Vetting

By Ray Purcell

 

Stepping out of the Megamid the moonless night was as dark as the inside of a photographers film sack.  The air was still, cold, and syrupy.  I walked cautiously forward onto the crunchy snow laden meadow and away from the tent.  It might have been Eleven O’clock or One AM, I’d never have known since my watch was lost somewhere in the jumble of gear strewn about my sleeping bag. 

 

I blinked as the fog was clearing from the lenses of my glasses, but I was already amazed at the detail that I could make out in the ambient starlight.  The features of the valley around Long Lake and the East Face of Mt. Hurd were a subtle monochrome reflection of light drawn from the cosmos.  Almost as an instinctual imperative my eyes were inexorably drawn skyward, per haps to orient myself in a disorienting environment by seeking out the familiar constellations.  Orion the hunter is the largest and most omnipresent of the winter patterns while the Big Dipper is familiar in any season.

 

Since I typically spend more Summer nights out I’m more familiar with the Big Dipper only slightly dipping; the inclination of the pot angled over only so much that it would not spill out all of it’s contents.  But tonight the Dipper was high in the night’s sky and full inverted, so that it poured stars out across the entire pitch of night such as I have never seen.  The sky was turbid with the vicinal outpouring, which cleaved the refracted celestial light as though it were a layer of ground glass.  I felt small, so very, very small- and cold. 

 

Regarding the tent and considered the signs of life therein I began to walk back toward the distinctive meter of a human’s breathing in sleep.  I began to shiver as I became raked by cold, my body heat spilling out on to the ground through the seems of my clothing and seeping down into the snow, lost until spring.  I fumbled and struggled as I stuffed myself back into my sleeping bag.  At last confining myself and cinching the hood down I breathed warmth into the enclosure.

 

John Henderson and I had toured some seven or eight miles to Long Lake from where we had parked near Bishop Creek Resort.   After the Spring thaw and with the coming of trout season the resort comes to life like a mythical place unfrozen from a dark spell, and fisherman pop up out of the ground like the bright red Pine Drops that magically appear around the base of the White Firs; or like fairy folk thirsty for a cold Budweiser.

But for now the ground is mantled in snow, the resort abandoned and still, the small boats turned hull up in neat rows.  Bishop Creek Canyon and the Sierra High Country above South Lake is for now the domain of cross country skiers and torpid squirrels.  Rodents it seems have more God given sense than we do and hibernate through the bitterest cold until they smell Power Bait and the two-cycle outboard exhaust that signify spring.

 

This is Henderson’s and my second trial run in preparation for the big mother tour, the classic Sierra High Route.  A grand ski traverse of the most choice of the Sierra passes and peaks.  A tour so aesthetic and wild, so prized that it lures Europeans away from their own famous ski tours, like the famous route from Chamoni France to Zermat Switzerland. 

 

Our first trial effort had been an easy tour up to Rock Creek Lake.  We had meet John’s kids Carrie and Michael who drove down from Reno to join us.  We labored under heavy backpacks as we skied up the road and sweated under a relatively tropical Sun that seared us through a blue jay sky; the kind of warmth that can only be found in California, at 10,000-feet, in January.

 

But the snow was crusty and skiing felt like piloting an arctic icebreaker.   Carving turns down the East facing slopes to the North of Mt Starr, the shovels of our skis heaved up above the icy top layer and then broke down into the softer under layer.  The crust inflicted a herky-jerky studder in the rhythm of our skiing that threw our balance and threatened to pitch us ass over teacup. 

 

As the Sun began to slide behind the Western skyline we skied back to rejoin Michael, who had stayed in camp fatigued by a consumptive cough.  The cold of evening settled about us as if we’d fallen into Jell-O.  As we began to consider dinner all Michael had to say was that we could be “...eating burgers and tossing back beers at Tom’s Place.”  The clear implication being... instead of freezing our butt’s off at Rock Creek Lake and eating some nearly rehydrated freeze-dried meal.  I was quick to seize on the inescapable logic of his point and supported the defection from our original plan.  Carrie, who was just Twenty-One, clearly was in favor of the novelty of a beer legally consumed in public.  John, on the other hand, was clearly conflicted.

         

After all the Sierra High Route is no small undertaking.  It’s not only a strenuous and technically demanding tour across the snowy Sierra Crest at high altitude, but it also exacts a high price if two progressively unhygienic guys can’t get along together in a small tent for six long cold nights.  This wasn’t only an opportunity to test our ski technique and touring stamina, but also whether or not we could stand each other enough to be civil under the most trying of circumstances, at least not murder each other in our sleep.

 

Then I suggested that a night in the damp cold would be hard on Michael’s cough and before you could say “microbrew and a burger please” we had slung on our packs and were lugeing back to the cars.  Where I did feel a little silly skiing in and out the same day with a pack load of winter camping crap, I was at least consoled by the fact that unless anyone saw us ski in, no one would be the wiser and we’d still look really cool skiing down the road.  

 

We managed to find more marginal skiing the next day too but chalked it up to good ol conditioning and character building.  Besides I’ll ski through crust and over thin cover any day if I get to do it in the Sierra.  The axiom adopted by golfers and fisherman holds true for skiing as well, that being a bad day skiing is better than the best day at work.

 

To further prepare for the High Route John and I managed a day together at Sierra Summit Resort.  But it’s hard for the common man to take time from his job and family to train for an endeavor of this magnitude.  It’s an awareness that in retrospect helped me to realize that the citizen Olympians who competed up until about the 1960's were true heroes of the people.   These were genuine amateur athletes who brought the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medals home to their job at the grocery store in Anywhere, USA.

 

But despite other commitments, or perhaps because of them, we managed to eke out another tour, and so John proposed this weekend trip to Long Lake.  The day began at a civilized hour, which is any time after sunrise, and we skied off at seven.  It had been unseasonably warm because of an unusual early season high-pressure ridge that had shielded the Sierra from the usual spring storms and had brought unseasonably high temperatures.  So, the previous days slush had frozen the night before and was still hummocky ice.  But as the Sun raised above the long ridge North of Mt. Morgan the snow slowly softened.  The first three or four miles to South Lake passed over the roadbed so the morning tour was easy; so easy that I longed for my thin light touring skis with more soft flexible boots.

 

The grade progressively steepened as we approached South Lake and passed Parcher’s Resort.  The original plan had been to see how close we could drive to Parcher’s and see if we couldn’t tour over the low ridge to the South of Herd Peak and ski down into Treasure Lakes to spend the night; but the added miles from the road end where we parked was making that less likely.

 

From the end of the road at South Lake, Hurd peak raises above the snow-covered lake with a foreboding beauty that’s reminiscent of my imaginings of how the last glaciation may have appeared.   The trial toward Bishop Pass begins here, so we started out on the real tour following a contour around the eastside of the lake.  I felt the natural line of the route was self-revealing in that the terrain would reveal the most economical route to Long Lake.  But this sense was born more of a gut feeling, a mountain sense that has evolved from miles of ski tours.

 

Although, my seasoned mountain sense could have just as easily been biased by the fact that part of the trail was showing from under the snow. Then John raised a worthy point, what if you didn’t have any of these landmarks as clues and had to navigate with map and compass?   It had been a while since I had relied on orienteering but remembered being pretty good at it. 

 

Well I was pretty good at high school German to, but now I can only count to twelve.  Using a map and compass wasn’t like getting back on a bike and at first couldn’t find my azimuth from a hole in the ground.  It was a good thing that I hadn’t gotten plopped down in the Black Forest or I’d have been doubly screwed.  After struggling for a while, a few surviving albeit dormant memory cells started to smolder and some of my forgotten orienteering skills came out of hiding, but by no means would I want to stake my life on them.  Well, that’s the whole idea behind a practice tour any way, to identify your deficiencies, and either rationalize them away or develop the skill.  I wonder if it’s too late to buy a GPS?

 

We continued to contour up above South Lake and then began to ski due South and away from the lake until we found a drainage that formed a natural passage that according to the map should pass between Hurd and Chocolate Peaks, thus taking us directly to Long Lake.  Relying on our rapidly developing acumen with map and compass we divined our route based on highly accurate sightings and triangulation.  Then we head off with self-reliant conviction and followed the ski tracks of a party that had preceded us.

 

We began to rapidly gain altitude as we climbed the steep valley on ski skins that stuck to the bottoms of our skis with gooey adhesive, and that are covered by billions of synthetic hair-like filaments that all angle backward and stick into the snow like little ratchets.  The original old school climbing skins were made from seal fur, but no politically correct lover of the wilderness could in good conscience ski on the body parts of a marine mammal. 

 

We’d climb and rest, and climb and rest until we gained a vantage over looking a long lake, no really, distinctively long by alpine standards and apropos to it’s name.  We skied out over a meadow to the East of Long Lake and finally we came to a copse of trees with a bit bare ground.  It was the kind of a spot that practically screamed camp here.  Then as I looked about I noticed, I swear, a toilet paper holder nailed to a tree.

 

We set up the tent, a kind of floorless nylon pyramid, like a couple of kids playing in the sand at the beach with pails and shovels.  We stomped out level sleeping spots with our skis then raised the shelter over them.  Then with lightweight snow shovels we built a berm of snow around the perimeter of nylon to block the breeze.  Had we expected wind we’d have built a wall from blocks of snow semi igloo style.  Last we dug out pits to hang our legs into so we could sit up comfortably in the tent and a cooking and eating area.

 

By the time we got done with that production of erecting and fortifying the tent, the Sun was dangling above Hurd Peak to the West.  Once it’s radiant heat became snuffed behind the peak we knew that we would begin to float in a lake of cold in our valley.  So, we lit the stoves and they began to hiss like a slashed tire.  Don’t ask me how I know this.  Winter camping requires the skier carry more fuel than the snowless traveler because you have to melt snow for water.  You also have to start with a little liquid water before you start to melt snow or you’ll scorch the melt water, or worse melt a hole in the bottom of your pan.  So cooking also becomes more time consuming.

 

In fact, travel over snow antagonizes everything that western day-to-day life has become.  It’s matter to anti-matter, Calvin to Hobbes, Rocky to Bullwinkle.  The most flash-in-the-pan, convenience gone SUPER SIZED activity of day to day, drive thru, express, Twenty First Century living, becomes a drawl as slow as molasses in a Southern Bijou during a gooey humid Summer at Sundown.  You can feel your mind slow to the point of stopping, as if the very flow of thought had gotten tangled in a root that had grown into the septic line; and that’s reason enough to do it.

 

John and I sat side by side poised to, as Edward Abbey was fond of saying “throw a lip over dinner”.  As dinner was consumed we engaged in conversation, we analyzed the most salient social quandaries of our busting-at-the-seams-with-rampant-change society, at least from the perspective of two not even halfway into their midlife crisis guys.  We debated and discussed the spectrum of conundrums, which confound and disturb, from the appeal of cunnilingus, or lack there of, to gay couples raising children, and the risk benefit ratio of the Patriot Act on personal freedom. 

 

I was struck by the counterpoint.   Not necessarily of our relative views on these social issues, but more stunning that we were discussing them in a place about as far away as you can get from where any of those issues matter.  I mean there we were, camped by the shore of a frozen lake in the lengthening shadow of Mt Hurd at sunset.  It’s really a matter of degrees of separation I suppose, place and even time irrespective. 

 

Consider that merely 100 years ago the fastest average speed was 45 MPH, yet the petty intrigues of European aristocracy had already begun the inexorable path to the First World War.   It wasn’t until the 1920's that women were granted the right to vote.   Laws, which forbad interracial marriage, weren’t contested in the courts until just 40 years ago.   While anti-sodomy laws, which govern the sexual practices between consenting adults, are just now, state by state being abolished.

 

Yet there we were, sitting on our butts in the snow discussing not dissimilar or less significant social issues over dinner.  It really gets back to John’s point about being able to orient your self with map and compass when you loose your familiar frame of reference.   So, when society seeks its frame of reference what map do we refer to?  Do we turn to the Constitution and the bill of rights?  We do on a federal level since the Constitution has been revered as the ultimate arbiter, the datum on the map.   But then by virtue of how the panel of jurists is empanelled on the high court by the Executive Branch there is the inevitable question of political influence, bias if you will in the court’s rulings. 

 

Do we turn to a higher spiritual text, and if so which?   America’s faith foundations are now as equally set in the Bible as they are in the Talmud or the Koran, if not any other number of so called new age inspired non-theistic works.  In the end the most crucial axiom for any traveler, whether they are in the wild or the metaphorical social wilderness is to question your assumptions.  It doesn’t really matter whether we guide ourselves based on our collective gut feeling, some statutory datum, or the freedom established by our founding fathers to test the status quo with the quintessential American retort “Oh yeah, watch me!” as long as we periodically confirm our position.   I would argue that the most reliable and strident compass is the memory of history with the caveat to consider the context of the times.    After all it’s not uncommon for us to have crossed a commonly traveled trail before.

 

Everything about touring over snow is more involved and process oriented, largely because those actions are dictated by a much more unforgiving wilderness and the consequences of imprudence therefore more dire.  But then is the consequence of social change any less significant.  The answer is justified by the rewards.

 

March 2004