Yosemite
"Half Dome from the valley floor looks exactly like every photograph you've seen of it, which is somehow the most disorienting thing."
There is a pull-out just inside the Tunnel View entrance to Yosemite Valley where the entire spectacle opens up at once — El Capitan on the left, Half Dome dead ahead, Bridalveil Fall dropping a misty thread down the right wall — and I stopped there not because the guidebook said to but because every car in front of me had already stopped and I was about to rear-end someone. It was seven in the morning and the valley floor still held a layer of mist. El Capitan was catching the first light on its upper face, that three-thousand-foot wall of grey granite turning faintly pink while everything below stayed blue and cool. A woman next to me said, under her breath, in what I think was Korean: something that translated in tone to oh my God. We stood there for fifteen minutes without really meaning to.
Yosemite Valley is about seven miles long and a mile wide, and the walls are between three and four thousand feet on each side. The scale is the thing that photographs cannot convey — not the beauty, which they handle adequately, but the sheer bulk of the granite, the way it displaces sky. Walking the valley floor on the path that runs along the Merced River, you keep looking up and what you feel is not exactly awe, which implies a comfortable distance. It is something closer to vertigo. The meadows along the river are soft and green and the deer walk through them in groups of three or four, entirely unbothered, while climbers invisible to the naked eye work their way up routes on El Capitan that take five days. You have to look with binoculars to find them — small coloured patches of tent bivouacked on ledges.
I hiked the Mist Trail to Vernal Fall in early October, when the summer crowds had thinned and the trail was wet with spray and the maples along the valley had gone yellow. The trail gains six hundred feet in less than two miles through granite steps worn smooth by sixty years of boots, and by the time I reached the bridge below the fall my jacket was soaked through not from rain but from mist. The fall drops 317 feet in a single white curtain and the sound at the base of it is something you feel in your sternum.
The Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias is in the southern part of the park, and I went there in the late afternoon when the day-trippers had cleared. The Grizzly Giant is 209 feet tall and 1,800 years old and one of its lower branches is larger in diameter than most mature trees. Walking among them, you lose all sense of proportion — a sequoia trunk makes a normal fir tree look like a sapling, and the scale shift upends something in your spatial understanding. The bark is fibrous and red-orange and warm to the touch. The smell is sweet and slightly medicinal. I stayed until closing and drove out in the dark.
When to go: May and June for waterfalls at their peak, after the snowmelt. September and October for crisp light, low crowds, and autumn colour in the valley’s black oaks and maples. Avoid July and August — the valley floor becomes a traffic jam and reservations are required for even driving in. Winter, if you can handle snow chains and limited access, offers Half Dome under snow in a stillness the summer crowds never permit.