WATERSHED

I remember, many years ago when living in Marin County, California, a bunch of us hiking a fire trail to the lake/reservoir over the hill from the house. On the way back uphill, my little sister Nina, then nearly 20 years old, commented that she'd never enjoyed hiking, because however beautiful the surroundings, it felt like hard work. I said, "look at it this way . . . your muscles are moving together in harmony, you're in a way massaging yourself. If you concentrate on bringing that image to the front of your mind, pretty soon you'll feel you're gliding uphill while getting a massage."

Well, she snorted and didn't buy it. Of course neither did I, really, but back in my primo backpacking days the workout was kind of enjoyable, and every single time on return from a 3- or 4-day trip I'd feel revitalized.

My family moved to California when I was 10. By the time 11 rolled around, I'd already fallen in love with the California mountains. I remember the first brisk whiff of that wholesome, tangy Douglas Fir scent when visiting the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Angeles National Forest, repeated at Mt. Baldy, Big Bear Lake, and finally, Yosemite, the crown jewel of the National Park System. At 14 I climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls with my dad. At 18 I worked with the Forest Service in Plumas County for a summer. On graduation from Berkeley in '65, the week before flying off to join Peace Corps Thailand a bunch of us classmates backpacked up to camp overnight at Little Yosemite Valley before hiking up to climb Half Dome the next day. And I kept on doing things like that in every decade of my life, and did my best to get my kids on the same track, taking them up there from their earliest years.

Also around the 11-year mark, my imagination was captivated by a slide show presented by a family of four, with two young kids, who had taken a month and hiked something called the "John Muir Trail," (now known by hikers as "the JMT"), which began in Yosemite Valley and meandered 211 miles through roadless wilderness to the top of Mt. Whitney, at 14,496ft (4,418m) the highest mountain in the U.S. outside Alaska.

The images they showed were of unbelievably beautiful and varied tapestries of mountain, forest, stream, and meadow. From that day I had it in my mind to do the trip someday. After not too many years I'd done all the pieces of it within Yosemite National Park. But I'd never tackled the whole thing, and kept thinking how very cool it would be to really go up there and see all that fine country. The Sierra Nevada, or "snowy mountain range," which John Muir said would be more aptly named "the Range of Light":

"After ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light."

Then in 2007, at age 63 and a year before retirement, I thought I'd give it a go. Unfortunately a lot of things went wrong, and I ended up just doing a couple more pieces of the trail. Many of my friends know this story, but if you're interested, you can read here a copy of the letter I sent around at that time. I thought, hey, I'm getting pretty old, maybe I won't try it again. But then, who knows? Even that chopped-up attempt did a lot of good things.

A couple of years went by. I retired, moved to Thailand, and got into all sorts of great stuff, but, having chosen to live in the most decadent, urban environment possible there—Bangkok—got into all sorts of bad habits of urban life, including but not limited to eating and drinking too much, and not exercising, all that. Anyhow finally this year I—with encouragement and assistance from my old college and (PEACE CORPS THAILAND!) buddy Jim Weil—somehow put it all together to get back to the California high country and revisit that long-standing magnificent obsession. On August 8th Jim, his son Dustin, and I set up camp at Red's Meadow, where the wheels had begun to come off during my earlier JMT trek, and the next morning packed up, threw on the packs for the first time, and lugged them up the hill to big breakfasts at the Red's Meadow Café in preparation for another attempt: 18 days through the wilderness, again aiming for the top of Whitney.


Just about to get up and start, we were chatting with a couple of women who also looked ready to head out. They were members of an Appalachian hiking group and had come from Tuolumne Meadows to Red's over three or four days. But one had developed a knee injury and was unable to go on. "I hope you keep an eye on my girl up there," she said to us, indicating her friend. After talking a little more, we offered to have her hike with us if she'd like. So when we went outside and finally got moving, there were four of us, me, Jim, Dustin, and Anniell, this wiry-tough and wonderfully wacky woman from Texas via Washington, D.C.

This time, I actually completed the dream, reached the top of Whitney, and somehow made my way tortuously down and out to civilization the next day. For me it was a huge effort, even harder than I'd thought it would be. There were many times out there when I wondered just why the hell I was doing this. There were a couple of times when, could I have actually wished myself out, I might have done it. But through it all the awareness was there that the trip was doing a lot of great things for me, and that when it was over, I'd see it as a watershed, a major statement, a deepening of my natural education, with lots of good results flowing from it out to my future, hopefully all the way to the end of my life. This, even though back at the outset I as yet had no idea how much there was to learn about hat design, new possibilities for duct tape, what to do with dirty socks, all the really good stuff, imagine!

I didn't ever feel much like writing after getting off the trail at the end of one of those nineteen long, tiring days, but did take as many notes as I could force myself to. And so, presently, I shall regale you with such minimally assisted memories as I can of the happenings and impressions of each day. Hope you can get a little something from this dark and deep, painful and pleasant, awful and wonderful experience, also. Note: in spite of starting out with a cluster of friends, I ended up doing the bulk of the hike quite alone. This made the experience quite a bit more intense, and probably more personally meaningful, but just how won't become clear till the later entries in this blog.


DAY 1 - August 8, 2010: Through the burned forest, and maybe too far past Deer Creek

After finding the way up to the JMT (just up past the stables, off to the left there) our little foursome set off up not the yellow brick road—yes, our party did sometimes feel a bit Ozzish—but a trail of pounded pumice that made for good walking but led up, up, up, through a burnt-out forest (fire of '92, patiently regenerating itself at a majestically slow pace). At first I was right behind Anniell, out in front of the others. She was setting a pace which felt perfect for me. I was feeling surprisingly good. This has been a very wet and snowy year, so vegetation was lush. The ferns along the early part of the trail had grown in so far so fast that it was sometimes hard to see that a lot of people had been going through. Anniell was thinking for a while that we'd gone off track somehow, but no.

We were aiming for one of our shortest hikes, under seven miles, starting at 7430 feet (2265m) and gradually getting up to over 9,000. About a 1600-foot (490m) rise, in a kind of warm-up for the 9-mile daily averages we'd planned. I'd done some prep back in July, a couple of three-day backpacking loops up to 11,000 feet and a lot of long day hikes, but Jim and Dustin were new to this, having only spent a few days at altitude and a done few short day outings. We'd stop at Deer Creek, which showed on the map and guides as a good place to pitch camp, scenic and with plenty of water. The next day we'd be heading for Purple Lake. The guide book was a bit discouraging, saying that the bulk of these two days would bring us through the "most monotonous" section of the Muir Trail. But I thought it was beautiful anyway, with the deep forest (once past the burned-out part) offering occasional glimpses of sweet vistas back towards the Minaret peaks of the Ritter Range, in the direction of Yosemite.

Anniell kept looking back ("It's the mother in me," she said) to check on Dustin and Jim, and eventually dropped back closer to them while I hiked out in front. I hoped I wasn't neglecting them. Those guys seemed to be doing OK, and we did check in every now and then.

Eventually we reached a long meadow with a beautiful wide creek. The distance seemed short, but we thought this must be Deer Meadow. Since it was pretty early in the afternoon, we stopped to reassess—should we go on and make more miles?

Anyhow, it was a great place for a break. We eventually decided Deer Creek was further along, and so humped for quite awhile, eventually getting to the real one. Norm and Helen, a couple of 50-something hikers who were doing a 5-day loop, had already set up at one of the existing campsites.

My left foot was feeling a little pinched. Oh well, take a look when we set up camp. There were still hiking hours left in the day—again, pitch camp, or try to get further along? Anniell had something called the John Muir Trail Atlas, which I'd never seen, and it showed a likely spot for camping, with water, just about a mile up the trail. We all agreed that it was probably better to go on, making for a shorter trip tomorrow. So we hiked on. And on. And on. Stilll no creeks, no sign of water. I was feeling just too frisky, pacing way on out ahead, always sure water was just around the next bend or next rise. But I must have hiked two miles before realizing that the map must have been wrong. The Sierra mostly had streams all over the place, but this must be one section where that wasn't the case. So I sat down and waited for the others to catch up.

As it was, I had to wait quite a few minutes, and the afternoon was wearing on and on, light was slowly lessening. When they got here we'd have to camp, and just make do with the water we were carrying. It would be enough for dinner and drinking that evening, but the next day we'd be low. First lesson of the trip: always make sure you're going to have enough water to get where you're going, and that there's enough to restock when you get there.

Jim and Dustin finally pulled in, and Jim looked about done in. Not good for the first day. Not long after, Anniell came along a little late because she'd stopped to talk with the Deer Creek campers for quite a while. It was a good spot to pitch tents, lots of open spaces among the trees.

We set up the three tents, cooked pretty much separate dinners, and got to bed early. Anniell and I were hoping that because we'd actually done 8 miles instead of the planned 6, we might be able to hike on a bit further than planned the next day, make it up to Lake Virginia instead of only to Purple Lake. Jim seemed hesitant. I wish I'd paid more attention to that. As we lay down and got ready to sleep (always easy for me up there, since at the end of a day I'm always tired) Jim was reading aloud to us a description from his guidebook of the next day's hike. Wildflowers, eventually meadows. A change from pumice to granite on the trail. It was nice listening, then drifting off. Tomorrow we'd get to Lake Virginia, I was sure. Seemed we'd had a good first day after all, that's what I was thinking.

Next entry: Was I thinking right?