By Angus Phillips
Sunday, May 25, 2008

FISH CAMP, Calif.

Staying at a place with a name like this, you'd expect the fly rod to be the first thing unpacked. Five days in, it's still in its case in the trunk of the rental car.

It's a record hot spring in Yosemite National Park, three hours' drive from San Francisco. The mercury in the San Joaquin Valley topped 100 degrees four straight days last week, and snowmelt from the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada is running off in torrents.

The tallest waterfall in North America, the Falls of the Yosemite, thunders nearly a half-mile down sheer granite cliffs, sending up showers of spray on gusts of wind created by the force of the tumbling water. "The waterfalls are peaking early this year," said a park ranger monitoring traffic. "This is about as good as it gets."

High water may be fun to look at, but it's tough to tackle. On the South Fork of the Merced River, a rocky trail forges upstream several miles from a little place called Swinging Bridge. There are trout in there somewhere, for sure, but only a madman would venture to try them.

The whitewater roars, mile after mile, too powerful even for experts in kayaks to test. The creek stays clear, originating as it does in barren, rocky land, but the place is empty, unfishable, unapproachable, as are swollen creeks throughout the park in this blazing hot spring.

Fish Camp lies a mile or so from the south entrance to Yosemite. It's hardly a town, just a patchwork of cabins, hotels and a small general store serving traffic bound for one of the nation's iconic nature reserves. We came for the wedding of an old friend's son and his bride, who wrote their own vows and stated them loud and clear in a stand of towering cedars on a sun-kissed afternoon.

That was last weekend. Four days later, we've walked these hills and valleys to exhaustion, joining the throngs at the bases of Bridal Veil Falls and Yosemite Falls to be deafened by the falling water and standing awestruck at the base of El Capitan, staring at human figures the size of ants with little helmets on, painstakingly crawling up the sheer, hot granite, hanging by strings over 1,000-foot drops.

"You need to drive out to Glacier Point tonight," said a man in Bermuda shorts tracking the climbers' progress with binoculars. "You can see the whole valley lit up in the moonlight from there, with little tiny specks of light on the face of El Cap where the climbers are hanging in their bivvy sacks."

It often takes two days to get to the top, he said, leaving the rock-hoppers to spend the dark hours in mid-climb in makeshift hammocks anchored to the rock, swinging in the wind. It makes you cringe just thinking about it.

What to do if you can't fish or paddle through all that high water and aren't crazy enough to tackle El Capitan? Ansel Adams, the pioneering photographer, found plenty to occupy him here, as did 19th century naturalist John Muir, whose efforts led to the creation of the nation's third national park in 1890. Wrote Muir: "No temple made with hands can compare to the Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life."

Yosemite is about as big as Rhode Island, but the heart of it is a narrow canyon carved by glaciers thousands of years ago where the major attractions are clustered. To get to the seven-mile-long, mile-wide Yosemite Valley, you drive through a dark, chilly tunnel blasted through the mountainside and emerge to a scene that seems crafted in heaven.

The valley stretches east toward towering Half Dome, a barren outcrop of stark, pale granite, with picturesque Bridal Veil Falls tumbling down off to the right and the rumbling Merced River snaking through the bottomland, white with foam. The valley's sides are nearly vertical, 3,000 feet high, dotted with lesser waterfalls and stands of soaring pines; the peaks are craggy and darkly forbidding.

The price of all this beauty is popularity, of course, and it pays to look up at the peaks, not down at the traffic. A world-class wilderness this close to major West Coast population centers is bound to be crowded and Yosemite is, even midweek.

Between the motorcycles, camper vans, rental cars and tour buses spewing exhaust, there's not much space to stretch out, at least in the valley. One morning the wait to get through the gates into the park was 30 minutes, and the entrance to a famous grove of giant sequoia trees was closed for lack of parking. And school's not even out yet.

At times like that, you drag out the maps and find the little trails that go where most folks won't. Willow Creek near Bass Lake was worth tackling, we were told by a pair of mountain bikers from Orange County, so we set out one morning.

You never know what you're going to find. That day, nature conspired to create the ladybug hatch of the century, with millions of the tiny orange critters emerging from the pine needles and moss under foot. I felt like a mass murderer just walking the trail. "Don't worry," said my son. "I just read somewhere that by weight, there's more ants than people in the world. There are plenty of bugs to go around."

Halfway up Willow Creek, bushwhacking through the scrub oak and pine, we rounded a bend to find a hugely fat, tattooed man stretched out on a rock, stark naked and sunning himself. The women recoiled in mock horror.

Oh well, that's California for you, and that's nature. It's not always perfect.