Not much happening…

“It’s been a quiet week in Yosemite Valley…

Fall has sorta hung around, drifting up and down the valley like a teenager at the mall. Down at Degnan’s Deli, the usual crowd lingers around the coffee urn, talking weather and road work. Coffee is a ritual, more to warm hands that really should be a lot colder, but aren’t. The black oaks on El Cap Meadow have all pretty much gone naked, leaves layered at the roots, while a bear snuffles for acorns.

Half Dome does her usual dance of the seven veils in the afternoons, but mostly she’s just practicing, because there aren’t any tourists gathered on the Ahwahnee Meadow to watch in the fading light.

Talk meanders toward how few hours there are to work, and the employees are still polite, no pushing or shoving or loud claims of seniority for those precious few hours of work. That may change if Badger Pass doesn’t get enough snow to open on December 16th. We eye each other, speculating on who’s senior, who needs the money most.

Word circulates slower now, because there just aren’t as many sets of ears or mouths to pass it along. What used to circulate in a matter of hours now takes a couple of days. So it was rather late that the story of how two NPS rangers saved the life of a hiker outside the park at Saddlebag Lake found its way to me.

We’re ready for winter, but winter is taking a long time to come. Warm days are in the forecast, which is a blessing for the road crews. It’s bad enough when you’re standing in the shadow of the south wall down by the Bridal Veil Falls pullout, and they don’t need a windchill below freezing.

Nights will be colder, though, and my Crocs will have to be put away in favor of my shearling boots for my nightly walk to the Loft for dinner. My feet are still cold, almost as cold as my leftover artichoke and pesto pizza.

Curry Village has gone pretty quiet. We still get a few minutes of direct sunlight in the mornings, just enough to tease us with a smidgeon of warmth as we go about our housekeeping jobs. The front desk gets more requests for extra blankets this time of year, even in heated tent cabins. Whole sections of tents have been stripped for closure, and so there are stacks of blankets in our office, sorted by size and color.

There was no apple picking this year at Curry Village orchard. This annual event is meant to deprive the local bears of the temptation to break into the cars that are parked beneath those ancient apple trees. But this year it was foregone in favor of giving the bears more natural food. We’ve had a lot of bears in the valley, mostly because of the lack of food in the highcountry due to the lack of snow last winter. A stroll through the orchard parking lot shows no apples on the ground. The bears have eaten them all.

Bears in Yosemite don’t hibernate. They’ve learned that because of the number of visitors who don’t follow the rules, they can survive winter without having to bed down. I wonder if the new bears will do the same thing, or if they will learn from their valley cousins.

In the mean time, I’ve cleaned my car of every scrap of bear temptation.

And that’s the news from Yosemite Valley, where all the men are climbers, all the women are better climbers, and all of the bears are above average.