For Lack of a Better World

On the night of March 28, after the sun had set, we began to say our goodbyes to Yosemite Valley… Or so we thought. As we were exiting, we saw a park visitors apparently dining out of the back of their respective vehicle‘s — trucks, vans, and the like. I pulled over and approached a couple to ask them if they would be car camping. They informed me that car camping was not allowed in the park, that they wouldn’t be staying much later, but that there were people climbing through the night (El Capitán as it would turn out), so it wasn’t uncommon to see cars parked near the base of these mountains throughout the night.

“Come again? There are people climbing these peaks — at night?!”

Oh, I was hooked. I was hooked good now. This night and the subsequent sunrise the following morning would be enough to sweep me off my feet once and for all. Not only had Yosemite given me a rush of life that I had never felt before and bewildered me with vistas the scale of which I could not have imagined, not even with all the Ansel Adam’s portraits in the world at my disposal, but she’d only begun to amaze me.

The plan now, in as much as I had anything resembling a plan, was to stick around a little later to see if I could spot some of the climbers. At best, there would be a whole entire night of awe. At worst, we would be made to leave the park. Either way, I was already here longer than I had planned on being here and I had already experienced more than I had anticipated.

As night wore on, it seemed that we wouldn’t be treated to the site of climbers making their nighttime ascent after all. Their presence would’ve been made obvious by their the lights they would have been wearing and none of those lights could be seen. But the time I spent waiting for any sign of the climbers while we were parked on the valley road near the base of El Capitán gave me time to play with my iPhone 12, a still-recent acquisition at the time, and experiment with the camera’s night mode feature. This would go on for the majority of the night.

Let me tell you, there are a lot of stars in the night sky. Capturing and reviewing the images of the mountains, which came out surprisingly bright and sharp thanks to a big, bright full moon rising over the horizon, became it’s own attraction and Luna and I began to move around the park in search of different compositions. Before

This would carry us through the night for the most part and on to sunrise of our second day, which featured an epic view of the entire valley from Tunnel View, a scenic overlook at the western end of the valley.