We devoted our Yosemite time today to exploring the valley. Yosemite is PACKED with people, even though it’s the off-season, and the Valley is the most popular place to be in the park. The majority of the visitors—or at least a substantial percentage—seem to be foreign, and I heard a ranger say that was typical for the fall months. We put our car in day-use parking, and we rented bikes to tour the valley that way. The other national parks we’ve been in are pretty ambivalent about biking—they allow it, but only on park roads which are normally winding and narrow and teeming with giant RVs. Yosemite, though, has actual bike paths throughout the valley that allow you to get around without contending with any cars at all. It only took us a little over an hour to make a circle, by which point we were ready to move on. The bikes were decades old and pretty painful and made going up the tiniest hill a major struggle. But it was definitely the best way to get around, and it was pleasant riding around all the rocks, forests, and meadows. We decided to forgo a hike since we biked, and set off east out of the park.
We planned to drive about halfway across Nevada and camp at a sight midway across. Brad and I are both enchanted by the drive across the Great Basin. It’s desolate, with desert-y shrubs stretching out for miles, interrupted every so often by small mountain ranges. There are towns every couple hundred miles, with literally nothing in between. This is what you think of when you think of a cross-country road trip, and it's especially fitting set to the soundtrack of Tom Petty’s Highway Companion. A good portion of the highway skirts the northern border of a massive military site, which our atlas says contains Yucca Mountain, a test range and a test site. Lonely Planet fills in some other details, such as the fact that Area 51 is located here.
Our drive was much faster than expected though, so we decided to skip the first site and go to the next. We pulled up after dark to find it completely deserted, but open. I was a little freaked out by the desolation, but we were starting to think about staying when we saw a tiny notice posted that the campground was closed. Decision made, we left the murder campground (as Brad began referring to it). It was only another hour or so to Great Basin National Park, near the Utah border, which was our destination for the next morning, so we took a chance that campgrounds would be open and headed in. We found a campsite and set up our tent in the howling wind and went to bed.
-M
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