We had planned to come to Yosemite in 2020. You know, of course, why we did not!
Our next plan was to go in May, 2023, but Alonda got pneumonia. We finally made it in June, 2023!
We stayed in the town of Mariposa near the Park. We visited the Mariposa Museum and History Center. The biggest thing about Mariposa was the gold mining. Most of the gold was extracted from granite and quartz veins. There are still hobbyists who mine for gold near Mariposa.
This machine and several others are in their outdoor exhibit. These mining machines show the use of many Simple Machines. The indoor part of the exhibit was very interesting and well done. We highly recommend it if you are ever in Mariposa.
One of the two days we were visiting Yosemite, we entered the Park through the south gate and visited the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias.
Our friend, Erna Faruqui, who we met in Pakistan, was with us for this trip. She lives in Oakland, CA and we were able to pick her up and took her with us.+
There was a very nice trail along this grove of sequoias.
Along the trail is a set of 4 large sequoias. They are known as the "Batchelor and the Three Graces". This is bottom of the set of trees ...
This is the middle ...
Here is the canopy. The sequoias are very large.
We walked through several of the meadows in the park and enjoyed the wildflowers.
We think this is a picture of a Hartweg's Iris. 
We visited Yosemite Falls. This has been a very good year for all the falls because of the snowpack. We had planned to visit Vernal Falls, but there were so many people in the park, the Rangers stopped the traffic and we could not go there. We did see Bridalveil Falls from a distance, but could not get close. The fire damage this year made it impossible.
This is El Capitan. This is probably the best known sight in the Park. There were supposedly two climbers there when we were there, but we could not see them.This year there is no limit on the number of people entering the Park. In our opinion, a bad mistake! The crowds were enormous. It took us an hour and a half to ride the Shuttle Bus from El Capitan back to our car. We saw a lot of burned out areas in the park and the Rangers were doing some controlled burns, too.
We returned to Oakland and stayed with Erna for another day. She took us to the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. It was a beautiful garden and everything was well labelled. The exhibits included all habitats.We highly recommend visiting Yosemite National Park!
