Yosemite is known as one of THE National Parks to visit, it is neck in neck with Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon for must see destinations. It is definitely THE National Park to visit in California. However this means lots of people, I had fears of too many people. Annual visitors now top 4 million and on peak days during the summer there can be 20,000 people in Yosemite Valley at one time. This made me hesitant about visiting. For the past several years I have been asking about when is the best time to visit Yosemite. I was concerned over crowds. Stacey and I have visited a lot of National Parks, and while we are not hard core backpackers and are largely family car campers, we are not fond of crowds. This is why we usually go to Zion's in the fall, to avoid the crush. Among the many recommendations I received about when to go the two that stuck out were: go before summer hits, especially memorial day weekend and go in May when the waterfalls are at their peak. Most importantly was plan ahead.
So this past fall, I picked some weekend dates in May, and began researching campsites. Having never been I had no clear concept of where to go, Swerbo's Yosemite Valley Campsite Information was very helpful in this regard. Based on their recommendations the North Pines Campground was the way to go, and it looked to me like campgrounds 502 and 504 had the best potential. May 10th and 11th were the target days, so five months prior on January 10th at exactly 10 am eastern I called the reservation number. I tried the online system at the same time but found it to be way slower. Luckily I got right in and was able to actually reserve the sites. They only let you make 2 campsite reservations at a time, but I wanted one more so I immediately hung up and called back in but was unable to get through for at least 20 minutes, and by then there were no more adjacent campgrounds. When we actually arrived, just how great a choice I had made and how lucky I had been was confirmed twice. When the ranger came around to check us in he asked us if we had been to Yosemite before and upon telling him no, he incredulously asked "How did you get these two campsites, we have people fight over these?" The next day, a guy cycled through and told us in his opinion having casually surveyed by bike all campgrounds in the valley that he had rated ours number one.
We invited an old boss of mine, Paul Conley and his family to join us, and a friend from work Reto and Judith were going to join us as well, they had also secured site 400 which was very close by. Reto was unable to attend due to Judith's needing to prepare for graduation, so we invited our friends the Nelson's to come along and Paul invited some friends from their daughter Julia's school. All told there would be three campsites, 8 adults and 8 children. The plan was to camp Friday and Saturday nights and I agreed to do the cooking.
Click for a bigger picture From left to right: Stacey, Sofi, Jim, Mark, Lucien, Millie, Isabelle, Julia, Jacob, Maria, Paul, Kiah, Camden, Heather, Parker, Troy