I think I myself would – if I had to get poetic about it, as is the tradition with things Yosemidan – I think I would call it “the biggest dirt clod in DC’s shit-splattered mud tiara.” Not “the crown jewel of the National Park System.” This would retain the sense of royalty and ceremony that is a relentless carbuncle on the ass of “description and praise” that smothers even the keenest mind into a gurgling walloping sludge of sound when singing the praises of what I have come to learn is, basically, a desolate pesthole. And yet at the same time “the biggest dirt clod in DC’s shit-splattered mud tiara” would also subtly suggest the underlying murk of the place. A genuine twofer.



All of your past Yosemite photo experiences will be embedded into the vista you are now staring at. There will be a physical adrenal shock. A shock of recognition. You will gasp, “It’s really real!”

Yes, it sure is. It’s really real. And eventually you will come to consider this its primary drawback. And this change of attitude will come quickly. It will come quickly like Jesus said He would at Armageddon. It comes – this change of attitude, of psyche, of mood, of spiritual elevation – this change occurs at the same time as you descend into the valley itself.

This change, it affects the limbic portion of your brain, this change does: that part of your brain that exclusively concerns itself with the raw survival of the organism that’s carting the limbic brain around in its head; that portion of your brain that strives, when all else is lost, to at least keep you alive on a basic, metabolic level. And so, in an effort to do its job, the limbic brain slowly leaks chemicals into your nervous system that awaken in you the queasy, uneasy suspicion that maybe, just maybe................... you shouldn’t really be here.

Your limbic brain is dead-on accurate. Despite what you may have seen from the parking lot, your limbic brain knows just by the vibe in the air that you are not really entering into a beautiful valley. You are really entering into a box canyon, narrow in width, short in length, encased in solid granite slabs 3-4,000 feet high; a box canyon managed by idiots and from which there is escape only for one car at a time should calamity strike. And it will.



You advance at a dead run toward the large, hotel-sized defecation sump, only to abruptly slam into and fall backwards from the invisible barrier: the steel-like wall of impenetrable stink that extends a hundred yards in all directions from the structure.

Apprentice stenches come here from all over the globe to learn from the Queen of Stenches what a truly world-class odor is. And world class it should be since all the shit from all the asses from all over the earth for the past hundred years is still in that hole.


Lodging for the non-camper consists of three facilities of varying categories of luxury, the categories being, category 1: civilized and gloomy. Category 2: semi-civilized and neuter. And category 3: uncivilized and hallucinagenically torturous. Those of this third and last category are located on “the dark side” of the tiny valley at the southeast and are apelike in their accommodations, consisting of board bits, cloth shreds, wood particles, leaves and branches, twigs and bark, and the skins of animals if you can trap them. This area is referred to by me as The Area of the Frozen Tents. They call it Curry Village.
If there are Park horrors within the walls of the Ahwahnee I have never experienced them, never having stayed there. And those who have stayed there, if they have experienced any peculiar-to-the-Ahwahnee Park Horrors they were probably not aware of the extent and duration, being eternally distracted by professional panhandlers. Unless it intruded on the grandiose wine tasting extravaganzas. And then they might notice. At any rate they will probably never know of the horrors available since they will never be reading this guidebook because, well, they will not need to!.....they’ll be at the Awahnee!



First, there are the “wobs.” This is their word: wobs. And these are the accommodations that are “without bathrooms.” They are the “wobs.” They have no bathrooms. They are in fact “without bathrooms.” Or in other words the “wobs” have no bathrooms.

There are no bathrooms in the “wobs.” The “wobs” are without bathrooms. If going to the bathroom is something you do, or think you need to do, or do whether you think you need to or not, or do simply to be thought of as someone who does in fact go to the bathroom regardless of whether or not you actually do, the wobs may not be quite the place for you. Because the wobs have no bathrooms.

However, the National Park Demographic Engineers have decided that there actually is a segment of the vacationing public that considers lodging without bathrooms as normal and proper, and so they have gone to a diligent effort to provide appropriate surroundings for these people that they will be comfortable with. Or in other words, surroundings without bathrooms. They have provided them with wobs. Perhaps you are one of these. Perhaps you are someone who doesn’t need a bathroom. Perhaps you are someone who would be fine in a wob.

All Park Business is patterned after the brainwaves of a tent-dwelling nomad high on mescaline. The “Indian” is the master of the National Park environment, and you – the 21st Century Customer, are to toss-off your expectations and endure your stay in as Stone Age a manner as it is possible for the Park System to reduce you to. Because, you see, the “Indian” is granted, by the Park System Doctrine, the status of intellectual sainthood. Only the “Indian” has the right and correct outlook on things, from cosmology to metaphysics to religion to science to comfort: namely, no outlook.

Because the “Indian” philosophy on things is basically the equivalent of a blank tv screen. In fact, even a blank tv screen has energy surges firing across it if it’s turned on. So, make that a broken tv screen. One with the glass kicked in and the chassis filled with aged cobwebs a thousand years old. In fact, even a broken tv screen is too vibrant a comparison to the “Indian” worldview since a broken tv screen actually may have done something at one time.

Keep in mind that in the philosophy of the Plains and Western "American Indian" a human being does not become "productive" until he dies. It is then that he quite literally becomes fuel for "the environment." Therefore, all Park "energies" manifested by Staff are aimed at making you and the environment more cooperative with each other literally on an atomic-particle level. Any amenity provided to you by the Park Service that did not exist in 1805 in the average Hopi sweat lodge has been provided only with the greatest reluctance and as a last resort, probably due to an armed threat by a paying visitor. Certainly not by anyone In Washington, DC.



Some other sections of the Valley Floor you will not be allowed access to are the many free-ranging maintenance yards filled with strange and large and rusted machines that, when actually operating, fill the deep granite canyon with azure toxic haze, rich in poisons and dense with depth of caustic fumes for which you will be blamed because you drove your car in here. And which machines, when they are operating, as they often are, impart to the echoing walls intensely loud howlings, rumbles, clanks, shrieks, revvings, dronings, poppings, crackings, bangings and crashings of many kinds and volumes, and occasionally screams when they happen to shred an employee, leaving only the empty beer bottle – that flew from his hand during his churning disintegration into meat and spray – intact.

In fact, as far as environmental outrage is concerned, all is permitted to Park Staff. To you is permitted nothing. Every bag used to wrap your piece-of-crap purchase, every wrapper used to enshroud your piece-of-crap burrito, every paper cup used to contain your tastes-like-crap coffee is placarded with admonitions, warnings, threats and predictions of doom if the personal habits of you and your group are in any way not the way the Yosemite Philosophy says they should be.

You are reminded mercilessly from every quarter, from every printable surface, from every subhuman employee that Yosemite is much more important than you are, much better than you are, morally superior to you, wiser than you, better looking than you, and that if you don’t change your ways – and not just here in the Park but throughout your whole life – then you are a piece of shit and should probably just stay the hell out. This chastisement is relentless.



Construction projects around the Valley floor, what there are of them, are undertaken only by people who actually live in Yosemite Valley: the Lifetime Yosemite Repairmen. That is why nothing ever gets repaired or completed. They have the rest of their lives to fix it. Much of the time during construction or repair guests are encouraged not to become guests, so that when the repairs are made, they can become guests later. Later when they become guests, they will be glad that the repairs have been made. That is assuming that they are aware of the repairs that were made, since they will have been made during the time, they were forbidden to be guests. For their convenience.



Park Personnel – clerks, clerks, clerks, clerks, and some room-cleaners, mostly – seem to be, from the looks of them, the products of generations of park-clerk inbreeding. Slovenly, ugly, emotion free, snatches of overheard conversation seem to be devoted to a single topic; an impending day off and the volume of beer-drinking which will ensue during it.

Intelligent people often seek work here just to be in “this really great place.” But “this really great place” starts to get pretty old, pretty quick, and after about 2 days you begin to see it for what it really is: a seven-mile hole, walled-up on both sides with solid granite that collapses occasionally in sudden unpredictable horrific descents; a narrow canyon of bear-infested close quarters; a piss filled river of scalded bathers in the summer and a slippery moss-heap of lichen in winter between episodes of catastrophic flooding; a narrow racket-filled echo chamber of industrial noise and pollution where rest comes hard and the sight of falling water wears thin fast.





Yosemite is considered the premier National Park because you need not actually go outside and seek adventure here. It comes to your room and finds you.
Supreme and available to all on the adventuring list is the Sudden Printed Announcement.
No, S.P.A.’s are always laid on the bureau in your room by a mysterious interloper.
S.P.A.’s are always formally worded and very neatly typed. Every S.P.A. is the son or daughter of a long line of ancestors. Thus, the language is always facile and the message thoughtfully composed. They are printed with dark readable ink on good paper.
Not knowing if the water was heated electrically or not, I got up at 5AM to shower.
“Dear Yosemite Guest: Due to an unseen construction problem, the power outage scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 3 did not take place.
The power outage has been rescheduled for Thursday, Dec. 5, from 8AM to 6PM.
The third S.P.A had to do with the bathroom situation in the “wobs.” You will remember that “wobs” means “rooms without bathrooms.” The rooms without bathrooms had a bathroom problem. The showers broke. Well, the mens’ showers broke. But the womens’ showers were still working. Why we, who were not in a wob, were left this S.P.A. is still an unsolved mystery. One of many.

What the penalty would be for taking a shower at a time when no showers were scheduled – say 3 in the morning – or violating the showering schedule in some other unimagined way wasn’t mentioned. But the printed showering schedule should give warning to the visitor who stays at the wobs should the toilets fail, if they exist and wherever they may be located: very likely there will be printed a very well thought out shitting schedule.



You call information and get the number of the fire department, not provided by the sign.


If there is a lesson for you here, it is this: having something go wrong at Yosemite at the hands of the Staff changes the way you number events. For instance, not getting the room we reserved is of no consequence – they provided a substitute. Therefore, there is nothing to complain about because in Yosemite-land this is not a botched incident. A new room was provided. Just not the one they said you would have when you sent them money.
You learn to think this way in Yosemite in order to save your temper and your nerves because if you allow yourself to react at the first failure at providing you with some normal, expected, run of the mill service, you will be yelling and screaming all day long. Always wait until the first attempt at the correction of a botch. Sometimes you get lucky and this second attempt is successful. The first time.



YOSEMITE GRANDEUR
These narcotic-like discharges in the brain when viewing Yosemite Falls occur also when viewing empty listless vistas that are commonly referred to by 40-year-old lesbians who refuse to die or style their hair and emotionally-arrested anorexic men with striated knee tendons eternally visible beneath very short hiking shorts with no underwear often worn weeks at a time between washings.......... as “the environment.”



Signs that remind you of your duties to your garbage. In Yosemite you owe your garbage your full attention. In Yosemite you are told to wash your trash. You are in spirit and in practice to intern yourself to some unnamed reclamation company you have never contacted. And you will never be promoted to pay status for your efforts either. You will remain a trash intern forever. And the guests in Yosemite, fair to say, are not alone in this. Now most of America washes and sorts its trash so that somebody else, usually an Italian, can obtain full profit from your labor.

Since trash collection all over the USA is controlled and operated by a Secret Italian Men’s’ Fraternal Organization, the dago mobster who talked Congress into taking trash seriously is now living higher, and with more laughter, than the owner of Las Vegas.
The “environment” is doing everything in its fucking power to annihilate us and we’re trying to be kind to it. Floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, lightning, wind, rats, ants, cancer – and we’re trying to save it from pop bottles.



You are to, among the various ploys to get Ursus to scamper off, make noise; bang pots together; gather into a group and face it whilst waving your arms and shouting, “I’m over here!” Or in general staying right in place, doing nothing, and acting, basically terrified. This will scare the bear away. You acting terrified and making sure this is clearly communicated to the bear, that you are afraid of it.....this knowledge about you will make it run away and hide. That you fear it and are now up to your white pasty ankles in your own shit....this will tell the bear he had better skedaddle if he knows what's good for him.
Nowhere in the article does it advise you to grab a loaded rifle and carefully place a bullet anyplace into the bear’s anatomy, following this up with all your remaining ammunition and all the ammunition you’ve snatched from your friends being pumped relentlessly into the motherfucker’s hide, killing the animal, and then reloading repeatedly and emptying several more cases of ammunition thereafter into the animal’s dead body until you have finally disgorged your rage and hatred and have turned the threat to you and your children into a flat, obliterated, blood-soaked bathrobe.
In fact, it is forbidden.
You are to encourage him to become fearful and shy, nervous and embarrassed, jittery and faint. You are encouraged to try and get the bear to behave like some other species. Perhaps like a park squirrel. Or perhaps like an inhabitant of a delightful tale, such as a gentle Eloi. At the same time, you are attempting to alter the bear's nature you are not to do any damage, physical or emotional, to the bear in any way.

You are never to swing an ax in its face. Or throw a grenade. Or even a firecracker. The assumption of the Park System is that if the bear is there at all, you have done something you shouldn’t have done to lure it into the area. Like, for instance, you came to Yosemite.


I was once forbidden by the Park Service to return to my cabin because it was “too windy.” They weren’t just picking on me and being mean. Nobody could return to their cabins. It was too windy! It was too windy to go inside! We had to stay outside. If we went inside, a tree could fall on us and kill us. That’s what they said. They said the year before a tree had fallen on a cabin and killed a youngster. So that this wouldn’t happen to us, and since it was again windy, we would have to remain outside of our cabins.
“When would it become absolutely necessary to cut down a Yosemite tree?”

Also, because Park Rangers only inconvenience you for the duration of your stay in the Park, rather than, say, for the duration of your life like cops do, the Rangers are convinced that the answers they have been taught to give are actually informative and intelligent. Thus, is it that their inability to see beyond their world of plants and animals, which is basically the worldview of a child in a petting zoo, or their inability to see into your world of trying to make enough money to keep both you and your family alive, as well as have enough left over to pay to keep the Park Ranger and his family alive, is not surprising.



I have gotten off the track. I apologize. The problems of Yosemite just come to the mind so quickly it leaves you breathless in your haste to warn the innocent. The swarm of details overlap and interweave, like traffic in a panicked exodus, like the town crier’s syllables as the flying saucers approach with 4th dimensional railguns glowing, like the child’s staccato vocabulary to his parents after having just found the family dog dead.
If you are hurt by a bear you are to blame and you have no recourse, save a personally undertaken extermination plot. However, human attacks upon National Park bears, whether the bears were provoked or unprovoked, are punished severely and quickly.
We are now ready to actually define Yosemite and in fact the whole National Park system: the National Parks are places where a portion of your weekly paycheck is confiscated and sent to in order to enable the Park Employees to protect bears from you.



The beds have probably been selected by Yosemite Management for this reason, so that you can experience unpleasantness and danger every moment here, whether while going up a cold, slippery ravine, down a cold slippery trail, across cold slippery rocks, or to the cold, slippery toilet in your room."



Yosemite employees on the tax dole are so far removed from the needs and efforts of people who support themselves by fair trade that they remain spoiled, impacted-arteried imps all their useless lives. And why not; service to the customer is unnecessary in a non-competitive arena. You yourself may not, you will be absolutely forbidden, don’t even think about it, put any thoughts you might have right out of your head of going into business for yourself in Yosemite. Even though everyone who visits there is clamoring for one kind of service or another, which if they were actually provided and not just pantomimed, the taxable revenues would run the upkeep not just of the American National Parks but everyone else’s. But it’s not allowed. “It would ruin it.” The visitors and paying tourists would be happy. But the land would be sad.



They are unwise, however, in that they accumulate shit.
A portion of this shit will be yours, and that would be the shit that is in your particular toilet AND it will be on the bathroom floor and in your room, and around your ankles if you don’t shit properly. There is a right way and a wrong way to shit in Yosemite!
A Yosemite toilet will be no match for your mighty turds, sir, the toilet-clogging capabilities of which I’m sure are legendary. You will have to, in Yosemite, evolve a toilet-override technique that will involve initiating the flush whilst the mighty toilet-choking ass-mud is still dangling out into the atmosphere from its starfish birth-canal.
After you have turded and after the turd has hopefully disappeared – and by that, I mean down the toilet and not out the front door – you, unless you are a Yosemite employee yourself – are going to need to wipe. If you have an asshole made out of barbed wire, corrugated tin, or rusty fish hooks, feel free to use the toilet paper provided. Otherwise bring your own. And a plunger.



“Cecily and I have been discussing the rescheduled power outage, which is to occur in 30 minutes, unless it’s rescheduled. Having already taken a shower herself, she was urging me to do so before 8AM. I said to her there would probably still be hot water after 8AM. She said ‘But it will be pitch black in there because there’ll be no lights. It’s like a tomb.’


All of Yosemite Valley Policy is geared to appeasing the mentality of a mortgage-free delirium-acclimated dementia-addled lunatic: you are encouraged to wander around the woods eating berries rather than use precious resources at one of the “restaurants.”
The Park is apparently run by bums; they don’t want you driving, or sitting, or otherwise being in any way comfortable since it is Outdoor Mental Patients that pull all the strings in whatever sub-basement of whatever legislation generator that powers the National Park System. Why the visitors put up with it is a mystery. Perhaps it is because the visitors don’t really expect to be comfortable at the bottom of a fucking canyon.
And I have been talking about walking in the “safe zone,” the area around the Lodge.
Climbing up a rock face 4,000 feet high is permitted to all and at all times, even during earthquakes. Just don’t throw any trash down. That’s forbidden and punished ten thousand times more seriously than climbing up a granite megalith without ropes because it’s completely irresponsible.

In the museum of Yosemite History there are also some plaster versions – like in first grade – of Yosemite in various stages of its supposed development which they at the museum have attributed to a glacier. It’s been my own experience that when you have no idea how something happened, just say a glacier did it and all will walk away from you content.

Similarly, just insist that meandering ice plowed its way through miles and miles of 4,000 ft high mountains of solid granite terrain rather than take the path of least resistance, say through a canyon already there, and sure as oil comes from the sunken and compressed bodies of dead dinosaurs you will be enthusiastically believed.

In the winter in Yosemite the edges of the dilapidated road are a sargasso of sludge and sleet and bulldozed piles of oily crap and frozen filth, and here is where you have to walk just to feel any discernible false sense of safety. False because every once in a while a car will come by in some direction and it will have lights. So, every once in a while you can make some movement forward through all the invisible hazards before the car passes. You also have to hope that the car sees you, that it doesn’t skid through the winter’s ice or the summer’s moldering algae right onto you accidentally, which is probably commonplace, though there are no available death tolls, just like there are no available death tolls of the tourists who just fall into the Grand Canyon.



Your privacy is always respected in Yosemite Valley. This is something that cannot be faulted. If you should happen to buy a nature tape that has an orange PAL sticker affixed to it, and you are not aware that these three letters mean that this tape can only be played in a VCR that is located 15,000 miles away from where you are now standing – in Romania, in other words – you can be sure that the enormous-assed woman behind the counter, especially if she is wearing a Ranger hat, will not inform you of your mistake.

They will never augment this information with, say, where a phone can be found, or what a PAL tape is. But if your survival in the woods or your mental well-being within Park confines ever depends on you having immediate pine needle information, a United States Dept. of the Interior Park Ranger will rush to your rescue and ask no thanks.



Well, if there are spirits hovering about the canyon, they are not the spirits of the prehistoric Indians, they are coming from a far larger supply of the Newly Dead. A congregation of deceased members that far exceeds in numbers the paltry Indian population that once squatted here on their asses and did nothing, as do their civil servant progeny today who have picked up the cast-down gauntlet of indigence and are now running with it with their feet up on the desk.

It is a ghostly spirit population that increases yearly, filling the canyon with specters and miasmas which then hover here forever, like spiritual pollen in the air, darkening the souls of the vacationers with a removal from them of any diligence-of-purpose, all of it rivaled in sloth-like sodden lethargy only by the living staffers.



However to the Climbing Elite, the life of the Unworthy Climber – one who needs bolts – is not important. The “aesthetics of the route” are what matter.
Bolt Removers are not considered accessories to murder by the Yahwehmite aficionados who approve of this level of cold-blooded murder, no, they are revered as serene and “realized” beings who are now spreading truth and calm through the universe, beginning right here on our little planet by removing bolts from cliffs and killing people.



Teddy Roosevelt knew, with the great inner certainty which he possessed regarding when a wilderness area was at it’s most attractive, that never again would Yosemite be more perfect than it was the first time Teddy Roosevelt, hacking his itchy balls, and picking his stuck longjohns out of his ass, stumbled into it. Because Yosemite heard that Teddy Roosevelt was coming by for a visit and so Yosemite put on its best dress. They met, they talked, they came to an agreement: what Teddy Roosevelt saw, you will see.


The waiting list is 20 years long and has 8,000 names on it. I guess the Grand Canyon is just too small and congested a place for the Park System to squeeze a lotta people through it via gravity. On the other hand, if the Grand Canyon was run by anyone other than the Park System, even Dairy Queen, 8,000,000,000,000,000 people an hour could go through it.



Even if you’re in a hundred-year-old VW van filled with kids all wearing Birkenstocks, shorts, and no coats, the government bids you farewell and lets you drive off with absolutely no concern for your welfare. They stand there and wave goodbye to you. They do not sit down with you and try and talk you out of what you are about to do.
The entire National Park System in America is designed for your inconvenience. The whole National Park system in America operates under the principle that torture is good for you. This in fact is the operating spirit of every government function on earth, actually. What makes the National Park Service so unique is that they specialize in providing you with a scenic environment in which to suffer. The government’s philosophy is: if the scenery’s nice, torturing a citizen within it is a virtue.
In government mentality Hitler’s big mistake was in executing 12 million people in shabby surroundings. If he had abandoned them in a mountain wilderness to die of exposure he would have been hailed as a visionary. Dachau, Treblinka and Auschwitz would have been national parks if they had just had, in addition to the misery and the body count, glaciers, waterfalls, park rangers and a few bears.



Yosemite Falls, lit up from within by green lasers would provide more than enough light for evening strollers traveling along the loop road, with additional, brightly lit guidance all along its length provided by dinging, clanging, eternally flashing slot machines. Vernal Falls would be the central lobby and check-in of the Infidelity Casino and Lounge, where, what happened there would get washed away down the Merced River.
The only bears would be the ones in the topless circus show, mock-boxing the naked models wearing only 50-ounce gloves and lotsa baby oil to better illuminate all hidden skin surfaces.

Sure, you couldn’t bring the kids. But who cares. Make more of them while you’re here. Besides, you can’t bring the kids there now and expect to ever see them alive or in one piece again, so who gives a crap. And besides, if they want scenery they can see the same sort of scenery, and some a hell of a lot better in Halo. What do they need to be buggin’ you at The New Yosemite, where you and yer ol’ lady are sneakin’ around to get some Strange for?



Even more uncomfortable would be the thought that would have God Himself pulling Himself suddenly to the edge of His Own Bed, and that thought would be that they are breeding to each other. Which is clearly the case, judging from the appearance and behavior of the youngsters. Who live in the really nice, off limits houses.

--J.J. Solari