I’ve been looking at the maps for Yosemite and realizing that the convoluted nature of the roads means it can be a very long drive to go a very short distance (as the crow flies). From our campsite, we can look up and see a sheer cliff of granite, above which is Glacier Point. Glacier Point is a spectacular place to view the entire Yosemite Valley and I wanted to go there.

It would be simple to get to Glacier Point if you had a helicopter. It is 3,200 feet above us and perhaps a half mile to the southwest. Not far at all. But that’s like saying outer space isn’t very far. After all, it’s only an hour’s drive away if your car can go straight up.

For us earth-bound residents, there are two ways to get to Glacier Point. You can hike the “Four Mile Trail” which zig-zags steeply up the mountainside. This was the historical route for early visitors to the valley, and it’s climbing all the way. I would expect it to take us about eight hours to get up that route.

The other method is to drive out of the valley on Route 41, climbing steadily and winding constantly, until you reach the Glacier Point Road on the left. Then keep climbing and twisting until at last you reach Glacier Point. It’s about 25 miles and takes 45 minutes to drive. Once you’ve completed the drive, you are almost exactly where you started, except 3,200 feet higher and lightened by a couple of gallons of fuel (which currently costs $3.77 per gallon at Wawona, by the way). It felt faintly ridiculous to have done all that driving to end up where we started, but the view from Glacier Point made it all worthwhile.

There are four managed burns going on in the park right now, which occasionally send layers of brownish smoke through the valley and obstruct the view, but we found that over the course of the day the view clears. Even with a light haze and occasional smoke, the viewing was superb. The valley is laid out before you like a model train set. We could see almost everything, including our Airstream, glinting through a gap in the trees.

While we were up around 7000 feet, we stopped off to hike to Sentinel Dome, which is another great viewing spot. That’s a relatively easy 2.2 mile roundtrip, even in the thin air of 7,000 feet, is worth doing if you are passing by on Glacier Point Road.

The next stop was near the southern entrance of the park at Wawona, the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoia trees. These trees are absolutely incredible. The Pacific Coast Redwoods are magnificent and humbling as they tower in the fog, but the Giant Sequoias (close relatives) are just plain huge. They aren’t taller than the Coast Redwoods but they are bigger in diameter, and that has a tremendous impact on how you perceive them from the ground. Even a fallen Sequoia lying on its side will tower over a human. They are the largest living things on earth, and also the longest-lived (up to 3,000 years old). The Grizzly Giant in the photo is estimated at 1,790 years old. It’s worth the trip to visit the Sequoias, even if it means 25 miles of hairpins curves on Route 41.

This time of year the light fades early behind the mountains, and by 4:30 the Sequoia grove was getting too dim for photography. We hustled back to the cars and found ourselves driving back in the dark at 5:15. On the mountain tops we could see the prescribed forest fires glowing like lava on a volcano.

Back on the hotel’s wifi I reviewed the weather for the next few days and it looks like Sunday will bring some rain. We were thinking we’d head out on Saturday anyway, and the weather report solidified the decision. It is also going to get colder in Yosemite next week, possibly with a little snow overnight. We made the right choice zipping down through northern California to get here before the weather started to change. Now, it’s time to get back to the valley for a week of work, repairs, maintenance, and planning of the next trips.