Karen Ivy's Home Page

When we came down for breakfast Sunday, we met a new restaurant employee, a pleasant black man who greeted and seated us.  He said he was from New York and asked if we knew anything about the people he saw climbing the walls here!  In fact, we did – Yosemite has a camp space (#4) reserved for rock climbers, and the sign when we drove past it said it was full!  Jim swears he saw lights up on the walls late at night.  I told the nice man that I thought the climbers were crazy, and if they’re climbing those walls at night, I stand by that.

We spent most of Sunday in Yosemite Village, especially as we had dinner reservations at the Lodge.  We started the day with the 11 AM nature walk at the Lodge, which was guided by Courtney, the young woman who led the tour of the Ahwahnee the day before.  Courtney got around.  It was a nice tour.  We followed up with lunch at the deli in the Village, then attended the 2 PM ranger talk.  This turned out to be a talk on “fire ecology,” which boiled down to “don’t light that stuff.”  The ranger was more political than I was used to, although I can’t argue that wildfires aren’t Bad.

Dinner in the Mountain Room at the lodge was quite tasty but oh, my, was it loud!  The Lodge does table service, and the joint was jumpin’.   The dessert was especially good – Mexican chocolate cake, with ginger and cinnamon, and marshmallow cream icing!

Monday morning the weather changed again – we woke up to rain, after 2 mainly clear, sunny days.  And the fog was back – Half Dome, usually visible from the balcony, had vanished.  I had a minor accident – there was no grab bar in the tub, and when I tried to sit down at the back of the tub to wash my feet, I slid right down into it!  No injury, and I managed to get out of the tub by myself, but we reported it when we checked out.  I suspect that bathroom was furnished well before the ADA rules came in.

If Yosemite failed that test, they passed another one big time – as we were checking out, the clerk asked Jim, “Did you leave your credit card at the Lodge last night?”  He looked, and he had!  But they had it.  So that’s major points to the Yosemite staff.

The waterfalls in the valley were not as full as usual – Yosemite Falls in particular was just barely dripping.  But I did get a photo of Bridal Veil in the fog, on the way out.

Heading home, Jim decided to take highway 120 through Tioga Pass.  The Pass was closed over the mountains, but we weren’t going that way.  The climb out of the valley on 120 is 2,000 feet up to the rim, and we did it in a very thick fog, on a narrow 2 lane road – at times we could barely see the truck in front of us.  Second “I’ve never seen one like that” on the trip, after the hard rain the first day.  We eventually climbed out of the fog, but we could see blobs of snow on the ground by the road – we saw no snow on the ground in the Valley during our stay.  We came down into the central valley on the Old Priest Grade, a road neither of us had driven in years.  It’s 2 lanes, just barely wide enough for 2 lines of cars, and very steep and winding!  If you’ve never done the Old Priest Grade, you haven’t really been into the Sierras!  The rest of the drive home was uneventful.

Saturday morning we woke up to a clear sunny day.  The fog had cleared for the moment.  Temperatures varied from the high 30s to the low 40s, and as long as you were in the sun it wasn’t too bad.  The sun drops behind the Yosemite walls around 2 PM – before that, it was chilly but walkable.  We took a walk after breakfast, when it became clear that anything in the shade was likely to be frozen:

Those are pieces of ice in what used to be a puddle of water.  It was in the shade.  From the location, and the tire tracks, I’m guessing people rode bicycles through it and broke up the ice into slabs.  We also saw some frost covered leaves, which would not have been so pretty if they were in the sun.

Our weekend at Yosemite was enlivened by the Saturday afternoon wedding, scheduled for the grounds of the Ahwahnee.  Yes, after the sun went behind the walls.  I have a note that it was 39 degrees out, but I didn’t note the time.  I shared a table briefly with (I think) the groom’s mother.  She had been planning to sit and watch the ceremony bundled in her coat, and then learned she was expected to walk down the aisle – without her coat.  We didn’t see the wedding, but we did see the ranks of folding chairs in a field near the hotel, waiting for the guests to come.  And we saw a lot of people walking around the Big Room and the lobby wearing what were obviously “wedding clothes.”  I still don’t understand why you would wear shoes with blinking, colored lights around the soles to a wedding, but then I know I’m a dinosaur.

Since nobody has hunted deer in Yosemite in over 100 years, it wasn’t surprising to see a small herd grazing in the yard outside the Ahwahnee’s entrance lobby.  They just ignored any people walking by.

For the most part the food at the Ahwahnee was very good, but on Saturday we both decided to have “the soup” for lunch – which turned out to be a vegetarian chili.  Jim liked it (he likes hot spice), but it was so hot I could only eat a little of it, the only meal there I didn’t like. 

After lunch we took the guided tour on the history of the Ahwahnee.  Jim knew more of it that I did, but I was startled to learn that Donald Tressider and his wife Mary Curry Tressider actually lived in a private suite on the 6th floor of the Ahwahnee, converted for them in the 1930s from a ballroom; and that Mrs. Curry Tressider continued to live in that suite until she died in 1970!  She was the daughter of the couple who founded Camp Curry, now called Curry Village, in 1919.  Our guide also showed us the original cornerstone of the hotel and explained that the huge logs in the ceilings of the building are actually hollowed out and lined with concrete, and that what looks like wooden siding on the outside of the building is actually concrete slabs painted to look like wood.  Concrete, of course, doesn’t burn.

When we weren’t walking around or touring somewhere, we tended to spend our time sitting in the Big Room, or possibly in the lobby area, watching the fire that was almost always burning there in the big double-faced fireplace.  Our room was very comfortable, but it had no fireplace.  The Big Room is very comfortable unless somebody comes in or out the outside doors, when the cold air follows them in.  I met some interesting people sitting around watching the fire, or sometimes I just read a book, or wrote in my travel diary.  We had a second dinner at the Ahwahnee that night, very good food but fetch it yourself, the Ahwahnee hasn’t restored table service yet, probably to do with the ongoing repairs.

My husband Jim’s birthday is November 12, and this year he turned 70.  He likes to celebrate his “big” birthdays in Yosemite, so he made reservations for the weekend of November 15 – 17 at the Ahwahnee Hotel.  We drove over on Friday the 15th, leaving early enough (we hoped) to make a 6 PM dinner reservation in the Ahwahnee dining room.

The drive across the Central Valley was gorgeous and the traffic wasn’t too bad.  Due to the weather predictions, we headed for route 140, which would take us into Yosemite alongside the outflowing Merced River.  The other main route looked like there might be snow, the road runs higher and Jim didn’t want to risk having to put on chains.  The day was sunny with lots of huge white cumulus clouds, moving into one formation after another, gorgeous – but every time we looked east we saw a ceiling of clouds over the Sierras which got blacker and blacker the closer we came.  The weather caught up with us a little west of Mariposa.  Driving along, we were suddenly in a massive rainstorm, we had to turn the windshield wipers all the way up and the view still wasn’t clear!  Also, the windshield had little circles on it – not quite big enough for hail, but possibly ice pellets.  The temperature shown by the car dropped from 50 to 31 in minutes.  The whole thing only lasted about 10 minutes, but we got rain (less hard) off and on the rest of the way into the valley, and the mountains we drove through from then on were off and on covered in fog.

We arrived at the Ahwahnee around 4:15, so dinner was no problem.  They put us in a room on the 5th floor with an external balcony (after carrying all our stuff up for us!).  I didn’t take a photo of the balcony, but Jim did; here’s what we had.

Of course, the balcony door was also the only window in the room.  The fact that you can’t see anything but the balcony (you should be able to see Half Dome) is a sample of how foggy it was; it was actually taken about 9:30 AM on Monday.  Yosemite was there when the fog cleared; here’s Glacier Point from the balcony, about 5:30 PM Friday:

We made our dinner appointment Friday night.  Here’s the Ahwahnee dining room, taken with my Samsung cellphone, which is amazing at low-light photos:

At some time point Friday evening I realized that November 15 still had the Supermoon, the last one this year.  I took my cellphone out on the balcony and got a couple of amazing photos.  This is the supermoon and Half Dome, taken at 9 PM:

And here, taken about the same time, are Glacier Point and Sentinel Dome, lighted only by the supermoon.  You can see all the lights on in the hotel, in the lower part of the photo.

My biggest problem with our room was the size of the bed pillows, which were much too large.  I sleep with a standard pillow between my steel-implanted knees, and I just couldn’t get comfortable with that huge pillow.  Fortunately, the front desk was happy to ask Housekeeping to give me a standard size pillow and I slept much better the rest of our stay.

I’ll talk more about the trip in another post.  If you’re interested in all the photos I took, you can find them at https://hedera.smugmug.com/Travel/Yosemite-2024.  And you might be interested in Jim’s photos (he took many more than I did), at https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/2024/Ahwahnee-2024.