This past weekend I went with my dad and brother up to Bass Lake and we went into Yosemite for the day! It was really beautiful. Here is a pic of Yosemite Falls through the trees. eee! I forgot how much I loovvve being in nature.
We didn’t go on any major hikes because we didn’t have enough time before it got dark. We walked to the Lower Yosemite Falls viewing area and then we walked to the Yosemite Lodge to get a bite to eat. They had really good french fries 
After that we decided to hike to Mirror Lake because seemed like the shortest walk. We saw a bunch of deer and these giant ravens that looked like they could tear your ear off if they wanted to. We also saw a coyote while driving up there on the side of the road (alive and walking of course).
Mirror Lake was really cool. It was mostly frozen over and my dad and brother kept testing the ice to see if it would hold them so that they could walk to the other side. They never walked, but this group of like 7 japanese people did! And you could hear the ice cracking around the 5th person hah.
When we were at a part of the lake where the ice had melted, we heard this giant crash and I look up and there was an avalanche coming off Half Dome! My dad and I only saw the end part of it but it was still really cool! We kept looking up afterwards incase any more snow decided to come down.
We started walking back and it got dark really fast. We walked to the Ahwahnee hotel, which looks like a mini ’The Shining’ hotel if you ask me. A wedding was going on at the time in one of the giant dining rooms. We eventually took the shuttle back to our car and drove home. Luckily the lowest temperature was around 37 degrees so there was no black ice on the road.
The whole way home I had this vision that I was going to take a pilgrimage one day to Yosemite, on foot. It would be like my version of a Mecca pilgrimage. According to Google Maps it is only 195 miles and it says it would take around 3 days to walk that far; probably non-stop though. 
So if I walk around 3-3.5 miles per hour, it would take 65 hours (3 mph) or 55 hours (3.5 mph) to get there. If I walked 8 hours a day, it would take about 1 week to reach Yosemite. What a trip that would be! I would have to learn survival skills, etc. Oh, here’s a pic of Half Dome. I’m climbing it some day! Anyway enough daydreaming for today…time to learn more Russian!
