No Thru Traffic

Doing this trip alone is so different than doing it with Ryan. I don’t have anyone to complain about the heat with, no one to point out fat people on Harleys, no one to talk about how creepy it is to be in a campground completely alone, and I don’t have anyone to spoon peanut butter for lunch with anymore. Oh, and it’s about twice as expensive.

Since we divided just south of Bakersfield, I’ve never been more terrified in my life. I found myself camping completely alone in a campground on Millerton Lake which is just north of Fresno. At first it was kind of cool and I enjoyed camping right on the water, watching the sunset. But after the sun went down and I had to walk the 500 yards in the dark to the bathroom I started to hear all sorts of crazy things. I literally found myself yelling “hello?” into the black abyss as I was convinced something was fiddling with my bike and had caught my scent.

But I lived. And the next night I had some company in the campground which made it much more enjoyable.

Part of the reason that Ryan and I split ways was because I really wanted to hike to the top of Half-Dome in Yosemite National Park. I had been there and heard of the hike almost two months prior and had been looking forward to the challenge since then. It’s a 10-12 hour, 16 mile hike up a total elevation gain of almost 5,000 feet.

Since I was camped about two hours south of the trailhead, I had to get up at 4:00am in order to start the hike at 6:00am and be done well before dark. But of course, since I assumed that every breath was my last while sleeping alone in Millerton, I slept through my alarm the next morning.

Very, very disappointing.

So I ended up hiking to the top of Nevada Falls instead, which is an earlier stop on the same trail to the top. It was grueling, too. Almost 2,000 feet of elevation gain in about a 7 mile round-trip hike. My legs were pretty tired at the end of it, meaning that the hike to half-dome may have been more than I could have handled anyway.

Nah, I totally could have done it.

Beautiful day though, and an awesome hike.