As announced during a number of our past Friday Forums, we are going on a camping trip to Yosemite after finals. (May 23-25 in case you were wondering) For those of you who don’t know, Yosemite National Park is a beautiful place with plenty of different types of scenery and hiking trails. Some of the most popular photographs that are displayed in people’s offices and homes are actually Ansel Adam’s depictions of Yosemite! (see here and here)
And instead of what have done in the past (rent a nice vacation home in Groveland), we are camping. As in, sleeping in tents outside, and doing all of our cooking around a campfire or propane gas fires. And the showers are limited. The English term for something like this is “roughing it”.
Because of space constraints, this event is invite only. (Sorry, we can only accomodate so many people in the tents that we were able to get from our church!) So if you did not receive an invitation, but feel that you should have, please talk to one of your friendly ISM staff.
Yosemite has so many trails, ranging from easy to intermediate to difficult. Now the question for everyone: what sort of hiking trails do you want to do? We want everyone’s input on this because we may split the group into 2 groups if enough people want to do something very rigorous. (Of course, this assumes that some people want to take a more leisurely stroll as well)
International Graduate Student Ministry (IGSM) is an official graduate student group at UC Berkeley. IGSM started in the fall of 2003 with the vision to help all UC Berkeley graduate students from various countries (including students from the United States) find out the true meaning and purpose of their lives through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Many of us also attend Gracepoint Berkeley, where Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang lead the ministry.
I personally like the idea of an easy or maybe an easy-intermediate hike. It’s hard to enjoy nature while you are suffering.
Here is a proposal: If Glacier Point is open, it would be great to do the Panorama Trail to the valley via the John Muir trail, which would take us within view of Nevada and Vernal Falls. To satisfy everyone, I suggest that we split into two groups–the easy going group (E), and the hard core group (H). The E group will drive up to Glacier Point and hike down to the valley floor–that’s probably about 8 miles, and mostly downhilll, from about 7500 ft down to 3500 ft, with a 800 ft up portion in the middle. The H group will hike the same trail in the reverse direction, but obviously with a head start since it will take the E group 45 mins at least to drive to Glacier Point. This allows us to meet in the middle for lunch and to exchange car keys so that the H group can also drive the vans back down to the valley, or wherever else we decide to meet up. This scheme has the virtue that no one has to miss hiking in order to move the vans. Also, if some of the H people discover in the middle that they chose wrongly, they might be able to switch with someone from the E group at lunch time. To ease the load a little for the H group, perhaps the E group could be responsible for carrying lunch and some extra water. Finally, this allows us to do both a challenging hike and an intermediate hike without completely separating into two groups, since we would be meeting up in the middle. Again, this hike is only possible if Glacier Point opens before our trip.