Terri Webster Schrandt

Sunday Stills: #Landscapes of the Great Outdoors

On the last day of June, let’s celebrate our favorite landscapes in our backyards, vacation spots, or places we would love to spend more time visiting. Summer is being celebrated in the northern hemisphere, so landscapes that include water are also encouraged.

As the US begins celebrating our Independence Day on July 4th this week, indulge me while I take you on a tour of Yosemite National Park’s amazing landscapes.

“…Like every American, you carry a deed to 635 million acres of public lands. Even if you don’t own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and many other natural treasures.” – John Garamendi, Congressman

If you’re not a US citizen, statistics show that international visitors to Yosemite make up 9% of the annual visits (as of 2022), with total visits averaging 3.6-4 million people. The top countries to visit Yosemite were Germany, Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Yosemite ranked 6 on this list of most visited US national parks. Source

“Yosemite’s 747,956 acres (1,169 square miles), nearly 95 percent of which are designated Wilderness, are home to hundreds of wildlife species and over a thousand plant species. The park’s rich habitats range from thick foothill chaparral to conifer forests to expanses of alpine rock.” Source

Yosemite Valley

When people think of Yosemite National Park, most think of Yosemite Valley. Like any popular national park, multiple systems protect these irreplaceable public lands and habitats.

Mule Deer enjoys the meadows

After over 25 visits to Yosemite, I’ve learned a few things to improve our visits. Driving into any national park is all about timing, which means arriving at the entrance gates early to avoid long lines.

After the intersection at the park entrance into the valley, you can begin to see various vistas peeking through the trees. Once there, the roads become one-way and are eventually closed to auto traffic.

Pine Trees make a window onto the world of Yosemite Valley
View of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley

The first real look is at Inspiration Point, where you can see the iconic domes of Yosemite Valley. On the left, you see the sheer face of El Capitan. Half Dome, one of the most recognized granite domes on the planet, stands about the center of the image. On the right stand Cathedral Rocks, from where Bridalveil Fall drops 620 feet to the Valley floor.

View of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point along Hwy 120
Iconic View of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point

“Yosemite claimed me.” ― Robert Redford

Another turn-off in the Valley, the road takes you through a tunnel, and this view (aptly named “tunnel view”) shows Half Dome from a closer perspective.

Tunnel View of Yosemite Half Dome
Tunnel View of Half Dome

Shortly, El Capitan looms above you to the left. The huge granite monolith stands 3000 feet above the Valley floor, a dream climb for mountaineers and rock climbers. The final elevation to the top is 5200 feet.

El Capitan stands as the gateway into Yosemite Valley
El Capitan stands near the gateway into Yosemite Valley

Several vistas open as you drive through the park, but there is limited parking along the road. From here, you can see Yosemite Falls.

Man and woman in Yosemite Valley
Yo-Selfie in Yosemite Valley
walking path to Yosemite Falls
Path to Yosemite Falls
Yosemite-Falls
Yosemite Falls

There are lovely visitor habitats in the form of campgrounds in Yosemite Valley. The famous Ahwahnee Hotel is a popular tourist destination and costs a mere $500+ per night. This painting of the hotel demonstrates how the hotel’s architecture blends into its habitat.

Painting of The Ahwahnee Hotel
Painting of The Ahwahnee Hotel

Further into the park, you must park your vehicle in the day-use areas and walk or ride the shuttle busses to get around to the various scenic attractions. The free shuttles stop at various locations (you get a free map at the entrance) where you can view Half Dome.

Clouds Hide Half-Dome in early spring
Clouds may obscure Half Dome from this view

Visitors can also drive to Glacier Point to see the best views of Half Dome.

Half Dome View from Glacier Point
Half Dome View from Glacier Point

“The great rocks of Yosemite, expressing qualities of timeless yet intimate grandeur, are the most compelling formations of their kind. We should not casually pass them by, for they are the very heart of the earth speaking to us.” ― Ansel Adams

Yosemite’s High Country–Tuolumne Meadows

“Tuolumne Meadows embodies the high-country of the Sierra Nevada, with its broad sub-alpine meadows and granite domes and peaks. The Tuolumne River, Lyell Fork, and Dana Fork flow through the vast, colorful meadows bursting with seasonal wildflowers. The meadows are surrounded by stands of western white pine, mountain hemlock, and lodgepole pine.” Source

Tuolumne Meadows
Tuolumne Meadows

Most visitors to Yosemite NP come to the Valley and think that is all to see. Summer is the high season, and the temperatures are HOT! I’ve been there among the crowds and traffic. My parents got smart and realized that the less-visited high country of Yosemite was the place to spend two to three weeks each summer. I remember my first time camping in Tuolumne Meadows at age 10 in 1970.

Tuolumne Meadows is located in the high country of Yosemite, and summer daytime temperatures average 70F.

This image (from a plane flight) puts Tuolumne Meadows into perspective compared to Yosemite Valley.

Yosemite Peaks from Afar

Highway 120, which runs through the entire park, also known as Tioga Road, takes you from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows. It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive by automobile.

Google map Tuolumne Meadows
Map of Yosemite and Eastern Sierra Nevadas

A must-see stop before entering into the Tuolumne Meadows area is Olmsted Point. From here, you can get a breathtaking view of Half Dome from a totally different angle.

Half Dome from Olmsted Point
View of Half Dome from Olmsted Point
Half Dome as seen from Olmsted Point
Half Dome as seen from Olmsted Point on Hwy 120

Do you see the deep vertical striations on the rounded part of the dome? To the left of those is the cable route where people “hike” (climb) Half Dome! And not rock climbers—regular people.

In 2013, my daughters and brother tackled the climb up Half Dome. These are my daughters’ photos. My brother is on the right, hiking up. The top of the dome stands at 8,800 feet elevation.

Line of climbers on Half Dome
Line of Climbers on Half Dome
Climbers on Half Dome
Climbers on Half Dome
WHEW! It may take you a day to recuperate from that experience.

After winding your way from Olmsted Point through the Lodgepole pine forests, you soon see Tenaya Lake. A great spot with a beach!

Lake Tenaya, Yosemite National Park
Lake Tenaya, Yosemite National Park

From here to the heart of Tuolumne Meadows, the Lembert Dome parking lot and trailhead are a mere 14 minutes by car. This view awaits you…

Lembert Dome under Mt Dana Tuolumne Meadows
Mt Dana looms over Lembert Dome in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite NP

Lembert Dome is a recognizable dome in Tuolumne Meadows. One can walk a ways up (just above the treeline). The ranger-led sunset hikes from here are legendary.

Lembert Dome
Lembert Dome

These are the same hikers (my daughters and brother) who tackled Half Dome that summer. Walking up Lembert Dome was an easy hike compared to that.

Family enjoying a hike on mountain
Sunset Walk on Lembert Dome, Yosemite

Hikers can choose to walk around the back of Lembert Dome for a moderately easy one-mile hike. Hiking to the top of Lembert Dome places you at 9400 feet in elevation.

woman top of mountain
Younger me at the top of Lembert Dome

This was my longed-for summer habitat.

“I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.” ― Ansel Adams

This is the east entrance to the park, boasting an elevation of 9,945 feet. Walking in this elevation for a few minutes can take your breath away.

Gateway to Yosemite
Tioga Pass Entrance to Yosemite Nat’l Park

I hope you enjoyed the whirlwind tour of Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows. It looked this way during the 2020 pandemic and the last time I visited. You couldn’t drive into the park unless you had a pre-purchased permit that year.

Tioga Pass Entrance Masked

In early August, my family and I will finally scatter my mother’s ashes in her beloved Tuolumne Meadows. After record-breaking snowfall in 2023-24, the campground and most amenities at Tuolumne’s 8600 feet elevation remain closed in 2024. We’ll all be staying in Lee Vining, near Mono Lake. Stay tuned for more Yosemite pics from this trip.

“The wildlife and its habitat cannot speak, so we must and we will.” – Theodore Roosevelt

red white blue swatch

Sharing for Brian’s Last on the Card, Johnbo’s CellPic Sunday, Lens-Artists: Habitat, and Marsha’s Wednesday Quotes.

Sunday Stills Photo Challenge Reminders

The Sunday Stills weekly-themed photo challenge is easy to join. You have all week to share and link your post.

  • Remember to title your blog post a little differently than mine.
  • Please create a new post for the theme or link a recent one.
  • Entries for this theme can be posted all week.
  • Tag your post “Sunday Stills.”
  • Don’t forget to create a pingback to this post so that other participants can read your post.
  • I also recommend adding your post’s URL to the comments.

I will leave you with this golden skyscape for Brian’s Last on the Card challenge.

Golden Sunset

The July themes are ready to view on my Sunday Stills Photo Challenge Page, which is updated monthly. Please join me on July 7th for the monthly color challenge (red/white/blue).

awesome week bitmoji

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139 comments

  3. Great and enchanting blog post Terri. I really love the views there and if I was an American, I would visit that Yosemite Valley Park😀🔥🔥🌳🌳🌲🌺🌻🌸

    Anyways, this is also a long post. Take care And have a blessed Sunday😊👏

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    • Thank you for reading, Mthobisi. I hope you can make a trip the the US someday to see a few of the US national parks. Photos don’t substitute for standing in the alpine meadow and gazing up 3000 feet at the monoliths of Yosemite Valley.

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  4. Yosemite is spectacular! Have you read the book “High Country” by Nevada Barr? It takes place there and is a great read. There are other books in the same series that are equally good. Some of them were a little too scary for me…they are very realistic and all takes place in National Parks and State Parks around the US.

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  5. Yosemite was one my first western National Park visits, and I was blown away, Terri. It has a special place in my memory. Your pictures are amazing, and yet, I think, the grandeur is hard to truly capture. Photos are a great tease to get us there to stand in the midst of it and feel the majesty ourselves. Awesome post.

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      • So true! I was just up in the San Juans and even the panorama shots look “meh.” Of course that’s not how your photos look, but it’s so hard to capture how stunning these places are, how huge and enveloping. Just gotta get there somehow.

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  18. Oh my gosh, Terri, you have outdone yourself here. From the darling photo at the beginning through each spectacular view, I felt the awe. I’ve been there, and I love the photos, but somehow these display the spectacular professionally. I hope that your August trip goes well. May your mother rest in peace and in the beauty of God’s surroundings.

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  19. Hi Terri, it was great to see all your wonderful photos of parks and peaks in your part of the world. You’ve captured some amazing landscapes. Yosemite is one area I’m keen to visit one day!
    I’ve actually managed to link up with my Norfolk Island post sharing some great landscapes from this side of the world.

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  23. We have never been to Yosemite but we have it on our list. Thanks for sharing your beautiful pictures of the park.
    I hope to share a landscape or two in my post tomorrow.
    Happy July!

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    • Happy July, thanks, Nancy! Yosemite is a must see. Check websites for drive through permits, which is new in 2024. But if you visit in fall or winter while you’re in AZ, I don’t think the permits are required. Still have to pay the entrance fee like all NPs. I always look forward to your posts and I bet you have some fun independence day tablescapes too!

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  24. Terri,

    I know first-hand what you mean about arriving early to avoid the lines. Our first attempt to visit Yosemite was canceled because of wildfires. Our second attempt was during COVID and we learned too late that we needed a permit to visit by car. We ended up taking a shuttle to the Visitor Center in the Valley and could only walk around. Thanks so much for showing us much of what we missed. I want to go back. I did capture an image of the Falls. Have a great week! Joe

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    • 2020 was a bad year for travel for obvious reasons, Joe. 2024- Yosemite is following what Glacier NP is doing–requiring pre-bought permits to drive in. My family member already purchased theirs for our trip in August.

      Wow, your greenish-sepia-toned image of Yosemite Falls is fabulous! Must have been sometime between April and June for that much water the be flowing! Hope you enjoy a safe and fun 4th!

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  26. I love these Terri. I bought a National Park Passport book in April. I hope to get to more than a few. Not sure I’m going to get a post up this week….I haven’t had time to sit and focus 😦 I may still try Tuesday morning…we’ll see. Otherwise. hopefully next week. I’m always inspired by your photos and the words you choose to go with them. I still need to catch up on comments from the last few weeks. yikes

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    • Thank you, Kirstin! No worries no hurry to post anything. Next week is the color challenge if you want to wait.

      I was happy to share a lot of new (old) images of Yosemite. This August will likely be my last time visiting there. Like you, I want to see more NP, and we have a few awesome ones in our own state!

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  29. Thanks for the great trip through the Yosemite National Park, Terri. I’m pleased to say that we’ve been there, driven through the park, and stayed overnight. I am trying to remember the name of the hotel we stayed at, but it had a very ‘log cabin’ style, and I remember thinking how pretty it must look in December. It’s also the only time we saw a bear, although he/she didn’t hang around long enough for me to get a picture. We were in the car at the time.

    Hiking up Lembert Dome looked like a real challenge. I can only imagine how my legs would have ached the following day.

    Have a great Fourth of July. That day, we have a general election, so I’ll be counting ballot papers!

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    • Maybe you stayed at the Curry campground, Hugh? Or the Ahwahnee? Most amenities are open during the winter in Yosemite Valley but roads to the high country are closed. We used to see lots of bears in the 1970s before the creation of the bear lockers in Tuolumne. One even crawled into the back of our van and sat on my sleeping bag (in Tuolumne Mdws)!

      Lembert Dome is the much smaller dome in Tuolumne. I can’t imagine that hike of Half Dome. It’s a 12 hour ordeal I’m told.

      We’re looking forward to a nice 4th. Lots of illegal but shall I say fun fireworks in our neighborhood.

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      • I asked my partner, but he couldn’t remember what the hotel was called either, Terri. We’d driven there from Mammoth, as the hotel there was awful. It was a lucky find.

        I’m unsure how I would have reacted with a bear crawling into the back of my van. I guess it was looking for food. It must have been an incredible sight watching it, though.

        Enjoy the fireworks.

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      • Sounds like you had a good Yosemite experience, Hugh. If you drove up from Mammoth you might have stayed in the Tuolumne Meadows lodge! Nice place! All the amenities there are closed this summer due the last winter’s big snow. We’ll only be driving there for the day. Enjoy your week!

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  30. I love the Tuolumne Meadows photo! My mother visited most of the U.S.’s National Parks and felt that Yosemite was the most beautiful. I scattered her ashes in a flowering meadow in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, alongside her favorite hiking trail.

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    • Hi Jennifer, that is a lovely way to remember your mom. Our moms had a lot in common! There is a fishing spot in Tuolumne Meadows my parents took us to off the beaten track. We’ll scatter her ashes there in August. Thanks for sharing that.

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  37. That was not just a whirlwind perspective on this national park Terri- it was very comprehensive! I have never been there, but I did recognize most of the iconic places that you have shown us, especially El Capitan and Half Dome. That’s amazing that you have been here 25 times … no wonder you are an expert!

    The landscape, no matter where you took the photos was magnificent and we humans are so small when we look around at the enormity of the nature experience here.

    The quotes were perfect … all of them.

    Here is my landscape post which pales in comparison to what you have seen at this venue. My landscape perspective pertains to some of the recent changes to the Detroit River shoreline parks and a few critters I saw along the way too.

    Rambling along the River’s Edge … and beyond.

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    • Thank you, Linda, It was supposed to be this quick short post with a few pics, then poof it morphed into a story I had to tell, LOL! I shared a lot of new images that hadn’t seen the light of day and my daughter sent me her Half Dome hike shots from 2013.

      I have July’s themes set up now which may correspond to the next Lens-Artist themes in July.

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      • I start out that way on some posts too Terri. 🙂 In fact my post today I thought I’d just do the shoreline pictures of landscape changes and call it “Addition and Subtraction” and keep the critter shots I took that day for another time. Nope, I ended up adding them too, making it a long, picture-laden post.

        I saw your July Challenges and I forgot that the 7th would be the second week. I already have my red/white & blue pics. I will use my baby robin pics for the Oddball post. I’m going to be in a 5K that I will walk the same time as a fellow blogger in Wales will be walking to raise funds for a guide dog. Only Zena is walking 11 miles daily (without her current guide dog, just her cane and her daughter helping her). So I may use that for the Parks Challenge or maybe Afloat as it will be several trips to the River where I’ll see freighters and kayakers. 🙂

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      • Thanks Terri. I need to get more info on Zena, the Welsh blogger and her five-day, 55-mile walk. That is brutal. I feel badly for her that when her current seeing eye dog, Munch, is forced to retire due to his age, there will be no new dog to take his place for at least a year. It takes a lot of money/time to train new guide dog, so no seamless transition for Zena and she’ll go back to using her cane on public transportation to/from work.

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  40. It has been a couple of years since I’ve visited Yosemite, so I really appreciated your tour! Now that I’m retired and can pretty much travel when I want, I don’t think I’d ever try going in the summer… crowds and heat: yikes! I also don’t think I’d hike up Half Dome. I’ll leave that to braver souls.

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  42. What a wonderful post Terri! Having spent a little time at Yosemite I very much enjoyed your “tour”. I also loved the info about Tuolumne, which I’d not heard of but looks lovely. What a perfect place to honor your mother who clearly shares responsibility for the love of nature you share with your daughters and brother!

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    • Many thanks, Tina. I’m secretly glad Tuolumne isn’t as well known. Luckily it will never be like the Valley. Fewer amenities but their campground and the lodge are both quite wonderful. Mom will be happy her remains will add to the soil there.

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  44. Terri, thank you so much for this incredible tour of Yosemite through the years! Thanks for sharing your wonderful memories of this special place. Your landscapes are stunning. I love the views from Tuolumne Meadows and the images of hikers going up Half Dome. When we camped in the Wawona Campground in 2007 we lucked out on being there the day they opened up the drive to Glacier Point. Happy Independence Day!

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  57. Yellowstone is such a beautiful place. I can’t imagine why I waited over 70 years before visiting it for the first time. Your photos remind me of the many places we visited, and I hope to make it there again.

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