Kennedy Meadows

James and I set  on foot in the heat of mid-afternoon, up a hot, dusty valley of ponderosa pine. We had driven up from the desert floor to a place called Kennedy Meadows, at about 6100’ in Inyo National Forest. My pack was ridiculously heavy. I had planned and worked for the last couple months on the gear, to keep my pack weight down, and yet in the end the weight was significantly more than I had hoped…. The base weight was probably around 24, 25 pounds. Manageable, but that number didn’t include food and water, and that’s where I ran into trouble.

My first re-supply spot was 150 miles down the trail, the longest stretch of the trip—so I had to carry quite a bit of food (more than I needed, as it turned out, but I didn’t know). Then, the water sources were far enough apart, and I was worried enough about being thirsty, that I felt it necessary to carry three liters of water (also probably more than necessary, along most stretches anyway)…. So, when I put on the pack it weighed about 47 pounds, or about fifteen more pounds than I had been naively hoping…. But I figured I could get used to carrying the pack, and anyway, the weight would drop each day as I went along….

Soon after we set off we passed a wooden sign marking the boundary of South Sierra Wilderness Area…. The path rose gradually, and after two miles we came to a bridge over a stream and had our first rest….

The path was sandy, and juniper trees grew among the larger pines. Occasionally the woods opened up to patches of sage, “meadows” that didn’t seem very meadow-y to me. A couple miles past the bridge we crossed Crag Creek and started climbing a little more steeply, up through a forest to a small saddle at 7500’, then out onto the broad Beck Meadows, another sage brush flat….

We thought to camp here but saw no obvious spots and so kept on, down an arm of the big meadow, admiring the horizon line of jagged mountains, eventually entering the woods again, up above the meadow on the south…..

We had been walking hard almost without pause for five and a half hours before we came to a good spot to camp, on Deer Ridge, at 8400’. The sun had just set, and in the last of the light we put up our tents. I was too tired to cook and not hungry anyway. I forced down an energy bar, and we hung a food bag in a nearby Jeffrey pine (most of the food was in a bear canister, which one simply places 100 feet from camp; if a bear wants to play with it, fine, it’s not getting in).

I got in my tiny tent and blew up my air mattress, pulled the sleeping bag from its stuff sack, put on another shirt, organized my stuff in the cramped space, a headlamp and bottle of water, book, hat and gloves if it got cold…. And finally lay down on my back and breathed a large sigh. I didn’t feel too well. A little de-hydrated, sore shoulders from the pack, a little anxious about the prospect of losing James’ good company in the morning. He could only go for one night before returning south for work….

At the beginning of any backpacking trip, at least for me, there’s the question, what am I doing? In some ways it’s an irrational undertaking, the decision to carry a heavy pack all day, sleep on the ground at night, eat dry or re-constituted foods…. One foregoes the usual pleasures and comforts—for the unconventional pleasure of living outside in a beautiful place. An adjustment is necessary, and it doesn’t happen all at once right at the start….

Just the night before I had slept in a soft bed with several pillows; in the morning I had showered and shaved with hot water; I had sat in the kitchen and eaten a breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs that James had made me; I had set off into the world in the passenger’s seat of the Range Rover, north across and beyond big Los Angeles….

And then I had walked with a pack into the mountains and come to a rest atop a ridge, where a night jar flew back and forth low in the sky calling out, and I lay in a coffin-like tent exhausted and wondering about the days to come.