Yosemite Valley

Last February, Stainer was still living in his room above the lounge when he saw Carol and Julie Sund and Silvina Peloso arriving in their bright red Pontiac Grand Prix rental.

The trio of tourists had spent a long day admiring El Capitan, Half Dome, and other granite monoliths, ice skating in Curry Village in the Yosemite Valley, and taking snapshots along the Merced River Gorge.

So those are some of the biggest draws inside of the park.

El Capitan, known for some of the most epic free climbing runs ever.

You have Half Dome, which is very prominent.

When you come into the park, you can't miss it.

And then, of course, Curry Village down in Yosemite Valley where all the action takes place.

The girls were happy, remembers Carol's father, Francis Carrington, who spoke to them on the telephone that day.

Seems to me that there sure are a lot of those.

With the murders in Yosemite Valley, the dual nature of the wilderness, the threat lurking behind the beauty, came again into unnerving focus.

By last spring, the FBI was centering its investigation on two suspects from Modesto, ex-convicts and methamphetamine users who had violent run-ins with the police in the days after the Sons and Peloso vanished.

Michael Larwick and his half-brother Eugene Dykes were both being held in the Modesto County Jail, Larwick, on charges of shooting a Modesto police officer, Dykes, for drug possession and parole violations.

In the dead of winter, when snow dusts the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the night temperature drops below freezing, the Cedar Lodge is often nearly deserted, with most of the staff on hiatus until spring.

Last February, Stainer was still living in his room above the lounge when he saw Carol and Julie Sund and Silvina Peloso arriving in their bright red Pontiac Grand Prix rental.

The trio of tourists had spent a long day admiring El Capitan, Half Dome, and other granite monoliths, ice skating in Curry Village in the Yosemite Valley, and taking snapshots along the Merced River Gorge.

So those are some of the biggest draws inside of the park.

And I think in business, you can always do more.

During my California springs and summers, I spent most of my days in the high Sierras in Yosemite Valley working as a river guide and a rock climbing instructor.

I loved those jobs.

But unfortunately, they didn't pay that well.

which sort of pointed to this direction.

You know, one of the famous photographs he took of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.

You see the cliff and the beautiful landscape and In reality, he took this next to a parking lot filled with cars that were part of what has become this traffic jam of people seeing the valley and turning the Yosemite Valley into this very problematic tourist attraction.

And he sort of tilted his camera up.

So that you didn't see the cars, you didn't see the traffic, you didn't see the problems, all you saw was the beautiful landscape.

Maybe, yes, it is an argument for conservation.

Let's keep things beautiful in national parks.

But even there, there were contradictions because while he was taking those photographs, the indigenous people to whom the Yosemite Valley and the Sierras were home were expelled.

We always like to look at our mountain regions before we take a look at those temperatures.

There's Yosemite Conservancy, and your temperature is at Yosemite Valley, 83 degrees.

Those higher elevations, Hume Lake, 72, 67 for Huntington Lake.

Those overnight lows will be nice and cool in the 40s.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, if all the mules are hiking up to little Yosemite Valley to pack out everyone's literal poop [laughs]-

That's true

... why can't we use them to, to carry our things if that makes it a little bit more accessible?