Yosemite Super Bowl Weekend (2006.02.04)

glacier point 2006.02.04 @ 6:15am

2006.02.04 Superbowl weekend = ..Yosemite..

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The weekend starts with a quite simple syllogism:

Clause 1) Superbowl Sunday causes lots of people to sit on their ass.

Clause 2) People who sit on their ass do not crowd national parks.

Conclusion) Thus Superbowl Sunday causes national parks to be devoid of people, because they are at home sitting on their asses.

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Its Friday and with my eyes Ive just said, Fuck this, Im out of here, to all my co-workers. The past week has been one of uninterrupted production line hell. I work on basically the biotechs version of Fords nifty little assembly line, but instead of model Ts we pump out A, T, C and Gs; decoding the genomes of everything from human to the bacteria that live in hind gut of a Costa Rican termite.

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I get home just with enough time to make up for the packing I didnt do last night at 3am. Sleeping bag, check, extra pair of socks, check, food mix a little dry potato soup with quinoa, throw the a few tangerines and what have yous in a sack, check. Adams out front of 1502 ....Alice.... in his white ford truck as Im tying up the last strings on the pack. I drop down the blood red stairs in my beanie with the weekends burden slung over my shoulders like dead horse. I close the door of the ford and find Adams conservative talk radio blaring on about something. I try to focus in to see if its something interesting, but my mind is a thousand places and none all at the same time.

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Before I know it weve eaten In-And-Out hamburgers, slid through the Yosemite front gates without opening our wallets and pulled into ..Bridalveil falls.. near the junction with 41. The lights from the truck go dead and a brief moment light adaptation takes place in my 20/30 eyes and it feels like a fucking religious experience. Its less than a half moon, but the copious amounts of water shooting forth from just south of cathedral rocks is enough to make everything in your body freeze up and go limp. Then the sound becomes visible and its like what a lighting bolt sounds like if it could only strike for eternity. For a brief moment Im completely unaware of myself, Adam, the couple in the front of the parking lot making whoopy in the little red Jetta and just about any other detail that reminds me of my division from this world around me.

Back in the truck we jet up the 41 towards ....Badger.. ..Pass..... We take a brief stop over, across the median and then into the parking lot just outside of the Wawona tunnel. In the dark we stare back into the blue midnight depth of ..Yosemite Valley... Bridalveil at the right, El Cap and half Dome all just glow in the same strange way the ..Hollywood.. backgrounds look implausible in most movie sets, but you really want to believe its real. To commemorate the beauty, I do what any adolescent boy would do, I take a nice long leak over the biggest cliff edge around and contemplate the origins of beauty or how and why I might find this place as beautiful and another landscape as not.

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Badger pass is dead besides a few snow groomers grazing the slopes. Their large bodies, mechanized appendages, and beaming lights transform this terrestrial landscape into something more suited for a Ray Bradbury story. Adam and I sign all the self registration material that lets the park know where your going and where they might look for your cold dead body if for some reason your vehicle is taking up space in their parking lot for to long. We put down ....Badger.. ..Pass.... to Glacier Point and back. Though adequate it was definitely not a complete nor an accurate description of our evolving plans. Had we incurred some grave misfortune along the way, the park service may have been very upset in not being able to use the documentation to quickly and resourcefully find our cold dead bodies, before some family of five found our rotting carcasses in the spring.

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 I strip down to my boxer briefs in the front of the truck so I can get my snow gear on and my skinny, naked, white body quickly becomes aware that it is below freezing out. Though I probably should have guessed that with the 5 foot snow drifts surrounding the ice covered parking lot. Sometimes Im not real quick. Adam and I put the finishing touches on our packs while a mini-van of ski bums pull up beside us. The five of them will be sleeping vertically tonight so that they can enjoy the slopes those groomers have been working on all evening.

At the trailhead Adam and I decide the ski path out to Glacier Point seems solid enough to just hoof it without the snowshoes. The plan at this juncture (midnight) is to hike out a ways, crash and then make whatever else is left of the 10.5 mile hike the next morning.

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The groomed cross country ski trail crackles indiscriminately underneath our feet and our silhouettes are made visible against the snow by the bright stars and the little bit of glow from the now downed half moon. A mile in and I throw out the idea that we could make it to Glacier Point for sunrise. Adam bites, so its final. Final in that both Adam and I are stubborn enough and prideful enough that neither one of us would admit to the other if at any point we didnt think we could make it. Destination Glacier Point, its a lock.

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Visually the trail at night is not very interesting, which gives each of us a lot of time to spend upstairs. My hearing becomes extremely acute when the data quantity from my eyes to the back of skull diminishes, so I found myself stopping occasionally to listen to birds that Adam swore he could not here. The bird songs I heard were small bleats of maybe 2-3 at a time (probably chickadees). Since Adam could not hear them though I began to question how much I was actually hearing and how much my brain was adding in. Standing still, the world around me sounded like a speaker cranked way up with nothing  playing, just a ominous hum that seemed to amplify any little thing that came through.

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We tramp on, sleep deprived and eager for our destination. Adam divulges to me later that he was sleep walking or the closest thing to it for at least the last two miles. He said he was just listening to the sound of my shoes against the snow and mindlessly following. I was busy having lucid-waking dreams, so I wasnt exactly the best person to be following. Im really good at performing a physical task and taking my brain elsewhere while its being done. Part of my brain was playing with this triangular-cube-ish object that was emitting beams of light while the other half of my visual brain was trained on keeping the edge of the ski trail in view, so that I didnt walk off course.

I think just about the time I had figured out how to get the light intensity and color spectrum to change in the lucid dream, visual field two over rode the whole matter. All of a sudden the trees had given way and right there in front of me as real as a ..Hollywood.. backdrop there was Half Dome giving me the cold shoulder over about a mile and half worth of icy air. The lucid dream shut down as the recognition of how high up I was kicked in and how close we were to the cliffs edge kicked in. Unfortunately for Adam he was still for the most part asleep and though he recognized that Half Dome was right in front of us, his brain had not computed the fact that we were standing at Warrens Point right on the edge of the cliff line. He began to wonder toward the last rolling hill of snow at whos end was a two thousand foot potential energy equation about to be put to use. Finally the glucose or the oxygen got the right departments up stairs and Adam jerked about and exclaimed something quite incomprehensible. He then murmurs on that he had just now recognized we were on the cliffs edge and that he shouldnt act upon his first impulse, which was to go over that snowy little hill in front of us and get a closer look.

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I was ready to can it in at ....Warren....s Point. I figured I really only wanted to be able to look over the valley as sunrise occurred and this spot seemed just as good as any other. Luckily for me Adam persuaded me to push on to Glacier Point. In the east a bright light cut behind one of the peaks, so intense and so sharply that we both thought it might be the first rays of the sun or a nuclear explosion going off in ....Nevada..... By the time we had reached glacier point the light had risen from the horizon enough to recognize it as Venus. We crawled upto the edge near alligator rock and peered into the dark valley below. To the left of venus a wide dull blue glow had started on the horizon. The sun was on its way up. Adam checked his watch: 5:45am. We put our pads up against a snow bank, fought off closing our eyes and watched the sun rise up over the back of the Sierras. The sun appeared to rise three times against the sky as if Auroa were rolling over in bed trying to decide when finally to get up. With each rise a new and dazzling set of colors fell upon the incoming storms first clouds. Yellow to Pink to Golden Red and then it all died out into the colors of daylight.

We crashed out on the pads for about two hours, Adam was crafty enough to get into his sleeping bag for the occasion, where I, well, I was less crafty and passed out face first on my pad with no bag. My shoes were wet from hiking in the snow and the below freezing temperature did wake me often and persuade me to walk around a bit to get the toes warm enough for me to sleep a little further. Groggily we got up around nine-ish and started to make our way toward the Panorama trail. The new plan was to take this trail to the valley floor and then hitch back to ....Badger.. ..Pass..... In the process we passed a lonely cross-country skier coming into Glacier Point. He would be the last person we saw that day.

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The Panorama trail had a few snow shoe prints leading away from the sign, which made us comfortable that the trail was open or at least marked enough for us to get down to the valley. We donned our snow shoes and headed out only to find that the snow shoe tracks we had seen at the sign and all turned around just over the first little blip of a hill and headed back. We took this as an omen, but in our delirious state decided to push on anyway. I have done the trail before in the summer, so I had a visual remnants about where the path should lead and luckily these memory scraps were able to lead me to some very old snow shoe prints. The prints were fairly old because they were only visible as negatives. If you think about a snow shoe print, its an indentation in the snow, but periodically what happens is that a print compresses the snow and then all the snow around it melts at a faster rate then the print itself and what you get is a raised print, a negative. The negative prints seemed to be heading out from the valley, so I felt assured that I could use them to get down the cliff sides.

Adam was blazing his own trail down beneath me and kept going farther and farther down. I tried yelling to him that the trail was up here, but he didnt want to seem to listen. Eventually we got out of visual range from each other and got to play a very annoying game of Marco Polo through snow fields that showed signs of previous avalanches. Finally we got visual confirmation of each other again and Adam kept waiving for me to come down to where he was and I just kept yelling, Trail up here. I could see that Adams current course was going straight for the cliffs edge and that he would eventually have to come up to the trail if he wanted to continue onto the valley floor at a less then falling pace. Adam kept yelling for me to come down there and I yelled back, Why? Trails up here. He then just began waiving at me to come down there, the way a pissed of two year old waves at you when they are trying to get you to do something that they know is against your will. We settled, Adam stopped and got water and then went on his marry way, which included going to the cliffs edge and then having to come back and meet the trail. He apologized and said that it was because of a lack of food and sleep that he was extra irritable and maybe not always making the most sound of decisions. I apologized too for not being more articulate on my end, I too was a little tired.

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We eventually made it down past Illilouttee falls and just up the trail a little bit before taking a nap. Maybe about a mile or two after that we set up camp on the nose of Panorama cliff. We dug a camp site into the snow where Adam could fit his tent and I could fit my bivy. At first we were going to put up right on the cliffs edge, but realized the slope, the warm temperatures and any sort of tossing and turning in our sleep could potentially land us down below, so decided against the open aired site. From our little site in the tree we could still see ....Yosemite.. ..Falls.... and Half Dome. We made dinner as the pink shawls of the evening laid upon the shoulders of Half Dome and some of the other granite slabs that overlooked the valley. Both of us were out before 8pm.

In the morning we high tailed it down the Panorama to the top of ....Nevada.. ..Falls...., where we basked in the sun a little bit and then busted our way down the mist trail and into the valley. Only now in the valley hoping to find a ride up to ....Badger.. ..Pass.... does the syllogism that starts this story off with work against us. We worked out the details as we hoofed it from Happy Isles to ....Curry.. ..Village..... We would take the valley bus out the ..Yosemite.. ..Village.. and then I would try to hitch a ride up to ....Badger.. ..Pass.... leaving Adam behind with the gear. We figured I looked like a hippy, Adam looked like a skin-head dresses all in black, so between us I had the better chance of securing hitches.

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We jumped the valley floor bus just outside of ....Curry.. ..Village.... and talked up the driver. Buses leave from the valley floor at 8:30am and 11:30am, which did us no good at 12:20pm. He said he might be able to connect us with another driver who has to go up to Badger to bring folks home in the evening. When we pulled into ....Yosemite.. ..Village.... he pointed out the other bus driver, Ronny, who was just getting off his shift. We exited the bus and talked with Ronny briefly, so he would know what are mugs looked like. The new plan was that the current bus driver would drop us off at Sunny Side camp where we could hitch from and if Ronny came by with the bus going up to Badger he would give us a ride. Ronny didnt know what time he would come by though, because his higher up hadnt given him the schedule yet.

The bus pulls away from Sunnyside camp and  Adam and I are left there with out bags sitting against rocks and thumbs to the wind trying to snag anything that comes along. If it werent for wives and girlfriends Im fairly sure that we would have secured a ride in the first five minutes. Vehicle after vehicle with women in the passenger seat mouthing things like, Dont pick them up, Dont think about it, or, No, passed us unrelentingly for at least twenty minutes. A Subaru pulling out of the Sunnyside camp became our only chance. I rushed the passenger seat downed window and quickly blurted out our situation. They agreed to let me in and before I knew it we were zipping along leaving a skin-head dressed in all black with two packs far behind us on the side of the road.

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They were dear enough to drop me off at the intersection of 41 and the road up to ....Badger.. ..Pass..... The sign ahead of me read 5miles to ....Badge.. ..Pass..... I hung out for about five minutes and realized that no cars are going up to a dinky little ski resort in the middle of the day. Plenty of cars were coming down the hill, but they did me no good. I had a show to catch in the city at 9pm at the Make Out Room, so I began calculations. Ok, I can run a 6 minute mile, there are five miles, best case scenario thirty minutes. Im dressed in snow pants and boots, lets bump it up to ten minute miles; I can do it in an hour..that puts us on the road by 4pmanother 4 hours to get back to the bay to see Old School Freight Trainok lets do it. With calculations out of the way I begin running like a mad man up the windy five mile road. Im being literal with the mad man bit, I had a car pull over to ask if everything was all right, I had to assure him that everything was all right and that I just needed to get up to Badger Pass. He said he would take me but his gas tank was empty and that he was actually hoping to coast all the way back down to the next gas station. He rolled on his way and I continued my run up the five foot snow banked road. In the distance I could here the sound of maybe a snow plow or some other heavy machinery making its way up the road and then from behind me this great big bus sweeps out into the lane Im running in. I look up and there is Ronnys big old grin and his hand waiving me to get in the bus. Adams on the bus and tells me that 2 minutes after that Subaru had taken me away, Ronny came by in the bus and got him and all the gear. 

We get to the truck get geared down, grin in the warm winter light and then pack up and hit the road back to the bay. I make it back in time to see Pete Frostic and his band Old School Freight Train play just a few songs at the Make Out Room in the Mission.

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Funny how things work out, plans work out, but never how one expects them. The most important thing is to just lay yourself open to opportunities and desires, life will always fill in the details.