Lessons in eeriness from an odd trip to Yosemite

Finding the sublime in the smoky haze

The smoke gave El Capitan a ghostly feel. (All images unmanipulated, and ©John Clayton)

I arrived in Yosemite National Park on the eve of Labor Day weekend. I had no hotel reservation. It was 2022, the height of the post-pandemic national park tourism boom. I was traveling with my dog, and dogs are not allowed on park trails. But temperatures were expected to exceed 90 degrees, meaning that I couldn’t leave her alone in the car for very long. In short, there were lots of reasons that I shouldn’t have even bothered to show up.

The reasons to show up included John Muir, Ansel Adams, Frederick Law Olmsted, Steve Mather, and Tie Sing. They and other heroes of Yosemite play big roles in my writing. I hadn’t been to the park in many years, and it felt worthwhile to ponder each of them in their natural environment.

A speaking engagement brought me pretty close, and I had a day or two to spare. So even though I couldn’t go on a long backcountry hike, even though the road to Glacier Point was closed for construction, even though the Mariposa Grove was bus-in only and thus totally off-limits to a traveler-with-dog, I took the plunge.

The previous day, I’d seen two plumes of smoke, one far to the north, another far to the south. These were tiny, relatively controlled wildfires. And as I crossed the high country on the Tioga Road early that morning, the plumes were gone; I felt fortunate that the skies were clear.

But as I descended into the park’s namesake valley, the atmosphere became ever more ethereal. (Either that, or my vision was failing!) In a phenomenon known to Yosemite insiders—but not to me—smoke will often gather in the valley of an otherwise-clear summer morning. The deeper I went into the valley, the more beautiful the scenery became, but the harder it became to see. I later learned that at some point, often by noon, the smoke will dissipate and you can actually see the scenery you came for.

Having arrived, I made the best of it. I knew that in a crowded national park, picnic areas are generally scenic spots empty at non-mealtimes. I made a couple such stops. I went out to the river. I walked its banks like a fisherman might, except that I was looking not for fish but for atmosphere.

I found it, in spades. In the smoke, the valley’s famous cliffs didn’t stand out in front of me, but instead lingered, ghostly. It was like fog except more colorful, with sunshine highlighting browns and reds and golds of the smoke. On a foggy day you tense up against the wet chill, but this was warm and peaceful and my pores opened to the beauty.

I took some pictures. Later, I drove around a bunch more roads, found a shady parking spot, checked out the famous architecture, and walked to some of the best-known views of the prettiest waterfalls. It felt like a special place, a good place.

I wished I could have seen it as Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson did, in the 1870s, with vast, empty meadows. But the smoke that made the cliffs gentle and eerie similarly obscured the cars and roads. I felt like I was visiting a foreign country, or a different planet where your senses are all discombobulated. Was that cliff really there, or had I entered an exquisite painting? Were these tourists next to me, or just mirages? How could such huge blocks of igneous rock feel so lightweight and temporary?

Living in a time of religious change, Emerson and Muir tended to use the word Nature where others would use God. They capitalized Nature, where others would capitalize God. Their culture talked a lot about the sublime, the sense of awed powerlessness, of eerie humility, one felt in the face of God’s or Nature’s greatest work.

Thanks to the smoke, I felt it that day myself.