Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy resevoir gets busy

After being kicked out of Yosemite Valley (see previous post on flooding), we stayed at a lodge just outside the northwest end of the park, and waited in a long line to get into the Hetch Hetchy entrance the next morning. Hetch Hetchy Valley has no gift shops, no snack bars, and no restaurants. It's a place to hike around the 8 mile long resevoir, the waters of which slake the thirst of 2.4 million Bay area residents. A dam was completed in 1923, despite strenuous objections by John Muir and his Sierra Club.

Yosemite Valley may surround you with sheer granite mountains like Half Dome and El Capitan, but at Hetch Hetchy with luck you'll view an intense rainbow rising from a manmade fall off O'Shaughnessy Dam, pictured above.

You can also enter a refreshingly cool cave on your way to Wapama Falls, as we did.

Several falls were in overdrive, and the runoff from Tueeulala Falls, which precedes Wampama Falls, was so great it overflowed the trail. Not to worry, we took off our hiking books and waded in. After some debate, we decided Steven's foot blister, Samuel's old tennis shoes, and timing issues, made turning around at Tueeulala Falls a good idea, but there are another half dozen trails to choose from next time we visit.

At Benjamin's request, we then tried a little off-roading.

Benjamin picked a forest service road just outside the park, but we discovered it was a little too rutted to handle without emergency gear. Here's a picture just before the 56-point turn needed to get back to the paved road.

From there we took a detour to historic Jamestown, hoping to do some panning for gold. That didn't pan out (sorry for that groaner joke there), but we did get to see the famous Jamestown jail, built in 1897 of brick with tiny barred windows and a low-walled privy in the center. It held goldminers who didn't behave. It was suitably uncomfortable inside, dank and dark.

We emerged into the sunlight and walked down the street to a popular hangout, The Service Station (which I highly recommend) for a hearty dinner.

Jamestown has been used for countless Western movies, beginning with The Virginian in 1929, and retains many of its old buildings from the late 19th century.

Yosemite Valley floods, a little

A year ago, Steven secured lodging for us in Yosemite Valley, a site so popular getting a room is dicier than winning the lottery. Little did we know a year later that Yosemite would experience record snows and then record runoff. Two days before we left for Yosemite, we were informed the Valley was closing due to anticipated flooding. Was our vacation ruined? Not with a quick pivot to Plan B. We still had one night at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel before the gates closed. So we spent our first night outside the park in Merced, CA at the excellent El Capitan Hotel (named after the famed mountain in Yosemite, we presume) then rose earlish to get in a full day in Yosemite Valley.

We started with a warm hike to Mirror Lake. Our sweat was rewarded with the above view, the perfect reflection of North Dome and Half Dome. According to Indian legend, the two peaks are a husband and wife who quarreled and were turned to stone. They now face each other for eternity.

When we got back to our hotel, we were interviewed by a reporter from ABC News who was covering the imminent Valley closure. While we thought we were too boring to make it on the local news, it turns out we did have something to add. On the way back from Mirror Lake, the trail had become impassable due to flooding and we had to cross a log over the now (IMHO) raging river to make it back. The tale is retold here. Don't blink or you might miss it.

Our second hike of the day was to dinner at Yosemite Lodge. This took us past the Yosemite Falls, the tallest falls in North America. Not a bad way to work up an appetite.

After dinner, we relaxed at the Ahwahnee Hotel. Ahwahnee means "place of gaping mouth" and was the original name for the valley. By all rights, Yosemite should have been named Ahwahnee, but white Europeans apparently modified the Miwok Indian word Yemonite instead. According to my Yosemite Trivia book, Yomenite or Yosemite roughly translates to "those who kill" or "some of them are killers." Not the best choice. But back to the Awhwahnee Hotel. Here you see three quarters of the Chesslers sprawled on the Indian themed couch in one of the lounge areas. The hotel was built in National Park Service Rustic, or Parkitecture style, in 1927, with a decided nod to the indigeneous peoples, the Ahwaneechee. Should you be lucky enough to secure a room here, and not blanche at the cost, you will also likely get a prime view of Half Dome from your room. In summer, you can also see intrepid climbers crawling up the face of Half Dome, looking like ants against the granite.

The next morning everyone was hustling to check out of the hotel, but the Valley wouldn't close until 10 p.m., so plenty of time to get in two more hikes. The famous Mist Trail, and its 600 steps next to waterfall spray, was closed due to icy conditions, but we managed to hike to Vernal Falls bridge and a little bit of the John Muir trail, which, for hardier souls, will lead you all the way to Mount Whitney.

We also got a close up of the lower Yosemite Fall, which pelted us with spray. A good cool down on a hot day.

San Francisco - Coit Tower

Before I leave our SF staycation, I need to say a few words about Coit Tower. This 210-foot tower was completed in 1933, using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's $118,000 bequest to the City of San Francisco. Her only stipulation was to use the money to add "to the beauty of the city which I have always loved." Here you see Steven enjoying the 365 degree view at the top.

There is a single elevator to the top, well worth the $10 fee to ride, and while you wait in line you can fully appreciate the murals on the ground level. Our elevator operator informed us that people always ask which mural Diego Rivera painted, but she has to disappoint them. There are no Rivera paintings, but all of the murals are in the Rivera style and all are captivating.

As one of the first Depression era WPA projects, local artists were paid $25-45 per week to depict "aspects of life in California."

They focused on California industries, professions, and past times and covered all the walls on the ground floor. (See the Wikipedia article here for the full list.)

All the artists used the tower's recessed windows to create depth in their murals. Here you see a man reaching for a book above that recess, in the fresco called "Library." The artist was Bernard Zakheim, a Jewish immigrant from Warsaw, who painted in friends and family in an imagined California public library. According to Coittower.org, "above the window are three books lying on their sides in the central stack; their Hebrew letters spell out the contents: Torah (Scriptures), Prophets, and Wisdom Literature, books of the Old Testament. His "gun-slit" window invites the viewer up the steps into the library containing classical authors like Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Swift, and Oscar Wilde, as well as writers of the 1930s like Dos Passos, Jeffers, Stuart Chase, and Kenneth Rexroth, the young poet who supplied most of the authors' names, here shown on the library ladder."

San Francisco - The Fairmont Hotel, Cable Car Museum, Tonga Room

The Fairmont is one of the grand dames of hotels in San Francisco. Sisters Theresa Fair Oelrichs and Virginia Fair Vanderbilt decided to build an enormous hotel on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. The sisters used the family name (Fair) and the hotel's location on top of a hill (Mont) to create the name Fairmont. Finished just before the 1906 earthquake, it was so solidly built it survived the earthquake, but not the subsequent fire, so wasn't ready to open until 1907.

Dedicated in honor of their wealthy father, Senator James Graham Fair, the two hoped that the business would become a renowned local icon, even though at the time, Nob Hill wasn't considered centrally located.

That's where the cable cars come in. The Fairmont is actually at the intersection of three famous cable car lines, so back in 1907, you could take a cable car to the Fairmont. (Or it might have been 1908, because all but one cable car was destroyed during that 1906 earthquake.) In any event, it was the cable cars that made The Fairmont easily accessible.

Down a very steep hill from the Fairmont you can see the workings of the cable car system at the Cable Car Museum. It is really just the warehouse that contains the sheaves and gears and wires that power the cable cars, and they've just opened it to the public for viewing. The gears run continuously, allowing the cars to chug up those impossible hills at a top speed of 9.5 miles an hour. Here you can see Steven looking down at the machinery that drives the cars. You can also learn about the "gripman" who operates each car, using a single break between the front seats. If you walk along any street with cable car tracks, you'll hear the cable vibrating underground.It's an ingenious system, that has now been in operation 150 years. Of the original 23 lines, three remain, all clogged with tourists enjoying this newfangled carriage that replaced the horse.

To test this whole system out, we took the Mason line from its starting point at Taylor, close to Fisherman's Wharf, back up to the Fairmont. We watched as three transit workers turned our cable car around on a wooden turnstile, then we all boarded Car #23, originally built in 1890, and last refurbished in 2018. We had the luck of sitting across from an elderly cable car enthusiast who told us he first rode the cable cars in 1939 for a dime (that's 84 years ago people!). He pointed out a single story house built after the 1906 earthquake, then gave us the skinny on "the sling." Around Mason and Washington, the car turns and grips a new cable underground. The gripman has to gain enough speed up the hill to make the turn without stalling, gliding until the new cable is gripped. I can report he did just fine. (And to think they were going to take down these 19th century marvels in the 1950s!)

Back at the Fairmont, we also visited the delightfully kitschy Tonga Room. According to Wikipedia, it was named after the South Pacific nation of Tonga, and opened in 1945. The Tonga Room replaced the Terrace Plunge, an indoor swimming pool that was installed in the Fairmont in 1929.

The pool was transformed into the Tonga Room's lagoon, with periodic tropical rainstorms added in 1953.

We came for dinner and their original Mai Tai, formulated in 1944. A live band played cover songs on a boat in the middle of the lagoon/pool. I expected more Don Ho tunes, but after imbibing that Mai Tai, I realized I didn't really care and it was all good.

San Francisco - The Beat Generation

Today was our second staycation in San Francisco, as we work our way through the seven neighborhoods featured in Leslie Santarina's The 500 Hidden Secrets of San Francisco. In the Northeast section of SF is North Beach, cradle of the Beat Generation, the post-War poets and bards that spawned the hippies. I was particularly interested in visiting the Beat Museum because for my my senior thesis in college, I wrote a 25-page paper on Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, centered on Ginsberg's poem, A Supermarket in California. (I guess I had a lot to say about a 200 word poem.) Ginsberg, a budding poet in 1955 when he wrote this poem, follows his muse Whitman down the aisles of a supermarket in Berkeley. It is, as you might imagine, my favorite Ginsberg poem. But what really got Ginsberg on the map was his poem Howl, also written in 1955. His publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, was arrested for publishing it, the book banned as obscene. In 1957, when the case went to trial, you could argue that Ginsberg had became more famous than Walt Whitman. Everyone had to read this salacious poem, even military cadets. (If you look closely at the display above you'll see those cadets dutifully reading the Pocket Poet series No. 4 edition.)

The Beat Museum celebrates its 20th year in operation in 2023, and clearly it is a labor of love. It is mostly a bookstore, with hysterical pulp fiction from the 1950s, a bathtub of books (just $2 each, take your pick) and vintage Playboy magazines wrapped in plastic. For $8 you can go into the museum through a turnstile and see a replica of Jack Kerouac's Hudson car of On the Road fame, as well as my favorite, the single copy of Jesus was a Beatnik, pictured above. (I should pause here and say that Beatnik was not a term favored by the Beats, and was invited by a newspaperman, but became identified with this movement anyway.)

After purchasing my own personal copy of Howl and other Poems (don't worry, the ban was lifted in 1957), we walked across the street to the bookstore that started it all, City Lights Books. Its owner and publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, just died in 2021, at the extraordinary age of 101. Poetry and controversy apparently kept him young.

City Lights Books is both a bookstore and a publisher, with over 200 titles published currently. It has an alcove for Beat books, pictured here, as well a slightly dank basement with even more books. It was doing brisk business when we visited.

We also took a break down the street at the semi-famous Caffe Trieste, where Ginsberg and his pals drank coffee and also where Francis Ford Coppola penned The Godfather.

Today the cafe was celebrating its 67th birtday, with a band wedged in between seats crooning Italian favorites. The lattes were good too.