And We're Off to Yosemite!

After Bryce Canyon, our next planned destination was Yosemite National Park. This meant crossing all the way through Nevada and into CA again. Since we had already driven through Vegas once, we decided to take the roads less traveled and cut across Nevada via the Extraterrestrial Highway! Shortly into the drive we realized that these roads would commonly be boring, straight, and go on for as far as the eye could see. There were also many points that we were completely alone: No cell service, and no cars for at least 5 miles in either direction, and there was a good 150 mile stretch in there without a gas station.

Along the drive, we saw the most wildlife that we had seen in total on the trip. But with wildlife comes the possibility of hitting an animal. Remember that note of no one being around us for 5 miles in either direction? Well, in this exact moment there were 4 places on the road that a squirrel-sized animal couldn't be, and he decided to dart under JHG's back tire and die!! May you rest in peace, idiotic animal.

First, we stumbled upon a town called Rachel. As many of you know, my favorite coworker and closest friend's name is Rachel, so we decided to stop and take pictures of the lame sign that said "Welcome to Rachel". Rachel consisted of trailer homes that were extremely spread out, and an "Al`e Inn" - Hah! Get it? Alien! I don't even know if there was actually an inn there because the place was so small, but it cracked me up. They had junk that they claimed to space alien junk, and a faux flying sauce hooked up to a pick up truck. It was a good time!

After Rachel, we hit free range cattle country! Mmmm, dinner! There was one instance where a cow was scratching her head on a pole. We slowed down, and right as we were about to pass her, she decided to prance to the side of the road (yes, prance, it was a very strange gallop/prance) almost to say hello. We think that we thought we were a farmer or something because after she got about 5ft. away from the car, she looked at us and then bolted away!! Silly cow!

We made the rest of the drive in really good time and entered into the east side of Yosemite at about 2, and decided to take the hour and a half drive into the valley to do a 6mile 'strenuous' hike to two of the largest waterfalls in Yosemite. This hike was absolutely ridiculous. I will proceed the next few sentences by stating that the hike was gorgeous and (now) entirely worth it. But my god, the first 2.2miles of the hike was straight uphill. This was not a gradual uphill, but like...seriously uphill. At one point we had 600 stairs to go up and some of these stairs were 1.5ft tall and 6inches wide. Talk about steep!!! Of course, what you hike up, you must hike down. To say the least, I was sore the next day. The coolest part of this though is that right at the end of our hike, we saw a wild black bear about 20ft from us!! That's the first wild bear I've ever seen in my life, so I was pretty syched.