We're going on a bear hunt

Take me back to Yosemite.

So I'd always been a bit of a snob about America.. fat people, greasy food, gigantic cars, etc. But when given the opportunity to hike around Yosemite for two weeks, it wasn't something I was going to miss! 15 of us from Northumbrian UOTC spent eight days hiking in Yosemite National Park, California, with a few days either side to spend exploring San Francisco. So. Much. Fun.

Sea Lions at Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco

San Francisco was a pretty cool city. We did the usual touristy thing of visiting Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39, seeing the famous Sea Lions (I could've watched them sleeping and spooning and swimming and fighting for hours.. so cute) and walking along the seafront. I then felt unhealthily full after eating a salad for the first time in my life (I'm so ready for a break from American diners!).

Even after having watched The Princess Diaries and the hill/Mustang/tour bus scene an unhealthy number of times, I hadn't realised how many hills there would be in the city! They did mean we found a lot of awesome viewpoints over the city and the bay whilst exploring the street grid, though. It also turns out San Francisco isn't the best place to play frisbee - something we found out after it had been thrown straight off Pier 41 and into the bay.. 

Pretty successful vegetarian BBQ, I'd say!
Abbie, Me, Esther, Erin

Our hike began at White Wolf campground, pretty much in the middle of the park. We'd planned a massive team barbecue on a fire pit in our camping spot before the hike properly began, but somehow the meat got left on the bus.. so we ended up sharing around the vegetarian food, making do with mushrooms and peppers and even making sweet potato fries on the grill. I also got to practise my new favourite skill of cutting up a watermelon (I practised this a lot in India and feel like I've nailed it now). The food set the tone nicely for the rest of the trip though, with our allocated food adding up to a measly 800kcals per day. The excitement and calorie overload we experienced when the two hiking teams met up for visitor centre burgers on day five made us all feel pretty queasy - I won't be forgetting (or repeating) that experience in a hurry! 

Yosemite's strict park rules meant that our group had to split up into two teams, walking and camping completely separately from each other. Our team's route took us in a big semicircle, averaging about 12 miles per day and often making steep ascents into AMS territory. We started off heading north into the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River, spending one night camped next to a shimmering blue-green lagoon at the edge of the gushing river - a perfect spot for a swim and some waterside yoga. We then pushed on upwards and east out of the canyon, working our way to the col behind Volunteer Peak at 10,481ft and down into Matterhorn Canyon, then Virginia Canyon, along steep trails with switchbacks galore, and not many chances to fill our rapidly emptying water bottles. California has been in a state of drought for the past four years, and a drought State of Emergency has now been declared; many riverbeds are bone dry and wildfires commonly sweep fast through the grassland and forest. We did manage to find quite a few perfect wild swimming lakes though, so I got to continue my new found passion and splash around as often as I wanted.

Hiking team photo!
Ryan, Danny, Chris, Abbie, Tom, Becky
Ellis, Matt, Me

We then hiked south, steeply up out of Virginia Canyon to join the famous 2,663 mile long Pacific Crest Trail (go watch/read Wild, if you haven't already!) for around 10 miles into Tuolumne Meadows - a visitor and wilderness centre filled with the fat Americans we'd happily managed to avoid so far. After sharing stories, stocking up on food and catching up with the other group, we then moved out along the John Muir Trail to camp beside the larger of the two Cathedral Lakes, overlooked by Cathedral Peak. This peak is what is known as a nunatak - a peak that stood proud of the glaciers carving out Yosemite's valleys, leaving its top sharp and pointy whilst its lower parts were smoothed and eroded by the ice of the Tioga glaciation, roughly 20,000 years ago.

As we cooked our dinner of quinoa and clams (I've been known to take tinned octopus on camping trips, so this felt quite normal) on the smooth dome of granite beside Cathedral Lake, we could see wildfires raging in the forest to our north, with smoke billowing up into the sky. It was incredible to see the fires in real life, having read about them and their necessity for preserving the Giant Sequoias - allowing new shoots to thrive without competition in the undergrowth.

Trail buddies 4 lyf.
Photo by Becky Mason

I'm loving bivvying at the moment, sleeping out in the open under the moonlit sky and being able to watch shooting stars until I fall asleep. Abbie became my bivvy buddy in Yosemite, with the pair of us brought together by our laziness towards putting a tent up and our love for the outdoors. We were quite blasé about the threats of bear and mountain lion attacks mentioned by everyone else in the team who felt safe behind a thin layer of tent fabric, until I woke one morning to Abbie's shouts of "oh my god oh my god oh my god!!" mixed with other profanities. I fully expected an angry bear to be standing right in front of us as I struggled to sit up and see out of my cozy cocoon, only to find out a coyote had been sniffing Abbie's face and was now wandering casually around our camp, ignoring us! Uncontrollable laughter from both of us obviously followed.

From Cathedral Lakes we'd headed to Sunrise Lakes, home to the curious coyote, and next we headed south west towards Little Yosemite Valley, via Clouds Rest, a peak promising '360-degree panoramic views, stretching from Hawaii in the west to Nebraska in the east'. We actually discovered 10m visibility through thick cloud and fog.. but it was a magnificent climb nonetheless, with precipitous drops either side reminiscent of Helvellyn's 'Striding Edge' in the Lake District.

Abbie on top of the world!

Our descent to the valley led us past the famous Half Dome, a Yosemite icon and hike-able for a fee, but we settled on continuing downhill and buying postcards of it later instead. We then spent our final few miles walking (and running, when we got fed up of downhill plodding) down steep step after steep step of rocky staircase into Yosemite Valley, saying "happy trails!" and "happy hiking!" to anyone we passed, annoying them with our happiness and enthusiasm as they worked their way up the daunting day of uphill ahead of them.

Yosemite Valley was fun to explore on our final day, with a free shuttle bus to the bottom of El Capitan - we spotted big wall climbers on their way up the steep face, marvelling at their skill but also wondering if they were people we could see or just shadows on the rock.. and I also lived up to my reputation as a postcard whore and tried to make people at home feel jealous of my American adventure, drawing them awful cartoon mountains and bears and telling them all about where we'd been!

With Abbie and Erin at the ball game, having stocked up on Giants stash!

Back in San Francisco, we tried to cram in as much as we could before most people went back to the UK. At Alcatraz, the famously inescapable high security prison on an island in the bay, we learnt the shocking fact that 1 in 32 Americans is either on parole, on probation or locked up in prison (and felt slightly uneasy..). That evening we went to a baseball game at the AT&T stadium between the San Francisco Giants and the Arizona Diamondbacks, where I realised that rounders is a far better sport and is much more interesting to watch! The pitchers couldn't pitch in the right place, the batter missed the ball most of the time, and the fielders were so good at catching (using their giant gloves to make it easier) that it was basically impossible for anyone to score any points. But the atmostphere was awesome, with the chants, kiss cam and corn dog sellers making the Giants' 2-0 loss much easier to bear (YES Tom I managed to fit a bear pun in here somewhere!!).

Slacklining in Golden Gate Park
Photo by Becky Mason

Our final day was spent in Golden Gate Park playing with my slackline (bought in the UK on a whim and carried around California, providing awesome fun and some funny looks from passers-by) before heading to Ghiradelli's chocolate factory ice cream parlour. My diary entry from that days reads: "Wen't to Ghiradelli's and had a salted caramel sundae. SO BIG. SO GOOD. SO CARAMELLY. > FOOD COMA (again..)". That definitely sums up the experience.

Basically, the whole trip was absolutely brilliant. Take me back!

Keep a look out for my second blog post about the trip - our 1,000 mile Pacific Coast Highway road trip! 

Life's a Beach

I like to keep busy. So after finishing my finals, running a half marathon and canoeing across Scotland, I was very happy to be off on yet another adventure - BARCELONA!

Me, Cat and Vicky decided to jet off to someplace new and exciting, involving sun, beaches, sangria and cool buildings. Barcelona is tip top perfect for all four of those things, so we were pretty pleased with our choice.

We stayed at Casa Gracia, a beautiful hostel with marble floors and a plant-filled terrace, in a neighbourhood filled with narrow streets, squares and bars. We had breakfast each morning outside in the sun, where we planned our culture- and food-filled days and repeatedly told each other how happy and care-free we felt!

Weird juice at Flax & Kale

I have a new (cringey and slightly unhealthy, some would say) obsession with Instagram, and somehow ended up following a few vegan cafes in the city and drooling over their b-e-a-utiful photos of yummy food whilst I was meant to be revising.. so I tried to drag the others to one - Flax & Kale, a 'flexitarian' restaurant - on the day we arrived. We tried grilled watermelon, all kinds of weird juices, and salads with some pretty suspect ingredients, and loved it. Obviously we instagrammed all of our experiences (otherwise it didn't happen) so you can check out all of those photos here.

The facade of La Sagrada Familia -
Gaudi's beautiful cathedral, still under construction

The architecture of Antoni Gaudi have helped with Barcelona's fame. His most famous (and most impressive and beautiful, in my opinion) piece of work is La Sagrada Familia, to which he dedicated 43 years of his life. We booked tickets in advance as we knew there would be hours of queueing in the sun for us otherwise, and it was definitely worth it. The outside is stunning, and despite being nowhere near finished (it's meant to finish at three times its current height) it towers over the rest of the city and can't be missed from any viewpoint. The interior is something else though. Every tiny detail was so well thought out - the stained glass windows let in the perfect amount of light and spread colours across every surface, and the pillars holding up the structure branched out like trees to a ceiling reminiscent of palm fronds. It was 100% the coolest building I've ever been into (and that's saying something, living 5 minutes away from Durham Cathedral).

Stunning stained glass windows of La Sagrada Familia

The Mercat de la Boqueria is a heavenly food market just off La Rambla, the main touristy tree-lined street leading to the sea in the city. Hundreds of stalls are overflowing with fresh fruit and vegetables, rainbows of fresh juices lined up in rows, and as many different pastries and meats as you could possibly ever want. We had lunch there a couple of times, finding it incredibly difficult to make a decision on what to buy, and bought lots of dried fruit, peppers and spices to take back home. 

Delicious empanadas at the Mercat de la Boqueria

Although the city is in Spain, it's actually culturally Catalan. So apparently all of the quintessentially Spanish things that tourists expect to be there (sangria, paella, tapas etc.) are actually not native to the region. Good thing they were there though, as all of them made me very happy indeed! We enjoyed sangria and Spanish beer together every night, and shared lots of tapas and paella. I absolutely adore padron peppers, tiny little sweet yet bitter green peppers, fried and covered with salt. My plan for Sunday is to recreate a big paella for my family, but I can tell it just won't be the same!

The floor in La Sagrada Familia,
showing Jesus entering Nazareth

One of the city's main draws for us was the beach. It stretches for miles along the south of the city, with the bright blue Mediterranean sea to cool us down and burning hot sand to warm us up again. After long mornings of sightseeing and visiting galleries, it was a perfect way to rest and relax (despite the constant calls of "mojito! cool fresh mojito, buy a mojito! mojito, sangria!" from people walking along the beach selling lukewarm 'cocktails' in plastic cups..). I definitely made up for my lack of sleep (first out and last back to our hostel room, every time!) from naps in the sunshine - so much relaxation!

An afternoon at the beach

We visited the Museo Picasso after wandering around La Ribera, an area of the city full of arty boutiques and cafes. The museum/gallery is dedicated to the works of Picasso, but it also had a temporary exhibition called 'Picasso/Dali Dali/Picasso', comparing and contrasting a number of pieces by the two artists. The main lesson I learnt was that artists copy each other a lot.. I wasn't a massive Picasso fan before I went and I certainly haven't changed my mind.. but I'm still glad we went!

Early evening at the Marina, enjoying the reflections

On our last day we visited the Fundació Joan Miró - a gallery exhibiting Miró's works - on Montjuïc, a hill to the south of the city that translates as either the Mountain of the Jews or the Mountain of Jupiter. The terrace of the museum has an incredible view over the rooftops of the city (still dominated by La Sagrada Familia) and the building itself is also impressive. I like Miró's work much more than Picasso or Dali's, especially his strong colours and simplified forms. Alexander Calder's mercury fountain was probably my favourite piece - a small fountain filled with mercury instead of water, with the dancing metallic beads flowing around the system in a mesmerising and soporific fashion, that I could have stared at for hours..

One of Miro's wacky sculptures,
on the rooftop of Fundació Joan Miró

Overall, we all had an awesome time and were pretty sad to leave! It's such a beautiful, vibrant and varied city, and I'd love to go back sometime to do some more exploring.

Now I promise I'll stay in this country for the next five weeks, before I fly to India!

These are the mountains I'm used to

I'm lucky enough to be able to spend a lot of time in the Lake District. I love spending days out on the fells and camping in the wild, as well as doing a bit of planking (more info here).

I'm sure the Himalayas will prove to be very different to the Lakes - I can't wait!

Planking near the summit of Scafell Pike at sunrise, Summer 2013

View over Wastwater whilst walking Wainwright's Coast to Coast route, Easter 2014