I’d been there before, but not when it looked like that.

I’d felt its grandeur before, but not quite when it felt like that.

Too much has felt too out of sorts as of late. And too much of it, has felt out of my control, and I needed to reel myself back in.

Coming from south + west, and 200+ miles away, I got a jumpstart the night before, to secure my ability to drive through the gateway to the land of the granite giants before the masses.

I woke up at 2:30 am at a Travel America, just outside of Fresno. June laying halfway on top of me. We both stretched our legs, I brushed my teeth. I folded up the backseat after I had gotten the car running, and onward we went.

I have a hard time driving in the dark at night, but for some reason when I get going really early, it doesn’t bother me so much.

Two hours later, we were seamlessly passing through the entrance, unstaffed. The familiarness of the Sierra was in abundance, + the meadows of Wawona were soon filled with lupines, and I could see some type of paintbrush in small red flashes on the banked side of the road.

Soon enough we rounded one corner of the road, and there it began. The towering granite in its various shades of gray.

With June in tow, I would be pretty tethered to the main + paved path, but the backcountry wasn’t the reason I was there. I wanted and I needed the humbling reminder that the granite giants never fail to provide. The world is immensely vast, and that feeling of being small in the presence of said giants invokes a feeling of awe, transcending my current understanding of the world.

It didn’t take long for me to feel strong feelings of humility. On all of my lefts and all of my rights, there was water flowing. The Merced ebbed, flowed powerfully yet peacefully, as ribbons of white water moved over the tops of the rocks and gracefully slid down the striated granite.