Yosemite

While Muriel was still quite young, probably less than a year old, we made a trip (the three of us) to YosemiteValley where we stayed several nights at Camp Curry. I think it was my first trip to Yosemite. Then we drove over the Tioga Pass Road to Tuolomne Meadows where we spent a couple of days. The Tioga Pass Road was unimproved at that time — just an unpaved, un-gravelled one-lane path through the forest.

It was cold at night at Tuolomne Meadows, I think we were in some Sierra Club cabins, and one night at least we took Muriel and had her in bed between us. This was of course long before I developed my interest in sketching and water-coloring, but me recollection ow is that there is a lake on the roadthat is really a picturesque, high mountain tarn that would be a good subject. We stopped at the lake and I think we have a color slide or two of it.

From Tuolomne Meadows we went down the Lee Vining Grade to Bishop on the east side of the Sierras. This road also, at the time, was relatively unimproved and for a person like myself who hadn’t done much driving up in the mountains it was a rather tense drive. I don’t recall now what our rout was from Bishop back to the Bay Area.

My recollection is that I’ve been in Yosemite twice since then. Once it was Jean and I, along with our three daughters and we came from Bishop, then Tuolomne Meadows and through the valley. That was the trip that Jean instructed the girls to lay down their books, stop reading and look at the scenery for awhile. I’m not sure the instructions did much good, all three of them were not interested in what we were passing.

The other time was when we took my mother on a sight-seeing trip when she visited us in El Cerrito after my father died. This memory is rather vague but I think we stayed at the Ahwahnee facility in the valley the night we were there. I wonder if we may have taken her down to see Marold and Jeanne later on. I don’t recall if we had our daughters along — I have no memory about them at all.