The End of my Summer

Week 10 was one of the best weeks I had this summer, it also managed to be one of the worst weeks I had all summer. This was due to the fact that I spent most of the week saying goodbye to all the great friends and rangers that I was fortunate enough to meet in my time out at Yosemite this summer. Enough of the bad though, the week was packed with a lot of new experiences that I hadn’t been able to do so far this summer.

Monday I started my day off with the investigation services for the NPS. They handle all the cases that call for more of an investigation than rangers can do during their shifts. The first part of my day with them I helped to organize the paperwork for a cold case from the 1980’s which happened in the park. I was able to follow the paperwork from the original report back in the 80’s all the way up to the most recent information they received in 2012. While sorting through the mountain of papers we got a call of someone wanting to talk with an agent about drug sales within the park. We quickly jumped in a car and drove over to the meeting spot they had worked out. After getting the report we drove over to where he claimed there were sales going on and watched it for a bit. We were unable to see anything happening so we went to lunch and I said goodbye to the agents. I then took the afternoon off and jumped in for one of my last times doing a night ride along with the valley shift rangers. The night shift was slow but I had a great time with the ranger who I was riding with.

Tuesday I was on another night shift ride along, although this time I was with a jailer. Yosemite is special because it is one of the few national parks who has a jail on site and will hold subjects who need to be held. They like to let the jailers go out and help with patrols when there is nobody who needs to be watched in the jail. My night spent with them we started it off with a jail tour, from there we went out and did a vehicle inspection. After we got through the vehicle inspection we started our patrol which was slightly busier than the night before. We had reports of drones and some traffic stops, but I had to get an earlier night because I was doing something very physically demanding on Wednesday.

My day Wednesday was with the climbing rangers Yosemite has to make sure that the climbers are being safe and following the rules. To do this they go out and climb routs up the faces and make contacts with climbers when it is safe to do so. We went out and climb a route on the manure pile that the ranger said was a 5.7 difficulty. It took us about 3 hours to climb and we made some great contacts with climbers while we were out there. It was my first time climbing anything like that and I had a great time and learned a lot about rock climbing.

Thursday I traveled up to Tuolumne and had my final ride along up there. Tuolumne is an interesting sub-district because it is mostly road but also has a lot of backcountry work they have to take care of. Majority of the day was spent driving and watching the road, but later on we had a visitor assist and walked the meadow checking permits and fishing licenses.

For my final weekend in the park my roommate Katie, who works preventative search and rescue for the park, and myself decided to go on a backpacking trip and summit Mount Hoffman. This trip would take us up over 10850ft in elevation and let us spend time in the beautiful backcountry. Our trip didn’t start as planned, when trying to get to the trailhead we were starting at it started to rain and the area we were in had a flash flood and the road we had to drive on had a river flowing over it. So to kill time we went over to a nearby lake and got some swimming in. After an hour or so at the lake we tried the road again and were able to start our hike. Our hike in was easy and uneventful and didn’t take too long, what took longer was finding our campsite for the night. We found a beautiful spot that you could see most of the Yosemite backcountry at. We made dinner and got an early night because we wanted to start our hike at 6am the next day. We ended up starting our hike to the summit of Hoffman at 8am, which was a mutual decision while watching the sunrise over the mountains in the distance from our campsite. There wasn’t a formal trail up to the top of Hoffman so we ended up making our own way up there. After a 2-hour trip to go 1.5 miles we summited the mountain and I saw one a view you can’t get anywhere else. I didn’t know this before we started but Hoffman sits in the center of the park and gives you the best view of the vast backcountry. It was the best way to end my time in Yosemite and I was happy that I was able to experience that. On our trip down a large storm cloud started to roll in so we ended up hiking out the entire way back to the car in 2 hours.

I would like to thank Yosemite National Park and everyone I got to work with this summer for making this the best summer I have ever had and helping me to grow as a person and as a prospective ranger.