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The Sun and the Moon set astronomy back thousands of years.

As the only two things in the heavens that the ancients could look at and see any detail whatsoever, the fact that the Sun is a brilliant, featureless disk, and the fact that the Moon is a featureful but unchanging disk, kept Ptolemy and the rest of those guys in the dark. It was obvious to everyone that these things up in the sky were two dimensional. They were not spheres, they were heavenly stamps.

This is my example: if the Moon had rotated as it revolved about us, so that it showed a different face, gradually, every night, then it would have been obvious that it was a big ball out there. It is a stupendous coincidence of natural law that it shows us one unchanging surface. This stupendous coincidence allowed people to assume that it was not spherical. And if the Moon wasn’t a sphere, why think that anything else up there was? And if nothing else up there was spherical, why believe that the Earth was round?

There was no obvious reason to think that. It took many different people many lifetimes to convince everyone else that their subtle reasoning that the Earth is a ball, surrounded by other balls, was correct.

I tire myself out right now, just thinking about the inherent difficulty in trying to convince the hoi polloi of thousands of years ago that the earth is round, given the Sun and the Moon.

On David and my latest field trip, in Pate Valley, during our day off, when we had nothing better to do, I broached the subject of “perfect information.” My example was that, if I did have perfect information, I would know where to go to find a rare and expensive coin buried in the loam in Yosemite. I probably wouldn’t have to go very far. If I had perfect information, I’d be able to walk down the hiking trail a quarter mile or so, dig down 2 feet or so, and find a $5 gold piece that John Muir or one of his cohorts had dropped, decades ago. Those things are out there, lying around under the dirt, ripe for picking, if only I had perfect information.

“Perfect Information” is another way of saying “Omniscience.” The example is mundane, obviously; if I were omniscient, I wouldn’t waste a lot of time digging for lost gold. It’s just an example.

All that science is, as far as I can tell, is the human yearning to be omniscient. To be like God in that respect. God, of course, besides being omniscient, is also reputedly omnipotent, which is beyond our abilities, and even beyond our possibilities. I mean, I can see my way toward a time when we know everything we can possibly know; I can’t see a time when we’ll be able to do everything we can possibly imagine. So God’s safe, there.

The reason why I can see my way toward a time when we, as humans, as humanity, know everything we possibly can, is because scientists tell us that there are limits to what we can know. Chaos theory; the Uncertainty Principle. These are shorthands for saying “We can’t know everything.” Therefore, at some point in the future—call it ten thousand years from now— humanity will have as perfect a body of information as is possible. There will be nothing more; fact and fiction will be irrevocably split.

I can see how the possibility of knowledge limits can cause despair. It would have bugged the hell out of me 20 years ago, if I’d thought of it.

Now it doesn’t bother me at all. The way I think about it is that there are many ways that we can fantasize that the world is built, but there is only one way that it is really built. The way that it is really built is beyond critique; it is immutable. What good does it do me to rail against the immutable? None. My pitiful burst of blood and bone won’t change the way things are at all.

The very fact that there is a barrier between us and omniscience, I think, is cause for hope. If there was no barrier, no Chaos Theory, no Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, no Schroedinger’s cat, that would tell me (in no uncertain terms) that the universe and everything in it is inherently boring.

But, I’d still like to know where to dig to find a $5 gold piece dropped by John Muir decades ago.

And there’s a long way to go before it gets boring.

“Preheat the oven” my ass.

Pate Valley is at the bitter end of the canyon. Go farther, and you will fall from sheer cliffs into the Tuolumne, and your body will be carried over various falls and rapids to the Hetch Hetchy reservoir itself. Eventually your disintegrated remains will mix into San Francisco’s water supply, which will in turn cause San Franciscans’ cholesterol levels to rise slightly, and no one wants that.

So we stopped at Pate. We set up camp and spent the night. We decided to spend an entire day of rest there—a whole day of nothing to do but laze around on a beach, resting up for the three thousand foot elevation gain from Pate to White Wolf, which was about 6 miles away.

Lazing on a Beach at Pate Valley

It was a good plan. The next day, we found a nice sandy beach a few hundred yards upstream from our campsite and lolled for many hours, occasionally moving our soft cushions several feet back into the shade as the sun crept across the sky. Around 3pm, we rolled up our soft things and ambled back to our camp to fritter away a couple more hours before the sun went down by eating, sitting, yawning, and so on.

We’d barely started frittering when a snake slithered by my hammock. It was a rattlesnake, a ‘one rattle’ rattlesnake. After a couple minutes of consternation, I took my hiking sticks and, feeling in the groove, feeling Australian, I lifted the snake up and tossed him to the far side of a little creek that we were next to. Hardly had I finished congratulating my nature-documentary-sized balls, when another snake slithered into camp.

This one was a five- or six-rattle rattlesnake. He coiled up behind a tree next to the river, very close to where David and I had (many times) hunkered down to pump water or cool off.

Here’s my thinking at this point: one rattlesnake is an aberration. Right? Two minutes before, I could count how many rattlesnakes I’d seen in the wild in the last thirty years on one finger. Now, in the space of two minutes, all that had changed. I mean, one rattlesnake equals one rattlesnake; that’s evident. On the other hand, two rattlesnakes equals many rattlesnakes. Gangs. A conflagration of rattlesnakes.

Obviously we couldn’t sleep in a place that was also home to a conflagration of rattlesnakes. So we left. It was 4pm or so, and our nice, easy stay in Pate Valley was at an end. We packed in just over fifteen minutes and we were, groaning, back on the trail.

Hours later and eleven hundred feet higher, we struggled into an unexpected campsite on the side of the mountain that had an awesome view of the reservoir, the first we’d seen of it on the whole trip. It was beautiful, but we were tired, so we set up camp after only a minute or two of gawking. It looked kind of like this

The Beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley

only a lot farther away and less oil-based.

The next day we climbed the rest of the way to White Wolf and fell upon what the little camp store had to offer. I stepped up to the window and asked for “the biggest, fruitiest athletic drink you have.” Unfortunately, all they had were half-pints of orange juice. I ordered seven of them.

Hours later at our traditional apres-hike stop at a Mountain Mike’s halfway back to the Bay, David ordered a ‘mountain-sized’ pizza for us, and we did our manly best to inhale it.

A day after that, we hooked up with Eric and Donna and Julie and spent some time inhaling beers at PCB. Also ping pong; Eric’s bought a ping pong table, and I did my level best to inhale that, too.

It was a good trip.

So we’re back. Another memorable trip into the wilderness, complete with rain, hail, sleet, and sunshine. Mostly sunshine, but the first day out it looked like we might be in for copious amounts of misery. At first, the weather was gorgeous. We started hiking from Tuolumne Meadows after grabbing some last-minute camping supplies, such as fritos and bean dip, a slab of cheese, and an orange as a nod toward the health nuts.

Tuolumne was gorgeous. Here, look at Tuolumne:

Tuolumne Meadows

After the Meadows, the trail trended down the canyon toward our first stop, the Glen Aulin High Sierra Camp. Originally, we’d planned to go a little farther than this, but about an hour out the rain started, which gave way to hail, and then sleet (I amused myself by saying “Hmmm….sleet, that’s nice” when it started), so we straggled in to Glen Aulin proper and decided that’s as far as we’d go that day. There’s a bridge over the river just prior to the camp, where I handed my camera to a passing hiker to take a picture of us, which can be seen via clicking the following:

Stan and Dave at Glen Aulin Bridge

Lucky for us the weather had cleared up a bit at that point! But the rain started again as we entered the backpacker’s camp, which made putting up our tent and hammock a wet business.

Glen Aulin is where we came across our one-and-only bear on the trip—a nice-sized cinnamon bear that lurked on the outskirts of the camp, waiting for hikers to mislay scrumptious hiker-food so he could swoop in and take it. He got someone’s hot cocoa while we were there. Most of the time I was watching him, he was rubbing his shoulders, flank, ass, and face on a tree up the hillside from our camp. He did become a little aggressive at one point, and I managed to hand my camera to a fellow camper named Felipe to record it:

Glen Aulin Camp

but Dave and I, using our hard-won veteran black bear knowledge we’ve accumulated over many years, gave him a respectful berth, and he eventually lost interest:

Glen Aulin Camp Too.

The next day the rain was but a memory, and after coffee and tea, and (for my part) an enormously successful shit in the last outhouse for the next 26 miles, we packed up and headed down the trail.

We passed several waterfalls. California, Waterwheel, Le Conte, and a couple others. The thing is, the back country being wilderness and all, we weren’t sure which waterfall was which, and the canyon was perfectly lousy with them. In “Yosemite Disney,” each waterfall would be accompanied by a sign, garish or not, that would tell us what we were looking at. Not so here. We fantasized about Park “John Muirs,” dressed in drab period costumes, who would function as roving informational Goofys, showing up in the oddest, most out of the way spots in the back country. Perhaps a hiker would be huffing and puffing up an incline, and around the bend would be: a John Muir! sitting on a boulder, smoking a pipe, ready to lay out the latest Yosemite Disney homily.

Perhaps; that was one fantasy. Another fantasy cut straight to the heart of things and populated the forest with Micky Mice and Goofys, walking about waving their white-gloved paws in a half-hearted way, just in case tourists were watching.

We found a nice isolated spot with water access, Goofy-free, near an unidentified waterfall, and set up camp.

The next day, being the 3rd day of the trip, we returned to the trail. We passed more waterfalls. It was, of course, gorgeous. Here is the Register Creek waterfall where we stopped and re-filled our water containers:

Register Creek Falls

I asked a passing ranger named Esmeralda to take that picture. All the time we spent at the falls, I had the strangest feeling I was being watched.

As the day progressed, it became clear to Dave and me that we hadn’t gotten as far down the canyon as we’d thought. According to our calculations, Pate Valley—our destination for the day— should have been an easy 5 or 6 mile hike from our riverside campsite. But apparently we were 2 or 3 miles shy of where we thought we were. I perpetually expected to get to Pate right after the next bend, or the next rise; my expectations were defeated many times.

It was also getting quite hot at these lower altitudes. We plodded through several hot, dry manzanita/scrub oak patches, which weirdly gave way to humid and fern-filled deep forest just yards away. In one such fern forest, a kindly leprechaun named Good took this picture for us:

Fern Forest Prior to Pate Valley

Finally, though, we arrived at Pate.

more later…

Welcome, Julian! You’re going to find the earth, by and large, a pretty nice place. Here’s hoping all our pesky little problems are ironed out before you get to be my age.