Tuolumne Meadows

I woke to the coldest morning yet, the temperature in the mid-thirties. But the six mile walk down the nearly level valley was a great if coolish pleasure. I walked in the shade of the high eastern ridge, and I saw no one till I was close to Tuolumne Meadows, when I began to meet groups of day hikers….

At 9:30 I reached the store, a canvas-sided and roofed affair. All Tuolumne amenities are summer only; the road in, and over nearby Tioga Pass, is closed in winter. The lot was full of cars, and more kept coming in looking for room…. People passed in and out of the store and an adjacent grill, and more lingered outside and around the lot and building, including a group of young  thru-hikers. I felt a little skittish around so much action….The post office was open, in the store, and in a few minutes I had my box. Sort of like Christmas, all that happy food, and a new pair of socks, maps, new tubes of toothpaste and sunblock….

I sat down at a picnic table and transferred most of the treasure to my bear canister, then walked to the nearby campground, through the car camping portion and up a short hill to the backpackers’ section, where I found an open site at the back edge. These sites are limited to one-night stays, and the previous night’s occupants had mostly already set off. I felt a little more at ease once I’d secured a home for myself; I put up my tent and put some of my gear inside, and all the food in a large metal bear box (each site has one, and they’re also at all the trailheads nearby; bears are a much bigger problem where people congregate rather than in the backcountry).

Just as I was leaving the store area, I had seen Greg, standing at the corner of the building. I was surprised—he had been heading the other way, to the south—but I went up to say hello. He seemed embarrassed to see me. He explained that during the night he had suffered stomach cramps, and by morning he had decided to walk back out. “I was sort of inspired by your story,” he said, but he looked more disappointed than inspired. He was waiting for the morning bus to Yosemite Valley, and from there he was going to call his parents, who live in nearby Mariposa. He planned to stay with them for a few days, then see how he was feeling. That was the plan but he obviously had his doubts. “I’m actually feeling okay now,” he said. “Maybe I should just go on.” But he wasn’t going to.  I had the feeling he would’ve preferred that I hadn’t seen him….

After I’d settled in at camp, I walked a mile down the road to a small visitor center, where I used Tuolumne’s only pay phone to call Naomi and Alix and tell them I was still alive. Inside the log building I sat down at a bench in a corner by an outlet and charged the iPod and my camera battery. A man looking to do the same appeared, and after he found his own outlet he sat down to chat. His name was Phillip and was a high school physics teacher in Las Vegas. He had done a PhD in geo-physics at Ball State, and then taught at an Indiana community college for a number of years. But he preferred high school and Nevada. He told me of protests on campus in Indiana about his course on evolution; one time an evangelical group burst into his class room singing a hymn, to drown out his lecture.

He had a tattoo of a trout on the back of one calf (he’d spent two summers in Yellowstone studying trout for a master’s in biology) and his nostrils were more on the front of his nose than under it.  He was out for a month’s hike, doing a loop around Yosemite and through the Sierras to the south. His sixteen-year-old daughter had accompanied him for the first week, and he had only a few more days to go.

Later, I ended up sharing my campsite with a young couple, Blaze and Olivia, both about twenty (the campground filled up, and they had wandered past several times before I made eye contact, which encouraged them to ask). They had been hiking, briefly, on the JMT with Blaze’s father, who was sixty-three and doing the trail for the second time. He’d done it seven years before, with the then thirteen-year-old Blaze. “And he plans to do it again in seven more years when he’s seventy,” Blaze said, “and then once more when he’s seventy-seven. He figures that’ll be the last time.”

Blaze was wiry and knowing and ready with trail advice; on the hike with his father seven years previous they had walked not only the JMT but the PCT all the way north to the Oregon border. Olivia had pale red hair and a shag cut and clearly lacked the ease and confidence of a seasoned hiker. When Blaze went off to fill their water bottles, Olivia told me what had happened to bring them back to Tuolumne. First, she told me she’d never been backpacking before this trip. She shook her head, as if it was a lot tougher than she had expected. She and Blaze had planned to walk with the father south to Red’s Meadow (about 37 miles), where Blaze’s mother would pick up the young couple. But they only got about eight miles up the valley along Lyell Fork—not even to the first tough bit of climbing, though I didn’t say so to her—and Olivia had decided that she could not continue, it was just too much….

Despite these brief social encounters, I found Tuolumne Meadows a bust…. I’d hoped for cell phone reception (so I could talk on the phone longer) and a shower (no such facilities), but more I found the crowds of people daunting and obnoxious…. It would be easy to move on….

But first I wanted to get myself re-organized. Back at camp I re-packed my pack, then the food canister. I walked down to the bathroom building and washed some of my clothes in the sink. I figured out how to backflush my filter and clean out the cartridge (which is supposed to be part of the regular maintenance). I got my pack all ready for the morning, and then I went down at the grill next to the store and ordered a hamburger and fires and ate outside at a picnic table next to a French couple with a young boy….

Just after sunset I went to a campfire talk on owls. Ranger Sally, like nearly all such National Park rangers, talked to us like we were four-year-olds, but I did learn an interesting fact or two. For example, great horned owls are fond of skunks, and a skunk can go ahead and spray away, the owl doesn’t care because it doesn’t have any sense of smell.

I came back in the dark, and Blaze and Olivia had gone to bed and so did I.