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“I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite.”
― Conor Knighton, Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park
“Is that an instant camera?” The bartendress eyes my Fuji Instax Wide Evo. The square shape and wide slit in the top offer a couple of clues about what type of camera it is.
“Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.”
“I’ll bet,” she looks like she wants to ask another question, but with a slight shake of her head, she moves on.
It’s a busy Friday evening at the Sierra Nevada brewery in Chico, CA. When we had arrived and I inquired at the host stand, the hostess said the wait for an indoor table was about two hours. Fortunately, the bar was open seating, and we snagged a couple of stools. There’s a lot to be said for parties of one or two. For instance, it’s much easier to find seating at a crowded bar.
Founded in 1980, Sierra Nevada is one of the oldest extant post-prohibition breweries on the West Coast. Along with a few others, including Lagunitas and Russian River, they’ve defined West Coast craft beer. While best known for their eponymous pale ale, the variety of styles represented on the draft list is impressive and refreshing. Macros have enjoyed a choke hold in the area where I currently reside, and it feels like forever since I saw more than a couple of Sierra Nevada styles available.
Due to the trick of nature known as El Niño or La Niña (it’s tough to keep los niños straight), it’s been a freakishly dry winter in Oregon, with very little snow. As such, the mountain passes which would normally be impassable, or at least a dubious proposition, are mostly clear. Combine that with early spring weather and a holiday weekend, and it’s time for a road trip.
Around 2 p.m. on Friday, we can’t handle desk work anymore, and we load up and head down to Chico, passing Shasta (which does have snow, and looks majestic as always) on the way. The deity of Google Maps loves playing merry hell with our routes (I think it recognizes data sets that travel a lot, and uses them for all they’re worth), so shortly after Redding, we wend our way through an increasingly narrow series of country highways bordered by flowering orchards, rather than just heading straight down 99. None of this could have anything to do with my abysmal skills as a navigator and wayfinder.
Seated at the long, polished wood and brass bar, I’m perusing the draft list, about to come down with a case of decision paralysis, when the answer reveals itself. In addition to the usual pint or flight options, pretty much everything is available in an 8 oz. pour.
“It comes in half pints,” I say, pointing to the printed draft list. “I’m getting one.” Not only does it come in half pints, but the price is exactly half that of a full pint. Hot damn, there’s no economic downside to ordering a smaller pour.
Spring Fest IPA is the discounted pint of the night, so I do get a full pint of that, and subsequently a couple half pours of other things that I thoroughly enjoy and utterly fail to write notes on. There is also food. The Brewers Pizza goes down very well, and since it’s almost Valentine’s Day, the kitchen is offering a special dessert menu with a lovely cheesecake. Several beautiful pours of Pils (here, it’s served in small, 8 oz. Pilsner glasses) hit the bar, and I ask the staff to let me take a quick photo of them. Even though all tables are full and no one has time to waste, the bartenders still turn the glasses so I can take a picture showing all the “Premium Pils Lager” labels.
As we’re finishing our drinks and nosh, and paying up, I watch the stylishly bearded bartender cut up some bits of paper – stickers, maybe. As I’m wondering what one needs to do to get stickers, he presents us with a stack of four.
We’ve missed the gift shop, which closed shortly after we arrived, so the bartenders helpfully tell us about a couple of places nearby where we can find a decent variety of packaged Sierra Nevada beers.
In the grey light of morning, Chico looks like a town that’s seen better days. At least, one hopes better days happened at some point, because the town looks as beaten down as a middle-aged chain-smoker who hits the booze a little too hard every night. Speaking of hitting the booze, I’m in need of a good coffee and some decent breakfast. We fetch up at Country Morning, a bakery and coffee shop with a small parking lot, and delicious breakfast sandwiches.
Thus restored, we head down 99, toward the main object of the trip, Yosemite National Park. While not the first, or the largest, or the most-visited national park, Yosemite still ranked #6 for visitors in 2024, welcoming well over 4 million visitors that year, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Yosemite has been federally protected land since 1864, and in 1890, it became the nation’s third national park.
From Chico to somewhere around Catheys Valley, our journey is an overly bright-yet-hazy, mostly boring drive through farmland, odiferous cattle ranches (near Stockton), and the types of agricultural and industrial sprawl that seems to accompany most journeys down a major US highway. Approaching Mariposa, we’re starting to get more into the mountains, and Mariposa itself is a historic mining town with some of the same feel as Sisters, Oregon, if Sisters were less organized and a bit more run-down.
From Mariposa, pilgrims approach the park through a winding mountain road that leads, more or less directly, to one of the park’s entrances. Along the way, there are a few lodges with names such as Yosemite Bug, Yosemite View Lodge, and Valley View Lodge. Hoping to catch sunset at Tunnel View (not the Instagram-famous firefall), we hastily deposit our luggage at Valley View Lodge and head toward the park entrance, which is only about two miles up the road.
In a normal winter, Yosemite is extremely snowy, with some accumulation in the valleys, and many feet on the peaks. That’s not the case so far this winter, and we join a seemingly endless line of cars inching its way toward the entrance gate. This stage of the journey lasts for about an hour, during which time a few pedestrians pass all the cars by walking along (or atop) the low stone wall that stands between the cliffside road and the Merced River as it rushes over huge boulders below. Lines from Cake’s “Long Line of Cars” play in my head during this maddening crawl toward the park entrance. Little do I know, this is merely a harbinger of what’s to come.
The aforementioned “firefall” is a trick of the setting sun that sometimes occurs in mid-February, where Horsetail Falls appears to glow, as if on fire. The phenomenon has been photographed countless times, and thanks in large part to its social media fame, thousands of people flock to the park in an effort to photograph it. Knowing this, we try to head toward Tunnel View instead, thinking to avoid the whole glut of firefall traffic. As my poor map-reading skills would have it, we don’t do that at all and instead wind up joining the horde of cars passing (somewhat) close to Horsetail Falls, trying to make our escape from the park.
No sunset photos tonight. Just a seemingly endless sea of red taillights.
At last, we escape back to our lodge, where we study the maps (both paper and digital), and plot a second attempt for early morning.
Success! The park is cold, reasonably deserted, and we get to photograph both Valley View (one of the views that Ansel Adams famously photographed) and Tunnel View during the elongated mountain sunrise. Early wake-up and cold-numbed fingers notwithstanding, this second foray wholly redeems the experience.
Editor’s note: There’s now some hoopla on social media about catching sunrise at Horsetail Falls, so there might be traffic if you visit in the morning, too. If you have questions, it’s usually a decent idea to contact the park.
It’s raining the next morning as we head back down the winding mountain road to Mariposa, and beyond. Many of the coffee shops there are closed on Sunday or don’t open early enough, so we make for Hola Cafecito in Merced, before heading west and north, to the Lagunitas taproom in Petaluma.
Rain has been our companion all day, and it’s also doing a number on the generator for the Cousins Maine Lobster truck outside the taproom. While we wait to see if they’re going to be able to accept cards, we claim seats at the bar and dive into the extensive tap list. Like Sierra Nevada, Lagunitas has been on my to-visit list for a long time. They’re another of the breweries that’s strongly influenced West Coast beer. The taproom is quiet today; no bands are playing the stage outside, and only a few souls are staying dry inside the taproom itself. Amongst the posters from past concerts decorating the walls, is a poster for Mdou Moctar’s show here in 2021. Right on.
Amid a wide selection of IPAs (of course), and a few other interesting-sounding beers, like Amarachi Crudo, a 7% ABV imperial rice lager, I opt for the Pils. It’s a difficult style to master, and the low alcohol content (5% ABV) is suitable for lunchtime imbibement.
The folks running Cousins Maine Lobster truck do get their generator to cooperate, and the Pils pairs well with lobster grilled cheese and lobster bisque. Perfect fare for a rainy North Bay afternoon.
Less than half an hour’s drive north (in light traffic) lies Windsor, which contains Russian River Brewing Company’s second location. It’s larger than their downtown Santa Rosa joint, with a different food menu, and a secondary dining area + bar, where it appears that well-behaved dogs are welcome.
Over the years since first writing about Russian River, I’ve heard some scuttlebutt to the effect that they’re scaling back their Belgian and sours program in favor of more lagers. While it is true that the Windsor tap list contains several lagers, they are vastly outnumbered by a combination of IPAs, Belgian, and sour styles.
The next day, we catch up with the winter storm we’ve been sort of following since leaving Yosemite.
The hills heading out of the Santa Rosa area have snow, and by the time we get back into Oregon, we’re glad to be rocking snow tires.
Back home, it’s time to unpack, share a bottle of Pliny of the Elder, and watch the snow blanket the yard.
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