29 July 2024
I did an early run at Minihaha Creek. Our summer, which after an exceptionally dry winter and spring, has been relentlessly moist, continues in its steamy mode. So morning is the time to run, when the temperature is still in the 70’s.
It was pleasant to run, feeling the air, heavy with water, slip by me. I feel immersed in it. And I notice smells a lot more. A lot of things are blooming, and though I don’t have a very sensitive noise, I notice that the scents shift as I run: here it is sweeter, now I get a bit of mildew, and later a the scent of wild roses, one of the few flower scents I recognize. A bit later I catch an acrid whiff of marijuana, no doubt drifting down from a car stopped along Minihaha parkway. It makes me appreciate the floral and herbal scents all the more.
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I have been traveling a lot this summer. A bit too much… not the travel per se, but not enough time at home between trips. I like being at home, and being embedded in familiar rhythms and routines is comfortable. Travel disrupts that, which is good, but it is also nice to return to those patterns, and I’ve not had enough time between trips to do that. This is a good lesson, even though the frequency of travel this summer is more a matter of circumstance than planning. A new rule: three weeks, preferably four, between trips. We’ll see how that feels.
I most recently returned from a hiking trip in the eastern Sierra Nevada. The centerpiece of the trip was supposed to be a circuit of the High Sierra camps in the high country of Yosemite National Park. The camps enable one to hike from one camp to another with a relatively light load: food, shelter and bedding is provided at the camps, along with the option to purchase lunches for the trail for the next day. This is a popular option, and you have to enter a lottery to get a place. I did this not long after my retirement, entering the lottery in 2019, and winning a spot for the summer of 2020. Covid, of course, resulted in the cancellation of that trip, but I was grandfathered in for the next lottery… and then the next, and the next, and the next, as High Sierra camp cancellations became an annual event. Covid canceled two years, then there was difficulty recruiting staff in the wake of Covid in 2022, and then a winter of record snowfall in the Sierra tanked the 2023 summer season. The winter of 2023/2024 was normal, I ‘won’ the lottery and received dates for my circuit. All indications were that the camps would open for the 2024 season.
I, and two friends who decided to join me, made our plans. We would fly in several days in advance, and spend time in the eastern Sierra at 8-9,000 feet in an attempt to acclimate to the altitude (Minneapolis is at about 700 feet). About three weeks before we left, the first sign of trouble appeared: I received an email stating that: Due to changes made to the 2024 High Sierra Season date, we had to cancel a portion of your itinerary” and referring me to a new itinerary. This was a bit ambiguous, but as it turned out they were having trouble getting the camps open — they needed a lot more maintenance work after being closed for five years — and had pushed the opening back two weeks. Fortunately, this only chopped off one day the front of our trip, but unfortunately it eliminated what was, for me, the high point of the trip: I’d scheduled two nights at the Glen Aulin camp, so that I would be able to do a day hike to a storied waterfall called Waterwheel Falls. Over the previous few years, during my solo hiking trips to Yosemite, I’d made a couple of attempts to day hike to Waterwheel, but they turned out to be too much much for me at 8,000+ feet. Starting at Glen Aulin would mean a hike of 2-3 miles which is well within my capabilities, even given a lot of elevation change and reportedly poor trails. That was the plan that came to naught. O well.
So, we looked forward to a circuit of the three camps: Glen Aulin to May Lake to Sunrise, starting and ending in Tuolomne Meadows. (I’ll note that when I entered the lottery in 2019 there were five camps, but at some point the powers that be decided to close Vogelsang and Merced, citing environmental reasons but, more likely in my view, probably due to difficulty recruiting enough staff.) We flew to Reno, rented a car, and drove down to Bishop, on the east side of the Sierra at the north end of Owens valley. We stayed at a high altitude resort called Parchers — it was lovely, if rustic, and near a lot of nice trails. I’d come across a reference to Archer’s in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, a fantastic book, though one that I would recommend to very few. I was taken with his description of the geomorphology of the Sierra, particularly the high basins, and harbored fantasies of using Parchers as a base to day hike into Duzy basin. However, by the time we’d arrived at Parcher’s, I’d looked at the distances and recognized that there’s no way I could do the distance at that altitude on the first day (and, frankly, it is questionable I could do it at all). But, still, we had a nice hike out of South Lake, and began our acclimation. After a second night at Parchers we moved north towards Yosemite and stayed at Mammoth Lakes, where we did more acclimative hiking. Finally, on the morning of the fifth day, we decamped to Tuolome Meadows to begin our High Sierra camp circuit.
The hike in to the Glen Aulin HSC was 8 miles, and it was relatively level, with a bit of a descent into Glen Aulin. We got a leisurely start, around 10:30; a lot of the hike was along the Pacific Crest trail, so we encountered other groups about every half hour. It was fine — I don’t care about solitude, although I draw the line at standing in lines, which is why I have no plan to summit Half Dome. Anyway, the hike was quite pleasant, and in particular goes over some granite domes (just across from Little Devil’s postpile, and about 1/4 mile south of the two-span bridge) that have wonderful mats of glacially polished orthoclase crystals (which get altered to an almost wood-brown color, for reasons I don’t understand). There are also what are called “ladder dykes,” which appear to be flows of darker basaltic material intruding into the granite, and pushing along bunches of orthoclase crystals. I’ve not researched what causes ladder dikes, but they are cool and, once you understand their pattern, you see traces of them everywhere. Some day I hope to take a course on the dynamics of magma chambers.
Anyway. That’s where I had lunch. My two companions, both faster than me in any case, did not tarry, so I had the rest of the trail to myself. I passed along the wonderful cascades of the Tuolomne as it descends into the big canyon, including Tuolome, and approached Glen Aulin. There, on the bridge into the HSC area, I found my two companions awaiting me. “We are the trolls of the bridge,” they proclaimed. “We have bad news.” It turns out that the HSC camps were closed. Yes, we had reservations for that day, and the next two. Yes, I’d checked email that morning before we set out. But nevertheless, they were closed — I “should have received a text or voicemail telling me our reservations were canceled.” (And, in fact, later I discovered I had received those things, but at 1pm the day we were walking in — just about when I was having a nice lunch on a mat of orthoclase crystals.)
The good news is that there was staff at the camps, and they said they could take care of us for that night. We had tents and blankets but no pillows. We had a basic dinner (I’m guessing it was from staff rations), and a breakfast, but there were no lunches for the trail. Some infrastructure was working, some, like the water, was not (but there was a working water spigot in the adjacent backpacking camp.) The staff was great, and I did not envy them for having to deal with very irate (not us) hikers. It appears that it was yet another screw-up by Aramark, the concessionaire that runs almost everything in Yosemite. Our group just pivoted. We hiked back out in the morning, and went back to Mammoth Lakes, which served well as a base for some really nice day hikes (including big Devil’s Postpile).
There is more to say on the geology, but I’ll save that for another post.
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