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David and I spent a week backpacking in Yosemite a few days ago (as we try to do most summers), and it was sensational. The best one yet. The secret to being the best one yet, I think, is that I prepared not at all for it. Usually I try to work up to one of these things by exercising pretty regularly for weeks and months beforehand, but not this time. This time I didn’t exercise at all and ate badly. Because of this, I had a great time and few to no aches and pains after leaving the mountains. A direct cause and effect relationship. I suppose staying every other night in the high sierra camps contributed to our well-being in some marginal way, but I like to think my slothful habits had more impact.

And I can recognize trends when I see them. Next year I plan to increase my pleasure by actively sabotaging my health. A 3 or 4 pint blood donation a week prior to our expedition should do the trick.

So we had a great time, and all goals were met. I even managed to snag a new desktop for the ‘puter:

As you know, the prettiest picture can fail as a desktop because it’s too cluttered, or dark in the wrong places, or stretches ridiculously, or any number of other things that make it interesting in the wrong way. So taking a desktop picture is kind of a trial-and-error event; in fact, the pictures I took with an eye toward their utility as desktops were uniformly unusable.

List of Photo VR Scenes in Yosemite National Park by erik goetze

What’s odd and exciting is how little this guy’s experience of Yosemite overlaps with mine. I’ve been to a lot of places in Yosemite, but very few of those places are these.

David and I have backpacked for twelve years. In the beginning, it wasn’t easy to say whether or not we’d make it a continual thing. The first two expeditions, in fact, if not disastrous, were certainly less than satisfactory in most ways. Ticks and mosquitoes, chafed thighs and blistered feet were only just outweighed by psychological benefits. But it got better, chiefly because we’re tool-using monkeys who realized we had to make backpacking more comfortable in order to justify continuing to do it.

This, then, is a short chronicle of the implements two tool-using monkeys bought to tame the wilderness:

May (?) 1993 (?), the Shenandoah:

Hell. Surplus army backpacks; tarps instead of tents. Steel-toed workboots; I may have well just been wearing nails and broken beer bottles. The tarps, which seemed like such a good idea when I used them in a survival course in eastern Washington in the cold, instead took a small piece of my soul away in the nights, among the night creatures. We were treating water with chemicals before drinking it. After it was over, two days later, Carole discovered a tick behind my ear. I had wounds to lick. If not for the partial solar eclipse on the day we left (enjoyed from a Long John Silver’s parking lot), I fear this trip would have been the last. As it turned out, it was a long time before we did it again.

July 2001, the Hetch Hetchy:

We had the same backpacks, which were ungainly nightmares. Meals Ready to Eat, which was not an innovation but an eventually-recognized dead end. We had Scientific Marvel #Q, a water pump which made chemicals a thing of the past. It opened the door to comfort, just a little.

We might have given up after this one, though, except for one contraption David brought: a hammock. The comfort turned night into day and made angels weep with joy. And it turns out one can skinny-dip in a sun-warmed inlet above a waterfall and find Jesus.

A digital camera chronicled the events, except for the angels and Jesus.

May 2002, the Hetch Hetchy:

Damned if there weren’t bears. Bears. And I brought this tent/hammock thing out which lifted me above the cracked earth into the sky’s sweet embrace, which was cool. MREs made their final, lackluster appearance. Our backpacks were fingered as a cause of mopiness.

Labor Day weekend, 2002, from Tuolumne to the Valley:

We have real backpacks. A brief flirtation with designed and packaged backpacking meals contributes to ennui. But I have my backpacker’s stove, David has his monocular, and they are invaluable in creating hot-food-and-coffee and scenes of the spectacular far-away, respectively.

The major innovation of this trip was trekking poles. It isn’t immediately obvious that sticks are so valuable. After all, they weigh more than nothing, and one has to carry that more-than-nothing miles and miles. But what they lack in lightness, they more than make up for in support and balance. Once the math was run, the choice was obvious: sticks contained 37% more support, 55% less ennui, and yielded 240% more aggregate comfort than no sticks at all.

A junkfood epiphany. Could the slovenly calories consumed by eating tasty junk food and peanut butter and crackers possibly match the tightly-wound but uneaten calories engineered into packaged mountain food? Yes, it goes without saying. A Dorito in the mouth is worth two fortified Cajun Delite powdered meal-packets left in the backpack.

And finally, finally, after two shaky forays into the wilderness, the world had turned enough to envision backpacking as an ongoing thing, something we do periodically. The precarious nature of our wilderness urgings was made stable and sure, as sure as the sun rises and beer is delightful.

July 2003, Ostrander:

Bug repellant is critical, and head nets are fine. Sometimes it rains, though, and rain has to be dealt with, so we did.

July 2004, the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne:

Nearly the whole package. Hammocks, adequate bug fender-offers, sweet, sweet junk food, coffee and tea, comfortable hiking boots, floppy camp shoes, and walking sticks. And the experiences: there is little better in life than to see a force of nature that is as blatantly not-about-us as is a bear. Beyond taking advantage of us if they can, bears just don’t care. To see something so totally unimpressed with people is a miracle.

The primary drawback was in planning. The route meanders generally pleasantly down for the first three quarters, but the last quarter is a three thousand foot climb out of the valley.

But it’s obvious that it had to be done, and I’m ecstatic that we did.

July-August, 2005, Tuolumne to the Valley:

It will be a different route, because there’s no reason to make spectacular scenery mundane. As for me, I’m not leaving any of my necessary and precious things home. And I will take, for the first time, an innovation that has the potential to revolutionize backpacking as I know it: a soft chair. Because it’s fiendishly hard to find a slab of granite cut to my ass’ exact proportions. It’s a sort-of canvas tripod stool-thing, and I have high hopes that it will rock my world.

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.

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…

To prepare for my hike with Dave in Yo, I took out my planisphere. Turns out the Duck’s Foot is part of Scorpio, with a couple stars that are unrelated.

The Ancients obviously made a colossal mistake in not incorporating those extra stars and calling the resultant thing “The Duck’s Foot.”

So much for spanglemaking this one.