the waiting game

So this last weekend was the latest outing of my adventure club. We headed up to yosemite early sat morning to get a hike in. I wanted to see if we could hike up to Stanford point for an awesome view of the Yosemite west valley. We were meeting up with K from LA at the bridalveil falls parking lot. After we got there, we thought maybe she was just a little late but after 30 minutes passed, I got a bit worried. Surprisingly only cingular had service in that area so we left a few voicemails and then i started looking at the yosemite map and realized that there were two locations named bridalveil in the yosemite area (bridalveil creek as well). Now I really was fretting that somehow K ended up there on glacier point with no cell phone reception to reach her. It finally dawned on me to send a text message to her phone with our correct location with the hope that her phone may get a moment of reception and receive the message. Finally, an hour and a half later, she appeared and I was so relieved to see her safe and sound! Turns out she had gone to the other location by mistake and the text message helped steer her the right away. yay for technology!

We did a short hike instead (it felt like it was 90 degrees in yosemite valley) just up to inspiration point which still had an awesome view and a good log to lounge on except for the big old ants.

We stayed overnight in mariposa so that we could get to the 9am meet point for our merced river rafting trip on time. But of course I forgot about the ML factor. ML is someone on my dragonboat team who is notoriously late. He is famous for showing up 6 hours late to a dragonboat race in LA because he started driving to LA the morning of the race. As you can the imagine, the coaches were a bit annoyed by this.

So I was not too surprised when I got a phone call from ML sunday morning at 7am saying he had just left the bay area because he overslept (it would take about 3-3.5 hours to reach the mariposa area). Luckily, the rafting company was chill about the delay so we stood around waiting for him - once again, there was poor cell phone reception in the area. Seems to be a trend.

Once we got going though, the river was a blast. They had us get out at one point to scope out the class IV rapids. I would actually say all that bouldering up rocks from the river seemed more dangerous at times than the actual rafting :) We were all keen to do a harder trip next time after this adventure. The below picture is of the class VI rapid that is not raftable by commercial outfitters. They dropped our raft down the rapid and we got into it downstream.