The road to Yosemite Valley literally takes you into the bowels of the earth, so to speak, since the surrounding environment is grandorite walls that loft skybound into the cooler upper atmosphere, while you remain on the Valley floor, as small and tiny as a colorful butterfly in spring, or a grasshopper hidden by meadow grasses. One felled tree was laden with 135 rings, while others still standing might be even older as these ancient soldiers stand and sway, guardians of all that goes on within the Walls and Cliffs of Yosemite.
While you are enthralled watching and viewing cliffs as you may have never seen them before, and trees whose heights may astound you, please be ever mindful of the unguarded dangers that may catch you unaware due to your detachment from your normal earthly reality. What might that be you ask? Say for instance you stop your car and get out, forgetting that the road in is a one way road, and perhaps you just stop without pulling over because you do not see any approaching cars. Well, cars are not supposed to drive over 25 miles per hour in the Valley, however Yosemite boasts 3.5 to 4.1 million visitors and guests per year. If the road is open and the weather is pleasant, someone will be on the road. You can count on it! Pull over and shut off your car engine. Look both ways and all around and then be mindful of picture taking. Many people loose themselves in the beauty of the scenery and they forget to be careful.
Everyone wants the perfect picture and we all have to be in the right spot, according to our own perceptions to get it. This often means we do not look where we are going at eye level and oops, we step into a gully or soft meadow patch or trip over a rock, loosing our foresight in our photo conquest. Our camera, digital or expensive telephoto goes flying and we can land boot side up with mud on our lense.
Some dauntless visitors stand smack, road to their middle and stop traffic or naught...making the ultimate picture their very last vision. Believe me, those cliffs and walls will be their finger click or naught, so watch out where you are walking and then stop when you are safe and still and then click away my friends.
Please realize you are in a National Park and it is a wildlife habitat and a forest. The latter is important because while the trees tower from 5 stories to perhaps 30 or 40 stories high on an average...when limbs and branches break they come a crashing down and the wood in one seeminly small branch is quite heavey. Falling from a distance far above your 5 or 6 foot human body, the branch can accumulate a speed and an impact that is deadly. My suggestion is to pay acute attention to the sounds around you. Many visitors wear headphones or play music off their ipods...not a good idea in Yosemite. Listening to the music of the forest is for certain a better way to survival and ensuring your safety. Those strong branches, that are often falling, make great music and the sound they play is the sound of them warning you to pay attention and hop out of the way.
Yosemite is a geologists paradise. While rocks can be an absorbing study of geometry, and an artists delight of shifting colors, from grays to whites to blacks to golds, all depending of the moment of light and tones of the shadows, the rocks themselves are never stable and are always moving. Well, maybe not right at the moment you are there, but they will and you do not know when, and that is why you have to pay attention and be alert. Again rocks send out warnings and if you are listening to the rocks or the walls or the cliffs, you can hear them speaking to you. Rocks make music just like your ipod does, and if you are listening to their voices, it could save your life, however, outside music only provides background noise, drowning out the low growl of shifting granite walls, or the heavey clunking music of descending granite cascades tumbling and grinding rock over rock in a thunder of vertical descent. Listen to the sounds of the forests.
