Bravo Cheese Farms

On the way home from Yosemite, just past Fresno is Bravo Cheese Farms...It's a pretty interesting place with cheese that they made, homemade beef jerky, and they have all these farm animals around (chickens, goats, bunnies, donkeys)....

Cook's Meadow Loop

On our last day in Yosemite, we decided to go for a little walk to take in some more sights, especially with the clearer skies...We went on Cook's Meadow Loop which is supposed to only be 1 mile, but we sort of got off track in finding the beginning, and went a little farther...anyway,

Got a better view of Upper Yosemite Falls, saw Half Dome, even saw a deer haha....

Mirror Lake

After finishing our big hike around 3 PM, we took a bus to the start of the Mirror Lake trail. This is just a short 2 mile round trip walk to a lake that apparently gives very nice reflective views of Yosemite...

Hike back to Yosemite Valley

On the way down, we chose to take a different path, one that was supposed to be a little longer, but without the narrow granite steps. What we encountered instead were a whole bunch of switchbacks and a couple encounters with more water. In one of the pictures, it doesn't look like a lot of water coming down, so I decided to just walk on the side of the water, but by the time I got to the other side, I was pretty wet.

It took us roughly 90 minutes to get from the top of Nevada Falls back to where we started, about 3.5 miles. With that, you could see how difficult the hike up was in comparison to going down, 3.5 hours v. 1.5 hours....

Nevada Falls

We got to the top of Nevada Falls at 12:00 PM, about 90 minutes from the time we left Vernal Falls which was a 2 mile hike...

So to sum it up, our 3.4 mile hike took us about 4 hours, and even if you take away time for pictures and a 30 minute break, the amount of time it took us to get there can tell you just how tough the hike was, from the steep slippery steps, to figuring out where the trail is in the snow, and more steep inclines. The hike was hard, but definitely do-able if you're in decent shape.

With that, we took about an hour lunch break sitting on the top of the granite formation that sits next to the waterfall.

Hike to Nevada Falls

As you can see, the granite steps didn't quite end yet. Of course, as we got higher up the mountain, we saw more snow, and at one point, we were going through some trees, and it felt like it was raining once again, but it was really just the snow melting from the trees. All this snow made it a lot harder to find where the trail was....

Vernal Falls

Finally, we got to the top of Vernal Falls, and it was probably the longest and toughest 1.5 miles I've ever gone up haha....

Looking down from the top of the waterfall, you can see see a narrow strip running up the picture which is actually the steps that we came up...

It was about 10 AM when we got here, so we took a 30 minute break and had some snacks...

Hike to Vernal Falls

The last part of the hike to Vernal Falls, about 0.7 miles up took us about 70 minutes which included over 600 steep granite steps (as described by the National Park Service) and water from the falls coming straight down on us, as you can see from the pictures.

The higher we got, the more you could feel the water...If you look closely at some of these pictures, you can see the steps/trail that we came up on...