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I know, I know…

Many of you were expecting immediate updates on the Yosemite trip.  I even warned you, right?  “Expect  more frequent UPDATES! in your inbox…”

Well, life has a way of imposing itself upon you sometimes, and after eight days incommunicado, I had a lot of catching up to do.  I’m even forsaking some work-related issues right now so I can write this post while enjoying a cigar.

So!  On July 10th, our crew descended upon San Fransisco airport and loaded up for Yosemite.  It’s a bit of a ride on California highways at first (traffic), and then it turns into a bit more of a ride on the mountain roads and passes leading into Yosemite National Park.  “Roads” in the Park are not like roads in the civilized world — they’re Narrow Lanes of Death.  On more than one occasion I wished that John would slow down to about 4 MPH so we might better avoid the side of the road…which amounts to about three feet of stone and then a vertical plunge a few thousand feet into oblivion.  Don’t these mountain people know what a freakin’ guardrail is?

A 27-foot RV does not handle like a sports car, but John is a mountain goat.  I guess he figures that whatever skills he uses to command his body up insane mountain sides also apply to said RV doing 45 MPH on the traffic equivalent of a balance beam.  We arrived at our first campsite alive and well.  The boys got their RV beds ready; I set up my tent.  (Hey, if you’re going to go into the wilderness for eight days, you might as well do it right, wouldn’t you agree?  I am proud to say that my tent was put to good use every night, i.e. protecting my exhausted body while it tried to recover from each day’s adventures.)

As we drove into the Park, we got a chance to see some incredible views and get a lay of the land.  Here are Paul and John playing with a small rock on a slab of granite:

Yeah…that thing was just sitting there.  Glaciers are powerful things, right?

Okay, with the first night behind us, we moved on to our permanent camp in Tuolomne Meadows.  At 8,600 feet, Tuolomne Meadows is an excellent spot to acclimate to altitude, and it’s a perfect starting point for the treks John laid out for us.

Our first hike was scheduled as an “easy” one.  John figured we’d do a “simple” day hike to get a feel for the trails and the elevation.  The plan?  Hike up to May Lake and then head on up to Mount Hoffman.  The guidebook calls this hike “moderate”.  Smitty claims the guidebook was written by sadists.

Here’s what a recent hiker posted on his blog about Hoffman:

At 10,850 feet, visitors can see Mount Hoffman easily, but for the occasional or novice hiker the trail to Mount Hoffman can be forbidding. The glacial advances over the last 1.5 million years buried this area under ice several times. The last of the retreating glaciers, about 11,000 years ago, finished the job of carving the spectacular spires and domes in Yosemite National Park. It is well known; the panorama view of Hoffman showed all the spender of these magnificent peaks.

A little quick math…let’s see…from Tuolomne Meadows to the peak of Hoffman is about a 2,200 feet gain in elevation.  Spread over 3.5 miles, this amounts to well less than 1,000 feet up per mile.  Should be easy enough, right?

Umm…right.

Here’s a view of the peak(s) as we got started:

The boys heard me repeat this over and over, but for everyone’s benefit, let me be clear:

I like to think I’m in halfway decent shape.  I run, I box, I bike, I swim, I spend some time in the gym.  Paul spent a bunch of time in the Army, so he knows a thing or two about humping through hills with a pack on.  Smitty competes in triathlons, and he once asked me to swim the Great Chesapeake Bay Swim for kicks (that’s 4.4 miles in open water, folks).  As mentioned earlier, John is a mountain goat.  All of us should be able to tackle a “moderate” hike, right?

You’d think!  But for the uninitiated, a long, uphill walk at altitude is like sucking air through a cocktail straw.  That someone bent in half.  Plus, at 9,000 feet (for example), the sun beats down on you and life feels “warm”.  At almost 11,000 feet, the wind whips around you, the altitude sucks every ounce of water out of your body, and life starts to feel “chilly”.  Standing at 11,000 feet is decidedly different than standing hillside at 9,000.  Let the learning begin…

So up we go!  Yosemite is filled with well-marked, well-maintained trails.  Rangers will tell you anything you want to now abut the trails.  But!  Trails tend to go around peaks and through passes.  Rarely do trails make their way up to the peaks, and when traveling with a mountain goat, the peaks are the destination.

Up to May Lake!

Incredible!  The lake is beautiful and crystal clear.  It’s cold too.  Hoffman is in the background, and the peak is the hump on the left.  The stuff on the right is a collection of “false” peaks.  From the lake, the false peaks look like they need conquering, and conquer them we did.  But those false peaks are the mountain version of a head fake; the real deal is the summit, and that’s on the left.

Here’s another look:

The tree line ends at about 9,600 feet.  In June, Yosemite enjoyed heavy snowfall at 6,000 feet.  The nice-looking, seemingly accessible pile of rocks is a different world.  Any plant life above 9,600 feet is hundreds of years old.  Fallen trees near the treeline have probably been “fallen” for two or three hundred years.  Nothing rots at this elevation, and in the warmer months, there’s very little precipitation or moisture to encourage decay.  When the precipitation does fall, it falls in the colder months when everything is frozen.  So…it’s like walking back in time.  An incredible experience!

Here’s a look back at our way up.  You can see the trail sticking out in the dust and granite, and this part of the hike really is a long walk uphill.  But as noted earlier, trails don’t lead to peaks.  Rangers won’t even discuss peaks.  What’s a group of hikers to do?

Follow the mountain goat, of course.  As the trail came to an end, here’s what we were faced with:

That antenna you see is the peak.  That’s where we want to be.  And yes, that’s a person next to the antenna.  We’ve come a long way, but we have a little more to go.  All we gotta do now is scramble up these rocks.  No big deal, right?

Being an efficient kind of guy, my eyes were glued to the rocks and ridge lines in an attempt to find the easiest way up.  John was scurrying around like a little kid in a toy store, so as I made my way up, he was a little below me.  I didn’t have my mountain goat guide to lead me up the side.

See that flat spot to the right of the antenna?  I chose that as my line.  I figured “hey!  Get on up to that ridge, and then it’s a flat hop, skip and jump over to the peak!”  Brilliant, right?  Check out what I saw on the other side of that ridge –

The camera’s depth of field is having a hard time rendering reality.  The green stuff you see ain’t bushes — it’s trees!  The white stuff is obviously snow.  What isn’t so obvious is that the snow and the trees are about 2,000 below me.  Straight down below me.  Ooopsie.  My “efficient” route suddenly seemed a lot less efficient.  Time to regroup.

(As an aside, on our way down, I encountered a girl bunched up in the fetal position near this ridge.  I took one look at her and said “You looked over the side, didn’t you…”  She said “yes” in a voice that came from miles and miles away.  I suggested the alternative route up that I had found, but she insisted she wasn’t moving.  Not up.  Not down.  John saved the day by escorting her up to the top so she could join her friends.  It was assistance that was offered over and over again to many a terrified soul during our travels…)

Once on the top, life was good!  Cold.  But good!  The view from the summit was the basis for the panorama I posted in the first Yosemite post.  The view from the summit is the view our commenting hiker (above) made on his blog.  The view is incredible!

And here are some views from the false peaks –

Pretty amazing, right?

And check this out — snow cups!

These guys are formed by the movement of the sun.  John can explain it in detail, but it has something to do with the depth of the snow and how it melts as the sun crosses the sky.  Here are the boys playing on some:

John is on the left, Paul on the right.  Maybe they’re not playing…John has that look in his eye.  I think he was planning the attack on the next peak.

The hike down was faster but no less work.  Going up means fighting gravity; going down means fighting gravity too, but in a different kind of way.  By the time we got back to camp, I was ready for bed.  We did a little dinner, but if I remember correctly, the sun was still up when I zipped up my sleeping bag and passed out.  It was certainly a day of firsts, and it was a day that set the tone for the rest of the week.  John is an expert, but the rest of us quickly realized that these “long walks” were going to be challenging.

Hoffman was a 7 mile trek round trip.  The next ones were going to be longer.  And higher.

Yeeee haaaaa…

Stay tuned.  More to follow.

Earlier Yosemite posts:

Yosemite — a taste