The Mist Trail (Nevada Falls, Vernal Falls) - Yosemite National Park, CA

If you only have one day in Yosemite, I'd spend it on the Mist Trail. To find the trailhead, get a good map and follow it until you see this amazing sign.

The hike from Curry Village up to Nevada Falls is part of the legendary Mist Trail. A lot of people have died on this trail. If you want to read more on that, you can check out the book, Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite. In terms of lives claimed, it's the deadliest single day hike in the United States. That doesn't mean it's reckless to hike this trail. Rarely do folks buy the farm because of treachery on the trail. The hike itself is no more dangerous than most other trails. Almost every death occurs  as a result of bad judgment off the trail--swimming in the river above the falls, taking pictures on ledges, slipping on slimy rocks above the falls, after ignoring danger signs, etc. Just don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine on this hike. Don't let your wife talk you out of it.

There are several variations of this loop. I describe a commonly-used loop version, climbing in on the Mist Trail until you reach the top of Nevada Falls and descending on the John Muir Trail until it rejoins the Mist. Although the top of Nevada Falls is a destination in itself, you will be sharing this trail with Half Domers, some of whom start long before dawn using the Mist Trail as the first segment of their ambitious plan to bag Half Dome as a one-day, out-and-back event. Other Half Domers break their experience into a two, even three day event by hiking in past Nevada Falls, over-nighting in Little Yosemite Valley back-country camp site.

The Mist trail is a very popular trail with diverse users. The lower part of the trail is quite scenic with water features and is easily accessible from the Curry Village parking lot, which means it will likely be inundated with seven-year-old girls running around in sandals, seven-year-old boys throwing rocks at each other, and Asians with over-sized cameras traveling in large packs. Like most hikes, the more you climb the Mist Trail, the more it thins out. This rule does not apply to Half Dome. The queue on that single-file ascent can be longer than the line to the ladies's restroom at a Bon Jovi concert. I'm not guiding you up Half Dome, only to Nevada Falls. You can find tons of other resources about Half Dome, but it won't be as funny as my guide.

Vernal Falls will look very different depending upon what season you view it. The photo here, was taken in October, and you see one thread of water.

More too come about Nevada Falls

Olympic National Park - Shi Shi Beach

I've slept on a beach twice. In 1983, me and some Navy buddies drove out to Ocean City, Maryland on Fourth of July weekend. After discovering every bed in town was accounted for at 7 p.m. on Friday night, we decided we'd just head to the bars, pick up some girls, and crash with them. At 3 a.m.,  having not spoken to any girls all night, we stumbled out of a bar, across the boardwalk and flopped on the sand. After one of us puked, we staggered twenty yards away, took off our shirts and shoes, and used them as pillows and hunkered down. Tip: New Balance shoes make for suck-ass pillows. Around dawn, a cop jabbed his nightstick into my back. The camping trip was abruptly over.

Having overcome my fear of speaking to them years before, I now prefer to take women as hiking partners. They tend to accept being to bossed around and are easier to impress using the skills I learned from Man vs. Wild. Plus, if we're attacked by a wild animal, I can generally outrun my girl hiking partners, which gives me some piece of mind in the backcountry. So I got that going for me...which is nice.  Twenty-five years after Ocean City Beach, I tried camping on the Pacific Ocean with another buddy. We were in Seattle for our friend's wedding. The groom had plans for the honeymoon that didn't involve us, so we took off for the Olympic Peninsula with a backpack full of tiny corn on the cobs, celery with cream cheese, crackers, and other wedding h'dorves.

The Shi Shi beach trail, in in the Olympic National Park in Washington, is short and easy. You'll stroll about 2 miles through a rain forest to get from the trailhead to the beach. Ferns will brush your legs. Waterlogged treefall and moss surround you.  Moss hangs from old growth evergreens like a scene from a scary movie. Unless it's July or August, most likely it will be overcast, dreary, moist, cool. You won't see much sky anyway, the tree-cover is thick. You might come across toads or salamanders, and maybe some dear.



The trail descends toward it's end before the forest opens up abruptly and gives way to the beach. You see sand, ocean, and billions and billions of tree trunks turned driftwood. You'll have to log hop or Wallenda your way through the maze of logs to get to the breakwater.







Before you do anything, pause to consider you are further west than anyone else in the US except for a handful of American Indians a few miles up the coast. After pondering the enormity of that, find a place to pitch your tent. Here's a tip: when you pitch your tent, remember tides come in and can turn your tent into boat.  It's hard to swim inside a tent, especially when it's dark. Remember all those logs you walked across to get to your campsite? They weren't carried there by lumberjacks. The ocean moved them and it can move you while you sleep. So, if you see a bunch of tents lined up one-hundred meters from the water, don't be a wise-ass and setup fifty meters closer than them, unless you wanna end up further west than the Indians.

As you pitch the tent, send your girl out to convert driftwood into use-able sized pieces of firewood. Give her your overpriced, inadequate, multitool with its 2-inch saw blade and see what she comes back with. When you're relaxing on a log, sipping some rum you packed in, with the tent already setup, she'll probably come back with a couple twigs saying your tool is too short to do the job. Don't take it personally.

To get your firewood, show her how to snap branches off tree trunks by jumping off logs onto the branches. Then watch as she tries.

Or, come prepared with a really cool human-powered chain saw

Having pitched your Sierra designs tent and collected firewood, take off your hiking boots and don some water shoes and explore the beach.
















Enjoy the smoke-stacked cliffs and














the sea creatures which look like vaginas glued to rocks.

Go back to the tent, build a fire, cook up some food, and sip on that rum.











If you have an harmonica, do your fellow hikers a favor--keep it in your backpack. There's nothing more annoying than bad harmonica on a hiking trip. If you're with another dude instead of a girl, try not to think about how gay it is for two guys to camp together on a cold romantic beach, and bring a warm Mountain Hardware sleeping bag to head off any hypothermia-induced spooning.

And to mitigate the gay factor to the extent possible, under no circumstances, take photos together...

Crowds can be bad in the summer. I hear during high season weekends, tents are twenty meters apart. We went on a Sunday night in June and saw one other tent a hundred meters away. The highlight of this trip is beach combing.

See ya on the trail...