Yosemite! Day 2 by Kenny & Kristen

On our second day, we got up around 6am and headed back into the valley. We had somehow come up with the plan to hike up lower yosemite falls and on to upper yosemite falls. One the way in though, we saw a bear snacking on some dinner right outside our campsite.  The lower falls was a pretty simple 1-2 mile round trip hike that gave a great view of the lower part of the falls. It looked awesome!  The guides all noted that the trail was only about 3.6 miles up to the upper falls so we figured that wouldn’t be to bad - we wanted to take it a bit easy before we hiked half dome the next day. Well...we made a mistake. The upper falls are pretty long and steep…  After what my watch considered about 5.5 miles and about 400 floors of stairs we made it to the tope of upper yosemite. It was much more difficult than we planned and towards the top you end up getting right in the sun with no shade, which made for a hot time. Luckily, we were surprised at the top with an awesome pool from the falls you could swim in!  After taking a dip in the water to cool off and then snacking on some PB&J for lunch, we started to head back down the mountain. Another 5 miles or so later, we were at the bottom. At this point, I wasn't on Kristens good side because we were supposed to take it easy and we clearly had not. Our legs were TIRED and they were going to feel it tomorrow.  We then headed over to the creek where I rinsed off in the water again and took what felt like a bath in the cold tub. The water was about 60 or so degrees. Kristen then took a shower over in half dome village and we packed up and headed back to our campsite.  What we kinda knew, but hadn’t really seen till the end of our hike, was that there was a wildfire that had started the night before. On our drive back to the tent, we could actually see the flames on the mountain about 50 or so miles (maybe more) out. This was causing the valley to be very hazy and caused a concern for us because we didn't know if we would actually get to hike half dome or not.  We figured that we would wait till tomorrow to see if there was any change and plan on making the hike anyway. We ended up making some chicken sausages for dinner with Zucchini which was super good after a long day. We then headed to be early because we wanted to start hiking at around 5am the next day.

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