thanksgiving in yosemite

 last march caleb and i sat down to watch the movie Free Solo. immediately after the movie we promptly booked flights to yosemite for thanksgiving. we couldn't believe we hadn't visited yet, and we were on a mission to change that ASAP (due to other travels planned out, we had to wait until November).

a week before our trip, i was whipping up dinner for my parents who were in town and got a notification of a winter storm slated to hit yosemite right when we were set to arrive. i ignored the airbnb message.

after my parents left i told caleb about the notification i received. i decided to look up the weather and realized that this was no small storm -- yosemite was expected to get up to four FEET of snow. tire chains were likely going to be required. salt lake city was going to get hit too. we had no idea if we'd even leave salt lake at this point.

we took off only 30min delayed from salt lake. we landed in sfo, and got upgraded to a brand new audi q5. not too shabby of a start. then, we picked up our tire chains from the nearby autozone and began the four hour drive at 6pm the evening before thanksgiving. much to our surprise and delight, the last 15min of the drive was essentially the only bad part of the drive. yes, it was dumping snow. but all in all it really wasn't that bad. and we never even needed to use our tire chains -- hooray!

thanksgiving day we woke up to about two feet of snow outside. we headed down into the valley (we stayed in yosemite west) and hiked all around the meadow at the base of el capitan. it was UN.REAL. it honestly didn't look or even seem real. also, thanks to the winter storm, there were hardly any people in the park. we saw about 3 people hiking. we were definitely breaking trail through the two feet of snow but it was so beautiful.

yosemite in the winter is really something special. at the end of the day we were actually thankful for the snow as it added an unexpected beauty and warded off all the tourists. it was a thanksgiving we'll never forget.