Yosemite National Park, USA

Yosemite is a location that evokes thoughts of pure, untouched, natural beauty, but in reality may fall far from that ideal. Famously swarmed with throngs tourists, disgorged from busses, cars, and RVs, the park draws millions of visitors per year, with tens of thousands per day in the peak of summer tourist season.

However, in the unseasonable warmth of January 2021, things were very different. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Yosemite closed all in-park lodging, and with most long distance travel reduced to a trickle the park saw visits drop to just half that of the same month the year prior. At the time I was working at SummerBio, an automated lab where we were routinely running tens of thousands of PCR tests per day, ensuring the safety of students in the LA public school system and of other public and private institutions. After months of work days of up to 16 hours I was in need of a break, and traveled to the national park, having no idea what to expect.

Driving into the park, I was met with a stunning, serene vistas, with hardly another person in sight. Upper Yosemite Falls saw perhaps a few dozen people the day I went. Climbing to Glacier Point, one found the world-famous lookout completely empty, literally without another person to be seen. I was able to sit down and admire one of the most beautiful vistas in the world - the the soothing scene in front of me, winning, at least for a bit, over the sense of the world seemingly crumbling all around.

That same day I came across this view. Half-dome, the awe-inspiring granite monolith, towered over the valley, nearly empty and quiet for perhaps the first time in decades. The still, mirror-like water of Merced River brilliantly reflected the view, similarly reflecting the calm I felt for the first time in nearly a year. Even today, the incongruence of having time and space to relax while across the world people dealt with the pain and fear that the pandemic is hard to come to terms with. But despite all of that, I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to visit this incredible place, to experience the feeling of having it as a personal sanctuary, and to have been able to take that energy back to a job that at the time was the most important thing I could possibly have been doing.