"Y" is for Yosemite

Well. It's been a while.

Off The Beaten Path has actually done a great deal of hiking since March. Yes. Lots. We went to a bunch of places and ate lots of great sandwiches. I just haven't written about it, but it did happen. Really. The sandwiches were particularly yummy, too.

While I may not have been writing about hiking, I have been writing. For about a year I've been working on a play (among other things) in The Red Room, and recently started doing work in-trade to barter for studio hours. The funny thing is that now that I don't have to pay, I'm not going. Which is the whole frigging point of paying for your hours. Paying for something helps me keep my commitment. Most everyone has a 'price point,' a line that is invisible to others but if you cross means that you are 'wasting' your money. Of course the line changes from thing to thing, so to one person paying $250.00 for a new laptop bag is a total 'waste' of money, and for another it is a total necessity. And no, I don't have a pretty ACME made bag, like my friend Jen, since I cannot spend that much money on something I put on the floor of a public bus. When it comes to classes and gym memberships, it is how much you are willing to 'waste' per month. My studio hours? Past my price point. My gym? Not past my price point. Gyms are evil that way. The monthly cost is just cheap enough that you keep paying for it each month, even though you haven't been since the Reagan administration, but you might. Not that 24Hour Fitness was even around back then, but I digress.

It is possible that it is just me. There are plenty of writers who manage to get their ass up in the morning and haul it to their coffee shop office to do their writing. My good friend just finished her dissertation for her PhD in Psychology at her local coffee shop. The guy who owns the place is so thrilled that she wrote so much it there, that he is giving her the space for free so she can throw a huge, "I &^%$ FINISHED IT!" party. Hell, she's probably dropped about $900.00 in there for tea alone so they'll both break even.

The only time I've met writing deadlines is when I kept my online journal. Since that is the other way I get things done in life: I make a commitment to other people. If I tell you that I'm going to be at the gym at 8 in the morning, I will be there at 8 in the morning. 8:15 at the latest. Maybe 8:20 if I'm really dragging, but I will be there. Case and point I finally found a gym buddy this past January and we were gym rock stars until about a two months ago when I started doing my work for the writer's studio. Now our schedules are out of synch, and I've stopped going, but I'm still paying $40.00 a month because I might. And lately as I feel my legs slowly submit to entropy, as my jog up the stairs from the train station gets slower, and slower, I realize I really need to find away to way to make this work again.

What's my point? Commitment is tough.
Money sometimes help keep you rigorous, as do friends, and ACME bags are pretty.
And all of this brings me to talk about Yosemite. Yes, there is through line here, just roll with it.

For years, ever since I started this hiking club, I've said that I wanted to go on a backpacking trip. Not camping, but the real deal: the hike all day with your life on your back backpacking. My goal was to build up a group of devoted hikers and then take them all on a backpacking overnight. The problem is that aside from one or two people, I've never had a consistent group of hikers. I've had groups as large at ten and as small as one. Years passed and at the close of each season we would have only done day hikes. So three months ago when Monique mentioned that she wanted to go to Yosemite for the weekend in preparation for her own hiking goal: to hike Half Dome in October, I leapt up and said that I would help her organize things. From there, car camping turned into one night of car camping and one night of backpacking. Aw yeah.

After many long e-mails, several shopping trips, some last minute drop-outs, and a large mug of coffee, our Team Alpha left San Francisco bright and early on a Friday morning at the end of August. About four hours in my coffee failed and we were almost out of gas, so we stopped for a refreshing late brunch of Red Bull and trail mix. I always forget how much you start hating the food you bring on a backpacking trip about halfway through the trip. The trail mix I was happily noshing on Friday morning would be looked at with absolute disgust in about 72 hours causing me to think, "Those mushrooms can't all be poisonous, can they?" Lucky for me I was hiking with girls, and girls are always interested in something new that they don't have, and in lieu of swapping clothes we could swap snacks. But right now, that trail mix was hitting the spot and I felt like a million bucks. A few more hours pass and we make it to Yosemite and to our campground for Friday night. We get there early enough in the day so that we have our pick, and we pick one way in the back, secluded from the other campsites. We set up our tents and unload all of our food into the bear box.

For those of you who have never been to Yosemite, you can't throw a stone without hitting a warning about bears, and quite possibly, that stone would then ricochet off the warning and hit a bear. This is especially true if you are in the valley, which were weren't, but...nevermind. The last time I went to Yosemite, years ago, I only went backpacking. And while you, like myself, may feel that it is more likely you will run into a bear when you are miles away from a large groups of people that can hear you scream, the truth of the matter is that if you are staying in a campground your chances of seeing a bear quadruple. I was so nervous about bears the last time I was at Yosemite, that my boyfriend and I decided we would only bring pre-made snack food that wouldn't require us to heat up or cook anything, lest the tempting smell of quesadillas would bring a ravenous brood of bears with a serious Goldilocks complex. I remember on that trip that rather than a full 72 hours, I hated everything we brought to eat in about 24 hours and I didn't have anyone to swap with at all. I spent the next 48 hours fantasizing about hamburgers and fries.

Back at our current campground, everything with a smell has been put in our bear box, including the Tic Tacs I found buried in my glovebox. We then set off to get wilderness permits for our Saturday overnight along with the regulation "bear barrels" that the park requires you rent when you are backpacking in Yosemite. A bear barrel is basically a big black cylinder made of industrial government plastic. It has a pop-lid that you lock down with a quarter, so make damn sure you have one, because as we discovered a knife will not do the job. You are supposed to stash all your food, trash, and any scented items at all, inside the bear barrel, lock it down, and put it 100 feet away from your campsite so that you aren't mauled while you sleep. While people used to think that stringing up their food and Tic Tacs in a bag in a tree was good enough, the park frowns on this for two reasons. One, bears can climb trees. Two, even if they can't get to your food by climbing, they will try to get at it from the ground, and what you'll have is a demented game of Bear Bag Piñata happening about 100 feet away from where you are sleeping. Not good. The bear barrels are not only unopenable without opposable thumbs and a quarter, but they are thick so that your campsite won't have a fragrance of Ode De Picnic. Even so, when you get these containers covered in scratches and dings, all I can picture is this bear banging the bear barrel on a rock making the same noises as the Wookie in Star Wars.

We put the barrels in the trunk of the car and drove off to a nearby spot to do a short day hike. Nothing major, just a mile or two to stretch our legs and start getting adjusted to the altitude and the dry air. We started out with little thought to where we were going, and were just happy to be enjoying the late afternoon and the beauty of the trail. We were headed towards May Lake, and there was one point when we could see a beautiful lake off in the distance, before we continued our trek downhill. It was when we hit the bottom hill, and then a road, that we realized, "Hm. There's no lake." Retracing our steps a mile uphill, we realized that rather than taking a the trail to the lake, we'd followed some sort of piece of a trail that did nothing but connect the trail we wanted to be on to another trial you could take to some place scenic. It was nature's equivalent of an alleyway. At least it was a very pretty alleyway and we still had a great talk on the way down the hill. Uphill, we were pretty quiet. You really feel the difference in the air up there, especially when, you know, you're breathing.

After getting back to the parking lot, we headed back to our campsite to make dinner. The night before I had made a huge batch of spaghetti and sauce and we eagerly lit up our coals to begin reheating the sauce. Cooking, even just reheating, over coals takes a long time. We got the sauce to about two degrees above room temperature before we said, good enough, and dug right in. Besides we had a campfire to make and s'mores to roast. We finished up dinner, changed into warmer clothes, put everything back into the bear bin, except for the s'mores, and stared a fire. It was a beautiful, in your face Boy Scouts, campfire just like I'd learned how to make from watching my Dad. In my house back in San Francisco, I take particular pride in making fires in my fireplace, even though one of my first ones almost lit our entire mantel on fire and melted our fire screen. After eating our weight in s'mores, we packed everything away, and laid down to look at the stars for a while. There is nothing more breathtaking than stars in the wilderness. It is a magical sight to have the entire milky way laid out before you, with pine trees stretching their arms up to the sky to touch it.

Therese was the first one in our party to hit the sack. By this time it was close to 9:00PM, which feels like midnight in the great outdoors, and we were still waiting for our second car coming up from San Francisco. It takes anywhere from four to five hours to drive up from San Francisco, and our second car didn't leave until 3:30 in the afternoon, so you do the math. Monique and I decided that we'd sit up and wait for them, just in case they get lost trying to find us. Monique puts on her head lamp and I lean back to look at the stars some more. To pass the time, Monique is looking around our campsite. The light from her head lamp is like a movie spotlight, highlighting rocks, trees, tents, a bench, and a bear. Bear. Monique whips her head back to our bear bin and we see a four hundred pound furry friend banging at it with interest. She then whips her head back to me, eyes wide, meeting my own saucer faced expression.

"There's a bear."
"Yes."
"A bear."
"Yes. What are you going to do?"
"What am I going to do?"
"Yes."
"I'm going to get up."
"Uh-huh."
"I'm going to walk over there," nodding to the next campsite over with a bigger campfire
"I'm going to come with you."
"What about Therese?"
"She'll be fine."
"She's in the tent?"
"She'll be fine so long as we don't yell out, 'Oh my god it's a bear!'"

We darted over to the next campsite and hurriedly said, "There is a bear in our campsite!" The couple there quickly says, "Quick, you have to bang your pots and pans so that he'll go away!"

"They're in the bear bin."
"All of them?"
"Yes!"
"Hm. What is the loudest thing you've got on you?"
"Me."

One of the guys gets together with a few of his friends, and they arm themselves with two empty wine bottles. They whoop and yell and bang two empty bottles of Merlot and our bear scampers away. I guess he prefers good Chardonnay. Not too oaky, and with a light dry fruit.

Monique and I scurry back to our campsite and to Therese's tent. There are no claw marks so we settle back to our campfire while we listen to other campers bang pots and pans while the bear makes its way through the campground. From that point on we are on high Blair Witch alert. Every twig snap and rustle causes us to flash our lights around. Finally Michelle and Michael arrive and we usher them in like Marines. Move, move, move. Go, go, go! We open the bear bin and stick in their food and toiletries so fast you'd think we were avoiding radioactive contamination. The second the food is on lockdown I give Michael a lantern and flee to the tent I'm sharing with Therese. Monique grabs Michelle by the arm and they dive into her tent. Michael, I'm sure, sighs and pitches his tent to the sound of crickets and the nervous titter of four women freaking themselves out talking about bears.

An hour later the adrenaline leaves my body, and I slowly fall asleep, smiling to myself. I think about the fact that the only thing separating us from the bears are just a two pieces of nylon. Still a tent has the same power as a magic bedsheet, which protects nervous children everywhere from monsters and other things that go bump in the night.

[Next up: Hiking North Dome]