The rest of the Yosemite Weekend

Following our trek up Half Dome, the remainder of the weekend was a little less punishing. Starting off with Sunday Brunch at The Ahwahnee. This has to be one of the highlights of any trip to Yosemite. The Ahwahnee is a spectacular Arts and Crafts style hotel in the valley floor, and its dining hall is just a wonder to behold. If you can’t affort the $400 or so room rates, then the Sunday Brunch allows you to soak in a bit of the atmosphere at a more modest cost.

A piece of trivia about The Ahwahnee is that it was used for some of the indoor shots of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", the exterior shots being from another famous hotel, The Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood. Oh and the Queen stays there when she is in the valley.

George, Steve, Mike in the Ahwahnee post Half Dome

Brian and Allison - 5th Wedding Anniversary

After the excesses of Brunch, we then drove out to Wawona (the south entrance to the park) and paid a visit to the grove of giant redwoods there in the Mariposa Grove. What wonderful things these trees are. Much more impressive than the coastal redwoods.


We were staying in the tent cabins in Curry Village. While this is not the wilderness experience by a long way it is quite a nice atmosphere and I like it a lot. There are some 500 or more tent cabins and they are all full during summer weekends. There are people moving around and making noise at all times of the day and night. If it isn’t the late arrivals, or the early departing hikers, it’s the people shouting at the bears as they do their nightly pass through the camp looking for food. Apparently this year there have been a lot of bears in the valley and it seemed like there were people shouting and screaming at them all night on Saturday. I didn’t get up to investigate, though I wish I had now.

Here are some more photos from the trip (same ones from the previous post).