Due to the the Australian government’s spectacular kindness in allowing me into their fine country for the past year coming to an end, I had a window of a few days to kill in California before Smart Geometry (more on that in the next few days).

While zooming out on the San Francisco map, I spotted Yosemite National Park 200 miles to the east, and knew in seconds what I’d be doing for those free days!

After a less than inspiring flight, and Lloyds thoughtfully putting a stop on my card in SF because I might be getting scammed, I eventually got on the train to Merced, where if I’d had less drama buying food I’d have caught the bus to Yosemite, but as it was, I ended up sleeping at the train station in a luggage cart!

Yosemite doesn’t mess about, there are incredible falls in the valley floor, and about a kilometre into the trail you come across Vernal Falls

the water falls so far that by the time it gets to the bottom it’s just a very fast mist that hits a rock and flys out horizontally!

Almost immediately after that is Nevada fall, by the top of this I was 1500 feet off the valley floor. (Americans still use imperial measures, cue imperial march music.)

I thought that Josie would like this, when an item falls on the snow, it’s a bit warmer than the snow, and it absorbs more solar radiation that the surrounding snow, so it burrows down into it and makes a little pocket the same shape as the object.

This was the moment that I realised that I was a bit under prepared for all of this, without show shoes, it mean that almost every step meant a deep plunge into snow, and then a big step out again.

once I was tucked up in my two sleeping bags and a bivi I was toasty warm and should have slept fine except that nobody at macpac told me that if all the zips were done up for warmth, then there was no air movement whatsoever, so I woke up hyper ventilating because I’d used up all the air inside. Oh, and that I was terrified that a bear would come! every tiny noise could well have been a bear’s footsteps, or a mountain lion sniffing about for a snack. I wonder how long you need to sleep out there before your mind stops playing tricks on you?

My ultra light stove was made from a red bull can and a piece of foil, and it worked pretty well, it only had one drawback though.

It seems that to make a stove from a can of red bull, you need an empty can to start with, and the good, healthy people that you find in Yosemite aren’t much into energy drinks. I bought a can of red bull, but just could not give it away. So at the beginning of day 2 I ended up drinking the repulsive stuff myself.

tasty honey-y porridge out in the wilderness is great!

you can only see this faintly, but the path ahead is actually bear tracks. There were quite a lot of bear, mountain lion and coyote tracks, and no human tracks other than my own!

this looks flattish, but it’s actually at about 40° and picking a route that has snow dense enough to actually walk on is about 90% luck.

I'm pretty sure that this would have been no deterrent to bears, but it was fun winding the cord around the bark on the tree. My food bag fitted nicely into the dry bag that I had my sleeping bags in during the day, so that would have had some effect in keeping the smells in.

The second night I spent quite a long time melting snow as the lake I’d been heading for had been frozen over. Never again will I say "just melt some snow to drink", it takes ages, and your water bottle ends up pretty full of tiny bits of tree!

I slept with my shoes inside the bivi, but outside the sleeping bags, which meant that there was quite a lot of shoe defrosting to be done the next day.

there were a lot of incredibly gnarled trees, natural bonsai almost

as the sun set on day three I could see the full complement of Yosemite mountains to the north of the ridge, and the lights of the bay area, 200 miles away to the south.

mmm, salami, fatty protein goodness!

by day 3 I was wearing the hood of my jacket with the rest of it over my pack, to keep the sun off my face. Mid day breaks are good times to melt snow are good because you can get out of the sun, and use its heat to do a bit of the melting.

This was the first serious look at Mt Clarke.

I think that with proper gear, and a partner, it would be very doable, but as a solo, with no water and no gear (crampons, axe, rope) it was a bit on the risky side!

	I was so pleased to find a waterhole, but I had no idea how to actually get the water out, but after a bit of head scratching, I made a fishing kit out of the accessory cord and my platypus.
	descending is much faster, especially when glissading on my arse!

as if to highlight how cold the water I was about to cross really was, the Merced was fringed with frozen pools.

I ended up crawling over this log in a very inelegant way, and then discovering that I’d actually made it to an island, and that I had to crawl back. The people in the catalogues make water crossings look like so much fun, so I found a rocky bit, and whipped off my shoes.

when I woke up on the last morning, there was frost on the inside of my bivi bag.

So this is the route that I actually took in the end.

It’d be great to go back in August one year and try it without the snow, and with a partner. I think the ring of mountains would be an incredible trip, and if you really did take 8 days over it it could be epic!