I had been here before.

It was the early 2000s and I was on a trek through the Alpine regions of Yosemite National Park that saw me and two buddies scale Half Dome, summit Glacier Point, and suffer a million mosquito bites in between.  It had been my first real back pack experience and my first sojourn to the Sierra Nevada.  On that epic journey we trekked 40 miles in 48 hours with everything on our backs pushing through thousands of feet in elevation gain.  We even came face to face with a brown bear and her two cubs as they came sniffing through our post dinner campfire on a starless black night. (*Editor’s note: We survived.) It was awesome and exhausting and helped cement the foundation of my love of the West as a still relatively young man. And yet, had I really trekked dozens of miles through Yosemite all those years ago without ever reaching THE Yosemite Valley?

I had gotten increasingly excited in the weeks before this year’s trip with Tania and the little ones, surveying a lot of web info about the Park.  Even though I could recognize the familiar visages of Half Dome and El Capitan, the most prominent Google Images didn’t really sync up with my recollection of the place. I continued this game of matching my memories with fresh expectations as the family drifted in and out of sleep on the 6 hour plus drive up to Yosemite from LA.  Once we officially entered the Park and paid the entrance fee the kids seemed to perk up, having recognized that something transactional had taken place.  This must be it, I imagined them thinking, this must be the park that Daddy won’t stop talking about.

A quick side note: Sebastian’s favorite place is “the park”.  He talks about it in the morning and at night and in that daytime space in between.  And being the lucky kid that he is, his mom takes him to the park most days.   But this trip is different and you can tell that he’s been thinking it over.

Hmmm…Mom and Dad don’t usually talk about going to the park for so many days before it happens, and…

….they are never nearly as excited about it as I am.

….and since when is the park so damn far away?  

Yosemite National Park is actually quite large, officially spanning some 1,100 square miles, so even though we had entered its boundaries we were still a good half hour from a view of the Yosemite Valley. Soon enough the kids lost the expectant looks on their faces and went back to trying to hit each other.  The area was starting to look familiar to me though, with its granite peaks rising above the groves of giant sequoia. But it wasn’t as if we passed some sort of magic dividing line once we rolled through the gates of the main entrance…that moment would come later.

As you descend from the sub-Alpine levels of the Park along the winding road towards the Valley floor you get a couple of vista points that hint at the majesty of what is to come, but I had read to continue on to get through the Wawona Tunnel for the storied “Tunnel View” of the valley on the other side before stopping to take a longer look.  We had already introduced the kids to the concept of holding your breath while driving through a tunnel, so we all breathed Dizzy Gillespie deep as we entered what looked like a slightly widened mineshaft.  The Wawona Tunnel is a mile long, so the breath-holding was near impossible, especially given how literally breathtaking the view is on the other side.   Finally at the end of the narrow tunnel, I inhaled deeply.  And then, I exhaled…

Hole.

E.

Chit.

We’ve all seen beautiful scenery before.  Azure waters framed in crescent-shaped bays.  Mountain lakes that breathe morning mist through their stillness.  But, there is something different about Yosemite. Something different about…THIS.

Even the kids seemed to slow down and take notice once we stopped in the little parking area and got out of the car.  Or maybe they were just waiting for their legs to wake up after the long trip…I don’t know, my sense of sentimentality has been heightened as a father and can cause me to project. Whatever the impact on them, I had been smacked with a raw energy and wonder, a particular type of emotion that usually has me try and put things in their proper perspective.  In this case, I remember immediately feeling that this place must have held great meaning for all of the peoples throughout Earth’s history who had the fortune to find it, or be found in it.

Appropriately, the U.S. government has been celebrating 2016 as the 100 year anniversary of the National Park Service.  I had been taken with Ken Burns’ series on the National Parks from a few years back, and was particularly struck with the tagline for the program, which confidently asserted that the National Parks were and are “America’s Best Idea.” But what I kept thinking as I stood there at tunnel view was how much more permanent this carved space was than the name “Yosemite National Park” or even “the United States of America.”

A quick geology tour:  The underlying granite that forms the monuments of Half Dome and The Sentinel and El Capitan and the Cathedral was formed between 210 and 80 million years ago.   These first Yosemite rocks were laid down in Precambrian times, when the area around the National Park was on the edge of a very young North American continent. A month of Sundays later, or about 10 million years ago, the Sierra Nevada was uplifted and then tilted to form its relatively gentle western slopes and its more dramatic eastern shelf. The uplift increased the steepness of stream and river beds, resulting in faster moving waters that over time caused the formation of deep, narrow canyons.  Fast forward to just about a million years ago, and glaciers from the higher alpine meadows moving down the river valleys cut and sculpted the U-shaped Yosemite valley that attracts so many visitors to its scenic vistas today.  The last glacial period ended about 12,000 years ago, retreating from the Sierras and giving the Yosemite Valley its last real Botox treatment before it hit the red carpet for this year’s celebration of the National Park Service Centennial.

Do you see what I mean though, with respect to proper perspective?  Its only been 150 years since President Lincoln granted Yosemite Park to the state of California “upon the express conditions that the premises be held for public use, resort and recreation.” 50 years before that the land where it sits wasn’t even part of the United States. 50 years before that and the United States had yet to exist anywhere at all. And yet, people had been living in this modern incarnation of the valley for the last 8,000-10,000 years, and to be sure, they had many names for it.  Whereas just a few hours ago, proper names like Abraham Lincoln and Yosemite National Park were the very pillars of permanence and longevity, I now stood at the edge of the valley with a different understanding, one that came at me all at once.  As I looked around the parking lot, I saw the faces of strangers making similar adjustments to their preconceived notions of beauty and impermanence and time.

And yet, as I look at the pictures now I’m reminded of that beauty, but the photos don’t actually convey it.  Its kind of like listening to a recording of a live concert without actually being there, or reading about a euphoric moment instead of experiencing it yourself.

The four days of adventure and exploration that followed in Yosemite were extraordinary for me and my family.  Check out some of the videos below to get an idea.  But the thing that I keep thinking about a month after the trip is that first view of the Yosemite Valley on the heavenly side of the tunnel.  There are very few guaranteed “aha” moments in life.  If you’re into that kind of stuff, you should visit Yosemite.

A quick bookend:  Sebastian didn’t concede that he’d been had on this park business until the second day of the trip when he burst into tears screaming “this is not a park!” while throwing himself to the ground in a heap. Fortunately, we ran across an actual children’s park at the base of Yosemite Falls later that day.  A toddler’s existential crisis averted.