Yosemite Climbing Association

Tom Frost, Royal Robbins and Liz Robbins during the book and photograph signing in the Curry Village Mountain Shop.

I was not able to get any photos during the evening slide show. Perhaps others will send me theirs.

Hope to see you there.

I would like to thank everyone that participated in the 7th annual Yosemite Facelift.

Your support has turned this event into the largest volunteer event in the National Park system.

We had check-in stations in Tuolumne Meadows and at Crane Flat on Friday, Saturday and Sunday along with the Visitor Center check-in during the five-day effort. 1,001 unique volunteers signed up gathering 172,307 lbs of trash. Slightly over 140,000 lbs gathered was asphalt and concrete found in an old dumpsite near Cathedral Beach which was trucked out for recycling. On the bright side, many of the areas that we have been cleaning over the years are a lot cleaner than when the Facelift was started. We have been taking on special projects to clean problem areas besides sprucing up the rest of the Park.

Over 160 miles of roadway and turnouts were cleaned up. 100 + miles of trails and 20 miles of river corridor was also cleaned. Everything was sorted and over 80% was recycled. Some of the special projects included the Cathedral Beach dumpsite, the ledge system below Glacier Point, an old weather station above Tunnel View, the area below the Tunnel View cliffs, removal of coiled phone line by Daff Dome and removal of an old paved road by Tuolumne Grove.

The Facelift started off with an evening program on Tuesday at the East Auditorium. Brittany Griffith provided her presentation and Jeff Johnson introduced his new movie 180˚ South.

I turned down a potential $20,000 sponsorship because they wanted to promote bottled water. They were disappointed and a little upset. I feel promoting bottled water is encouraging the wrong message especially in Yosemite which has some of the best tap water in the world. A lot of what we clean up during the Facelift is empty plastic water bottles. I would have accepted their offer if they would have brought a water station to encourage the use of sustainable containers. I think that the bottled water companies need to move in this direction for the future. This will make it a little harder to finance the Facetift(Don't worry I will find some funding). I hope you feel the same and agree with me for holding my ground.