For years Dad has been talking about a "Mountain Vacation", so we decided this was the year to make it happen. Our destination was Mammoth, a huge ski resort high in the Sierra Nevada's. We like to visit this gorgeous area in the summer when it's the off season and everything is cheap and uncrowded. Even though our destination was pretty awesome this was one of those "Life is about the journey..." kind of experiences as we got to Mammoth by driving through Yosemite from end to end.
We could actually never visit Mammoth in the winter as every road from us to it shuts down under snow. Summer is the only time you can travel through the "backside" of Yosemite. We're always up for getting a different view of Half Dome, or the chance to get to know our favorite National Park a little better. These pictures were taken at Olmstead Point and Tuolomne Meadows.
Our bags of food and shampoo bottles were ready to pop when we arrived in Mammoth because this road took us up almost 10,000 feet in just a few hours!
At the end of the week we took the same way home. We ate our picnic lunch in a meadow we shared with a herd of grazing deer!
Then, we headed down into the valley to see some of the familiar sights. Unfortunately, things were not looking the way we are used to seeing them in mid-summer. All the creeks were dried up and the waterfalls were just barely a trickle-- a sobering visual of the drought we've been enduring in CA this year.
We also roamed around the visitor center, watching the movie and turning John Muir into a Cubs fan. The days of travel were full of their own breath-taking sights, but just wait till you see some of the other beauty that surrounded us this week...
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