Lookin' for Bears in all the Wrong Places

          I awoke around 5 o’clock in the morning thinking it was surely early enough to spot something wild outside.  Over the course of our trip, I had gone from extremely frightened of spotting a bear to longing to witness one of nature’s rarest wonders.  I had seen at an information kiosk the day before that some folks had spotted a mother bear and her cubs someplace near Glacier point. But I figured that getting there and back in time to check out of our room would be next to impossible.  What we decided to do was take the car over to the trailhead that leads to Vernal Falls, and then follow the trail to the falls, back down the John Muir Trail, and back to the room. Our thinking was that our early start might yield our highly coveted bear sighting and we would also enjoy a refreshing morning hike.

          We were becoming more adept at figuring out where we were going in Yosemite on foot, but we were lost in the car!  It took us about 30 minutes to get to the trail head, and we had to park some distance from it in the first place.  What was worse, however, was the sad reality that the closer we got to the trail head, the number of experienced hikers sharing the trail with us was increasing exponentially.  I knew there wouldn’t possibly be any bear sightings on this hike.  There were simply too many people.  It seemed surreal hiking with this many people headed in the same direction on the exact same trail, and my resolve began to shrink down to a fizzle.   This was not how I wanted to spend my last morning in Yosemite.  We stopped to discuss our strategy and decided, regretfully, that this was not the time to embark on this particular journey.

          By now, we had wasted about an hour or so, and we were both frustrated and disappointed, but once we found a short, paved, empty trail that led us to Happy Isles we perked up a bit.  It had the quiet serenity that we desired, yet became stimulating when we both decided to work our way across a fallen log over some threatening rapids below.  As we hiked around the isle, there were a few times I thought I’d spotted a bear, but upon closer inspection I was disappointed every time.  As we walked back to our parked car, it felt like we were going the wrong way on a one way street as we watched hiker after hiker heading toward the trail head.  Once we were driving back towards the hotel, the park became peacefully quiet and secluded again. We even noticed deer grazing in the meadow and when we stopped the car to snap a photo, they just kept on grazing as if we weren’t intruding on their breakfast at all.

            It was our last morning in Yosemite, and by now we knew it was far too late to sight a bear.  We opted to take a seat (like we had seen so many tourists before us do) outside the Awhahnee next to the meadow and just take in the beauty.  We wanted to do something fun before our time was up.  Fortunately for us, we met a staff worker who was outside the lodge and would help us make it happen.