I went to Yosemite for the first time when I was eight years old with both my parents and my older brother, Caden.
We were out in California for a family reunion in Carmel and when our parents asked Caden and I if we wanted to drive four hours east to see Yosemite, we both enthusiastically responded yes.
I don’t remember driving into the valley on that very first trip to Yosemite, but I vividly remember it from every trip I have taken since. Just when you feel like you can’t stand driving down the winding roads any longer,, shadows start to cast down upon your car as you enter an area with bigger trees and mountains that seemingly sprout up from nowhere.
In the spring there is more flowing water from all the rain. If you go from the months of February to May, this extra water will materialize itself into waterfalls in every direction you look. Cascading down from the tops of mountains, the water is so powerful it lets off a white steam when it hits the bottom that makes it look like a snow avalanche.
As you’re looking around at the waterfalls, a greater looming presence appears to the left, El Capitan. The 3,000 foot granite monolith is world-famous for its angular appearance and even more famous amongst the big wall climbing community. If people come into Yosemite for one thing, it’s to sit in the meadow, eating, talking, or simply admiring in silence, the magnitude of El Cap, especially if it happens to be a day in which climbers, who appear to be the size of ants, are making their way up the face.
I don’t remember seeing El Cap for the first time, which is probably because I didn’t really care about the names or impressiveness of mountains back when I was eight. I just wanted to walk up them and see the view from the top. I have been told by my parents while inquiring on that first trip to Yosemite that before we went on our hike, we did eat sandwiches while sitting in the El Capitan meadow. It seems as though I was too engrossed in my sandwich to remember.
I do remember the hike though, partly because it was a story my parents told extended family members for years to come. As an eight year old I was very stubborn and maybe a little bit irresponsible, as all eight year olds should be. My parents decided to take us on Mist Trail, as it’s one of the most famous hikes in Yosemite and we would be able to hike near a waterfall. Since I knew we would be getting sprayed with the waterfall mist I informed everyone that I would be wearing flip flops up the mountain. My father rejected this motion, my mother silently got my tennis shoes out of the luggage in the back, and my brother stated that he was not going to wait for me while hiking as I was going to be going too slow in my flip flops.
Alas, I persisted and my parents had no choice but to let me wear my flip flops.
If you’ve never hiked the Mist Trail, then this sentiment might be lost on you. Let me provide some quotes from the sign at the trailhead of Mist Trail:
“With an average of 3,000 hikers setting off from the trailhead daily, it’s now more crucial than ever to address the need for visitor safety.”
“This is a hazardous trail. The majority of search and rescue accidents in the park occur in this trail corridor. Some of these hazards are rushing water, steep terrain, slippery rocks, visitors losing their way, and hikers venturing beyond their skill level.”
In short, Mist Trail is seven miles of climbing upwards for a 2,900 feet elevation gain. Not only was I doing it as an eight year old, but I was also doing it wearing my brand new blue flip flops. Even by eight my parents knew they could not influence me once I set my mind on something, so we headed off.
The initial plan was to hike 0.8 miles to the bridge over the Merced River. When you stand on the middle of the bridge and look up, you can see the top of the hike, and it really doesn’t look that far away. When our parents tried to turn us around to head back down, Caden and I protested, saying we could literally do the rest of the trail in 15 minutes. It took a little bit longer than 15 minutes, but we did finish the trail with no complaints.
With 50 yards left to the top, Caden turned off at a vista point to look out over the valley and the falls. I took this as an opportunity to turn and sprint as fast as possible to the peak, so I could make it to the top before him, in my flip flops. This made him very mad. It also made my parents very mad, as the peak of the trail is where the powerful waterfall starts that already had missing persons signs posted around it, and I did not know how to swim.
The men at the top of the mountain with two walking sticks, hiking boots, and daypacks did not like the sight of a scrawny eight year old in flip flops running up the last 50 yards of the mountain while holding a Nalgene in one hand.
Cut to ten years later and I’m in my childhood bedroom – quarantined and concussed. It was the very early stages of the 2020 quarantine, back in April and May when everyone still had hope that the plague would simmer out soon. I couldn’t do a lot on account of being quarantined and concussed, which means my main hobbies included slowly walking the neighborhood in flip flops while listening to podcasts about extreme sports and watching rock climbing documentaries. Can you see how I got from point A to point B here?
I’ve always had this problem with hobbies. It’s that I don’t know how to have them. I have never been able to just like something, it always has to absolutely consume me. I have a very obsessive personality. The “personality of an addict” as my father says jokingly but with a hint of worry in his eyes.
This obsession with climbing and completing great feats in the outdoors started one evening in that spring when I watched the documentary “Valley Uprising” which tells the story of the counterculture revolution and lifestyle of rock climbers living and playing in Yosemite Valley Camp 4, contrasted by the strict park rangers who tried to end that fun. The lifestyle was something so far different that anything I had experienced living in the Missouri suburbs and the adventures they went on was all I could think about in vestibular physical therapy every week.
That is how I spend the rest of my spring and the summer of 2020. Podcasts, Youtube videos, Instagram stalking, documentaries, and fantasizing about my life once I got out of my quarantine and the concussed state. The following fall was when things finally started to get in motion.
COVID restrictions eased up quite a bit to the point where gyms opened back up as long as you were wearing a mask, but I was still very well dealing with the aftermath of being concussed. This meant I had a lot of trouble doing the exercises I had done all my life. Any kind of exercise that involved my head going up and down – sit ups, squats, even running – was out of the picture. I started going on 15 mile bike rides, working out my core by hanging from the ceiling of my unfinished basement, and got a membership to the rock climbing gym.
My parents were very worried at first. How exactly is rock climbing a concussion safe activity? For most people, it probably isn’t. For me, I just wanted an activity that could work out my entire body without having to lift weights, where the pressure would hurt my head. Fragile girl! I don’t quite remember if they finally got on board, or if it was another circumstance like the flip flops in which I didn’t give them a choice. Either way, I remember driving 20 minutes on the backroads (as I wasn’t allowed to drive on highways concussed) to get to the climbing gym every other day. As my parents saw my appetite start to come back and my body start to be a body again instead of just a lump on the couch in pain, they very quickly got behind the rock climbing.
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My absolute lust for the outdoors was something else that drove me to move to Phoenix with my friend for the spring semester of my freshman year of college. Doing menial online classes, I spent most of my days outside. I would bike every day, hike mountains, scramble up to precarious peaks, and could swim in the pool by mid-March.
The second time I ever went to Yosemite was the summer after this freshman year. My dad and I flew out to Sacramento in July to visit my grandma in Sacramento. One morning we woke up far too early to drive four hours to the park, go for a hike, and drive four hours home the same night. We went on the Four Mile Trail hike (which is actually 9.7 miles long), climbed up the waterfall, and it was so hot I dove headfirst into the stream that goes through the valley. I stood in the meadow in front of El Cap and imagined I was standing there as part of the film crew recording the same documentaries I had watched while quarantined and concussed.
When I finally got to an in-person college campus, I went around telling everyone who asked that I wanted to be an extreme sport photographer. My first project for photography class was based off of some of my favorite Jimmy Chin photographs, but how the photos would look in Oklahoma instead of the great peaks he was at.
If you have been here for a while then I would suppose, at this point, you might be a bit confused. I’ve spoken profusely about wanting to work in fashion, music, economics, journalism, even finance, before writing about wanting to be a nature and adventure sport photographer. I suppose it goes along with my dream to be able to make a living as a photographer traveling the world. This particular dreamseems farther away than the other ones though, because there’s no direct and formal path to take down that road the same way there is for a corporate job.
This was also two years ago and since then I have had many other obsessions that have jerked my life in various ways. I don’t think that many wannabe nature photographers would move to the city, but I got obsessed with fashion, so I went to NYC. I started working in the music industry, so I started writing about music news instead of rock climbing news. I got enveloped in my studies, so I spent my time researching and writing about economics.
Last Tuesday though, my parents and I took the four hour drive to Yosemite again. The minute my parents and I drove into the valley and saw that magnificent view of El Cap leaning out over me, Half Dome in the distance, and the waterfalls on all sides of the car, the box that my extreme sport obsession was closed away in officially opened back up.
I can’t believe it has been so long since I went to a National Park. My freshman year I had a National Park pass because I was going so often and my dad made me carry a portable emergency start amp in the back of my car in case the battery died in one of the remote places I was sleeping in my car.
When we got back to the city after our day hiking, I started thinking more about how this ‘crunchy granola girl’ version of myself had been packed away for so long, and how surprised I was that this was the case as I was pretty much raised outside. I didn’t watch TV until I was 12, during the summers my family would take our dog, Muffin, into southern Missouri and camp anytime we could. One time we got stuck in a tornado in the middle of a campground and had to abandon all our stuff to run to the car and seek shelter. Father Huntley had to four wheel our minivan over a rocky field because a tree had fallen down across the only road that led out of the park.
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This definitely isn’t the best time for me to be rehashing all of my previous selves, as I’m currently trying to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life, or at least the next two years as a recent college grad, and I don’t need more lives to consider living. Up until now, I thought I wanted to work a corporate job in a big city, but in reality that won’t satisfy all of my selves. When it comes to having lots of different versions of oneself that all want different things, I tend to give great advice to other people but not so good at following it myself. I tell people that our selves aren’t static and singular and therefore they don’t have to pick just one person to be, they can be all of them at the same time. I don’t need to just be a girl who lives in the city and loves that environment with all her heart, I can always leave on the weekends to go camping. There is nature and wide open spaces everywhere.
While fishing at the river in Sacramento the Saturday following our Yosemite trip, I had a lot of time to ponder what I might do over the summer. I don’t really like fishing, because when I relax my mind races in all different directions and distracts me from the task at hand, meaning I generally miss when the bobber goes under so the fish can just eat the worm that I intricately hooked without a fight.
I didn’t come up with much for what I will do over the summer before starting work, which has been a real problem as of late. But there were two words that kept floating around my mind as I stared out at the river and pondered – road trip!
So I sent a quick text to Lennon – “I’ve always wanted to go to Montana, wanna road trip?”
When I ask Lennon on a road trip, there is nothing she can do but say yes. It is her kryptonite. Although we are unsure of when exactly this road trip will happen (hopefully mid-May) it is the only thing on both of our minds. Seven days of open road, big sky, a diet that consists of peanut butter and Cheerios, and sleeping in hammocks.
As long as neither one of us takes on some random summer job during the month of May, expect a thorough documentation of a Montana road trip very soon. Road trips are extreme sports, right?
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Yours truly,
Calihan