Yosemite National Park, California.

“Not just a great valley, but a shrine to human foresight, the strength of granite, the power of glaciers, the persistence of life, and the tranquility of the High Sierra.” The opening quote on the Yosemite National Park website tells you all you need to know about why you should visit.

Probably the most iconic feature in the park is Half Dome. Millions of people visit each year to capture a view of this unusual granite dome. Thousands apply for permits to hike the cable line. It’s a 10- to 12-hour hike and it’s not for the unfit. Needless to say, we let other people take on this approximately 15-mile (24 km) hike that requires a Half Dome permit different from the park’s entry permit. Caution should tell you to start at or before sunrise, and if, by 3:30 PM, you haven’t reached the top, you need to head back anyway.

I’m told (again, this is beyond my ability,) that the last 400 feet (122 m) to the summit is achieved without climbing gear with the help of cables placed by the park service in the summer months. If you are up to this challenge, you can find out all the details on the Yosemite NP website here.

If you are not up to the challenge of the Half Dome Hike but like to climb, there are plenty of options available. At one photo stop, we spotted these climbers on a relatively shallow section of a granite rockface.

You don’t have to be a climber to enjoy hiking in the park. Hikers should look for the 15-page trail description and distance guide that you can download from their website here.

There are lots of places along the highways in Yosemite to capture views of the park. Check out the Tioga Road from Crane Flat to Tioga Pass. This 46-mile (62 km) drive is one of the more popular.

We entered the park at the eastern entrance near Tuolumne Meadows and eventually exited the park at Mariposa Grove. From there we had hoped to visit Sequoia and Kings Canyon, but both were closed due to wildfires in the area.

Regular readers may recall seeing this cell phone photo published in a Cellpic Sunday post in July 2022. The park road, which you can see running along the ridge in the distance provides views of Yosemite Valley from both sides of the Merced River many miles below.

There is so much to see that we could have spent more than a single day there. We stayed on the main roadways, though there are plenty of roads that are open for exploration. We will have to save those explorations for another trip. Yosemite is a busy park in the summer and reservations are required in advance. I’m posting this in Autumn 2022 so you can start planning and reserving campsites or lodging in the area in plenty of time for next summer’s tourist season.

There are plenty of waterfalls in the park, but many are created by mountain runoff. To capture waterfalls, it is best to visit while snow runoff fills the falls.

For complete details on the park and to find out details on how to schedule an entry reservation, check out the National Park’s Yosemite website here. You can pixel peep at these images in 2K HD on my Flickr site by just clicking on an image. If you click here to visit the album, you’ll be able to view the entire gallery that contains a few extra images not posted here.

John Steiner

Yosemite National Park, California.

In September 2021, on our western trip, we planned to see Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. Wildfires closed the two southern parks, but we did have the opportunity to make our first visit ever to Yosemite.

The lake, named after Chief Tenaya of the Yosemite Indians, is the largest lake in the park. Surrounded by the Sierra Nevada Mountains, it is a popular lake according to the National Park Service website. On our day visit, however, we were the only ones there. We drove through the park in the morning, and the photo was captured at about 10:30 AM. The sun was above the peak to the east.

On busy weekends, Tenaya Lake is a popular place for picnicking, swimming, and canoeing. The road to the lake, Tioga Road, is only open from late May to November, the actual dates dependent upon the first significant snow in the fall and the final clearing of snow from the road in the spring.

About the photo: Despite the strong backlight from the shot straight into the sun, the bright reflections on the water enticed me to take the shot. I was hoping the flare from the sun would be less than it turned out to be, but processing via Adobe Lightroom and Luminar Neo still allowed me to bring out the details in the heavily shadowed mountain in the background. The original image is a JPEG. I probably would have had even better success had I used my Samsung S20U’s RAW image.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment.

John Steiner