Friday, October 31, 2025 (Samhain/Hallowe’en); from Jinny in San Diego, CA to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
One important item crossed off my bucket list—I’ve now experienced some of the wonders of Yosemite National Park. I’m not sure if it’s a place you’ve ever visited in person. I seem to remember your prior attendance at numerous conferences and workshops in the San Francisco Bay area, the park’s closest major urban center. If Yosemite hasn’t yet been part of your direct experience, I wish you future visits to this very special place. I’ll do my best to describe my experience of it. Over the years, I’d read a good bit of John Muir and looked at Ansel Adams photos of the park. If you have access to Muir books and/or Adams photographs, please look at them some more. They capture a good bit of the spirit of Yosemite. Even with these as background, though, I wasn’t totally ready for the majesty and beauty of Yosemite Valley and the surrounding mountains and cliffs. As our bus rounded the final turn before entering the valley, all of us gasped out a collective “Aah!”
Jim and I had originally planned to visit as a couple just after Consultants’ Camp 2023 took place on the Monterey Peninsula. That year, though, wildfires enveloped much of the park in smoke and closed several of its areas. We decided to wait for a better opportunity. This year was also a bit iffy on the wildfire front. In the weeks leading up to our trip, we followed weather reports and area news closely. However, because this year was less dire on the covid front, we hazarded our first group travel since long before the pandemic. We signed up with Road Scholar (formerly known as Elderhostel) for a group tour of Yosemite highlights for much of the second week of September, 2025.
Our first foray into Road Scholar travel had both plusses and minuses. Plusses: Our trip leaders were experienced at working with older adults (our primary leader, Mary, was in her early 70’s herself); the itinerary included a good mixture of planned activities and free time, so we could take naps or just veg out if the preceding day’s pace had worn us out; inside the park, we spent all our nights in the same central lodge, so we had a minimal amount of packing/unpacking to do; we had near-constant views of El Capitan from just in front of our room at the lodge, plus a very easy accessible hike to Yosemite Falls; almost all our meals were provided—no hassles with long restaurant lines.
Minuses: time constraints that wouldn’t have been as strict had we been on our own; on hikes, we were only as fast as our slowest member. Perhaps most annoying was that in order to see the park’s highlights in slightly less than a week, we spent what seemed like an excessive amount of time on a tour bus. (In its entirety, Yosemite is about the same size as the state of Rhode Island.) Despite great guides and diversions via films shown on the screen at the front of the bus, we still spent hours of seated, somewhat boring bus time. Our first and last tour days involved six hour jaunts between the Bay Area and the park. Nearly every other day included at least a couple of hours to get from our base in Yosemite Valley to another park area—the Mariposa groves of sequoias, Glacier Point, Olmstead Point, Lake Tenaya, and finally Tuolomne Meadows near the eastern edge of the park. All were worth seeing; given the chance to visit again, I’d have tried to find a tour with twice as much time. Still, I was very grateful for our bus drivers—I considered what an awful alternative it would have been for us two older drivers with somewhat compromised eyesight and slowish reflexes to navigate the park’s sometimes steep slopes and hairpin turns.
One of my favorite park memories is not solely of terrestrial scenery. The non-profit park support group Yosemite Conservancy puts on periodic evening sky watching programs near Yosemite Valley Lodge. Our tour’s dates included the night of one, available for sign-up at the lodge. Conditions were not ideal—nearly all week there had been wisps of smoke from wildfires in the general vicinity. Our sky watch night coincided with a waxing moon, which would dim out the stars once it rose. Jim begged off, but I decided to go anyway. Our guide was a long-time area resident and science teacher with an encyclopedic knowledge of local stars and constellations. We met at the conservancy office and walked a short way to a flat open area that served during the day as the local school’s athletic field. Our guide had prepositioned a series of plastic tarps on the field. Once we arrived there, our guide told us to lie flat on the tarps and to douse our flashlights and any other lights. It took a few minutes for our eyes to adjust to the dark. We had an unobstructed view of the sky. As stars winked in and out, our guide pointed out three bright stars visible despite partial cloud cover: Arcturus, Rigel, and Vega. Later, after the moon rose, we all watched the play of moonlight and shadow on Yosemite’s cliff faces. At the end of the session, I waited a moment or two in the sheltering darkness before turning on my flashlight and then returning to the lodge.
In the days surrounding Consultants’ Camp, the two of us also had chances to visit briefly with younger sets of friends in Silicon Valley. We had lunch one day with “Number 1 Japanese daughter” Eiko and her family—husband Dan and daughter Hannah. Eiko had lived with us in Richmond for about a year during 1996-97 when she was serving as a business intern at a local non-profit. Now married to an American and mother to a recent high school graduate, Eiko gave us an off-hours tour of the robotics lab at Stanford where she serves as administrative assistant. Another day, we shared a Sichuan-style Chinese feast with former Ya’an colleague “Joey” and his family—wife “Lou”, daughter “Jane,” infant son “Song,” and Lou’s mom, who’s in residence for a few months to help with the baby. Joey now works at one of the area campuses of Google, while Lou takes some parenting time off before reentering the paid work force as a financial analyst.
The older we get, the more special it becomes to spend time with some of our next-generation protegés. I’m grateful they’re willing to make time for us. I could write at length about a solo side trip I took to the seaside village of Pacific Grove, one-time home to the “Chautauqua of the West,” but I think I’ve used up my writing time and your patience for now. Hope your protegés are providing all the help you need. Happy vicarious travels! Happy Hallowe’en! Please take good care. Lots of virtual hugs!
Love, Jin
