Dispatch No. 5: The Long Way to Vernal Falls

SNOW, SWITCHBACKS, AND A ROAD CLOSED SIGN

We woke up to snow on the ground. Real snow, the kind that sits quietly on everything and makes the world look like it's holding its breath. Beautiful, until you remember you're driving a rental with no snow tires, and you have a trail to catch.

The alternate route to the main entrance cost us time we didn't have to spare. We didn't mind, not really; it was still the main entrance, still the way in. But then came the sign. "Road Closed." A recent rockslide had taken the route we needed, and just like that, we were rerouted again, switchbacks stacked on switchbacks, the kind of road that turns ten miles into an hour.

This was our last full day in Yosemite. Every minute we lost felt like it mattered more than minutes usually do. But we made it.

FUEL AND A BRIDGE

Curry Village Cafe was already past its breakfast window by the time we got there, so it was packaged food or nothing. Bryan grabbed a breakfast sandwich, and I went with a granola and yogurt parfait. Caffeine, sugar, whatever was going to get us up the mountain. We picked up the trailhead right there in the village and started walking: forest first, then paved path, then a bridge, and on the other side of that bridge, the real trail finally started.

THE CLIMB

Three miles round trip. A thousand feet of elevation gain. A thirteen percent incline that feels less like hiking and more like a vertical disagreement with gravity. Six hundred granite steps, soaked and slick from a storm the night before and from the simple fact that it was spring in the park, which means the falls were roaring at full volume and throwing themselves at anyone within reach.

Every step was one of life's great decisions.

We were about halfway through a two-week trip, and somewhere on those steps I did the math that every careful person eventually does on a mountain: how much risk is this view actually worth. The granite didn't care about my math. It just stayed slick.

I must confess: we didn't make it to the very top. We came close, close enough to stand soaked from the mist drifting off Vernal Falls to our left, close enough to feel the roar in my chest more than hear it, but not all the way up. It didn't feel safe, and I've spent nine years learning when "almost" is the smarter answer than "all the way."

It took us about 2.5 hours, all told, mist-soaked and breathless. And standing there facing the falls, watching all that water launch itself off the granite with zero regard for anyone's schedule, it really was worth every one of those treacherous steps.

The descent was worse than the climb. It always is; gravity is funny that way in relation to wet granite, but once our feet were safely back on flat ground, we were glad we'd gone up.

LUNCH UNDER EL CAPITAN

We came down starved. Curry Village had woken up properly by then, bustling in a way it hadn't been earlier that morning, and tacos sounded like the only good decision left in us. We carried them across the parkway into the meadow, sat down in the shadow of El Capitan, and ate lunch looking up at three thousand feet of granite doing absolutely nothing except being enormous.

ONE MORE TRAIL

Legs still tired from the Mist Trail, we closed out the day with a hike to Mirror Lake. A gentler trail after the morning we'd had, and exactly the kind of quiet the day needed before we let it end.

Along the way, the trail opened onto a massive field of boulders, and somehow that boulder field had turned into something else entirely: hundreds of small cairns stacked by hikers who'd passed through before us, little towers of balanced stone scattered across the rocks as far as we could see.

I've always called them shepherd's piles, and somewhere along the way, it just became a habit: leave one wherever I hike, a quiet "I was here" that doesn't involve carving anything into a tree. Bryan's caught the habit now, too. We added ours to the field and kept walking.

And then the lake itself. Still enough to turn the granite and the trees upside down on its surface, the reflection so exact it was hard to tell where the mountain ended, and the water's version of it began. A handful of photographers had staked out their spots along the bank, tripods planted, clearly willing to wait there for hours for the one frame where the light and the stillness lined up perfectly. We didn't have hours left in us. We had enough to stand there for a while, take it all in, and let it be the quiet note the day ended on.

That was it. That was the whole day. Snow, a rockslide, six hundred steps, a waterfall that didn't care how far we made it, tacos in a meadow under a wall of rock that's been standing there since long before any of us had a reason to climb anything, a field of stones we added our own to, and a still lake to close it out.

Worth every detour.

Tomorrow we'd trade granite for coastline, the Mendocino Headlands, and a kayak up and back the Big River estuary. Yosemite was behind us. The water was next.

See you on the trail.

Yours in hiking boots,

Julie· The Nurse Hiker