road to Glen Aulin

God himself seems to be always doing his best here, working like a man in a glow of enthusiasm.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

July 28, 2011

 Last night we slept under the Sierra sky you once called a bell-flower, out tents pitched, looking up at star over star. A bear box to stow our food, and beside it we found a dozen juice-stripped limes and empty beer bottles.

On the trail, I place my feet in a stream of melted snow and cut one toe. I dry my feet with a travel towel so not to get blisters in my boots. Your own metatarsals must have been impenetrable as granite. My friend, Frieda and I hoist more than forty pounds each on our backs, the same weight as the Rangers training in the backwoods of Tennessee carry, and we keep stopping on the trail to gape at open faced rock drops.  
 

Your editor said you scissored purple prose from your  My First Summer in the Sierra journal, the first time you moved your pen to praise this tree-robed granite kingdom. You took out some of the “Beautiful!” “Glorious!” 

Traces of your exclamation marks etched on trees.

We rest at a lake where Frieda, draws. We don’t want to miss a drop of stone or glimmer of stream. 
  

We hike past imponderables like Lembert Dome, Dingley Creek, Unicorn Peak, Cold Canyon, Matterhorn Peak and Whorl Mountain. And my favorite, Little Devil’s Postpile.  Tuwuolumne Falls gushes with  late melting snow. 

 Too soon we reach Glen Aulin camp where we eat, of all things, pork chops for dinner in a canvas tent before setting up our own
bivouac in back, in a place bears prowl. 
  

When I close my eyes, I can hear a waterfall singing.

road to May Lake

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

July 29, 2011

Breakfast of oatmeal and pancakes and back into our ninja turtle shells. I have a state-of-the art water system on my back to drink, but the cord keeps getting tangled. I’m not used to carrying it and can’t see how little I’m drinking.
 

Although it’s late July, snow still patches the ground. Mosquitoes eat into our faces as we walk. We’re looking for a place to bathe, but first we pass a swamp called McGee Lake. We move through logepole, hemlock and red fir forests until we reach a wide-open face of granite, the east face of Tuolumne Peak. 

I lose Frieda on the trail for a moment, and at the top the trail seems to fork and I’m not sure which one to follow. I call “Frieda” and my voice echoes over the splendiferous canyons. I have a bear bell in my pocket. A friend in San Francisco tells me bears will hear it and think, ring, ring, time for dinner. I shake my bell, shout and at last she hears and comes running back up the trail. She can’t hear the bell, but follows the fear in my voice.  
  

We lie on rocks in the shade and rest for a short time before wandering down to the place we’ve been seeking all day, a magical little wonder of a place called Raisin Lake. It’s almost a mirage, so shiny and inspiring, but just as we are pulling off our  boots, socks and shirts, a lightning storm strikes and we’re standing in bare feet on exposed granite. 

We hop back into the same sweaty socks, dusty boots, clothes, backpacks, and scramble for the shelter of trees. We sheath ourselves from rain in gear that makes us sweat as we walk. We try to decide whether it’s better to wait out the storm or keep walking. We keep walking although we finally decide it’s better to bathe in the falling summer rain than to sweat—lodge style—in rainjackets. I move woodenly as we wander down through a magisterial, Eden-like glade to a place that is May Lake.  
  

May Lake as an oil painting; May Lake as a dream.

Because of the late snow melt, May Lake camp hasn’t opened. So no pork chops. No oatmeal.

The frenzied mosquitoes chase us into our tents quite early and we zip ourselves into our nylon fortresses of solitude. Power bars for dinner. Frieda will read this later and laugh at how sad, how very sad, how unromantic that is but that’s the way it happened. 
 

I read your journal about the high Sierras on my e-reader, enjoying your descriptions of the “wooly locusts” or the sheep you kept watch over during your first summer in these mountains. Later you led a fight to have the wooly locusts banned because they gobbled too many of your precious alpine grasses and flowers.

I read with my headlamp until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. That night I dream of climbing rocks so steep I keep falling backward like an flipped turtle, pulled by the weight of my backpack like a magnet toward a fractured, granite-bedded earth.

road to Sunrise

The only clouds were a few faint flossy pencilings like combed silk.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

July 30, 2011

I wake at May Lake with fear like one of those little black-striped squirrels running furtively across my chest. 
 

I grew up in Seattle and used to drive a stick shift, and when I had to  stop on Queen Anne hill or East Roy, I would sometimes get a falling sensation like my dream about the backpack. I worry that I’m going to have vertigo on the steep hike to the extraordinary peak Vogelsang the next day. I speak to a park ranger and he assures me that the path  is one mules use. Not steep enough to fall backward like an upset turtle. I feel silly and try to stop worrying.
 

We walk slowly, wearing black mesh nets over our faces to protect ourselves from mosquitoes. “We have to think of ourselves like bee keepers,” Frieda says. 

We walk across a road and then across another stream where we have to take off our shoes. Although the trail isn’t steep I walk like a deflated balloon. Maybe I’m hungry. Frieda spikes our water with electrolytes and we gulp trail mix as we walk, but I move through an existential fog.

We reach another rock face with switchbacks, and I get behind again. I try to picture you bounding up a few feet ahead on the trail with your long legs, turning around only to shout, “marvelous! Beauteous!” 
 

Like me, you grew up in a violent, religious home. Your father used your labor for thirteen or fourteen hours a day as you broke in two Wisconsin homesteads when you were only a teenager. You invented a special get-out-of-bed machine to wake you  at 4 a.m. so you could escape the physical world for a few hours and bury your head in romantic literature and mathematics. Later you dove into botany like someone falling in love for the first time, and in this wildness you found the it you’d been seeking.  Transcendental flight from the cage of an ordinary life.
 

We hike down the other side of the rock face and it’s still raining. Every late morning or early afternoon delivers another thunder  storm. I’m getting ready to cross another stream by walking across two logs when a mosquito flies in my throat and I choke and throw up. Not only that, but I do it in my mosquito net that’s supposed to protect my face, bee-keeper style, from mosquitoes. 

Yes, this happens, John Muir. I vomit in your glorious wilderness tabernacle!
 

I rinse out my mosquito net in the stream. My feet do their balancing act across two logs, I’m carrying my turtle shell. There is more rain and more debate over whether it’s better to be wet from rain or from the sweat of rain gear, we make it up another huge hill, while all around us, beauty echoes, glimpses of wilderness so lovely it would make those our society considers hardened criminals, including drug lords, sold-out politicians, and the girls who give birth to babies in toilets at their high school proms and leave the babies in the trash bins, cry wet tears. 

At the top of the hill my body delivers a telegram but I don’t want to read it. The message says stop. Gotosleepnego. Gonononono. I can’t believe it’s for me.

We rest and then we pick up our bags to move again.  But I’m empty in this euphoria, under the intoxication of mountains. We walk down another steep hill and at the bottom there are more mosquitoes than there were at the top, more than there were at May Lake. 
 

I’ve lost the little mosquito net, which is just as well because it smelled like vomit.

The mosquitoes are having some sort of rave as we put up our tents. Sunrise camp in Yosemite is one of the most surreal and heavenly places I’ve been in my life, and in this paradise, mosquitoes are flying in my ears and up my nose. 

Two weeks after we leave, this mosquito frenzy—enabled by late melting snow—will be over, the rangers have told us. Luck of the draw.
 

I construct my tent, line my gear neatly under the rain cover, zip up everything tightly and I’m walking toward the bear box to get something to eat for dinner and I vomit on the way, again and again. I’m dehydrated, and even though my mouth is covered in fur, Frieda tells me I have to keep drinking water or it will get worse. 

We eat our dinner in the two little outhouses. This is true. She eats and I drink water without shame, hiding from the mosquitoes, creatures that you would find marvelous in some way. But I spend two hours drinking and trying to keep my drinking down by drinking slowly. It doesn’t work. It’s not so bad as far as outhouses go, John Muir.
 

At last gathering courage, I thread my way through the dark, toward my tent and choose a special, already dirty shirt of mine and place it near the door in case I need it during the night. I’m careful. I sleep and don’t throw up and each time I wake I drink a little more water though the little suction, and although it makes my stomach hurt, I’m careful to keep it all down, until morning, John Muir.

road to Lee Vining and June Lake

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

July 31, 2011 

Our plan is to hike ten miles the next day to Lake Merced, and then to the ethereal alpine beauty of the Vogelsang camp. But I wake with bloodless lips. More vomiting. Altitude sickness and dehydration. The only thing to do is hike back down to the road, five miles, up a steep hill, down a deep ravine, across a rushing stream, up a mountainous hill and down a rock face, through the woods, across an wider rushing stream, and to the road where we can catch a shuttle to the car.

As we’re walking up the hill from Sunrise, I’m dizzy and breathless. I’ve kept nothing down for almost seventeen hours. I start a series of drinking fantasies. As we walk past clumps of snow, I gather the ice in my hands like a snow cone. I’ve never been this thirsty before. It feels spectacular the way the ice melts against my skin. It feels like my reddened fingers can swallow it in. 

Instead, I force myself to drink small sips of the warm, electrolyte enhanced water in my backpack. And a few minutes later, throw up again. I never understood before that in dehydration, it’s not that you don’t want to drink, but that your body refuses.

We reach the top of the steep hill and start walking down toward the lake and I describe to Frieda my dream of sitting in a porcelain bathtub filled with thousands of tear shaped ice cubes. I melt them on my tongue and let the water slide down my fevered throat. 

As we pass hikers on the trail, several stop and do a double take of my face. “How long have you guys been in?”

I smile through cracked lips. 

“Three days.”

When the lightening storm arrives, right on schedule, we start our usual scramble to absent ourselves from the exposed granite surfaces, batting off mosquitoes, me trying not to throw up, when, a few yards away we hear a “growwwwwrrrrrr…” 

I’m scrambling through my pockets for a the bear bell, ring, ring, come and eat us, and Frieda and I start giggling and telling stories in the loudest voices we can, our boots crunching against the rocks. We make it to the road, J.M., you’ll be glad to know despite the lightning, nausea and  heavy rain, the wet backpacks, the stream we cross, the huge puddles we wade through and slide across, and the fact that I will slip and fall twice, backpack first, falling like a backwards turtle, the same way I had in my dream, except that in life the backpack cushions my fall. It’s like falling on pillows. And if I’d been feeling better those are the sorts of travelers I would have enjoyed getting to know, the ones we meet that day, rain hikers. Many, like us, just happened to be caught in it. Two, encamped along the rock path in a rain canopy seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as any two people in Yosemite could be.

 We make it to the road, J.M., and into that little town Lee Vining, named after a nineteenth century mining prospector who, in real American frontier fashion, accidentally shot himself with a pistol in his pocket. Then we circle around a loop to June Lake where we lay out our things in the grass to dry after all the rain. 
 

I drink Berkeley ginger beer and sprite and Kombucha tea until I can’t drink any more, and since the altitude is lower, recover.

No more vomiting. No more mosquito net burquas.

road to Tuolumne Meadow

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canyons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage. Over nearly all the continent the deer find home.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

August 1, 2011

We spend a day here, wandering among the butter colored flowers, watching butterflies and allowing the deer to pose for photos. We sit for a bit at Parson’s lodge, near the place you helped to dream up this park, and we walk around the Soda Springs and take in the mountains from a distance. 

We meet the lucky park rangers who live in a cabin behind Parson’s lodge for the summer and ask for advice for the best place to spend our last day hiking
and they suggest a secret place I’m not
allowed to mention here.

That night we meet a German woman and a Canadian man, ultra light hikers, who live in Oregon. They sneak in as an extra tent at the campground. We share our picnic table and they share their chips and salsa and life stories with us. We note there aren’t any abandoned beer bottles beside the bear box at the backpacker’s campground.

road to Someplace Lovely, part way  to another Magical Place, cutting off-trail  and wandering across a meadow to arrive at a Nameless Lake, and meandering back along a stunning trail snaking beside an Ice-Bejeweled Creek

August 2, 2011 

  This is the sort of day we had planned to have more of.  My legs are strong and we leave our camping armor at the campground and tread lightly through the lodgepole pine forest. We stop in a glorious alpine meadow and feast on gorp, apples, French bread and Irish cheese in Sierra luxury, unmolested by mosquitoes, storms, or brown bears.

Curtained by mountains, we bathe in sunlight. Not a cloud shadow on the horizon. We’re the only hikers visible on the trail in any direction. 

We walk along a path used by native people for centuries. In 1852, a mere sixteen years before your arrival, John Muir, the Ahwahnechee chief, Tenaya, took his band of followers to escape the Mariposa Brigade in this general direction.

Savage’s men failed to catch them, but they did discover more places to mine silver. We pass miners’ abandoned cabins lying like stripped, bleached bones in the forest. 

The Ahwahnechee were poets, John Muir. When white people told Chief Tenaya they were going to name a lake after him, in order to honor him, he was baffled.

“It already has a name,” he pointed out. “The Lake of Shining Rocks.”

Pie-we-ack. 

How could these native poets and mountaineers have imagined, that all their ancestors’ centuries in this valley would end so abruptly with the discovery of a little shiny metal in 1848? Forty thousand people of other races would flood California within a mere five years, people ravenous for quick fortunes, eager to push aside and uproot those who owned the land. More than half of the Ahwahnechee diet comes from black oak acorn, plentiful in these hills, and yet the only life they were offered was relocation to a withered reservation outside of Fresno. 

  You noticed, later in life, what a light footprint the Ahwahnechees left in these mountains, after centuries of occupation. What park-keepers they were, setting controlled fires to hold back the brush, and to release redwood trees from their seeds, into winged near-immortality.

After lunch, we hike past the meadow and up, off trail, across what my guidebook calls “rusty exposures of Triassic-period metavolcanics” or a delicious copper sea of chipped rocks. 

A doe stops from behinda clump of white bark pines and alpine willows to watch us. She stares. We stare. She observes us with the curiosity a child might use to watch a squirrel walk across her seesaw.

We hike down the slope, toward a creek where we rest again.  I sit on a rock writing a letter to a friend. I see a little marmot pop his head out of a hole in the grass, and then he dives back in again. His tunnels rumple the ground. A relief map of subterranean villages. His sole food during midsummer is Sierra wallflowers and Brewer’s lupines. 

Frieda swims briefly in the creek. She’s brave. Some of the creek is still glazed with snow and ice. This time I’m less tempted to drink it in with my fingers. 

Poor Frieda. When she was twelve, she did the same Sierra loop we had planned this week, until my sickness turned us back. She and her beloved Vogelsang will have to meet again one day soon. 

It’s a nine-mile hike and at last we have to begin back. We see a yellow-legged frog hiding under some leaves.

A butterfly follows us most of the way back along the trail.