"Up and away to Lake Tenaya, another big day, enough for a lifetime".
John Muir – "My First Summer in the Sierra"
The Tenaya lake area in the Tuolumne high country was one of Muir’s favorite destinations in the park. Enthralled equally by the sedate beauty of this region and its geology, Muir wrote extensively about these exposed granite domes. “All is bare, shining granite, suggesting the Indian name of the lake, Pywiack, meaning shining rock. …and huge shining domes on the east, over the tops of which the grinding, wasting, molding glacier must have swept as the wind does to-day”. Buffed by Tuolumne glaciers of the past, the glazed faces of these granite domes were referred by Muir as “polished pavements”, where “the sunshine is at times dazzling, as if the surface were of burnished silver”.
“The rocks, the air, everything speaking with audible voice or silent; joyful, wonderful, everlasting, banishing weariness and sense of time."
After almost three months of COVID-related closure, Yosemite recently opened again in a limited capacity for visitors with prior reserved accommodation in the park or a day pass. Such a day pass was procured on the first day of their sale on recreation.gov after some trepidation-causing snafu that is now a known characteristic of this government website. On the designated day of the day pass, we drove up highway 120 into John Muir’s “University of the Wilderness”. In the park, we first stopped at an unnamed pullover at about 8000 feet elevation. Stepping out of the car, I immediately noticed the unwonted silence – an outturn of much fewer tourists. This place is usually noisy (by wilderness standards) from hordes of clueless rabble and automobiles running up and down the alpine highway. Today, everything was quiet and the quiet was audible. Scores of invisible waterfalls all around were drumming up a soothing white noise. The wind, striking a chorus with fir needles, was gingerly imitating a canary now, or, a mockingbird then. These "joyful, wonderful" melodies indeed banished my weariness and sense of time. Rishabh told me that he had not seen me smile so much in the past few months as on this day.
“Wish I could live, like these junipers, on sunshine and snow, and stand beside them on the shore of Lake Tenaya for a thousand years."
Continuing with the pleasant singularity of an empty Yosemite, there were only three other vehicles parked at Olmsted point – a significant digression from the high tourist season norm of overly packed parking lot here. As we were gearing up for our saunter, a coyote walked past, calmly gawking us. His stone-cold stare was a genteel reminder: he owned the land, we were the visitors. Soon, our shadows were lengthening as the sun dropped down west. We scurried up about 300 feet on a nearby unnamed dome across several ‘polished pavements’, which felt like varnished marble to the touch. Scattered on these pavements were many well-rounded rocks (glacier erratics) and dwarf alpine flowering plants that have secured living rights in granite cracks. Past these charming spring floral displays, from the bald ridge, we saw (as shown above) Mt. Conness hogging the only cloud in the afternoon sky and the line-up of shiny giants in the fading light: Polly dome (9,806 feet), Pywiack dome (8,851 feet), the golden Mariuolumne dome (9,970 feet), Medlicott dome (9,880 feet), and Dozier dome (9,340 feet) from left to right. Nestled in between these behemoths in a cocoon of sturdy junipers was one of the largest lakes in the park – Muir’s beloved lake Tenaya. Everything was in place, not one thing worth bowdlerizing. Rishabh sat down on the narrow ridge to snack. I closed my eyes to invigorate all my other senses. “ –– not a breath of air astir, the lake a perfect mirror reflecting the sky and mountains with their stars and trees and wonderful sculpture, all their grandeur refined and doubled, –– a marvelously impressive picture, that seemed to belong more to heaven than earth”. Everything felt peaceful and all the worries of past months momentarily faded away. In those few moments, I lived many juniper years.
PS: If you haven’t been to Yosemite yet and need a scale to palpate the grandness of this place, then zoom in to find a delivery truck with headlights on by the lake.
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