Posts
“Ah, I just wanted to tell you I’m going into the woods for a few days,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m doing the Sierras hike. I’ll be out there seven to ten days, I think.”
“No shit,” Ben said. Ben was my best buddy. We’d done lots of traveling together, but he got married last fall and now his wife is expecting their first child in a little over a month. “Well, be safe,” he told me. “I’m at an all-you-can-eat fajita buffet. It smells awesome. Enjoy eating freeze-dried food.”
I laughed.
“Yeah, I’m going to load up my plate. Have fun drinking out of creeks.”
“Fuck off,” I grinned into the phone.
“Just kidding,” he said, “I’d rather be there.”
It was two hours later and I’d already lost the damned trail. It had led broadly away from where I’d parked my truck, an obvious if not inviting white avenue through the evergreens and around the ice-edged lakes. Three or four inches of snow on it. But when the trail led through treeless spaces, it was hard to follow. Thus it was that I found myself slogging up a hummock on the far side of a meadow, not knowing where the trail had gone and discovering that, like knowledge of winter camping among hikers, snow was not evenly distributed across the landscape. I transferred my weight to my uphill foot. It sunk through the snow with a whump. My leg sank almost to the knee. Deep here, evidently.
Figuring out where the snow was deepest, and where it was too steep to climb, was especially hard when the sun wasn’t out. In such conditions – conditions that skiers call “flat light” – the snowy ground becomes an indistinguishable mass without shadows to mark its peaks and valleys. Instead of looking at a shaded relief map, it’s like looking at an unshaded topo map with the topo lines removed. In short, when the sky is overcast, the reflection of light off the snow provides about as much information about its contours as the featureless state-lines maps that were printed in your elementary school textbooks. But at least those maps were colorful.
The snow was white and the sky was duct-tape gray. I took another step, and again sank to my knee. I pulled my downhill boot free from the snow to step forward once more but when I did, snow got packed in between my boot and sock. Meltwater-to-be. With days of hiking ahead of me, wet boots would not be okay. I spat in the snow to announce my displeasure but the snow remained cold next to my sock, my uphill foot remained lodged in the snow, and the warmth of my saliva remained insufficient to clear a path for my boots. I thought about that fajita buffet. If Ben and I had talked for longer he might have reconsidered his avowed desire to be in the Sierra Nevadas in late October.
At the top of the hill I knocked snow off a stump and sat down on it. I took off my gloves and dug the snow out of my boots, then fished my gaiters out of my pack. They came from a military surplus store at a discount price. I fiddled with the too-long cinch straps and wrestled with an ornery zipper. Gradually my fingers stiffened as I worked around my wet boots and the gaiters’ metal buckles. When I finished, six inches of excess strap trailed in the snow behind each gaiter. Leaving the strap trailing was asking to trip and fall, I knew, but I shoved my chilled hands in my pockets anyway. It would have to do for now.
I trudged past the Virginia Lakes, Cooney Lake, the Frog Lakes. The trail became a lost cause, the line indicated by my GPS a meaningless, imaginary track through the snow, rock, and forest with no ground-level indication of its existence. A little like, I imagined, the line in my elementary-school textbook dividing Europe from Asia. A cheerily bright line fondly penned by some complacent cartographer. A warm, comfortable, complacent cartographer, I suspected, who had never left his nest of Snickers wrappers long enough to traverse the terrain he purported to describe. I climbed ever higher up the canyon toward the source of the drainage that fed the Frog Lakes, then Cooney Lakes, then finally the Virginia Lakes. The Frog Lakes were frozen over – not an ideal habitat for an amphibian. If the cartographer was doing the naming, he was really out of touch.
Short of breath, I stopped to look around. To the south, Black Mountain and the steep ridges that flanked it walled the canyon. To the north, a nameless ridge, not as high but equally steep, blocked my view of anything outside the drainage. A high wind hurtling out of the north billowed snow off the ridgetop and into the valley like a sideways-shooting ice geyser. Smaller spats of wind moved across the valley floor, sweeping their own collections of ice particles before them. And to the west, at the end of the canyon, was my destination – an 11,000-foot-high saddle. I had to get up there. And I didn’t know how.
Duke came trotting back to where I stood panting, his red pack flapping jauntily against his sides. Duke’s tail whipped from side to side, slapping one side of his pack and then the other. He loved the cold. I sighed as I reached to scratch his ears. “Duke,” I told him, “I don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” He pressed his face happily against my legs and snorted. I wanted to tell him to leave me alone and stop acting so damned chipper. But of course you can’t say that to a dog. I wished Ben had come. Or anyone had come. This hike required an outsized spirit of adventure, a quality on which I usually run long. But on this occasion I wanted reinforcement. For the first time on any of my hikes, I thought about giving up.
* * * * *
I climbed higher, until eventually – as I described here – the snow got too hard-packed for me to move across. At that point I turned back, having decided to get my crampon-bearing snowshoes from the truck and try again the next day.
Cooney Lake, frozen over.
No comments:
Post a Comment