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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July 1, 2016
0 Miles No pictures today, sorry. Since Lindsey was going to join me in Bishop in a week and hike with me to Tuolomne Meadows, the plan was for me to hike north from there, and then Lindsey’s parents would pick me up at Sonora pass and drive me back down to Bishop (they had planned a long weekend at a lodge there to help with transporting Lindsey’s car up to Yosemite). The bus was leaving at 7am, so I awoke at 6. I hustled, but I just couldn’t get everything packed in time. My executive function (the part of the brain responsible for making decisions, planning, and organizing) had clearly atrophied, and I found myself struggling and stressing over simple decisions like which piece of equipment to pack up first, or whether I should go to the bathroom or brush my teeth first. They were decisions that didn’t matter, and yet I found them overwhelming and impossible to untangle. I’d find myself holding on to three things and trying to pick up a fourth because that, too, needed to go in my backpack right now. I finally cut through the gordian knot by deciding to pick up one thing at a time and put it away. After I finished the trail, I would continue to use this minor trick to process my inbox and clean up my house, and it would do wonders for keeping my stress levels lower. I got to the station at 7:10, but the bus had already left. I went to Schat’s bakkery, recommended by a friend on facebook, and filled up on pastries and coffee. The next bus didn’t come until 9, so I had time to relax and read on the patio outside. I continued reading when I got on the next bus and made the long drive up highway 395 to Mammoth Lakes. I would have liked to explore the town a little, but a YARTS charter bus was waiting for us, and it would be the last transfer until the evening. When I arrived in Tuolomne Meadows, I picked up my resupply from the general store and bought a beer and a pack of postcards to send to friends and family back home. There were several thru-hikers hanging out at a picnic table under a copse of pine trees, some of them eating expensive food from the grill, some drinking beer, and some just sticking around for the conversation and camaraderie. I finished up my postcards and engaged in conversation with the closest hikers. One of them, trail name Miles from Nowhere, was probably in his mid-fifties and had a slight Texas drawl. He had noticed Lolita in the outer, webbed pocket of my backpack, and wanted to talk about literature. He had a strange way of discussing it, like he was more interested in the historical impact of books than in the art itself. It’s a mistake I feel I often make as a music teacher: I list a bunch of reasons why a piece of music is important instead of sharing my passion for the music itself. I ate a late lunch from the Tuolomne Meadows grill, then looked for a place to set up my tent in the backpacker’s campground. It was packed. Most campsites had three or four tents, and some as many as six. Miles from Nowhere was building a campfire at a site with a covered hammock and only one other tent. He saw me and invited me to join him, then told me there were some extra beers in the bear box if I wanted them. After I set up camp and did my camp chores, I cracked a beer and chatted with him by the campfire. It turned out he was a teacher, or rather, a tutor. He had his own business teaching students accelerated learning techniques, such as memorizing cube roots to make them faster at particular math skills. The way he explained them, it sounded like a grab bag of tricks rather than a system of teaching kids to think. Not that tricks don’t have their place. For a kid who struggles with believing in their ability to learn, a good trick can give them a boost of confidence and motivation, making it easier to teach them the concepts that lead to real learning. Unfortunately, it sounded like his teaching never went beyond the tricks, and he was more interested in the marketing than the teaching. Whoever had the other tent (Miles had the hammock) never came out of it, but a fourth hiker, Chan, showed up and set up camp after we had been talking for about an hour. He was a quiet and polite hiker with limited English who was soloing the John Muir Trail. He joined us for a while, but said little, and went to bed as the light was just starting to dim and I was making dinner. Miles and I continued to talk into the dark, each of us recommending books that touched on whatever subject we happened to be talking about. It was clear that he had had an education, but it seemed like a checklist education, like he knew a lot of facts but hadn’t synthesized them into understanding. This became more apparent as our conversation became looser in the firelight. First arrogance, and then hints of misogyny and homophobia crept into his side of the discussion. Strange comments he had made about some of the classics we had discussed earlier started to fall into the context of a distorted worldview. When I pushed back on his more offensive statements, he was dismissive, blaming my relative youth on my “inability to see the world as it is.” I eventually decided I had had enough, wished him a good evening and went to bed. June 30, 2016 10 miles (off PCT mile 831) Although I was right against the easternmost ridge of the Sierra, the Inconsolable range stood tall and blocked the morning sun from my campground. What a great name for a range of mountains: Inconsolable. The angle of the ridge and deep crags means that direct sunlight rarely hits the face. Juxtaposed against the shining white granite of the surrounding mountains, the darkness resembles nothing so much as the dark belly of a thundercloud. I woke with the first diffused light. The condensation on my tent drained the heat from my hands as I packed it up, leaving them achy and difficult to move. Difficult to make breakfast. It was later, climbing up the moderate final slope to Bishop Pass, that finally warmed them. The pass was made of broken rocks, possibly a moraine. I passed a snow-measuring station and a few grazing deer along the way. I crested the top and looked down on Bishop lake and Long Lake, in a deep valley carved out of the granite. The three lakes sparkled in the morning light, gold inlaid over topaz. I regretted that I hadn’t spent more time on the eastern side of the Sierra before this. Years of missed beauty. I started down a well-constructed trail of broken, carefully arranged rock shards. Parts were obscured by patches of snow. It was steep and unlike any trail I had hiked up to this point: part staircase and part labyrinth. I scuttled down quickly, eager to get to town, to get to food. Quickly, but still at a walking pace. When I hurry in civilization, my mind speeds from one thing to the next, never settling on the current moment unless I rein it in and force it to pay attention. After days of walking, though, I find it easy to stay focused on life as it happens, in the moment. I sped by Bishop Lake, Long Lake, and South Lake as quickly as my feet would take me (and probably startled the many day hikers and their dogs as I came around blind turns at full speed), and still found I was able to sink my mind fully into their serene beauty. Nonetheless, ten miles was over in a flash, and I found myself at the parking lot by 10am. Despite all the day hikers I had seen, almost no one was on their way down the mountain. I asked an older couple for a ride, but they were headed to another lake after this, in a different direction. A small group of old ladies were up to take a gentle walk around the side of South Lake, and were on their way out, but they didn’t have room in their car. A ranger came by, cleaning out old food from bear boxes. He told me he would have given me a ride, but he wasn’t allowed to (an unexpected hitch from a police officer a few weeks later would make me wonder if he was being honest). With no other people around, I decided to read my book on a rock by the trailhead.
The sun had lifted itself above the mountains and was baking me as I sat. The nearby pit toilet was starting to reek. I considered finding some shade, but realized that it would be difficult to be seen if I tried to flag down a moving car. I decided to stay put. A half hour went by, then forty-five minutes. No cars. What if I can’t find a ride? What if I have to stay up here another day and still can’t find a ride? This is my fear every time I have to hitch. It feels like being single all over again. No matter how short the wait has been, it feels like it might never end. Around 11, a silver Land Rover pulled up and let out two clean hikers, male and female. I asked them what they were going to hike. To my surprise, they were thru-hikers as well. I hadn’t expected other PCTers to take this out-of-the-way resupply route. Indeed, the only reason I had was because my wife was supposed to join me here for a week-long trip through the heart of the John Muir Trail, and I was a week early. To my relief, the driver agreed to drive me down the hill. He was probably in his late fifties. He seemed grumpy at first, but I quickly realized that it was just a tough exterior he was putting up. “Thanks for picking me up. I was getting worried I wouldn’t be able to find a ride.” “Yeah, sure.” “Do you pick up a lot of hikers?” “Sometimes. Those hikers paid me $90 to drive them up there.” Was he expecting payment? I wasn’t carrying much cash. “Oh, do you do this for a living?” “Mostly I drive tours through Death Valley.” We talked about that for a short while, then he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a music teacher, and it was like a small crack in his facade burst wide open, revealing a shining light inside. He was suddenly animated, telling me all about his love of Russian Orchestral Music: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky. He told me all about bi-yearly trips to Moscow, where he would buy 5 or 6 tickets to see the different symphony orchestras perform over a period of two weeks. He was a man on fire, and I was happy to fan the flames. It seemed like a strange coincidence that I would find a ride with someone whose interests so closely aligned with my own, but then I realized that I just have a lot of interests. I probably would have felt just as lucky to find that I was being picked up by a fellow teacher, or a serious reader of books. When you add all of a person’s interests up, it’s probably rare to find two people who don’t have anything in common. Sometimes it just takes some deeper digging. When we arrived in the small town of Bishop, I hesitantly asked him if I could give him any money for his troubles. He told me not to worry about it. He dropped me at a cheap motel and wished me well on my journey. After I settled into my room, I walked down the street and promptly devoured a whole pizza. My most pressing need satisfied, it was time for town chores. Laundry, shower, resupply at a grocery store, pay my credit cards, check my email, figure out the bus schedule to Tuolomne Meadows where I would hike my next leg, and who knows what else I hadn’t thought of. It was overwhelming. I couldn’t figure out what to do first. My decision muscles were out of practice and I was so in tune with my body that the slightest rise in my cortisol felt as if I were in mortal danger. I eventually decided to start with a shower, then laundry. That meant wearing my rain gear in one-hundred degree weather, which turned into a sweaty mess. At the grocery store, I bought every snack that appealed to my hiker hunger, which meant almost every snack I laid eyes on, and gorged myself in the hotel room while I called Lindsey and then tried to tackle my email, bills, and the bus schedule. I discovered that Jim and Danielle, the couple who I had met before Kennedy Meadows and enjoyed chatting with, were also in Bishop. They were a few days behind me on the trail now, but they had hitched north from Independence to take a zero day and resupply in a bigger town. We met for dinner at a small mexican food place. I had gorged myself all day, so I was only able to eat about a third of my burrito, then we all went next door to the movie theater to watch one of the two movies playing: Independence Day: Resurgence. It was a cliched, stupid movie, just like the original Independence Day, but it was a good relief from all the trail chores I still had to do. At some point in the middle of the movie, it occurred to me that I was on a real quest, not just living vicariously through entertainment, and I was filled with gratitude and awe at what my life had become. And that’s how I became the only person to ever cry during Independence Day: Resurgence. After the movie, I walked back to my hotel room alone, took another shower (I still couldn’t get the dirt off of my feet), and restlessly tried to sleep, suffocating in blankets and stuffy air. It surprised me, but I realized I preferred sleeping outside on the ground. June 29, 2016 811.3-831 (+3) I’ve camped near the King’s River once before, when I hiked the John Muir Trail in 2008. This night, like that one, was one of the coldest nights I’ve ever spent in the Sierra. I had to force myself out of the sleeping bag. The river was already flowing deep and wide, not a good sign for those poor souls who would be crossing later in the day after snow had had a chance to melt and funnel into the river. I had to search upriver a bit, but I finally found a large Douglas Fir that had fallen across the water and was mostly bereft of branches. Balance was a little more difficult with cold, stiff muscles. Crossing logs is one of my favorite wilderness experiences, but I prefer to feel limber and quick. Nonetheless, I made it across safely and climbed out of the river’s funnel. The climb back up was a little longer than I remembered, but soon enough I was among stunted foxtail pines on a basin plain with wide views. To the east, a line of burnt ember ridges hinted at iron ore. To the north, Mather Pass loomed. I stopped at a granite bench that was polished and shattered by ancient glacial activity, puzzle pieces of rock that had been loosely arranged in order. I filtered water, then watched the shadows migrate along the eastern wall as the sun climbed over the peaks. The cold had me chomping at the bit, so I packed up quickly and charged ahead without checking my rest site. That would bite me in the ass later, when I realized that my water filter was missing. The trail followed a tributary of the Kings River through the basin plain. Meadows and polished granite alternated to create a mottled landscape for several miles. Morning mists hung about the nearby peaks. Their nearness reminded me that I was hiking a catwalk in the sky, and my spirit elevated. I passed several hikers going in both directions. The southbounders were almost certainly hiking the John Muir Trail or some other shorter hike. It was too early in the season for PCT SOBOs. The northbounders could be either PCT or JMT hikers, but it was usually easy to tell them apart. PCT hikers usually looked stretched out and underfed, their clothes had inexplicable stains, and their gear was scuffed and frayed. JMT hikers generally had bigger, heavier packs, and everything about them looked clean and nourished. I passed one such NOBO hiker in the late morning, and asked him if he was hiking the JMT. He scoffed. “No, I’m doing the PCT.” I felt bad. “Sorry, you look so clean.” He chortled and introduced himself as Golden Girl. By this point I had stopped asking hikers how they got their trail names, but I wish I had. The gently sloped terrain made it easy to crush miles, and I quickly found myself climbing Mather Pass. On my SOBO JMT trip in 2008, Mather Pass was the hardest pass we climbed. That day, as I remember, started with the Golden Staircase, which spent most of our energy. When we reached the top of that, we started into Palisades Basin, a long, curving ascent from which Mather Pass is visible for entirely too long. It seemed we would never reach the end, and we spent most of the afternoon cursing “Fucking Mather Pass”. By the time we finally reached the top, we were almost delirious from exhaustion and found the phrase so hilarious that we took pictures of each other humping the boulders that marked the top. I chuckled at the memory as I hiked up and around the lake and attacked the switchbacks. When I reached the top, I found a lanky young man (stretched, dirty, and undernourished—definitely a PCT hiker) taking photos of Palisades basin below. The top part of the basin was covered in snow crisscrossed by footprints and glissade tracks. The young man was called Tinman, and he asked me to take a picture of him with the basin in the background. I obliged and asked him to return the favor. The three pictures he took, all of them, prominently display the edge of his finger. “Isn’t this breathtaking?” I said, “I think this is one of the most beautiful places on the planet.” “Nah, you can find this in any country that has mountains.” Okay buzzkill. He asked to look at my maps. He told me he had dropped his phone in a river and hadn’t brought any paper maps, so he wasn’t really sure where he was. I showed him and helped him find his next resupply point, then we both started down the snowy slopes. I took a short glissade just for fun, but the snow was too soft and I couldn’t go very far. A while later I found myself descending through the paradise of Palisades Basin. Water cascaded down emerald slopes. Below, the azure Palisades lakes shimmered. Somewhere, a wood recorder was playing faerie music. I turned a switchback and saw the source, a young hippie sitting crosslegged, enchanting the basin with his improvisation. I wanted to sit and enjoy it, but I knew the music would stop and I would be expected to talk, so I just drank it in as I passed. I exited the Palisades and began my descent of the Golden Staircase. It was crawling with people, most of them headed uphill, and many of those resting in the scattered shady nooks between exposed switchbacks. I empathized. I remembered how grueling that climb had been and was grateful that I was now headed downhill. Eventually I reached the bottom, knees aching, and followed palisade creek along the canyon. I found a shady campsite near the river to eat lunch. When I went to pump water, I realized I had lost my filter. Not a disaster, but a bit of a bummer. I had aquamira drops as a backup, so now was as good a time as any to try them. Maybe I could just ditch the extra weight and use the aquamira from now on. I added a few drops to my Smartwater bottle caps and settled in to read some Nabokov while I waited for the chemicals to work their magic. Some deer strolled through camp and I stopped reading to watch them instead. After lunch, the trail turned up the middle fork of the Kings river through . It was roaring. Where the river plunged over a couple of 10-foot drops, I threw a pine cone in to watch it surf the rapids. I’ve always been fascinated with the way water moves, with its power and flexibility and beauty. I stood and watched it for as long as my attention would allow.
By the time I finally reached my turnoff to Dusy Basin and Bishop Pass at PCT mile 831, I was exhausted. I decided to continue on “just a little bit further”. That ended up being a 3600 foot climb over 3 miles of switchbacks. By the time I reached Dusy Basin I was so drained that it was difficult to set up my tent. I would push in a stake and nearly black out when I stood up. Finally, though, I got the tent set up, made dinner, and surveyed my surroundings. The basin was from a world of dreams. A calm, shallow waterway meandered so calmly through the alpine grass that it seemed without direction. Trees were sparse, small, and twisted like bonsai. Marmots loped across the grass without concern. The whole impression was of unspoiled innocence. As I lay down beneath the sunset alpenglow of the Inconsolable Range, two deer drifted by and carried away the last of my consciousness. |
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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