Finally back from the wilderness! Yosemite park was absolutely beautiful although at this point right now I hate it more than anything I’ve ever hated before! Ok so when we originally looked up this tour company we were told we would be provided with a tent, camping gear, a guide, food and glorious vistas to explore! I need to go back to their website because I clearly remember something about at your own pace, and no physical limitations being listed..or age!
Day #1 – we meet our amazing group at 8:00am and our guide from hell! We spend our day traveling to Yosemite and getting acquainted. By the time we had arrived we had invited everyone to my house for a reunion and had also invited ourselves to their homes:-) it’s ok they loved us!:-) We along with one other person in our group were the only ones from the US. There were 11 of us not counting our “guide.” We had a picnic lunch at a beautiful waterfall and Sarah Pelham and a few others from our group jumped off a 30/40ish foot cliff (according to our wonderful “guide.”) I of course documented.:-) We wandered through a section of Yosemite where there were gigantic sequoia trees! We made it to camp and set up our tents. We got our used sleeping bags..:-/ and our mats to put underneath them because we were sleeping on hard packed dirt and rocks. The mats were paper thin and completely useless. We went to dinner and then sat around the fire and made s’mores, drank wine and beer and talked. Amazing time! Oh and our “guide” who has appeared to be annoyed by our presence up to this point left us to go get hammered at a nearby bar…

Day #2 Worst night of sleep ever but so pumped to get into the park. Ok at this point you have to remember we all really thought we were being taken into the park to the valley and given free time to explore with our guide pointing out places of interest and explaining geological features. Nope…! His explanation was there’s a sign talking about geological stuff over there if you want to read it! And then he headed toward a path and said, “Oh today’s hike will be a little more intense than yesterday’s when we wandered around looking at trees! This will be an 8 mile hike.” And he walked off. I truly mean walked off. We lost sight of him after about 10 minutes into the hike. We caught up about 2 miles into the semi vertical hike at a beautiful lake. He seemed a little annoyed at the group’s tardiness. At this point he said, “Ok from here it gets a little more intense. So you can hike the full trail or stay here at the lake and relax and wander around. We should be back here in about 6 hours. If you do choose to take the rest of the hike there are no real trail markers there are just rock piles to let you know you are on the trail”…. Me, “So what you’re saying is, we look for rock piles among the rocks so we don’t get lost???” Him, “Yes!” 🙁 ok so we head out with the group with our 1 little measly bottle of water and trudge on. Did I mention our little bout of altitude sickness? The little “hike” became a completely vertical climb at the end with points of standing on a 6″ ledge clinging to the side of a sheer rock cliff wall with our fingernails! I swear to you I am not exaggerating at this point! Oh and we lost sight of him and eventually our group within the first 15 minutes of the hike! I may have taken one or two breaks:-/ God love Sarah for keeping me going because I’m pretty sure I have never complained and whined as much as I did this day! We were out of water and we were lost several times while attempting to locate our “Rock Piles!” Towards the end of the climb I finally told Sarah to go on with out me..yes in a dramatic voice… Because I wanted to make sure she got to make it to the top of the mountain and didn’t miss out because of me. At this point we were about a half mile away from the base of the sheer rock wall that encompassed the final leg of this torturous journey. It had been nothing but a 45 degree angle on unsteady rock up to this point for about the last 2 miles. I was done! After arguing for quite a bit of time I finally convinced her because we could see the end and we could see what we hoped was the rest of the group. I was afraid the group would be coming down before we got up. I told her I would keep coming but she needed to go. She unhappily went on without me. I got lonely after 2 minutes of sitting and took off. I could see her climb the beginning of the rock wall and then lost sight of her but I was pretty sure I could see people at the top of the mountain so I kept going. I got about 25 feet from the top and everyone was yelling encouraging comments to keep me going. Our guide decided it was a good thing to yell, “Be careful right there it is a sheer drop off!” I at this point looked down and realized I was standing on a ledge that was about 6″ wide and clinging to a rock wall with my fingernails. For those of you that don’t know me I am terrified of heights! I was so exhausted and driven, that up to this point the danger of what I was doing was not uppermost in my mind. But as our “guide,” so eloquently put it I could die with the tiniest misstep. I froze and panicked and later found out Sarah basically told him he was an idiot and reminded him of the hour long conversation we had about my fear on the way there. He kind of laughed and said, “Oh god that’s right!” It took me a little while to unfreeze and finally move on and I actually made it to the top to the cheers of the group! I have never felt so accomplished in my entire life!!! Our “guide” told us that not only did we do it in record time but that he has never had an entire group make it to the top!!! One of our fellow hikers shared his water with us in preparation for our trip down. I just climbed to the peek of an 11,000 foot mountain! I laid on the rock for a while, and then started to panic about having to get down. The group headed out and we quickly fell behind. I fell several times and almost died many times as well. The “guide,” was the first one there and the first one back not caring whether we made it or not. But we just climbed a mountain!!!! Exhausted, dirty and in horrible pain we get back to the campsite and go over to the ice cold river and jump in. Then we went to the motel next door and jumped in their hot tub. Spent the evening relaxing around the campfire. Went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep because of a couple of frisky campers!

Day #3 – In pain from our previous day and a night of no sleep and rocks, we began to pack our camp up. Sarah took our sleeping bags and useless paper thin mats over to the “guide,” where he proceeded to tell her to make sure we deflated our mats… Ok we can probably take the blame for that although all the other campers didn’t realize that our mats were inflatable either:-( We get everything packed and load the van. We head to the park and unload. “He,” informs us that we are going to be hiking an 8.5 mile trail on our own today and that he will pick us up on the opposite end of the park! What??!! He is supposed to be our “Guide,” as in one who guides… He briefly explained the 5 different connecting trails that we were supposed to follow and we all immediately set off in the opposite direction. He yelled at us to turn around so we did and headed out. This was not going to end well… He had told us that it won’t be bad because it was almost all down except for about a half mile stretch that would be a very steep incline up and that we had 4 hours to complete the trail:-/ Ok we would complete the trail when we got to the end… It’s not like an appointment that we could show up on time for. We promptly finished the trail in 6 1/2 hours:-( It wasn’t just us either. Everyone was late and we were only behind the last group by about 10 minutes. This time we had learned our lesson and took 2 bottles of water:-) those ran out about 1/3 of the way into the hike. It was about 90 degrees and 85% of the trail was in direct sun. Needless to say we became extremely dehydrated half way through the hike. I actually was sweating and covered in goose bumps and chills at the same time. Our muscles were cramping up and we were shaking. I was crying at one point and Sarah was close to tears quite a bit at the end. We eventually took a half empty water bottle from complete strangers! We must have looked pretty bad:-/ I have never been that thirsty in my entire life! We still had a few miles to go before we could get to water. When we did, we drank so much we were sick. We each had about 3-4 water bottles full. Only about a mile and a half till the end. When he said there was an incline he failed to mention how incredibly steep it was. I fell so many times we lost count! We had moments of hysteria where we couldn’t stop laughing and then moments of anger where we plotted “His,” death. I had never felt worse in my life.