Yosemite in the news---very sad.

[Drew Wiley]

It's really a pity seeing Yosemite run more like a theme park than an alleged wonder of
nature. But with that many visitors, they need quite an infrastructure. Down the canyon from us in a tiny little hyroelectric company town there was a kid who was quite a whiz
at math, who later became a nuclear engineer. He wanted to work in Yos Valley so he could meet girls, then went around bragging to everyone how he had been accepted in
an engineering position. Turned out to be a bit of a surprise when he learned what a
Sanitary Engineer actually does.

[ROL]

My understanding is that the lodging that was closed due to rockfall are some of the wood cabins closest to the Glacier Point cliffs.

Both, actually, over a period of some 20 years or more, and from different areas of the the cliffs below GP – the recent period of instability following the reawakening of the Long Valley Caldera in the early 80's, which included seismic activity in the Valley (not diminishing the ongoing effects of freeze/thaw!). Some cabins (tent or wood) are so long gone from their placements that the forest has started to recover from both rockfall and human occupation. I seem to remember that some of the slabs I had climbed once upon a time on the apron didn't have any visible means of attachment, though most of the rockfall events have originated from the headwall cliffs above.


Anyway, I was only trying to make a point, perhaps too subtle for the venue and the rigorous minds here. I'm out.

[Robert Budding]

It's really a pity seeing Yosemite run more like a theme park than an alleged wonder of
nature. But with that many visitors, they need quite an infrastructure. Down the canyon from us in a tiny little hyroelectric company town there was a kid who was quite a whiz
at math, who later became a nuclear engineer. He wanted to work in Yos Valley so he could meet girls, then went around bragging to everyone how he had been accepted in
an engineering position. Turned out to be a bit of a surprise when he learned what a
Sanitary Engineer actually does.

Yes, there are a lot of visitors to Yosemite. But the crowds thin out once you're 1/4 mile from the trail head. So there are advantages to the increasing rate of obesity!

[John Kasaian]

The Valley isn't wilderness and hasn't been for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. If you think it is a zoo now, you should have been camping there in the 1960s with hippies camping illegally and crapping in the meadows, and every camper & travel trailer in the 8 western states wedged in between the trees at the drive in camp grounds. The canvas tents at Camp 16 were heaven by comparison and quiet. It's a shame they replaced the tents with that concrete and relite DP camp (very poor radio reception in the valley. We used to see pie plates on the car radio antenneas! of course radios were all there was for music besides singing or instruments back then) Too bad they replaced them with that concrete and relite DP camp

[John Kasaian]

Yes, there are a lot of visitors to Yosemite. But the crowds thin out once you're 1/4 mile from the trail head. So there are advantages to the increasing rate of obesity!

I liberally apply traffic jelly to myself in order to sqeak through the crowds on the Mist Trail

[RichardSperry]

Looking at those tents, I'm surprised they haven't killed anyone with mold yet.

[Drew Wiley]

John - maybe I told this before - but my babysitter as an infant was allegedly the first white woman ever in Yosemite. Since she was well into her 90's when I was born, it is at
least possible that this was true. Her stories were told to my parents, then passed on to
me by her daughter when I took care of their garden as a kid. But when she arrived in the
Valley, many of the Indians were stark naked and still lived in bark huts, which is pretty
much what the hippie lifestyle replicated anyway!

[John Kasaian]

John - maybe I told this before - but my babysitter as an infant was allegedly the first white woman ever in Yosemite. Since she was well into her 90's when I was born, it is at
least possible that this was true. Her stories were told to my parents, then passed on to
me by her daughter when I took care of their garden as a kid. But when she arrived in the
Valley, many of the Indians were stark naked and still lived in bark huts, which is pretty
much what the hippie lifestyle replicated anyway!

Yeah, deer mice could pretty much come and go as they please as well---I've seen reprouctions of the native granarys for storing acorns---so how come we are first seeing signs of the Hanta virus now? Yosemite valley has been a sizeable popuation center for a long, long time. I don't recollect hearing about the natives keeping pet cats or terriers? This is very puzzling unless the Hanta was recently introduced to the park.

[Drew Wiley]

Well they did keep dogs, John. They also routinely cleared meadows etc with fire. And there were probably a lot more minor predators running around than today in the Valley.
The Indians were also quite a bit more hygenic than either hippies or the gold miners of the
day. Somewhere in the family archives we've actually got tintypes of exactly the kind of
Indian village I've described, with naked Monache (not Ahwahneechee) Indians standing
in front of their huts and granaries. The wide-angle distortion was severe, but I eventually
located that exact site, and remarkably, there was still a couple of ramshackle cabins on it,
with one old descendent of the original inhabitants still chipping arrowheads on the porch
for nostalgia. There were some left there when he died, mostly bottle glass rather than
obsidian, but still in the distinctive traditional neigborhood pattern. But I never personally
ever even heard of hanta in the Sierra until that gal ranger from a severely "pet" mouse
infested cabin in Mammoth died from it.

[Vaughn]

The ten years I worked on the wilderness trails, we were based out of an old log cabin -- inside walls were covered with 1/4 plywood, beams about mid-forehead height. I never slept in there -- the noise from the mice running in between the plywood and the logs was too noisy. I slept out on the ground with the rattlesnakes and occasional bear...and occasional sound of the belly rumbling of the mules.

But we cooked in there and hung out in there if the weather was bad, but most of our time was spent outside. And most of the time we'd spend only a night there, head off into the wilderness for 10 days, come back out, unpack and then head down the hill for 4 days off and resupply. So except for a week or so getting the station re-opened in the Spring, we did not spend a whole bunch of time there. Guess we were lucky. We certainly raised some dust when we re-roofed it. Nice spring water, too. One gets spoiled.