July 2, 2016 Mile 942.5-962.8 My first attempt at the John Muir Trail, 12 years prior, was a failure. I started in early June in a heavy snow year. I had cheap boots from the discount rack from a discount store that weren’t waterproof. I was carrying five books, two of them hardbacks, as well far too much equipment. And I was starting my hike during the first days of 80+ temps, which meant the snow was soft, wet, and uneven, and the limited trails I was able to find were flooded and muddy. It took me four days to go from Yosemite Valley to Tuolomne meadows, a distance of only 21 miles. My knees were aching from too much weight and too many jarring slips of balance in the snow. My feet were a mess of infected blisters—8 on my left foot, 7 on the right. I would make it another 10 miles the next day, and then turn around and come right back when a slip up the increasingly snowy slopes of Donahue pass led to yet another seriously painful twinge in my knee, ending my hike. At some point later, I would realize that the whole travail had strengthened me emotionally and eventually brought me through one of the toughest periods of my life. At the moment I arrived in Tuolomne Meadows, however, I was nothing more than beaten down and hungry. A decade prior to that trip, my very first backpacking foray had also ended in failure at Tuolomne Meadows. In the middle of the night, a bear stole the food bag my dad and I had hung at our campsite just below Donahue pass (the next year the National Park Service began to require bear canisters because the “World-Famous Marauding Bears of Lyell Canyon” had caused too many incidents). We hiked the 12 miles from our campsite to Tuolomne Meadows with no sustenance except for a couple corn tortillas the bear had left behind. Blood would rush from my head every time I would pick up my (overly heavy) pack after a break. On the first trip, I relieved my intense hunger with a veggie burger and fries. On the second, I was dejected to find the Grill, the general store, and the lodge all closed due to the high snow (in fact, the Tioga road would open the next day, much later than usual). Sometimes the denial of a desire makes the desire stronger, and so the grill took hold in my mind as an oasis of hot, real (ie, not dehydrated) food delivered to my starving self. This morning, though, I was fresh off of two days of gorging myself on hot, real food. When they opened for business, I was second in line. I bought a breakfast sandwich—eggs and cheese on an english muffin—, a side of breakfast potatoes, and a coffee. I sat down at the picnic tables and sank my teeth into the sandwich—and was disappointed to find that it was both bland and cold. After breakfast I took my time. I got a second cup of coffee and lazily perused my map for side trips I could take in the next section. I was planning to meet Lindsey’s parents at Sonora pass, a short 70 miles ahead, in seven days. After weeks of pushing myself toward milages in the upper twenties, I needed to hit the brakes hard. I could only do a sluglike 10 miles per day. When it seemed like I had taken as much time as I could muster, I strapped up and made my way over to Lembert Dome. My plan was to wander around it and kill some time, but somehow I found myself on the wrong trail, which spit me back out on the PCT. Careful to take my time, I stopped to read each of a series of informational signs that talked about the unusual ecology of alpine meadows. I walked at a pace well-suited to the glacier-formed landscape, more leisurely than I had been in weeks. The trail meandered through dry pine forest, then emerged at the side of the Tuolomne River. I sat and gazed at the beauty of distant Unicorn Peak, reflected in the surface of the placid river. Trout lingered beneath the surface. I slipped into a quiet reflection that matched the slow winding and shallow depths of the water as I ambled down the gently sloped trail. I came to a bridge, and with it, new landscape. The flat, dirt floor of the pine forest, and with it the calm controlled perambulations of the river, gave way to a release of sorts. Here, the flat earth fell away, first gently, then steeply, into a granite labyrinth of glens and vales. The water spilled down the muted rim of the world, passively jostled and joggled into a froth. I crossed over. The trail descended, the river grew more insistent. My walking pace increased without my willing it. I stopped to watch and listen, to slow my hike. Once, twice. The third time I stopped, I checked the map and my watch. 5 miles. 10 am. Already halfway through my miles for the day, and I had only been hiking for a couple hours. I decided to sit and enjoy the cascading water for a long while. I sat and watched for what seemed like hours, sinking deeply into the currents, becoming one with the sprays and fans as the river bounced off of rocks and back on itself. When I finally came out of the river’s trance, I checked my watch. 10:20. I stared in disbelief. There was nothing for it but to keep hiking. I was taking some final pictures of the site when two hikers, noticing that I had a good angle at the river, stepped off trail to snap photos of their own. Goat was tall and lanky, a quiet but affable guy in his mid-twenties. Earthcake, a shorter, gregarious woman with a German accent and an infectious laugh, looked younger but spoke with a self-assurance that made me think she was probably in her thirties. We all continued toward Glen Aulin High Sierra Camp, at first separately, but as we kept stopping to take the same pictures, we began to fall into an easy conversation that eventually rolled into hiking together. I mentioned how difficult I was finding it to hike slow, and Earthcake suggested that I just get picked up in South Lake Tahoe instead of Sonora pass. Without checking the map, it sounded great to me, so I took off the brakes and joined them at their faster pace. We continued to Tuolomne Falls, passed Glen Aulin, then followed a tributary of the Tuolomne up a long easy slope. We descended into a canyon, crossed the creek (I tried crossing a few creeks without my shoes, but it seemed more hassle than dry shoes were worth, especially when the mosquitoes started to swarm), and then a hard climb up to a ridge that we would then descend into Matterhorn Canyon. Goat and Earthcake hiked fast. I’m generally pretty fast too, but I had trouble keeping up with them, especially on the uphills, which they would charge up as easily as if they were sidewalks. But it was fun to be hiking with company again, and I was happy to burn some miles and push myself. When we reached the top of the ridge, we ran into a group of 3 guys and a girl, obviously PCT hikers, who were lazing about in a small grassy area alongside the trail. One of the guys immediately stopped us. “We’re taking a hiker survey, can you answer a question for us?” Some nervous laughter among the group. “Yeah, sure.” “Are you guys circumcised?” Guffaws from the group, especially from the girl. A surprising question with, as it turned out, a surprising answer: 3 of the 5 of us were uncircumcised. Apparently they had asked the same question of at least 10 other guys who had passed by in the last hour, and it was leaning heavily toward uncircumcised, a substantial divergence from the general population. Shock value aside, the group was friendly and the seven of us sat and rested for a short while. When Earthcake and Goat got up to leave, I got up with them. Earthcake asked “Are you hiking with us now?” “Uh, yeah, if that’s okay,” I stammered back, worried that I had made myself an unwelcome hanger-on, perhaps even interrupted some romantic dynamic between them. I hadn’t read anything like that between them, but I had only known them a very short time. “Great!” she said, dispelling my fears, and with that, we departed. This northern part of Yosemite was dotted with small, perfectly reflective ponds. Just as a mirror makes a room seem more spacious, these ponds made it look as if holes had been punched in the dirt to expose the sky below us. We hiked mostly in silence. We reached the edge of Matterhorn canyon, a spacious canyon capped on the north end with a pyramidal mountain, which I assumed was Matterhorn peak. The descent was fast. When we reached the bottom, we found a flat shaded area several football fields wide in which to pitch our tents. A small rill perpendicular to the main creek bisected the area and provided water, and we each made our separate dinners. Goat asked about bears in Yosemite, and I told him my experience with the World-Famous Marauding Bears of Lyell Canyon. This might not have been a nice thing to tell him. He was eating his dinner inside his tent
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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