A whole lotta tree!

Yosemite is one of the biggest, perhaps the most beautiful and unfortunately the most popular National Park of the US. It's so big that you'd probably need a whole week to explore the entire park. We decided not to go on a hike, still a bit stiff from the Narrows walk and thus took the car to drive from viewpoint to viewpoint. The evening before we already got a glimpse of the magnitude of the park by driving to the highest and probably most astonishing viewpoint of them all. The park is packed with trees and has a collection of monumental rocks sticking out of the forest. One of them is Half Dome, a white mountain with one side a completely round surface, and the other side a huge cliff. It's as if it used to be a very slippery round mountain but then was cut in half by an earthquake or something. Climbing the slippery side of the Half Dome is a very popular hike that we wanted to do. Regretfully we needed a permit to climb it. It's however a hike not to be underestimated. The very day we were looking at the Half Dome, somebody had fallen off from it and didn't survive the fall.
We decided to visit the giant sequoias the next morning. A sequoia is a big tree that has some unique capabilities that give it the possibility to become extremely tall and wide. It's like the Mothertree in that smurf pocahontas movie Avatar. Some are even bigger than the Statue of Liberty. Walking through a sequoia forest really makes you feel insignificant. One of the sequoias even had a doorway in the middle where a car can fit through!
After the giant trees we went to see the waterfalls and ended up doing a small hike up to the second waterfall. When we went up the trail night was falling and thus we had to descent a dangerous and wet trail downwards with our flash lights. Hiking is just a lot of fun, especially in the dark or in special conditions. When we reached the trailhead we took the shuttle back to our motel. The end of our National Park visits with Death Valley as an exception. Up next is San Francisco and after that back to Vegas baby!