Supercamp

I have recently embarked on a fair amount of camping in the first national park, Yosemite, and at Itasca State Park, head of the Mississippi River.

Yosemite was huge and totally developed. There was a shuttle bus every 15 minutes to take you everywhere, including the deli, the pizza restaurant, the visitor center, the gift shop, the hotel, or the campgrounds.  So we sort of accidentally decided to hike up 2700 feet over 3.4 miles to the Upper Yosemite Falls. It was grueling and awesome. The best part (other than reaching the top) was running into a bear on the way.  There was a sign in the campground saying “There have been 6 incidents involving bears in this camground this week.” THIS WEEK!  The threat of bears in our campground did not stop us from having a cooking extravaganza every non-raining night.

Itasca was much more chill. Unlike national parks, state parks tend to be rather dead when you go early in the season on a weekday. We were basically the on people staying in the park, which was great because we just used another empty cabin’s fire ring when it turned out our cabin didn’t have one. It also turned out that our cabin didn’t have internet access as promised, so the only work I got done was reading and hiking, but I can’t really complain about that.  We did manage to stand over the Mississippi River, a tradition at Itasca.