...being a hair-raising tale
of thrills and chills at
two miles above sea-level!
...being a hair-raising tale
of thrills and chills at
two miles above sea-level!
(*The remarkable thing is that some of this is actually true!)
1 We considered inviting the Other along on this trip, but we had to marginalize her due to space considerations.
The plan was to leave Berkeley on Thursday, drive to Lake Thomas Edison (elev. 7,600), spend the next two nights camping at Rosy Finch lake (elev. 10,800), and hike out and drive back on Sunday.
Our trip started innocently enough at high noon on Thursday. Josh and Chip snuck into UC Berkeley, sauntered into Massey's Latin class, and calmly hoisted Massey over their shoulders. She sighed and said "et tu, dudes?" 2 then turned to the professor and said, "pardon us as we exeunt your lecture" 3 and carried her to our getaway car piloted by your truly which had been idling along Bancroft. (Just for the record, let me point out that the exercise of staying alive in a car idling along Bancroft in rush hour is far more exciting than kidnapping friends from class).
2 "et tu" is Latin for "aw, shit."
3 Exeunt is the plural-nomative-subjective-nihilist conjugation of the verb "to exit." (See 4 and 5)
4 If you didn't know that then you're an uneducated slob.
5 If you did know that, you're an over-educated asshole.
We quickly left the Bay Area and entered the Central Valley of California. For those who don't know the central valley, let me explain that it is Kansas-in-California with two important differences.
Espresso stops aside, the central valley is weird, boring, and depressing. It's flat. The freeway system transports drivers from SF to LA as fast as they can go (posted speed: 70 MPH, which means "Autobahn") and lets truckers carry their genetically-perfected water-wasting produce to the cities. As far as I can tell, central valley towns exist to service the drivers who desperately want to get the hell away from such towns with all due haste and to abuse illegal immigrants. In short, it's a wacky and no-fun place to hang out. And they call the roads the stupid names like 18 1/2 ave or El Camino Road (Trans: The Road Road).
The nice thing about the Sierra Nevada range is that the central valley just ends and the mountains rise from the ground and swell up to 15,000 ft. The bad thing about the Sierras is that you somehow have to coax a ton of steel and rubber to climb many thousands of feet. I was driving an old Ford escort -- the kind with an engine measured in mililiters, not liters-- and it was carrying 5 people and all their stuff. There were packs strapped to the roof. And we hit a steep grade that just went up and up and up for 3,000 feet. The car almost died. The temperature gauge has a big friendly "N O R M A L" spanning the range of acceptable heat, and the needle kept swinging above "L". So there we were, struggling to go uphill in an overheating car. We had the heat blasting 6 and the windows rolled down and I was in 3rd gear at 30 mph and everyone was a-praying as hard as they could. And then, magically, we were over the steep grade and saw Shaver lake to our left. The car was intact, we were all alive, our stuff was still attached to the car, everything was great!
6 Hint: if your car is overheating, turn on the heat.
Never, ever, ever, count your chickens before the early bird gets the worm. Just past Shaver Lake we had to take a left turn onto a small road that would take us to our destination, Lake Edison.
The name of this road was "Steep Narrow Road." It was the sort of road that was obviously once called "Widowmaker Road" or something until one too many asshole mountain men looked at the map and chortled to his wife about how, ooh, scary, they'd have to drive on Widowmaker Road, oooh, and by that time they'd gone off the edge. So they changed the name so right on the map it says "Look, asshole! It's a STEEP NARROW ROAD. Slow down and be careful. We're not just fucking around here." Imagine the following: a single lane puckered with potholes that dives up and down steep gorges and goes around blind turns and has dynamite-blasted granite walls to one side and thousand-foot-dropoffs to the other side without guard rails and goes on for 40 miles. That description is just a pale reflection of the terror that is "Steep Narrow Road." There is traffic going the other way along this one-lane-utterly-blind road, mostly giant 4 wheel drive vehicles that could merrily run over my wimpy Ford Escort and not be any the worse for it.
We propose the state of California rename it "Aw, fuck lane," or "You Got to Be Shitting Me Way," or simply "Fuck off and Dr."
But we survived. That's how awesome we are. We defied the laws of logic, physics, morality, and common sense in one fell swoop, and arrived at lake Edison feeling like Lewis and Clark, expecting to reap the rewards of Sir Francis Drake. "Chuck," I sez to myself, "you're an amazing driver. You got your piece of shit Ford Escort up Steep Narrow road." But just when I was on the verge of feeling good about myself, I saw an RV. However the fuck an RV got up You Got to be Shitting me Way, I have no idea, but it was clear proof that I was not as nifty as I thought.
My ego burst, I found us a nice car camp site and we settled in for the night.
The pink talons of dawn swept across the sky to peel back our eyelids 'bout 6:30 the next morning. One consequence of sleeping outside without a tent is that you have no choice but to wake up with the sun. We packed our stuff into the backpacks that would sustain us for two days, and were pleasantly surprised to discover that our packs only weighed 28-32 lbs -- that's not much for a backpacking trip.
The air was warm, the sun was bright, we were all quietly suffering altitude sickness; it was a good day to start. We piled into a ferry to take us across the mightly Lake Edison, and off we went, to start our adventure!
It's not much of an adventure. Sorry. I know you were expecting more. I could lie to you and tell you that we extinguished three forest fires and fought the abomindable snow man and wrested Rodents of Unusual Size, but the closest we got to any of that was an encounter with a meek, confused vole.
We spent the first day going up. And up. And up. We climbed 3,400 feet to get out of mosquito-infested woods to the honest-to-God-high sierras, a land above trees, a land with green moss and babbling brooks and indian paint brush and granite and not much else. It was a killer day. Chip said it best when, utterly exhausted, he collapsed into camp, looked around at the beauty and said, "Charles" 7 ", Charles, you're an asshole for making me come up here, but thank you." Then he removed his feet and threw them away.
7 For some reason, Chip gets his jollies by calling me by my full and complete first name. You may call my Charles if you like, but Chuck is easier to say. Of course, the name Chuck has its pitfalls (c.f. childhood rhymes.)
When you backpack, you carry all your food with you. Unless you live off the land. But then I'd have to become one of those scary ultra-environmental nuts who never showers, stands in freezing creeks for hours with spear poised for that instant when they can impale a 3" trout which they put on top of moss and call "Sierra Sushi", curses electricity as the juice of the devil, and never, ever, ever checks their e-mail. The last is a problem for me 'cuz I'm a geek... so we packed our food. 8 We mainly lived off Powerbars and gorp. Gorp stands for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts, only ours was low on either. This is the 90s and we live in Berkeley. So we had dried cranberries where they have raisins, brazil nuts where they have peanuts, etc.
8 Strangely enough, when I mentioned living off the land to Massey, she perked up and said, "Oh, yeah, our National Outdoors Leadership Program taught us all about that! Armed with only a knife I lived in the rockies for a month. The only hard part was keeping the grizzlies away from my deer... say, do you like this nice cloak?" I backed away in fear and kept silence.
Josh had to borrow a lot of my dad's equipment. He had my dad's backpack, my dad's parka, my dad's towel, my dad's hat, my dad's cup, and he started to pun like my dad. I had my dad's sleeping bag, thank God. Were Josh to have gotten posession that item, it would have been at least as bad as Sauron obtaining the Ring of Power.
Woke up too early the next day, to something smelling really bad... which happened to be me. Over breakfast I learned that the level of a person's stench can be measured in Olfs (OLFactory unitS). There was apparently a serious scientific effort in the 1950s to quantize BO that involved a lot of armpit-smelling. So THAT'S what grad students do... but I digress. The point is, we were all starting to go a little funky. At least the mosquitos didn't bother us quite as much.
Chris and I set off to climb Mt. Isaac Walton, a large mountain ringed by some snow fields. Snow fields that don't fuck around. 70% grade 2,000 foot long runs ending in the Boulders of Death. Quadruple Black Diamond Plus, a natural gene-pool cleanser targeting sporting over-enthusiasts. We climbed around the snow fields, thank you very much, and started to pick our way up the mountain, stopping every 10 feet to gasp some of the very thin air. At one resting point, Chris leaned back and looked at the mountain. He said in a wise voice,
We climbed. We went up. Sharp granite lacerated our lily-soft collegiate hands. But then we were on the peak, a wind whipping our clothes, a view below us that even an eagle would appreciate... one problem. We weren't on the REAL peak. The real peak was nearby, only 200 feet above us, but a little too interesting 9 for that day's trip.
9 Interesting is a great word. At 300 feet above sea level it means "nifty, worth checking out." At 11,000 feet it means "don't make any fucking plans, OK?"
So we took hero photos where we were and jumped down the mountain like pinballs in a manic giant's game, scooting down the gorge of death and skidding down the Penalty Ice Field (-1 pinball if caught in trap), ultimately collapsing in an idyllic green mountain field suspiciously like the setting of the first scene of "The Sound of Music." Had singing nuns frolicked up the meadow at that instant, I would have... I dunno, I would have done something drastic, that's for sure.
We camped in this valley of paradise surrounded by the Crags of Doom. Around us, green grass, soft moss, pink mountain columbine, fields of indian paintbrush; above us, pale, chisled vertical granite like a sawblade. Check out the Sierras. 'S spiffy.
But this time in the trip, we had completely lost our minds. Verbs were optional in coversation; grunts were the prefered mode of communication. Chip guarded his territorty from Chris by uttering a harsh series of gutteral stops only vaguely resembing the phrase "don't sit there! That's my spot!", which translitterated is "glerhm mmit 'erh! Myhnnnnn!" I felt a bit like Jane Goodall as I observed these interactions. Paranoia swept over us. I remarked that the mountain above us, one of the aforementioned Crags of Doom, was called "Red and White."
So as to not violate the Geneva Convention with my near lethal olf level, I decided to bathe that evening in the idylic mountain setting.
You know how when people are close to death they have an out-of-body experience? You don't need to die. Just bathe in 33 degree water. You immerse, and instantly your body ejects your mind, saying, "asshole, you tricked me!" Then you watch with bemused detachment as you see your blue-white body tries to reach the shore before it shatters like the T-1000 in the second Terminator movie. Only after Cocoa in the evening does your body grudgingly permit the mind back in.
The last day was ridiculously easy. We went downhill for like 3,000 feet and 8 miles in something like 20 minutes. We wanted to stay longer, but the mosquitos wouldn't let us -- they said our olfs were bad for tourism. And when mosquitos don't want you to stay, you don't stay. They have some pretty powerful friends in congress.
We got onto the boat, got back to civilization, ate pie, then drove back to Berkeley. We pulled it at 1:00 am, and -- like a good student -- Massey stayed up to study Latin (!) whilst the menfolk went to bed.
And that's our trip.
-Chuck