Yosemite

August 2001

Holidaying in San Francisco it was too good a chance to miss visiting the much celebrated national park of Yosemite. After a four hour drive I eventually arrived heavily disguised as a tourist so as not to get drawn into attempting to bag any of these peaks.

I had been fascinated with this part of the world since the sixties. The magical names of some of those pioneers like ‘Royal Robbins’ or ‘Yvon Chouinard’ stuck in my memory from slide shows way back when. So it was a sort of pilgrimage that brought me there to stand and stare. 

It is impossible to appreciate the size of these gigantic walls but a traditional ascent of one of the real big ones like El Capitan or Half Dome can take between three and seven days. The word ‘traditional’ in this context means ‘artificial’. However, free climbing is becoming more popular nowadays enabling some of the routes to be done in a single day. 

I am not sufficiently skilled in the art of word craft to do justice to the stunning beauty of this part of the world so I will have to just let the photographs attempt to do it justice.