Yosemite National Park

The hordes of Yellowstone were fresh on my mind as I planned out how I would see Yosemite National Park on Thursday. I decided to enter the park from the less-traveled east side and only glance by the crowded Valley on the way to my next destination. This proved to be a wise decision.

The three hour route from Carson City to Yosemite East swoops past Mono Lake and climbs up into the Sierra Nevada to Tioga Pass, the highest road in California at over 9,000 feet. It's one of the more stunning sections of road I've seen in the nearly 8,000 miles I've put on so far.

Only after hiking eight miles in the Tuolumne Meadows section of the park did I start to encounter crowds. I was on the Cathedral Lakes trail just after 9:00 a.m. and only met three or four groups of hikers on my way to the heavenly lake surrounded by Cathedral, Echo, and Tresidder Peaks. I didn't run into a single soul when I continued another mile around Cathedral Lake to an overlook of Tenaya Lake and the world renowned Yosemite landscape of bulbous granite domes.

The hike, which gains over 1,000 feet, wore me out and I was only too happy to spend the next few hours driving the park's winding roads to various vistas. I stopped first at the shores of Tenaya Lake then at Olmstead Point where there's a beautiful back view of Half Dome. Next, after a brief car tour through the cliffs and waterfalls of Yosemite Valley, I drove to Washburn and Glacier Points with panoramic views of the ice-gouged valleys far below.

I left the park at rush hour and made my way to dingy, faded Fresno where I was within an hour of Kings Canyon National Park, my intended destination the next day.