Ben is very wise. That’s how I’m going to start my notes on today. One of the reasons I love Ben is that he is not only infinitely thoughtful and kind, but he is just smart and sensible. We needed that today—it was a mélange of ups and downs.
We have been in Tuolumne Meadows for the last two days mostly in preparation for a short backpacking trip to a place called Young’s Lake. A moderate hike that is about 6.5 miles, it was extremely complicated to get the permit (involving lots of online research and a long phone call with a friendly ranger), and, it turns out, it is extremely complicated to backpack in Yosemite.
In backpacking, you really need an ideal start (especially if you are a beginner), and we just did not get an ideal start. Due to cold, and a variety of other campground annoyances, Ben didn’t sleep a wink, so we decided to not wake up at the crack of dawn and tried to sleep a little more in the warmer daylight hours, which meant we got a very late start out of the campground. Checkout was at 11, and we were pushing that deadline between desperately grabbing a few more hours of sleep, taking down camp, and repacking our backpacks to accommodate the giant/heavy bear canister. We were also both hungry, deciding that in the sake of time we would get breakfast at the Tuolumne Grill instead of cooking it at camp (this campground doesn’t have a dishwashing sink, and cooking a full camp breakfast plus heating up water to wash dishes can easily add an hour to anything). So we rolled up the Grill around 10:57, only to be told that they weren’t serving breakfast anymore because breakfast ended at 11 (for the record, it was at latest 10:58, and those pancakes looked cruelly delicious), and that lunch service didn’t start until 11:15. Okay. We used the time to find a place to put all our food: not an easy task but we found an open box near the Wilderness Permit station and piled all of our food and scented items in there before heading back to the grill and eating a veggie burger and vegetarian chili for breakfast. Needless to say, spirits weren’t super high but we still wanted to try our trip.
The next challenge was finding the trailhead. We had a map. We had directions from the ranger (sort of…he wasn’t super helpful). And yet we could. Not. Find. The trailhead! Aaaargh! On top of that, parking was really hard to find. We finally felt somewhat confident about where we were going and squeezed into a tiny parallel parking spot (I may have gotten my mojo back in parallel parking—I thought I lost it when I handed over my beloved Honda Fit to my mom). We flung on our backpacks—we are getting better at that!–and headed towards the trail….
Except that wasn’t the trail! I saw signs for Glen Aulin, Soda Springs, Parson’s Lodge, but no Dog’s Lake or Young’s Lake. Where is it?! Frustrated, we retraced our steps (which is agonizing when backpacking: every step with those heavy things is gold), re-examined the map, ended up at the mule stables and asked a lady we found saddling mules for directions, jimmied out of the tiny space and parked again, found the trailhead, endured a fairly nasty, fly-infested pit toilet, and finally got on our way!
With all the setbacks, we didn’t get boots on the trail until around 1:00, and that made me really nervous. We had over six miles of unknown terrain ahead of us, and we are both really new at this. We both needed the reassurance of going as slow as we needed to without worrying about hiking in the dark. With the bears. Did you hear Yosemite has bears?
Well, we didn’t make it. We were going ridiculously slow, because the trail was steep and I have a lot to work on in terms of my stamina. I feel like I’m a fairly strong, fairly fit person but the High Sierras kicked my butt and my lungs. I struggled up an uphill mile that would have been manageable if I was only propelling my own body weight forward, but was really challenging for me with my pack on. I mean, stop-every-ten-feet-lungs-heaving challenging. It doesn’t feel good to admit that, but I just know I need to get better, get stronger, increase my stamina, and actually do something about it if I want to be a backpacker and a hiker. And we do want to be hikers and backpackers.
The trail level out after a little more than a mile of a steep grade, and we wandered through some truly lovely meadows and forests, glimpsing snow-covered peaks through the trees. We didn’t see any bears, but we did see a very pretty, graceful deer and a marmot (!!!) who scurried away before I could get a picture of his chubby, cute self.
But then the trail started climbing again, and as we sat on a log to rest, we had a serious conversation about what was the best thing to do. We don’t want to be quitters. We’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and money into backpacking gear and learning about how to backpack. I felt like a hypocrite: I tell my students they can’t just give up when it gets tough, and yet here I was sitting on a log in the middle of a forest…quitting. Mentally, we were beating ourselves up, but the facts were pretty brutal: we were both exhausted, we had a frustrating day full of roadblocks before we even started hiking, we had no idea how challenging the trail ahead was. We really didn’t. Despite reading lots of trail descriptions and whatever reviews we can find….we are finding that descriptors like “moderate” are extremely subjective, and no guide has given us the type of detail that an overachiever like me wants. I want tree by tree, foot by foot, pebble by pebble, “no really–how hard it is going to be?” guide. Shockingly, there doesn’t seem to be a market for that. Maybe backpackers and hikers don’t like to extensively research their activities before they do them? Where’s the fun in that?
So we turned back. We headed back to the car feeling a mixture of extreme relief (we were going to shower! We were going to eat food not out of a pouch!), and regret, along with a healthy dose of self-doubt. The whole time we were in Tuolumne, we felt slightly intimidated. All the people around us—from our dinner companions, to the somewhat smelly Pacific Crest Trail hikers straight out of Wild we saw at the store, to the rangers—seemed to have this insider knowledge that we just lacked. We felt like the new kids on the block, the scared student on the first day of school, the noobs, and we just weren’t ready for the High Sierras. I said we were baby backpackers—babybackers—and this was just too hard for us right now. Ben said that success was just a string of failures, and that real failure happened when you failed again and again and stopped trying (he also pointed out that Michael Jordan has missed more than 9,000 shots in his career—I love my Bulls guy).
With Ben’s great advice and generally great attitude, we cheered up as we headed down the Tioga Road towards the Bay Area. We were going to keep trying at backpacking. We have a trip scheduled in Washington…but first we were going to find a comfy hotel bed and a hot shower!
We stopped for some absolutely amazing Thai food in Oakdale. Seriously, if you ever go to Oakdale…and I don’t know why anyone would, but if you do, stop at Pho 38. Best Thai food I’ve ever had.
Then, we got back on the road and began doing some intense Googling/TripAdvisoring/Yelping/Expedia-ing/GoogleMapping to find a hotel for the next two nights. I don’t know when finding a hotel got so extremely complicated (actually, I know exactly when it got complicated, and it involves a tiny glowing screen and some dudes in Cupertino–ironically, not far from where we were heading!), but we were on a budget in a very pricy area and simultaneously picky about our accommodations. After phone calls, Ben reading review snippets aloud to me as we crossed the San Mateo bridge (miles of Bay water—we didn’t see that one coming!), some dubious use of our almost-expired Costco membership and some fantastic negotiating on Ben’s behalf (my mother would be proud!), we ended up at a little slice of heaven off the Bayshore Freeway called a Best Western.
I don’t know if we just have rose-colored glasses or we were so glad to find civilization after our harrowing experiences in the High Sierras, but we love this Best Western so much. It’s so clean. It’s so spacious. It’s so comfortable. John Muir would be disgusted by us but…the Best Western is calling, and right now, we must go. We’ll get to the mountain someday.
Babes in the Wood 