Yosemite! Day 4 by Kenny & Kristen

On our last day, we slept in a bit (till about 7am) and decided we wanted to see some other parts of the park. So we packed up our day bags and drove out towards Tuolumne Meadows. I had never seen this part of the park before - but it was awesome. Long green meadows leading up to smooth rolling hills in a huge valley type area surrounded by granite rock mountains. This place looked like where all the deer and elk love to roam!  It also has the parks largest lake - the Tenaya (Meaning “shining rocks”). We started off our exploring with some nice relaxing time by the soda springs off the road. We enjoyed the morning relaxing right by the stream. This is something we don't do as often as we should during our travel. We spent some time reading, enjoying nature, and a little of planning for what we wanted to do that day We decided to take a hike up to Lemberts Dome which was a smaller 2 mile round trip hike that gave us a fantastic view of the meadows and surrounding landscape from a nie high view. This gave us a great feel of being in the high sierras.  From here we decided to do a bit of a longer walk to Glen Aulen. We were under the impression that this would be a pretty flat walk though it was still about 5.5 miles one way. I really enjoyed the area we went through for this one. It was wide open even though we were surrounded by trees. And about 3 miles in we were walking next to a river that looked amazing - I really wanted to pack raft down through it.  This hike really hit home that we were in the high sierras. The road was about 9000 ft in elevation and our hike was right around the same elevation. We finally made it to the end of the hike and was rewarded once again with an amazingly beautiful waterfall. The landscape in this area is just something of wonder. The ground is sandy and dessert like. The air is dry, the trees are green, and the water is COLD. It was very calming - though at this point our bodies didn't think so. The past 4 days we had averaged something like 38k steps each day.  After making it through Glen Aulen, we headed towards lake Tenaya. We had a goal to go swimming in the lake and then cook dinner and enjoy the sunset behind the mountains. The lake was much warmer than the other bodies of water we had been in up to this point. We enjoyed a nice swim and then proceeded to make dinner on the lake beach. /static/img/ynp2018_4/ynp4.jpg For dinner we made freeze dried beef stew and for dessert we had a freeze dried ice cream sandwich - both were better than i thought they would be (Not great, but not terrible). We then relaxed in the hammock and read part of a book (each day during our drives and in the evenings we have been reading the Percy Jackson series of books together). We then packed up our things and headed back to camp. We stopped at an overlook and watched our last sunset in the park. It was a deep red and very pretty. We enjoyed our time here and plan on coming back at some point in time. It is definitely worth the visit!

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