Return to Wawona

My brother and I were on our way to Yosemite to scatter our mom's ashes. It felt like the end of a very long and complicated journey

- By JIM HINCH, San Diego, California

I strained to see ahead on the winding mountain road. Snow swirled in the wind, and the pine boughs drooped with white.

My brother, Ben, and I were in a rented SUV, making our way up Highway 41 in the Sierra Nevada. It was December. We were on our way to Yosemite National Park. When we left Oakhurst, the last major town before the park, the sky was clear and there was no sign of snow. We figured we didn't need tire chains.

We were wrong. Turned out, the early winter storm that had blanketed the mountains yesterday wasn't done. The road, plowed hours earlier, was slicking up again as we rose in altitude. No matter how slowly I drove, the SUV slid around each curve.

"You're sure about this?" Ben asked.

"I think we're almost there," I said, trying not to sound worried. We really needed to get to Yosemite.

In the back of the SUV were two small boxes containing our mom's and dad's ashes. Our mom, Robin, had died two months earlier after a yearslong struggle with dementia. Our dad, Charles, had died nearly two decades before that, in 2005.

You might wonder why we still had Dad's ashes all these years later. Let's just say there was a story behind that. And this unexpected snowstorm, making it harder than we'd anticipated to reach the cabin we'd rented, felt like part of that story.

Our destination was a cabin in the small community of Wawona, an early settlement within Yosemite that had, over the years, grown into a village of cabins adjacent to a historic hotel and golf course.

We'd rented one cabin in particular. Cabin 82. It was the cabin our family had always rented when Ben and I were kids. Those were happy memories: summer trips to Yosemite when the busyness of our life in Los Angeles, where we grew up, felt far away.