This week in the bear can

Days melt away faster than footprints in the snow. The only way to convey time to people who know the day and date is to take the days between towns and mash them together into one conglomerate of days. It’s the only way my memory will accept these stories as fact anyway. Out here we might call this time period “one bear vault” or “the communist party of miles 906 to 1,018″.
A brief briefing on the subject of bearvault. The yosimite area has a huge tourist problem in a densly populated bear neighborhood. Every receptical of smelly things in the entire park has a metal lid which requires opposable thumbs to open. The park employs over 2,000 metal bear boxes and countless stickers and signs that all have similar slogans, “save a bear lock your trash”. The crackdown on the real Yogi has gone so far as requiring any hiker in a hugely oversized radius of yosimite to have their food in a bear proof cannister. Used to be that a hiker atleast had options – the ursac, bear vault, old fashioned hanging of food. Recently the democratic approach to the north American ursa food embargo was scrapped. No more options, only the bear vault is deemed truely bearproof and therefor the only one we are forced/allowed to carry for 300+ miles. It’s translucent blue like a five gallon water bottle with a black lid. 15″x10″x10″ round. You can fit nearly seven days of food in it and it takes nearly seven minutes to open. The regulation is perfectly timed, coinciding with three consecutive 100+ mile sections between towns, all while in snow. Every time we left town the bearvault was mashed full of food and five more days of sustenance and snacks lived outside of the vault and the law. The oppression fueled negative propaganda and we dubbed these 3lbs food cannisters “commy cans” or worse still “commy buckets”. Each one got it’s own name, Stalin, Lenin, Castro etc. Caveman’s can came from Reaper ( met him way back in the san jac area) it’s carbon fiber and opens differently than ours, we named it ______ because it looked like it was a space relic. The commy can represents our time in the woods, it our week, but also our deadline. When the bucket is empty you had better be close to town. In this bearvult episode we were carrying food to get us from Mammath to Bridgeport, 112 miles, completely through the Yo and knee deep sun cups the whole way. Oh, adventure.

For the climes we have been dwelling in recently, this was a warm wettish morning. Wettish only because for the first time in several days I didn’t wake up with a wet sleeping bag and a wet tent. The new home may have a serious ventilation problem, or night wet is just another bonus of sleeping at high altitudes during peak melt. Either way, it was near 40degrees, humid and a thin layer of clouds covered most of the 6AM sky. Bird cawed, “salty!” but I was finally already awake. Three minutes later Caveman grunted, “salt!” having been awake for a few minutes my reply was clearer and louder than my usual morning growl. Caveman garbled something of an appology. For the second morning in a row we took care of the morning stowing of the house, sorting food out of the bear vault, taking a short walk, then climbing on top of a giant granite rock to catch some morning rays from Ra. In Yosimite granite is plentiful and easy to climb; in this perpetual cold and wet we have become increasigly reptilian. We eat our poptarts and larabars and nearly hold our breath for the light to pour over the mtns and give us the strength to put on our wet shoes. It comes, we warm and then we’re off.
Less than thirty suncup steps into the day and the map is out. We had spent the night off trail, but figured we had a good spot on where it was headed. The morning light made the contour lines bend differently and we were plum confused about this big nameless face infront of us for over an hour. Turns out, the off trail campsite where we started was in a much better direction than where we were headed. Granite is easy to climb, but has no consideration for decent. It let’s you hike up with moderate effort but will sometimes require you to use a rope, parachute, or helicopter to retrace your steps back down. So we marched onward in the wrongish way trying to gracefully correct our mistake.
Twenty minutes of battling sun cups to a rock outcrop and we encounter another setback. While mtn goating back and forth down a granite face, a patch of man made blue and something shiny grabbed my eyes away from the trail. A blue external frame pack full of aging gear lay rotting under a snow melt water fall, a place things only fall to. I dropped pack, retrieved my ice ax and climbed the steep snow drift up to the perch. It was soaking wet and the material was begining to let itself go, one shoe was strapped to the outside and the cooking pot smelled like it had old food in it. I lifted the pack hoping to not find what is usually attached to the front of a backpack. It was heavy, no human or bones attached, but nearly fully packed. Nearly. The pack frame was wedged between two rocks and the thru-hiker sized sleeping pad, raincoat, and other shoe had spilled out of the pack and fallen another fifteen feet down. A punctuation mark that I didn’t like the tone of. It was wet and cold and the pack had been there atleast two years, since there was no body I didn’t look any further into the pack. I thought good thoughts for whoever used to carry that pack and retraced my steps back down. Two hours into our day and we were less than a mile from camp. The dwindling level of calories in the commy cans required us to do atleast 18 miles before sunset, we were not off to a good start.
One of the guide books designed to entice adventurists and deter novices had said something that stuck with me for months leading up to hiking in yosimite. “In one day in yosimite you will cross more water than you crossed in all of Maine.”. First, I noticed it was assuming we had already walked through Maine, a bold assumption to say the least. Second, it had to be wrong, we more swam accross Maine than walked accross it. Early in the day and it seemed that the book may have been right and this must be that day. Everything was melting, more water than the whole earth could possibly drink, pouring off the mtns. Pouring down the trail, rushing under our feet as we walk above on snow, flooding the valleys. Just making everything wet. By the time we made it down out of the white and into the brown and green it was ten and our first real creek crossing was already a foot higher than it’s bank expected. They sent me in first. Having a waterproof backpack comes with some responsibilities. At the worst point it was nearly nips deep and pushing what felt like 15mph. Crossable and crossed. As rigid as a popcicle I sat on a stone in the sun and offered advice through clinched teeth accross to the other two. They both held their packs above their heads and tried not to swim the same route I just walked. With no arms to hold the help of trekking poles I have no idea how they made it accross, and I have no idea what help I may have been able to offer if they had went for a ride. Good thing we all made it to the snow on the other side. Without much pause we continued uphill in search of warm blood in our feet.
As days melt away, hours melt like a Hershey bar in the sun. A couple of minutes full of several hours melted onto the dashboard of father time and the three of us found ourselves on the bank of the ninth or tenth “creek”(river) of the day. This one was different though. A dark, powerful green. Thirty feet wide at the narrow and well out of it’s banks. Where it wasn’t the bottomless green color it was just white. Obedient to the burden badass backpackness I packed away my camera and other electronics and began looking for a reasonable place to ford. I inspected the river with a different eye this time, not just for the least powerful place, but for what was down stream. Falls, rocks, eddies. No place was good, no place was not powerful. I picked a greenish whitish spot and began my crab walk out to the middle. Caveman was close by, knee deep in the water. Water like that makes you want to help, but you can’t. So caveman grew smaller and the water got bigger. I wasnt in up to my belly button and my left foot couldn’t find a home. Too many round rocks, too fast of water, too many tries. I looked at caveman square in the eyes as to silently tell him I was aware and then the river took me. No hand nor foot found anything it recognized. Skin had some idea of it’s surroundings, cold and wet with lots of painful hardspots. No trick in water I knew to keep my head above the surface worked. It was falling down a mtn at a much shallower incline than usual and absolutely freezing. Whatever stone I did find with a hand, foot or head would just end up folowing me down stream. I was playing human plinko – waterpark edition. Then I was motionless, pinned against a boulder, head up, right infront of the trail on the other side. Nearly by complete dumb luck I was on soil on the other side. And with no advice or help to offer to my friends on the other side. In shock I sat down and laughed uncontrolably till the other two showed up soaked as well. They had found a more reasonable spot to cross and had not had the same experience as I had.
Nightfall found us behind a gas station in the still snowed in and shut down Tuolomme meadows of Yosimite. We made our bearvault mandated 18 miles, but could not get s hitch to town for a commy can refill. It would be just like this day for four more days before we could get to a town and rest. Oh, adventure.

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