Good Critter Day

Day 9    Muir Pass

I squinted open my tent-fly eyes this morning to so much light.  Up here at elevation where the air is thinner, I think the rays come through stronger.  It was 4:45.  The sun was bright but still hadn’t lit up the white granite on  the mountain on the opposite side of the valley, and the moon was still so bright.  I wasn’t ready for such an onslaught of brightness and pulled my head way back down inside the downy softness of my cocoon.  Once Mark awoke, though, the getting up process kicked in to full gear and we were up, packed up, dressed, fed and on the trail by 5:45- am.  My feet still felt a bit tender and the recent trail work done up here launched another, rather whiney, verse to my Ode to the Trail Crew. 

Who hired the villainous Trail Crew
That spread all these sharp rocks 'round here?
I used to adore them, but now i abhor them
I'm walking in pain, without cheer.

It’s kind of unusual to be able to see where you are going and then watch as that destination gets closer and closer. The Muir Hut, which began as a little speck on the horizon, loomed closer and closer as we ticked off the miles, and before we knew it, we were up and over the pass and knocking on the door.  I thought it was a wonderful metaphor for setting and achieving goals, but my hiking partner was not up to philosophizing at this hour. The little stone Yurt was built in 1938 to honor John Muir, and stands as an emergency shelter for any who might get stuck out there in the snow or bad weather.  It is cool and dark inside, with a table, benches and a fireplace (that has been boarded up).  We ate our granola bars, rested a bit, and then got to sign our first trail register. Post offices, hiker hostels and certain way points on the trail keep a book for the hikers to sign-in.  The thru hikers use this is a way to leave messages for one another, keep track of the hikers that are in front of or behind them, and just make their mark on the trail a little bit.  I read a few pages, looking to see if anyone we had met had logged in, and then we made our way over the broken granite surface of the trail and down the pass.

I really wish there was a way to aptly describe the scenery of the next few miles.  There was nothing up here but rock, water and sky. Huge boulders, small stones and rocks of every size in between were piled, tossed, and lumped around.  The water trickled under and around the rocks, working its way down the mountain.  There were places where we were walking on the path and we could hear the water trickling down through the rocks below our feet, and sometimes around our feet.  There was still a little snow up here, and it was melting right into the waterways and collecting in the few small, crystal-blue lakes.  It was a little like being inside of a Britta filter.  Sometimes people ask us what we do about filtering our water so that we don’t get sick.  If they could see how clean and pure the water starts up here at the top of the Sierra, they might be as confident as we are about reaching down into a running stream and scooping out a cup of water.  One hiking friend of mine expressed it like this: “It is an insult to nature to filter the water that we are drinking here, as if man knows how to make a better filter than nature itself.”  The bad boys are protozoa, namely giardia lamblia and are produced by roaming stock and wild animals and are said, by a reliable doctor friend of ours, to be frozen off each winter.  They are also anaerobic, which means they live most happily in stagnant water (and intestines), which is not what we drink.  If we are in lower elevations and the water is a bit warmer or not running in nice, aerated bubbles, then we filter- otherwise, when we cross a cold stream on a dusty trail, I whip out my 1970’s style Sierra Cup and serve up a nice, cool drink.  It is one of the pure joys of my hiking trips.

We continued in the surreal landscape for many miles, sometimes nearly losing the trail because it didn’t look all that different from the rest of the landscape, and because there was so much to see it was hard to keep our eyes on the trail. Sometimes we spent time trying to figure out how to get to the next part of the trail over the rocks or around them. We needed to cross one small patch of snow, which made us a little nervous because of previous experience (an icy patch of snow abruptly ended our last long hike) but we crossed deftly and continued down the trail. Soon we began to see a wildflower here and there, or a crop of grass.  Then the plants and soil were more common, and we even got to walk on dirt! We heard the chirps of birds and the skitter of creatures once again, and it was like returning to earth from some other planet.  A quick grey flash on a boulder caught my eye.  I hoped it was a pika- another of Sierra’s elusive rodents that I hadn’t seen yet.  I stopped and waited, watching carefully, and it crept out from under a rock ledge and sat right in front of me for a few minutes, showing off its cute ears and whiskers.  They look a little like a chinchilla, only smaller and grey, with no tail.  Crossing a stream Mark noticed something in the water.  A frog jumped onto a rock and clung on desperately, hoping not to be washed away in the current. Does ambled along near the path, grazing on the greenery. It was a good critter day.

Over one rocky bit of trail I was mumbling or complaining or something, and Mark turned to look at me.  Gazing over my shoulder he saw a beautiful cinnamon brown bear.  “Turn around,” he said calmly, “There’s a bear over there.”  I turned and looked, and was able to watch him fearlessly- a very healthy looking young bear, just browsing his way through the greenery along the banks of the creek.  I asked Mark to get out his camera, and he did, but as he focused on the bruin, it was coming closer.  It wasn’t aggressive, but it also wasn’t scared of us.  We decided not chance a  closer encounter, so we turned and moved quickly and confidently down the path.  Once we felt we were at a safe distance Mark took a camera shot, but all you can see in the photo is a splotch of brown in the greenery.  This was the first bear we have ever actually seen on the trail, though we have seen plenty of footprints and other evidence.  We were very happy with the circumstances too, he was being a bear, doing his thing and minding his own business, and we were hiking along doing our own thing.  It sure made carrying that stupid bear can a little easier to shoulder.   

Lunch in Grouse Meadow was very nice.  Mark snoozed away on a slab of granite, and I spent time collecting wild flower samples and playing in the creek.  There was a big monster in the campground too- some other hiker had erected a set of teeth in a big, cracked boulder.  I was in great danger, but all my husband did was snap pictures. Another critter encounter happened later in the afternoon, as we waded through the grass in Deer Meadow.  The trail there is barely a foot width, and the grasses hem it in on both sides.  It was comfortable walking- no sharp broken rocks!  I was looking about the lovely meadow and had just looked down at the trail when a brown dash just escaped my footfall and ran between my legs.  Gasping in surprise, I turned to watch a little chipmunk, tail straight up in the air like a mast on a ship, speeding down the trail behind me.  My loud chuckling broke the silence of the meadow, and I continued on in great satisfaction.  

We stopped at the edge of the meadow to get some water and considered camping by the idle creek for the night. Fish were swimming lazily in the shallows and we could smell the pungent odor of wild onion, but since we had no fishing pole, we decided to push on a little farther so that we could get closer to the base of tomorrow’s big climb- The Golden Staircase.  We found an abandoned Trail Crew camp, spread out our tent, cooked some tamale pie for dinner, did a little laundry, washed up some, and were asleep as the sun set.  We had covered 18 miles that day, not too shabby for a couple of old tenderfoots.