Photo credit: Kenny Karst for DNC, Inc.
It’s hard to imagine someone wandering around Yosemite and apologizing for its appearance. But when a friend from Africa came for a weeklong visit, that’s exactly what I found myself doing. It’s not that the place didn’t look breathtaking. It did. It’s not that I felt Yosemite couldn’t hold up against Zimbabwe (her birthplace and the most beautiful place I’ve ever been). It does. It’s just that, like most people welcoming visitors to their home, I wanted mine to look its best. But at this time of year, I think that’s impossible. Because the water is gone.
By summer’s end, the once thundering waterfalls have trickled to a faucet-like drip at Bridelveil and given up completely at Yosemite Falls. And while I kept pointing out where the waterfalls used to be, somehow it’s just not the same. Even the south fork of the Merced—a river that was roaring by with such mighty strength in spring that people were warned not to get near it—was now just a series of pools sitting quietly, hardly moving, as if the river had exhausted its potential.
This being only my second year of living here, I found the difference between the park in spring and the park in autumn so shocking that I wondered if it registered with others. My first hint that it might came from the pictures on the back of the RVs Europeans rent for their grand tours of the West. On each of these RVs are huge, blown-up pictures of America’s National Parks, each park shown at its best. Sure enough, pictures of Yosemite adorn countless RVs and in all of them the waterfalls are churning.
Next I checked out advertisements for Yosemite put out by the local tourist boards. There are those waterfalls cascading down in all their white foamy glory. And it makes sense. The waterfalls and rivers are to Yosemite what pearls are to a little black dress. They set it off; make it seem quite perfect, as if nothing else in all of heaven and earth is needed to complete the picture.
Photo credit: Kenny Karst for DNC, Inc.
So I dutifully (and happily) took my friend to see all the best I think Yosemite has to offer. We visited the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. We hiked the Valley, staying close to the banks and twists and turns of the now lazy Tuolumne River. We saw the 4,000-foot deep fissures at Taft Point and the knock-your-socks-off view from Glacier Point. And thanks to my daughter’s park school, we even joined a field trip to Tuolumne Meadows where water is completely beside the point (although we did see alpine lakes). All along the way, my friend oohed and aahed and I kept apologizing for the lack of water—as if I might have something to do with its appearance.
My friend left and the very next day a miracle happened. I obviously do not have a direct line to the rain gods, but apparently Oprah Winfrey does. She came to Yosemite to camp and sure as shootin’, the rain began to fall. Big rains. Huge rains. Rains that went on for days and days. There was brain-rattling thunder. There was bright-as-LED lightning. Over 1000 strikes hit the ground. Twenty-one fires started in the high country. The rivers ran. The waterfalls flowed. Yosemite was at its best again. All I can say is “Thank you, Oprah. Thank you. But, next time, could you align your schedule with mine?”
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In May 2009, while hiking in Yosemite National Park, long-time Los Angeles resident Jamie Simons
turned to her husband and said, "I want to live here." Today she and
her family have made the move to live for one year in Wawona, where her
daughter attends the one-room schoolhouse, Jamie writes, and her
husband longs for noise, fast food, people, and the city.(Though he's
learning to appreciate mountain life.)
