Upside: • You’re right next to half dome! A short walk away towards the center of the Valley and you’ve got a great sunset view of the dome. • Also located right next to the the trailheads for Mirror Lake and the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls (most popular trail). You can also start the Valley Loop Trail from here. • You’re in the valley! This saves you hours of driving in and back out and parking; plus, you get experience Yosemite in the morning and evening with a much smaller crowd. • Wildlife - Coyotes wandered through a couple times. Beautiful! Unfortunately, no bear encounters for me. Follow the food storage rules though. Don’t ever leave food out. Food in the lockers, NOT in your car. Especially not visible. I saw both ravens and the coyotes go nuts on one picnic. • Plenty of mostly clean restrooms. Not a bad idea to bring your own toilet paper.

Downside: • Campsites are right next to each other with no privacy *e.g. no tree barrier - between sites. Some sites are better than others. Not that you have much choice when booking but check out the site photo on Recreation.gov to manage your expectations. • Generators – three 2 hour time slots throughout the day where visitors can run their generators and it gets loud. • Between 11AM and 2PM, there’s a lot of foot traffic of people cutting through the sites to get the those popular trailheads after the parking lots fill up.

Other notes: • Cellular service with Sprint/T-Mobile was spotty, coming in and out. Usually out. Perfect signal 5 minutes down the road towards the Yosemite Village.