Weekend Warrior

Ready, set, National Park time! We took our long weekend a little before Labor Day Weekend this year, and headed East to explore Yosemite National Park, Mammoth Lakes, and Stanislaus National Forest for the first time. We packed as much as possible into our 3-day trip!

Here's the first part of it: Yosemite National Park. Hold on to your Vizslas, this page has more photos than I've ever put in one post!

For more information on dog-friendliness of the park and surrounding areas, check out this post (originally a guest post on the Fido Factor blog).

We were so excited to head out!

Once we entered Yosemite (yippeee!), we did the Yosemite Valley Loop, and there certainly was a lot to see!

Yosemite Valley View

  I'm no Ansel Adams, but the views everywhere you looked were astounding. The entire place was just amazing. Note that for National Parks, dogs aren't allowed on hiking trails... a sad fact, but it was so hot, and our time was limited, so we weren't too upset. For pet information in Yosemite, see their pet page (or my post!)

Half Dome

Half Dome is so impressive! And can be seen from many places throughout the park. I think we *might* have enjoyed this part of our trip more than Captain.  Although, he did get a lot of attention from other visitors to the park- especially people who were missing their dogs at home!

Mule Deer

 I was pretty excited to see Mule Deer many times, and got about 10 ft away from this one. Captain stayed in the car for this part - I'm pretty sure he would have "disturbed the wild life" if he saw this guy!

 It was a HOT day, and Captain's tongue was out for most of it ;-)

 
There was a lot of driving. Time to stretch out the legs at Olmsted Point . . .

. . . and then pose for some pictures . . .

. . . and enjoy the views.

We'll finish off Yosemite with the amazing Toulumne Meadows:

Have we overwhelmed you with pictures???

As you can tell, there are too many pictures from this trip to fit into one post, so we'll do one for each spot. Next up: Mammoth Lakes, CA.

Hope everyone has a fabulous Labor Day Weekend! ... And, sorry if we made you jealous ;-) Captain says he likes the next part better anyway, since he got to do more running.