Yosemite - Day 4

On our last morning, we got up early to pack up our gear and take down our tent. We wanted to move our car closer to the Yosemite Village where we will finish with dinner later that evening. We will then be able to hop in our car and head directly home at the end of our day. If we didn't move our car out there early enough, we would not be able to even get a parking space.

We signed up for another 6 hours of service, each. We then hopped on a shuttle to the Upper Pines area to clean along the Merced there. We fished out another 11 pounds of trash on our last day. More shoes, bottles, tarp and endless micro-trash.

Christian had to take a small break to finish up his homework that he had to submit later that day. We had to head back towards the central area of the valley so that he could use the cell towers to submit his work.

We went back to the Village area so that he had the cell service and ate our lunch there.

We finished up by going down some of the backroads and then cleaning at the Church Bowl picnic and climbing areas before heading back for our day's weigh in.

In the past four days, we each put in 20 hours of work. Together, we hauled in 66 pound of trash. Much of the trash we picked up, barely weighed anything. Things like the corners of granola bar wrappers when people pulled them open, stickers from fruit, cigarette butts,  and straws from juice boxes (along with their wrappers).

I think the total for the entire Facelift event was 6,790 pounds this year. They say that the amount of trash they have cleaned up has decreased every year since they started some 14 years ago, but I think a lot of it has to do with the special cleanup projects they end up doing, so a lot of the previous weight might have been cement and asphalt blocks. They think that a lot of the decreased amount of trash picked up is due to more awareness of the issue. I think that there is a little of that, but in general, there is still just way more carelessly discarded trash out in our natural areas than is acceptable.

We had a bit of time to kill before the raffle, especially since they stopped the weigh ins a little earlier on our last day so that they could clean up. We hiked over to the Lower Falls to see some of the climbing next to the falls. Emily wants to do this nice but long sustained crack up there.

It was towards the end of the day, but as usual, the place was still just crawling with people.

Afterwards, we headed back for the last raffle. We were relieved when Timmy O'Neill showed up to present the last raffle. Emily won a little Patagonia backpack. It's probably too small for her to use for much. She wants to enter as an adult next year since there are no real incentives to enter as a kid any more and much of what they have to offer are geared towards younger children. She noticed another older kid had entered as an adult and won a nice prize. Nobody said anything to them about it. You are supposed to enter as a child until you are seventeen. Before, if you entered as a child, you were pretty much guaranteed some kind of prize. Since that isn't the case any more, she would rather try for some of the climbing gear rather than a tiny backpack, sunglasses or t-shirt that won't fit her.

Caitlyn won a water bottle with VIP family passes for YARTS. Normal YARTS passes would be useless to us, but since the new concessionaire stopped the shuttles up to Tuolumne, it has made it impossible or expensive (same thing at this point) for us to go on our adventure hike through Tenaya Canyon; something we've been wanting to do for the past couple of years. Caitlyn has lots of nice water bottle but she was pretty excited about the passes because she knew what that would mean. Now we just need the time to be able to do it; something we don't have a whole lot of anymore.

We also caught some bags of chalk, so we have a lifetime supply of that! We don't use it often as it is. Neither Christian, nor I, won anything further.

I was happy to see that a couple of people that were not climbers, returned their prizes to be given to others because they would not use them any way.

After the raffle, we went directly to get in line for dinner. The concessionaire puts on a dinner for the volunteers at the end of the event. Usually, after several days of eating camp food, we are drooling for some real food. Since we ate at the meatfest the night before, we enjoyed the food, but we were not quite as desperate for it as before. Overall, the food provided at the camp was a whole lot tastier than the catered stuff...desperation aside. But having to choose between staying for dinner or braving the chaotic traffic out of the valley, we opted to wait in line for the free dinner. Even though we were near the front of the line, we still waited for an hour before getting to eat. It didn't help that lots of people were cutting in line to be with their friends, but mostly because it would mean less of a line for them.

Anyway, that was the end of our Yosemite adventures. There was a lot more frustration, pain and disappointment than last year. We accomplished more, but enjoyed ourselves less. Maybe we just expected too much since we didn't get to go anywhere all summer, I don't know. Did pandering to all the people who pretended to want to help create more awareness and improve their attitudes? I doubt it since at the end of the event, after picking up every bit of trash we could set our eyes on, all we noticed were discarded raffle tickets and other things people clearly got from the event and left discarded on the ground. It was pretty sad and made us pretty angry.