Take some white granite add some sequoais trees and you have the basic ingredients for Yosemite National Park. This being America where everything is big, the sequoais trees are the largest trees on the planet and the granite mountains rise 4000ft from the valley floor.

Getting here from Mono Lake we climbed over the 10000ft Tioga Pass (high enough for Liz to feel the effects of altitude). We camped out at about 7000ft on this road in a wonderful forest near Yosemite Valley where the famous granite walls of El Capitan and Half Dome lure climers from round the world.

In Australia if something is worth seeing they make sure it is hard or as expensive as possible in order to sell an expensive tour. In America they simply build a road to it. One such road called Glacier Point was built so that people can get a good look at Half Dome.

All the famous views that Ansel Adams took can be reached by road, in fact there seemed little incentive to do any trecks and time is getting short.

At 7000ft the temperature drops like a stone, depite being in T Shirts during the day some people said that last night they gave a 90 percent chance of snow where we were camped. So when we got back to the tent we got a camp fire going. The camp is simply an area that you are allowed to camp with a pit toilet, so keeping warm in the tent with just a duvet was going to be a challenge. Beer coat or in this case Gin and T was perscribed to an unwell Liz. We also went to bed with all our clothes on, but it was still cold.