Salt Lake City & Yosemite

09.05.2010 - 14.05.2010 12 °C
View Ben's World Tour on BensWorld's travel map.

Leaving Yellowstone National Park, the first stop we made was Craters of the Moon - a National Monument of black volcanic landscape. Although still fairly cold, we left the snow of Yellowstone behind. Unfortunately we missed a visit to Grand Teton National Park because the snow was so bad!

The next night we stayed in Salt Lake City. This is the home of the Mormon church and our tour guide said we should go and have a tour of the temple. Luckily I wasn't converted while there, but they tried very hard! We were staying at a campsite right in the centre of the city, which was great, and it had a cool little grungy heavy rock bar just outside. A few beers were had by all...

The next leg of our trip was the longest driving day - 13 hours!! Its a long time to be stuck in a small minibus! We were travelling from Salt Lake City to Lake Tahoe and on the way stopped at Reno, a city that wants to be Las Vegas, but is failing...its a small city and was a bit tacky, with some small casinos and plenty of walk-in wedding chapels!

So we finally arrived at Lake Tahoe and Nick had found us a 4 bedroom lodge to stay in (as it was snowing again when we arrived!). It was also Sam's birthday, so we had a nice meal and cake! The next morning there was snow on the beach beside the lake, and amazing sunshine - a little bit bizarre!

After a short drive the next day, we arrived at Yosemite National Park. I think this was somewhere that we were all looking forward to and it was the last big destination on our trip together. The scenery at Yosemite was stunning! Below are just a few of the photos I took that day. Daz and I managed to fit in 3 hikes in one day, Mirror Lake, Vernal Falls and up to Lower Yosemite Falls. On the last one we climbed 1000m up and then 1000m back down again. It was a good day of hiking!