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Day 4 we drove up over the Tioga Pass and through Yosemite to our next camp site at Indian Flats Campground at El Portal.  We did not have enough advance planning to get a site in Yosemite, but this worked out well.  We got full hookups and that is not available in the park.  The road the El Portal is normally the main entrance path to Yosemite and very busy (up to an hour wait at the entrance) but the fall before we visited there was a massive landslide blocked the road so it was closed 1/2 mile from this campground.  That made the trip into the park 15-20 minutes and an easy drive with no traffic.

We love to do water activities and down through the middle of the main Yosemite valley is the Merced River.  It is a gentle ride this time of year so we rented a raft and floated down with the many other rafters.  Here is were it would have been nice to have our own little raft or even inner tubes would have been fine.

We had always heard that Yosemite was very crowed.  We were pleasantly surprised to fine pretty empty, especially for being the prime vacation time.  The visitor count peaked in 1994 at 8 million and now it is around 4 million per year.  Some of the popular trails had plenty of people on them but at times we were alone, especially while riding bikes on the many miles of paved bike trails the run throughout the main valley floor.

Here were are below the famous Half Dome.  This was once a completely rounded granite dome but glaciers in the last ice age chopped it in half.  The glaciers were so thick they were more then 100 feet higher then the top of the dome you see thousands of feet above our heads.

At the main visitor center there is a great museum and this Indian village replica of how the natives  in the valley lived.

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