A Two-Day Excursion

Spring time in California - normally a season of optimism and promise, but for several years now stifled by the region's ongoing drought. A study published in December suggested that the last three years were the driest such period in more than 1,000 years¹.  Reservoirs across the state are falling below 50% of their average recorded capacities².  Necessity has created demand for the advancement of desalination plants; San Diego County will soon be served by a facility with greater capacity than any other in the western hemisphere³.

Dryer than normal conditions have also contributed to a rise in significant wildfires.  The number of fires and the quantity of acres burned have both been increasing in recent years⁴.  One of the largest fires in 2014 was the so-called Meadow Fire⁵ in Yosemite National Park, which engulfed an area east of Yosemite Valley and forced evacuations and trail closures.  Perhaps because this sort of thing has become a little more frequent lately, it was all unbeknownst to me until I found myself in that area of the park last weekend, in the midst of a long trek through a number of elevations, climates, and terrains...

Five friends and I arrived the Friday before Memorial Day.  Our plan was to spend Saturday hiking to a high point on Mount Hoffman in the geographic center of the park, awake to a spectacular panorama in the early morning, and then head off on a 20-mile long, 6,000 foot descent into Yosemite Valley.

As the weekend approached, though, a prolonged storm moved through the area, pelting it with rain and snow.  Luckily for us, the approach road was open by the time we embarked on our trip, but the initial hike to the mountain was done in near white-out conditions, and as we made our ascent up the slope, a mixture of hail and snow beat us back as if to forbid us from reaching the summit.  Breakout scouting excursions yielded no effective shelter on the high part of the mountain, so we retreated down a little, found a wooded area with some protection, and set up a tent-and-tarp shantytown of sorts, where we huddled by a pair of portable gas stoves and then settled in for the long, cold night.

The next morning arrived and in addition to discovering coyote and marmot tracks in the snow outside our tents, we bore witness to a beautiful Sierra sunrise, which rose over a distant cloud bank and into a clear blue sky.  Conditions at the bottom of the mountain were much different now, compared with the night before. We scrambled back down to May Lake, and then to the trailhead towards Clouds Rest.

A week's worth of rain prior to our arrival had led to the birth of many new streams of varying dimensions that flowed beside or often upon the trail we were traversing.  Your humble narrator may have even slipped into one while engaging in some fancy footwork across an apparent path of boulders.

Several hours into the morning, we could see back across the Tuolumne Meadows area to our home the previous night.

Soon after that, we branched over to the John Muir Trail, and at that point into the wreckage from the Meadow Fire.  We moved through a miles-long landscape of charred trees and burnt earth, occasionally relying on our admittedly suspect directional sense where the trail literally evaporated into a desolate tableau of ashes.

In an ongoing theme for the trip, we were able to avoid any major disasters and managed to find our way to more familiar sights.  The JMT eventually crosses behind Half Dome, by the backpackers' camp there, and meets up with the Mist Trail before heading down into the valley.

In the end it was not a particularly easy two days, but nor did we expect it to be.  These were two days spent in a place where you want to take everything in - to see everything, to taste the water and feel the sun and the breeze, to hear the birds and feel your foot press into the terrain.  Compare that with our daily walks through city life, in which we routinely avert our eyes or noses or ears from the activity around us.

On a weekend devoted to honoring our armed services and the manner in which they contribute to our peace and prosperity, it was a reminder that there is more worth protecting than just our borders.

¹ "California drought most severe in 1,200 years, study says"
² CA.gov drought update - May 18, 2015
³ "Biggest ocean desalination plant in California nears completion"
⁴ CA.gov Cal Fire
⁵ Meadow Fire - Wikipedia