Hiking Trail
Hikers will start at the Happy Isles trail head in Yosemite Valley. Travel is generally East-South-East. This is one of the shortest (1.3 mi/2.1 km)—though in places steep—and most popular trails in Yosemite. The trail is mostly shaded and is progressive in incline until it reaches the base of the waterfall where mist sprays onto the hikers.
Depending on the time of the year hikers can be totally drenched by the time they pass the mist from the waterfall. The final 15 minutes of the trail is a very steep climb up rocks to the top of the waterfall. Once atop the falls there is a pool of water called the Emerald Pool around which hikers lounge and rest. There is also a 20 degree slope of rock with water flowing into the pool called the Silver Apron.
Swimming above a waterfall is against park rules and can carry with it a great deal of risk: rocks are slippery, and strong undercurrents exist that may not be visible from the surface. Nevertheless, tourists have been swept over Yosemite Valley's waterfalls to their deaths. Though warnings are clearly posted to stay out of the water, more than a dozen people have died in the last decade by entering the water above Vernal Fall, including the Silver Apron and Emerald Pool.
One person died in May 2007 after hopping from rock to rock around Vernal Fall. Three people died after being swept over the falls in the same manner on July 19, 2011.
Read more about this topic: Vernal Fall
Famous quotes containing the words hiking and/or trail:
“The westerner, normally, walks to get somewhere that he cannot get in an automobile or on horseback. Hiking for its own sake, for the sheer animal pleasure of good condition and brisk exercise, is not an easy thing for him to comprehend.”
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than that a musquash leaves in similar places, where he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)