Yosemite!

8/7/08
The drive up Highway 120 from Lee Vining and Mono Lake toward Yosemite National Park is one of the great ones. This portion of the eastern Sierra front defines looming mountain walls and towering pinnacles. I got an early start as I knew my car would have a tough time climbing that hill and I feared holding up drivers hell bent on enjoying their vacation, but the grade isn’t as steep as Sonoma Pass and I made it up OK. The road passed through lovely Tuolumne Meadows, but I passed on by, wanting to get a campground before anything else. Into forest next, granite bulbs rising up above. I found the landscape a bit anticlimactic after the rousing walls east of Tioga Pass, but I knew this was but a summary impression. Tenaya Lake was more bucolic than I had anticipated; I expected more of a Mono Lake scene. Olmstead Point, a large, busy turn-out and parking area with great views, was hot and blaring glare and crowded. I didn't even consider stopping; I was happy not to run someone over. Sightseeing would have to wait. I needed cover, shade, a campground, and I found it all at Porcupine CG, for $10. I thought I might stay forever.


For my first Yosemite hike I chose the trail tp Mount Hoffman (10,850'). It was the hike nearest to my campground, but also significant in being the exact geographic center of the park and supposedly John Muir’s favorite viewpoint. The huge backcountry “camp” at May Lake along the way looked more like a rustic resort to me. As I approached the summit I headed east for views and isolation. This is not the North Cascades, visually. I was overlooking a sea of granite and the huge forest bowl surrounding Tuolumne Meadows. I would need to start adapting to a new mountain aesthetic. I did see some formidable peaks more to my taste out to the far northeast, and I realized this was near Tioga Pass. Eventually I "summitted" and cavorted with a marmot.

After the hike I spent the afternoon and evening at Tenaya Lake. I felt like jumping in but it was cool and shady with a slight breeze. Nice big clouds started to look like thunder but what do I know. Mostly Europeans at the lake: Germans and French. One American started an embarrassingly simpleminded conversation with some French on comparative culture. She wanted it to be clear that she was a liberal and did not hate the French.

I finally jumped in, adding Tenaya Lake to my list: Lava Lake, Pyramid Lake Golden Lake, Woods Lake, and now Tenaya Lake. It was the middle of August, slopping around in the water looking back toward the beach, seeing my empty chair and backpack, and starting to get nostalgic. How could I not think of Lavalette in the summer, my family lounging on beach chairs and blankets. Jack LaVelle and who knows who else. Back when I belonged to something. Now a rock and forest-encircled mountain lake, so far away from the Jersey shore both physically and emotionally. I miss those times. And now I'm back on the beach, in my chair. I'm my father, yet all else is gone. Tomorrow's hike. Pictures. What to read. Do I get lonely the guy asked me. No no no I said. At least not compared to how I feel all of the time, I thought. But I do like this hike in the morning and then lake in the afternoon stuff. I would go in Tenaya a couple more times this week but it would prove to be the last lake I go in the entire trip. I’m not really sure why.

The next day I hiked to Cathedral Lakes. The trail was mostly a forest meander, without a lot of views. It’s an easy backpack, and loads of tents circled the lakes. A cool breeze and big fluffy white clouds make a picturesque scene. The lakes are surrounded by acres of granite that would make for exquisite scrambling, but it seems I cut my foot in Tenaya Lake the night before and can't grip the rocks like I would need to in order to scramble. So I sit and philosophize

Rebecca Solnit has written that we can't climb mountains without referring to earlier mountain climbers like Clarence King. She also says that Claude Lorrain taught us how to look at landscapes and Elliott Porter taught us to see abstract art in nature scenes, and I’m not sure I go all the way with her on this argument. But I do wonder if one can hike around Yosemite, particularly the peaks around Tuolumne Meadows, without harking back to John Muir. He was an amazing climber, but I think of him more as our first hiker, roaming about the mountains for the sheer pleasure of it.

While I might look weird enough, I am nothing at all like John Muir. He went into the mountains for a week with only a loaf of bread, climbed major peaks without the slightest training or equipment, rhapsodized ecstatically on every flower - I don't need to go on. Nevertheless, here as I look at Yosemite for the first time I do feel very sympathetic with Muir. Even with all the people (what a parade heading up into Cathedral Lakes and beyond for the weekend as I descended!) it's still easy to get away, to feel alone. And I think that Muir had to be just the right sort of person to look at it all and imagining saving it as a park, and then go spend enormous time and energy helping make it so. He had to have that dreamy euphoria and the proselytizing of the Bible-people he left behind. It was a terrific achievement.

I took the next day off due to the hole in my foot. I ate breakfast at a different point on Tenaya Lake, the west end this time, and sat and read on a granite platform looking out over the lake to some profound granite mountains. I fooled around taking some pictures of course, and only much later did I notice that the Rough Guide to Yosemite that I had sitting on the ground next to my chair had more or less the exact same scene on the cover. It’s hard to get an original shot at Yosemite.

Tenaya Lake

Around noon, I took the shuttle over to Tuolumne Meadows and walked the half-mile or so to Soda Springs, the legendary site where John Muir and Robert Underwood resolved to protect Tuolumne Meadows as a national park. I was heading to the Parsons Memorial Lodge’s Summer Series for an educational session on the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The session proved to be more about the Act than the wild rivers and was too legalistic for me; I felt the frustration even more knowing the speaker the week before had been Gary Snyder. Then back to the lake for a beautiful evening. The hole in my foot hurt. I was starting to wonder, as I entered the second month of my trip, whether beauty and relaxation begin to lose their meaning outside the context of work. Maybe a month’s vacation was all I really needed.

The next morning I bandaged up my foot and hiked to Mono Pass. The trailhead is at 9700’ so the 3.7 mile hike to the 10,600’ pass is a gentle stroll through open forest and wet meadows, surrounded by 12-13,000' mountains. After a couple miles the trail forks, the direct way to Mono Pass goes to the left, but I headed to the right along Spillway Creek, one of the uppermost headwaters of the Tuolumne River. My hiking book said a trail looped from Spillway Lake back toward Mono Pass, but I sure couldn’t find it. I knew I could probably just cut off-trail over the divide but I was in unfamiliar territory with a dicey foot so I played it cautious and doubled back to the fork in the trail. I thought it was closer than it really was and began wondering whether I somehow missed that when I came upon a guy toward me who assured me the junction was still a bit further down the trail. Soon I was at Mono Pass, lovely but not spectacular. Crossing the pass I left the park and entered Inyo National Forest and the Ansel Adams Wilderness, a milestone. I only went as far as Upper Sardine Lake, where I relaxed and partook the scene. The trail proceeds down Bloody Canyon to Walker Lake and eventually Mono Lake far below. That was an area I'd have to save for a later day. Now I retraced my steps for a leisurely stroll back to the car.

Near Mono Pass

The return hike proved revelatory. I was more relaxed now and moving more slowly and the wonders gradually began to emerge. This was my third hike in Yosemite and I was finally starting to get a feel for the place, at least for Tuolumne. It simply does not have the killer drama of the North Cascades. Its more subtly lovely through and through. Instead of smashing conclusions it produces steady state wonderfulness. The key is not the peaks but the flowers and the trees thank you very much Mr. Muir. I was on my knees a few times along the way examining flowers, and I began looking closely at the trunk patterns on the trees lining the trail.

Along the way I bumped into the guy who had gave me directions earlier in the hike. He asked me how it went and I told him it went good and he was friendly and obviously knew his way around so I asked him about the alleged trail cutting across from Spillway Lake toward Mono Pass. He knew exactly what I was talking about and told me it doesn’t exist; he’s looked for it. My kind of guy I thought, and since we’d more or less fallen in together, the conversation continued. I explained how I had been cautious about cutting cross country as I was in unfamiliar territory. Where do I normally hike, he asked? The North Cascades I told him. How ‘bout that? He had been a back country ranger for North Cascades National Park, as well as a climbing ranger for Mount Rainier National Park. His wife, somewhere behind us, had been the manager of the North Cascades ranger station at Marblemount. They were now living in the Owens Valley. He worked as a professional photographer. We had a fine conversation reminiscing about the North Cascades, as he was intimate with every place I had even been, and then some. Back at the trailhead he spotted a park ranger and they started talking and I drove off on my own.


On Monday morning I broke camp early and had breakfast and did some reading in the early morning sun at Tenaya Lake. It was so pleasant, so beautiful and I wondered why I would even leave. Well, I had an agenda and had to move along, but with the conviction that I was going to other fine lakes, many other fine lakes. But I surely felt some ambivalence.

I had taken a very small bite out of Yosemite. I kept my base camp at Porcupine Flats Campground and from there I commuted mostly east to the various places I chose to visit. I kept my travels limited because I did not want to run around from this spot to that spot, all in the right light of course, a mania I can be susceptible to. I knew I’d be back later in the season.