The wettest winter in Northern California’s recorded history had to go somewhere. In April 2017, it was going over every cliff in Yosemite Valley at once.
The winter that preceded our trip had been exceptional by any measure. Oroville Dam’s main spillway had failed under the pressure of months of rain, its emergency overflow — a dirt embankment never intended for sustained use — eroding badly enough to threaten the dam’s integrity and force the evacuation of thousands of homes downstream. Our backyard in El Dorado Hills had grown its own small cascade, water carving new paths down the hillside after every storm. The Sierra Nevada had received more snow than it had in decades.
Standing in that and thinking about Yosemite — the falls, the granite, the valley floor — the conclusion was obvious. It must be extraordinary right now. A few weeks before spring break, I found one last room at the Yosemite Valley Lodge. We were going.
The Drive In
We came in on Highway 49, the old Gold Rush road that follows the Sierra Nevada’s western foothills in long curves and narrow stretches without guardrails — the kind of road that rewards confidence and punishes a wandering eye — the view straight down steep hillsides into country that sees almost no traffic. The countryside was deeply, unreasonably green — months of rain having saturated everything — the rolling hills brighter than California usually allows itself to be in April. We stopped briefly in Columbia, a preserved Gold Rush town that deserved more time than I had to give it that day, before the road closed ahead forced a detour south that added an hour to the drive. We arrived in the valley at midday.
The boys looked up. That was the right response.
Water Everywhere
Yosemite in the wettest year on record is a different place than Yosemite in late summer. The valley was loud with it — not just the falls you expect, but water coming from faces of rock that are normally dry, streams running hard through the meadows, the Merced running full and cold through the valley floor. From our room at the lodge, Upper Yosemite Falls dropped 1,430 feet in a single free fall directly in front of us, its roar audible through the walls, the lower cascade visible below it before the water reached the valley floor and continued to the river.
The first afternoon, the boys set out with Aaron to explore on their own — I stayed back, a migraine having made the decision for me — a seven-mile hike under Half Dome to Mirror Lake and back, which they reported was more pond than lake but worth the walk regardless. They returned with news of a discovery: a small branch they’d hidden behind a particular boulder near Mirror Lake, stashed in a specific spot they planned to retrieve the next day. The object itself was not the point. The knowing where it was — that was the point.
Rain Day
The second morning brought clouds low in the valley and steady rain, the granite walls disappearing into mist, the cliffs reduced to shapes and suggestions. Yosemite in fog is its own experience — the scale doesn’t diminish, it just becomes atmospheric rather than legible, the park quieter than usual, the sounds of water filling the space the crowds had vacated.
We retrieved the treasure — the branch, exactly where they’d left it — then walked the forest trails and along the river until the cold pushed us toward the Ahwahnee.
The Ahwahnee was completed in 1927, designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood in a vocabulary he called “mountain architecture” — a hybrid of Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, and Native American motifs, built in granite, concrete, and native materials to sit within the valley rather than assert itself against it.
Getting a lunch table on short notice was possible only because the weather had thinned the crowd. We dried out next to one of the massive stone fireplaces in the Great Lounge, 24-foot ceilings overhead with hand-stenciled beams, leaded glass windows diffusing the gray light outside. The dining room’s 30-foot vaulted ceiling, its log beam trusses carrying the full width of the hall, framed full-height windows that looked out onto the mist-softened cliffs.
Hot French onion soup. The right kind of afternoon.
By the time we left, the rain had softened and the clouds had begun to break — Half Dome making a slow, partial appearance from behind its shroud, the dusting of snow on the peaks above the valley suddenly visible in the clearing light.
The Final Morning
Clear sky on the last day, cold enough to keep the frost on the cliffside around the falls. We walked to the footbridge below Lower Yosemite Falls in the early light — the falls full and crashing, the spray catching the sun — and found a rainbow at the base of the cascade, arcing up from where the slushy water met the rock below.
The meadow beyond the falls opened up the full scale of the valley: Upper and Lower Falls together, the cliffs running up to the rim on either side, light moving across the granite faces as the sun climbed. We walked through snow still piled in sections of the trail before the meadow opened everything up. The kind of morning that makes two days of rain feel, in retrospect, like preparation.
Leaving the valley, we drove the loop slowly, stopping at El Capitan — its sheer vertical face rising above the Merced in a way that photographs compress into something too flat to be believed — and at Tunnel View, where the full valley panorama resolves itself in a single frame: El Capitan on one side, Bridalveil Fall on the other, Half Dome in the distance. The wettest winter had delivered the falls at full volume, every one of them running, some that hadn’t run in years reappearing entirely. The valley looked the way it must have looked before the century of drought years that had become the new normal.
Coarsegold
We were headed south on Highway 41 toward the Central Valley — on to Hermosa Beach, Disneyland still ahead — when Coarsegold appeared on the map and hunger made the decision, the way it tends to on long drives with kids in the back seat. It’s a small gold mining town in the hills, Chukchansi ancestral land for thousands of years before the 1850s brought miners and the infrastructure that followed. Tiny huts from the gold rush era still line the main cluster of buildings, most of them converted to small shops.
The Wild Fig Kitchen had opened recently, named for the fig tree already on the property, its menu built around fresh ingredients and regional produce. The food was better than the setting suggested it would be — quality sourcing, careful preparation, the kind of lunch that earns its detour. The room respected the character of the place without performing nostalgia about it. We hadn’t planned to stop here. The detour from the road closure earlier in the trip had put us on this highway. We wouldn’t have found it otherwise.
Some of the best stops aren’t on the itinerary. They’re what the route offers when the route changes.
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