Early in March, Alan and I enjoyed our first snowbird adventure when we spent time in Florida, Georgia and Virginia. Now that I’ve completed documenting that expedition, I’m returning to our West Coast National Parks trip in the summer of 2017. On that trip, Alan and I, along with our 18 year old daughter, Kyra, logged a total of 8,513 memorable miles of adventure over the course of five and a half weeks during the months of July and August.
Yosemite National Park is a tough ticket to get. Camping reservations within the Park are extraordinarily difficult to come by, crowds are extraordinarily easy to run into, and Mother Nature always feels free to throw one of her famous curve balls, making a ticket that’s tough to get even tougher to hold onto. About a week before I began drafting this post, Yosemite Valley was closed to visitors for a number of days. The record snowpack in the Sierra Nevada had started to melt, and above average temperatures were predicted, creating perfect conditions for the Merced River to reach flood stage and impact Yosemite Valley. Visitors who had planned to arrive in late April and early May, had their hopes dashed, as the National Park Service closed Yosemite Valley out of concern for the public’s safety. This year’s visitors aren’t out of the woods yet.
