Freedom of the Hills
I just returned from a camping/fishing/hiking trip in the Sierra Nevadas. I haven’t spent any time camping in the mountains since Master P and I tore up the Colorado Rockies many years ago. Back then, in my younger days, we didn’t just conquer mountains, we like, chewed them up, voided them, ate them back up, and voided them again until they were inextricably linked to our DNA.
We met some interesting characters on that trip. My deep tissue massage therapist says that mountain air is healthy, and good for your constitution. I say mountain air makes you fucking insane. This hypothesis is easily proven by stepping into a mountain bar, having a few drinks, and observing the locals, as I'm sure Master P would agree with me.
I packed my Jeep Cherokee with equipment, and headed up north, me, myself, and my ipod, stopping only when I hit 10,000 feet at the Golden Trout campground in the Horseshoe Meadows area of Lone Pine, California. I crawled into the back seat at 1:30am, and slept until morning. I woke up to this:
I pitched my tent, and inflated my air mattress. It felt good that all the old habits were returning. I drove up north to Bishop, and then to a lake at 8,000 feet. I spent the next hour attempting to figure out how to set up a fishing pole. The reel is what really threw me off, and there was no cell phone reception to contact the Youngest for advice.
"Where does the fishing line begin?" I asked myself, "At least scotch tape has a nice little piece of paper at the beginning of a new roll...I should have bought that cool "Dora the Explorer" fishing pole with an enclosed reel and push button release. It would have matched my sandals! I wonder if there are Hello Kitty fishing poles out there. Wouldn't that make even more sense? I should have loaded High School Musical on my ipod... Fish are slimy, but that's OK because they swim around in the water...I'll bet I find some flowers in the mountain to put in my hair...I'll be the prettiest little girl in the whole Sierra Nevadas!
The altitude was clouding my thinking, but eventually, I delicately pulled out my brand new, big-ass fishing knife, and stabbed the reel until I got a loose strand to work with. An hour later, after the beer had turned warm, I climbed into my kayak and paddled around looking for fishes.
Against all odds (not really knowing how to set up a fishing line, not really knowing where to look for fishes, nobody else on the lake catching anything) I caught a couple of beautiful rainbow trout. I was feeling good. I had spent a lot of time at a high elevation, I had caught a couple fishes, I was feeling lucky, so I drove over to the Paiute Palace casino just outside of Bishop, and won $80 playing 4/8 limit Hold 'Em with locals. I drove back to my campground and slept until the sun woke me up in the morning.
The next day, driving back from Bishop, I picked up a hitchhiker, and drove him forty miles to Independence, California, a place where nobody should live without transportation. Interesting fellow. Lived in Japan for ten years upon graduating college, and has pretty much wandered around the United States ever since. He was hitching back from Bishop after picking up some two-for-one underwear. Nice guy. He offered to pay for gas, ("I can give you a few dollars. Don't worry. I can afford it.") but I waived him off like an aristocrat. I didn't let on that at home, I had at least 15 pairs of skivvies, or he might have robbed me on principal.
My plan was to summit Mount Russell, a 14,000 foot peak, neighbor to Mt. Whitney, but with less than a tenth of the foot traffic. I've climbed my share of 14,000 foot peaks in the past, and knew that the key to a successful climb was acclimating, and plenty of rest the night before. I would begin the hike the next morning, so I naturally went to a Lone Pine bar for an early nightcap or two.
I sat next to a man that was sort of tweaking out. At one point, a woman came over to him, and the whole thing smelled of a drug deal, so I went to the bathroom to give them some privacy. The woman left, and I struck up a conversation with the man, asking him about his arm which was so filled with overlapping tattoos that it looked virtually black with ink. These were not done by a professional, and based on the subject matter, this man had problems. Lucky for him, I had an undergraduate degree in Psychology, and some time to kill:
His was a story of a life spent in and out of jail, tangled up in drugs. His was a story of redemption. His was a story of missing thumbs, of getting high on PCP, launching his car over an inclined highway, and landing with a shattered windshield, fully conscious, and watching as cop cars, fire trucks, and EMTs rushed to the scene, and then gathered around the car, staring at the carnage while he blinked windshield glass out of his eyes and laughed and laughed and laughed. His was a story of dealing drugs out of his hospital bed after the accident.
He was allegedly 120 days sober living with a drug addicted wife and her fourteen year old son. Technically, he was violating parole (again) by drinking, but it was the only thing he could do to chase away the addiction spider of heroin. He had just given his wife $20 to score drugs for herself, and all the old triggers were going off like synaptic fireworks in his brain.
He was an unbelievably nice guy for the all the shit he has been through. He blamed nobody for his problems. He felt lucky to be alive, to still have a father he got along with, to have a decent job even after being cuffed and sent back to jail while on the job for failing a parole piss test. He didn't speak bad about his drug addicted wife, who didn't work, or the fact that he was financially taking care of her and her son.
That night, I packed for my climb, and set the alarm for 3:00am. It was a short night, and I was on the trail head by 4:20am, hiking in the dark with my headlamp penetrating the dark wilderness.
Mt. Russell is not an easy climb because there is no clearly defined trail. The good people at the US Forest Service have decided to funnel all the damage caused by hikers to the Mount Whitney trail, which is virtually wheelchair assessable all the way to the highest point in the lower 48. Don't get me wrong, the Mt. Whitney trail is not an easy hike at 22 miles round trip, and a 6,500 foot elevation gain, but 90-100 peak baggers from around the world are on the trail every day during the summer season. Last year, to discourage Mt. Whitney climbers who couldn't get a pass on the lottery system from climbing Russell and getting killed, or even worse, not packing out their fecal matter in a particularly draconian "leave no trace" policy, the parks decided to limit Mt. Russell climbers to the same lottery system as Whitney. Luckily, they opened up some additional permits after people who had won the lottery failed to confirm their reservation.
My point is that the Mt. Russell trail is intentionally rugged and ill-defined. I lost the trail a few times on the way up, but managed to find Upper Boy Scout lake early enough for a summit bid before the afternoon lightning rolled in:
Following instructions culled from mountaineering books and trip reports from the Internet, I continued following little ducks left by hikers showing the way... (See Mount Whitney in the background):
...before coming to the startling conclusion that I was hiking the wrong fucking trail. I was following ducks up the "Mount Whitney Mountaineering Trail" rather than the Mount Russell trail.
I was lost. I read every piece of paper I brought I brought with me describing the route to Mount Russell, and could not determine where I made the wrong turn. To add injury to insult, I fell through the ice of what I later discovered was "Girl Scout Lake," luckily only up to my knee. Eventually, I found myself on Iceberg lake, and met up with some mountain climbers who were camping there, and had a good map of the area:
I should have zigged when I zagged and ended up on the wrong side of the mountain. The mountain climber gave me a detailed history of Mt. Russel, told me who climbed it first and what year, called his friend over who had soloed Russell a few years back for further instructions at the peak, and then zipped up my backpack as I was leaving "so nothing important falls out." I was totally pawned by Mother Nature. I wanted to tell them that I wasn't nearly as stupid as I looked,
but who was I kidding? This was an epic failure. I didn't have the time or energy to down climb several miles and find the right trail, so I marched my tired, pathetic ass back down the mountain.
At the trail head, I picked up a couple more hitchhikers who had just completed the John Muir Trail. They had spent 23 days in the wilderness, the last hundred miles with very limited food because of a mysteriously missing cache. I drove them into Lone Pine, and then headed back to Los Angeles with my tail tucked between my legs. It was a good trip, and next time if I don't make it to the top, it won't be for not knowing the correct path to take.
In retrospect, part of me thinks I should have climbed Whitney again (for the third time) just to say I accomplished something to write home about. Then another part of me knows that no matter how much of the mountain you ingest, void, and reingest, you can never pawn the mountain. On a good day, you climb the sumbitch, bask in the view and the sun, and skip on back down, but on a bad day, you snap your picture on the summit and get the hell out of there. On a really bad day, you get zapped by 30 million volts, cower under a rock, and try to stifle down the fear of being trapped in a place in which there is no exit. You watch as lighting strikes the peaks all around you. Or you watch as the snow continues to fall, and your hypothermic body and brain turns to mush. You watch as your own fear is mirrored in your climbing partner's eyes. You watch and wonder why you ever made this climb in the first place. You watch and are humbled, and afterwards you know that this is why you climb - you climb not just to experience the freedom of the hills, but to get in touch with your own morality. To dance with death, and then to get in your car and drive home.
I just returned from a camping/fishing/hiking trip in the Sierra Nevadas. I haven’t spent any time camping in the mountains since Master P and I tore up the Colorado Rockies many years ago. Back then, in my younger days, we didn’t just conquer mountains, we like, chewed them up, voided them, ate them back up, and voided them again until they were inextricably linked to our DNA.
We met some interesting characters on that trip. My deep tissue massage therapist says that mountain air is healthy, and good for your constitution. I say mountain air makes you fucking insane. This hypothesis is easily proven by stepping into a mountain bar, having a few drinks, and observing the locals, as I'm sure Master P would agree with me.
I packed my Jeep Cherokee with equipment, and headed up north, me, myself, and my ipod, stopping only when I hit 10,000 feet at the Golden Trout campground in the Horseshoe Meadows area of Lone Pine, California. I crawled into the back seat at 1:30am, and slept until morning. I woke up to this:
I pitched my tent, and inflated my air mattress. It felt good that all the old habits were returning. I drove up north to Bishop, and then to a lake at 8,000 feet. I spent the next hour attempting to figure out how to set up a fishing pole. The reel is what really threw me off, and there was no cell phone reception to contact the Youngest for advice.
"Where does the fishing line begin?" I asked myself, "At least scotch tape has a nice little piece of paper at the beginning of a new roll...I should have bought that cool "Dora the Explorer" fishing pole with an enclosed reel and push button release. It would have matched my sandals! I wonder if there are Hello Kitty fishing poles out there. Wouldn't that make even more sense? I should have loaded High School Musical on my ipod... Fish are slimy, but that's OK because they swim around in the water...I'll bet I find some flowers in the mountain to put in my hair...I'll be the prettiest little girl in the whole Sierra Nevadas!
The altitude was clouding my thinking, but eventually, I delicately pulled out my brand new, big-ass fishing knife, and stabbed the reel until I got a loose strand to work with. An hour later, after the beer had turned warm, I climbed into my kayak and paddled around looking for fishes.
Against all odds (not really knowing how to set up a fishing line, not really knowing where to look for fishes, nobody else on the lake catching anything) I caught a couple of beautiful rainbow trout. I was feeling good. I had spent a lot of time at a high elevation, I had caught a couple fishes, I was feeling lucky, so I drove over to the Paiute Palace casino just outside of Bishop, and won $80 playing 4/8 limit Hold 'Em with locals. I drove back to my campground and slept until the sun woke me up in the morning.
The next day, driving back from Bishop, I picked up a hitchhiker, and drove him forty miles to Independence, California, a place where nobody should live without transportation. Interesting fellow. Lived in Japan for ten years upon graduating college, and has pretty much wandered around the United States ever since. He was hitching back from Bishop after picking up some two-for-one underwear. Nice guy. He offered to pay for gas, ("I can give you a few dollars. Don't worry. I can afford it.") but I waived him off like an aristocrat. I didn't let on that at home, I had at least 15 pairs of skivvies, or he might have robbed me on principal.
My plan was to summit Mount Russell, a 14,000 foot peak, neighbor to Mt. Whitney, but with less than a tenth of the foot traffic. I've climbed my share of 14,000 foot peaks in the past, and knew that the key to a successful climb was acclimating, and plenty of rest the night before. I would begin the hike the next morning, so I naturally went to a Lone Pine bar for an early nightcap or two.
I sat next to a man that was sort of tweaking out. At one point, a woman came over to him, and the whole thing smelled of a drug deal, so I went to the bathroom to give them some privacy. The woman left, and I struck up a conversation with the man, asking him about his arm which was so filled with overlapping tattoos that it looked virtually black with ink. These were not done by a professional, and based on the subject matter, this man had problems. Lucky for him, I had an undergraduate degree in Psychology, and some time to kill:
His was a story of a life spent in and out of jail, tangled up in drugs. His was a story of redemption. His was a story of missing thumbs, of getting high on PCP, launching his car over an inclined highway, and landing with a shattered windshield, fully conscious, and watching as cop cars, fire trucks, and EMTs rushed to the scene, and then gathered around the car, staring at the carnage while he blinked windshield glass out of his eyes and laughed and laughed and laughed. His was a story of dealing drugs out of his hospital bed after the accident.
He was allegedly 120 days sober living with a drug addicted wife and her fourteen year old son. Technically, he was violating parole (again) by drinking, but it was the only thing he could do to chase away the addiction spider of heroin. He had just given his wife $20 to score drugs for herself, and all the old triggers were going off like synaptic fireworks in his brain.
He was an unbelievably nice guy for the all the shit he has been through. He blamed nobody for his problems. He felt lucky to be alive, to still have a father he got along with, to have a decent job even after being cuffed and sent back to jail while on the job for failing a parole piss test. He didn't speak bad about his drug addicted wife, who didn't work, or the fact that he was financially taking care of her and her son.
That night, I packed for my climb, and set the alarm for 3:00am. It was a short night, and I was on the trail head by 4:20am, hiking in the dark with my headlamp penetrating the dark wilderness.
Mt. Russell is not an easy climb because there is no clearly defined trail. The good people at the US Forest Service have decided to funnel all the damage caused by hikers to the Mount Whitney trail, which is virtually wheelchair assessable all the way to the highest point in the lower 48. Don't get me wrong, the Mt. Whitney trail is not an easy hike at 22 miles round trip, and a 6,500 foot elevation gain, but 90-100 peak baggers from around the world are on the trail every day during the summer season. Last year, to discourage Mt. Whitney climbers who couldn't get a pass on the lottery system from climbing Russell and getting killed, or even worse, not packing out their fecal matter in a particularly draconian "leave no trace" policy, the parks decided to limit Mt. Russell climbers to the same lottery system as Whitney. Luckily, they opened up some additional permits after people who had won the lottery failed to confirm their reservation.
My point is that the Mt. Russell trail is intentionally rugged and ill-defined. I lost the trail a few times on the way up, but managed to find Upper Boy Scout lake early enough for a summit bid before the afternoon lightning rolled in:
Following instructions culled from mountaineering books and trip reports from the Internet, I continued following little ducks left by hikers showing the way... (See Mount Whitney in the background):
...before coming to the startling conclusion that I was hiking the wrong fucking trail. I was following ducks up the "Mount Whitney Mountaineering Trail" rather than the Mount Russell trail.
I was lost. I read every piece of paper I brought I brought with me describing the route to Mount Russell, and could not determine where I made the wrong turn. To add injury to insult, I fell through the ice of what I later discovered was "Girl Scout Lake," luckily only up to my knee. Eventually, I found myself on Iceberg lake, and met up with some mountain climbers who were camping there, and had a good map of the area:
I should have zigged when I zagged and ended up on the wrong side of the mountain. The mountain climber gave me a detailed history of Mt. Russel, told me who climbed it first and what year, called his friend over who had soloed Russell a few years back for further instructions at the peak, and then zipped up my backpack as I was leaving "so nothing important falls out." I was totally pawned by Mother Nature. I wanted to tell them that I wasn't nearly as stupid as I looked,
but who was I kidding? This was an epic failure. I didn't have the time or energy to down climb several miles and find the right trail, so I marched my tired, pathetic ass back down the mountain.
At the trail head, I picked up a couple more hitchhikers who had just completed the John Muir Trail. They had spent 23 days in the wilderness, the last hundred miles with very limited food because of a mysteriously missing cache. I drove them into Lone Pine, and then headed back to Los Angeles with my tail tucked between my legs. It was a good trip, and next time if I don't make it to the top, it won't be for not knowing the correct path to take.
In retrospect, part of me thinks I should have climbed Whitney again (for the third time) just to say I accomplished something to write home about. Then another part of me knows that no matter how much of the mountain you ingest, void, and reingest, you can never pawn the mountain. On a good day, you climb the sumbitch, bask in the view and the sun, and skip on back down, but on a bad day, you snap your picture on the summit and get the hell out of there. On a really bad day, you get zapped by 30 million volts, cower under a rock, and try to stifle down the fear of being trapped in a place in which there is no exit. You watch as lighting strikes the peaks all around you. Or you watch as the snow continues to fall, and your hypothermic body and brain turns to mush. You watch as your own fear is mirrored in your climbing partner's eyes. You watch and wonder why you ever made this climb in the first place. You watch and are humbled, and afterwards you know that this is why you climb - you climb not just to experience the freedom of the hills, but to get in touch with your own morality. To dance with death, and then to get in your car and drive home.
Labels: Travel
posted by Mezz0 at 9:55 AM
3 Comments:
Nice trip description. Happy to hear you're breathing clean air instead of fermenting in the city. So many adventures, so little time. When are you going to Baja?
- G Jetson
Just knowing you are getting your ass kicked by inanimate objects brings a bit of joy. We miss you over here and I can't believe you, who could go anywhere, decided to go back into the abyss of healthcare...again!
I haven't had a real job since I left G. Valley, and was in serious need of some money and health care, and this place was just down the road, so I had to take it. Also, I am a sick man who has put myself in painful and humiliating situations my whole life, for reasons I cannot explain, and there was nothing so humiliating and painful as G. Valley...
I am monitoring the Baja situation. I'm going to make a run for the border, despite just talking to Prima over the weekend, and hearing about a Flamenco trip scheduled in Tijuana that was canceled due to a firefight between the bad guys (drug dealers) and bad guys (Mexican police). By the time I go, I hope the situation has improved, but I will be purchasing kidnapping insurance regardless.
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