for one day.

It is essentially a park where the wealthy, including foreign visitors, are treated as special guests and encouraged to stay. And that is entirely consistent with the park's history. When first discovered only the very rich from San Francisco, the east coast and Europe, could afford the expensive journey. It was a special place, mostly for the elite. Still is.

Today getting there is not the problem. Staying there is.

  One week at the Yosemite Lodge -- the only basic ""motel" inside the park -- would cost a family of four between $1,400 and $2,100 dollars, probably more. 

If you can get in.

 Meals at the limited eating places near the hotels could cost another $1,000 or so.

One week at the Ahwahnee Hotel, the park's iconic lodging place, today can cost a couple between $4,000 and $5,000. It is a grand looking hotel, even if the rooms are not special and the service lacking. Our recent lunch of hamburgers was $50.

In theory the rates are supposed to be comparable to facilities near the park. In reality park administrators have used destination resort areas like Tahoe and San Francisco, even Disney, not Mariposa or Merced. It is a stupid system.
 

The grand lobby of the Ahwahnee

The dining hall--bring money

Other housing in Yosemite is available only if you are lucky and diligent. There are campgrounds, housekeeping units (a three-sided canvas shelter), tent cabins, and a very few real cabins. You have to plan  months ahead. Demand always outweighs capacity. Most are unavailable half the year.

 Campground spots are so competitive that experienced visitors typically set the alarm clock and jump on the Internet the moment the window for reservations opens --  several months ahead. 

Half the year the vast majority of campsites are completely closed   while the most expensive lodge rooms and hotel remain open and operating. The limited camping spots are almost always  booked way ahead, including the  very few available in winter in the Valley. 

At a time when there are normally no crowds -- a relative term -- the park service jams people into less and less space. My estimate is that non-luxury available housing in the Valley is reduced about 90% for six months of the year.

The park service web site claims more than 1,500 campsites are available in the park, capable of housing almost 9,000 people.  

That is misleading. Perhaps deliberately. 

That number of people assumes most campsites  average six people, an unrealistic number. Three to four is probably accurate.

And then most are closed for half the year.

This November  only one campground was open for car campers in the Valley, plus the small mountain climber's camp, probably with less than 100 total sites and room for about 400 people total.  Other campgrounds, including many below the snow line, were closed for the season. 

A lack of employees due to Covid restrictions affected 2021 numbers.

But Covid is not the real  problem. Population growth and management decisions are. 

 The trend throughout the last four decades consistently has been to shut down the least expensive places to stay the night, and maintain  the most expensive. It's all about revenue, a position the park service finds itself in due to a lack of congressional support and pressure from concessionaires and politicians.

 

Not far from the Ahwahnee, a resident bear

The 150 year history of Yosemite is a classic American tale, including greed, failures, violence, triumph and some success. In the 1800s it was the natives who lived there that were run off. Today it is average American families who pay taxes.  And increasingly, it is the people who drive up to the gate, willing to pay to get in. 

Tour groups and people who use travel agencies get access. They pay more.

 Deciding how the park should operate in the interest of the public has always been a challenge. It remains so today. In the 1800s, prompted by glorious paintings and photographs, Abraham Lincoln set the space aside -- preserving it forever -- and asked California to manage it. The state chased off the early settlers, ignored the natives, and mismanaged it to the point the federal government finally took it back. 

Eventually the National Park Service was given the responsibility to manage Yosemite.

Hiking toward Mirror Lake

It has never been an easy task, and even today there are so many competing voices the future of the park remains uncertain. Congress pats itself on the back for supporting national parks, but provides so little funding the public is asked to pay constantly increasing fees for everything from entrance fees to places to stay to hamburgers. 

The congressional representative of the district that includes the park generally opposes spending any money on anything to make the situation better.  

Outside of a few urban-based environmental non-profits and some employee groups, the park has no effective advocates.

Close to the old stables

 The park's senior management has historically struggled, often forced to make hard choices between protecting the park for the public and bowing to the commercial interests who make money on it. 

 Part of the problem is the mission to "preserve and protect" both the natural wonders and the public's access. 

Too often the natural wonders are protected, but access for the very people who pay for the park is increasingly difficult. 

Where you can wait for dinner

Next: More history of the struggles of the park

-------------------------------------------

Note: Data from NPS:

Campgrounds

• Yosemite Valley Family Sites: 459 sites accommodating 2,754 people (Note: only one Valley family campground is open for six months of the year)
• Tioga Road/Big Oak Flat/Hetch Hetchy: 856 sites for 5,136 people (Note: All of these sites are closed.)
• 
  
• Glacier Point/Wawona: 206 sites for 1,236 people (now closed)
• Group campsites: 14 group campsites (for 420 people); and 9 horse campsites (54 people) (Closed)

Source: NPS website

Part Four -- end of the trip

We left Monument Vallewy and drove through the Four Corners area touching Arizona, Utah and finally our destination Colorado. Our travel "goal" was a vague idea that we wanted to get back to the Rocky Mountains. We figured out, with encouragement from a friend, that Durango in Southwestern Colorado would be a good destination. And we wanted to see new places. It was a good plan, but things did not quite turn out the way we expected. We were going to drive north through the Rockies from Durango and visit some of the area we had seen briefly decades ago just West of Denver. When we got to Durango we learned three things: 1. Durango was jammed with tourists, and even in paid RV parks we could only find space for one night. 2. The highway we had planned to travel was closed during the day for construction, leaving us with a choice of sitting and waiting for hours, or finding another route. There was no other route that would not add several days of highway travel. 3. We were getting tired after more than a week on the road, and beginning to think of home. So we fought the traffic in Durango long enough to get into a grocery store and replenish our supplies, and then found a commercial RV park just outside of town overlooking the Animas River and the famous Durango-to-Silverton Railroad. Here is the a picture from the RV park, as Pat is sitting and visiting with a very interesting neighbor.

Part Three: Roadtrip in Snowflake

We planned our eighth day of travel to be in Moument Valley, to wake up early and beat the crowds to take the self-guided car tour of Monument Valley. We were up well before dawn, grabbed coffee, and were third in the short line to enter the loop rode by 6:30 a.m. just before the sun came up. (To minimize impacts, and due to Covid, only 15 cars are allowed at one time to be on the two-hour loop. You could drive it faster, but why would you?)

Even with a lot of pretty good pictures, it is impossible to catch the beauty of the place. We kept trying, with Cell Phones and my daughter's loaned Canon camera. Every few hundred yards one of us would go "Oh!. Look at that!"

And then we would go around a bend in the dirt road, and the view would change. Like this.

And then a new vista would appear, with the sun climbing slowly everything changed every minute.

I suspect this photo is out of sequence, as it looks a lot like the moonrise the evening before.

And then we would have to take pictures of each other just to prove we were there.

The scale of the monuments is such that you hardly have time to consider the geological changes that took place over millions of years.

Whether far away.....

Or nearby.

When we finished the drive through the Monuments, we went back up to the Visitor Center atop the ridge looking east. The information center was closed, but the gift shop was open. It proved to be a good stop. Everything they offer is carefully labled, and one entire section is devoted to native-made items, from large expensive pottery to small souvenirs. They had a lot of Navajo silver and jade jewelry, not something we collect, but we could admire the workmanship.

One more view from the ridge looking east.

The Navajo people, who call themselves "Dine'", have done an excellent job protecting and sharing this national treasure. They not only manage the resort and visitor experiences, they also live in the valley among all this beauty. Side roads, marked "private" lead off to small ranches and homes and hogans tucked in among the towers. A few horses and sheep are always visible, and you can get a feel for what it is like for people who have lived here for hundreds or thousands of years. The people we encountered were friendly and helpful. The best example was when we had trouble with a tire, and were considering calling AAA from a town 100 miles away. At the trading post gas station, the air pump was broken and they said there was no help anywhere nearby. But a shop keeper in the native market told us about a local man who had a tire shop, and gave us directions. In this area, the directions were to go along the road past the commercial RV park, expect the road to be narrow and maybe dirt, but look for a home off to the right with tires stacked outside a small wooden garage. We pulled into the yard, and the man stopped what he was doing, helped us immediately, and fixed the problem.

And so, as the old travelogue movies used to say, we bid farewell to the incredible Monument Valley.

Go visit this place. It should be on every bucket list. Next and finally: On to Colorado. Briefly.

Part Two -- Travels with Snowflake

 Day Five began on the road from Great Basin National Park in Nevada, driving  east across Utah and then south through Moab and on to Blanding, a small town in the middle of some of the prettiest country you will ever see. And it ended in the stupendous collosal Monument Valley

To get there we started east along Highway 50, joined Interstate 70, and then turned south on 191.

The western side of Utah starts out in dry brushy rolling hills, then comes into large dry valleys and finally through farming towns like Hinkley, where we finally saw some green, and through the little farm town Delta. Breakfast in the cafe there included a conversation overheard that ranged from the Mormon church leadership's recent  pro-mask announcement for Covid prevention, to one farmer telling another to never quit his job working for someone. Let them fire you, and you can either collect benefits or sue, he said.

Very few people in rural Utah towns wear masks.

(Note: I read that every town and county in Utah except Salt Lake City has a large majority of Mormons in residence, including places like Hinkley and Delta. Probably true, but for they seem to have the same concerns, manners and politics as almost any other rural areas.)

A word about the Interstate 70 route across Utah. It has to be one of the  most beautiful stretches of Interstate Highway in the nation . 

 Hidden back in the canyons are  miles of off-road trails, and you can see evidence in hundreds of off-road vehicles with roll-bar cages and open sides at a scattering of towns and trailer parks.   The roads follow the old Pony Express route, and some places brag about that brief moment in Western history. Mostly it is seen through a series of "historical markers," several pointing out that just over the hills the intruding pony riders encountered hostility from the natives.

Also off the road a few miles are major fossil sites, where dinosaur bones can be seen if your vehicle can handle the back roads.

Once we left the Interstate highway, where the speed limit was 80 mph, traffic slowed slightly as we drove south  by Arches National Park where cars were backed up waiting to get in, through Moab which is always jammed with tourists and four-wheeled contraptions of every kind.

We landed for a couple of nights at an older motel in Blanding, Utah, just north of the Navajo Reservation and near Bear's Ears National Monument,

Blanding is a comfortable town, with a large Native American population and a couple of good places to eat, and a laundromat where we refreshed our limited clean clothes.

We discovered a wonderful museum at the Edge of the Cedars State park, right on the edge of town. The park has an excavated pueblo dwelling site, complete with kiva, but it was the collection inside that was so fascinating. They had Anasazi pottery and basketry, some items a thousand years old, and all found nearby,  all of them very rare. The displays contained a lot of information, interestingly presented. It is a must-see museum if you travel that way.

Pat taking in some of the upper floor exhibits.

A native flute, a woven water jug and what have been children's arrows.

And Kiva to explore.

We ended the day at our cabin at Monument Valley. The Navajo Nation's Monument Valley. It looks and feels like a national park, but is located on and run very well by the Navajo Nation. The series of photos below are all from our first afternoon. We arrived too early to check into our cabin or take the long car tour through the valley so we rode around, checking out Goulding's Trading Post a few miles away, the only open place to eat, a gas station and the gift shop. The pictures are mixed due to editing problems but you can tell that once we got into our cabin we were more than happy with the view right out the front window. The cabins are located on two rows, ours in the back but at a higher elevation, so every cabin has the spectacular view of the Valley spread out below. The giant monuments, buttes and mesas, dominate everything. At the time it was sunset so the colors were even more fantastic. The "resort" is called "The View" and is operated by the Navajo. Normally it has everything you would need: hotel, cabins, RV park, Visitor Center, a choice of tours (guided or not)cafe and gift shop. Due to Covid the only things open were the tours, gift shop, hotel and cabins. The cabins where we stayed are modern and clean, have a refrigerator and microwave, good beds, and a tiny extra room with two extra (bunk) beds. It is not cheap (about $200 a day) but you get a thousand dollar view plus comfort.

John Wayne's cabin was on the Goulding Trading Post property, a reminder of when western movies were made in the area. Next: More Monument Valley.