Ranger Stranger Danger

South Guard Lake

11,630 feet

near Brewer Basin

Kings Canyon National Park

My brother Jay, Turkey Tetrazzini Pete and I were happy to see a national park ranger on that afternoon we meandered cross country through the boulder field bordering Brewer Basin. We weren't lost, per se, and we could certainly point to our Mt. Brewer quadrangle map and say, "We are here," but we couldn't find our way through a robust moraine in order to descend toward South Guard Lake. We were like Sam and Frodo and Gollum lost and walking in circles in the rocky wilderness before heading into the Dead Marshes. (I was Frodo and my brother was Sam and Turkey Tetrazzini Pete, well, nevermind).

We hailed the ranger by raising our hiking poles and calling out "Hellooooo!" in Seinfeldian fashion. He was a stone's throw yonder and dressed in his park fatigues and ranger hat. He paused and turned toward us. He was a welcome site and a comfort of sorts, the first person we had seen in days. We walked toward him briskly. We stopped abruptly, however, when he bellowed, "That's close enough!" He held his right hand aloft in the "stop-right-there-position" as if he were Diana Ross.

"What do you want?" he demanded. Even from this distance we noted his haggard beard, sunken eyes and diminutive backpack. This was not the ranger who would be strumming his guitar, tossing logs on the fire and leading the campfire program back in Cedar Grove. We kept our distance.

"I asked you what do you want?" he repeated impatiently.

Turkey Tetrazinni Pete spoke like the lion answering the Wizard of Oz: "Um, we were just up here backpacking, you know, and enjoying ourselves, and hiking and stuff, and were wondering if you knew if we get down to South Guard Lake by going to the East or the West of this big old boulder field. Yes or no?"

The ranger paused. He looked at us as if we were the most inane creatures he had ever met. It was the same look attending physicians in medical school would give me when I answered their questions during morning rounds.

"Yes." he finally said.

"Uh," Jay asked. "Yes, we go East, or yes we go West? Meaning, what you're saying is that we go to the left of this boulder field?"

The ranger paused again. Finally he answered, "I didn't say that." He then unceremoniously skidaddled through some boulders and over a crest. He was gone. Gone forever.

For several moments we stood there with our mouths open and our hiking poles slack in our hands. It was oh so very quiet.

Finally, I spoke. "That was, quite possibly, the most bizarre conversation I've ever had."

Jay and Turkey Tetrazzini Pete agreed. We spent several moments discussing whether "Yes, go East" was the same as "No, don't go West." In the end we shrugged, hoisted our packs, gripped our poles and veered East. By dusk we were sitting at South Guard Lake enjoying salami and tortillas, while miles away, the campers at Cedar Grove were singing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean at the campfire program.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

Foxtail Pines (Pinus balfouriana austrina)

While hiking through Miter Basin I initially do not see these noble Foxtails. While sitting to tie my bootlace, though, the four trees catch my attention like the momentary glint of a tiny remnant of foil imbedded in the dirt. I focus. I shift my sunglasses. Yes, I see lots of rocks, standard-issue Sierran granite, resting on a hill. Some are polished smooth and slippery like a lacquered grand piano, and others are rough-hewn. There are patches of grass in the dirt and sand.

Then I see the four trees. They look really old, regal and not unlike Middle Earth ents. They stand guard over their rock pile in their little corner of the Sierras. They seem so out of place, like a robin in the garage.

I understand that some foxtails can live well over 2,000 years old, not quite as old as their nearby cousins, the 4,000 year old Bristlecones over in the White Mountains. These four have ruled here I'm sure, in close proximity to each other, since the birth of Christ. There are no other foxtails in this entire basin.

I stare a long, long time. Then I pull up my socks and move on. After exploring the basin all afternoon, I return the way I came. I forget to look for the four foxtails. I know, however, exactly where to find them.

Eureka!?

08/22/2005

View from Egg Lake toward our campsite (in the trees)

North Cascades National Park

I backpacked in the Cascades with my father, my brother and Turkey Tetrazzini Pete. Our first campsite area was called Silesia (named after a province in Poland). It rained all night, and, with the weak, grey dawn came an icy wind which whipped our tent flaps and sapped our disposition. We huddled close to the saturated ground and clutched our steaming oatmeal bowls. I was gnawing a Cliff Bar. In the cold it had acquired the consistency of leftover taffy forgotten in the freezer. Chopin, master of melancholy and one of Poland's favorite sons, could have written the perfect composition to describe our sorry campsite and our wavering demeanors. A mist had settled. We wore it like a shroud.

"I would rather sit in sunshine than in the middle of a cloud," Turkey Tetrazzini Pete said. Actually, I don't remember if that's exactly what he said, but that's exactly the type of thing he would have said.

My brother, Jay, who had camped at Silesia previously, pulled his wool hat down over his brow and apologized yet again.

"I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, " he said. "Typically the Cascades declare themselves in all their glory from this vantage. You can usually see Mt. Shuksan, Mt. Challenger and Mt. Redoubt. You can see all the way to Canada! And now," Jay continued, "We're stuck looking at Pete's tent. Who has a tent with an exclamation point on it? Tents should not be covered with any sort of punctuation! With God as my witness, Pete, I'm gonna' rip that exclamation point off your tent and feed it to the bears!" Jay was shaking the tent flap with tenuous self-restraint, thereby scattering the icy rivulets which had settled in the nylon creases.

I watched the entire affair while chewing on frozen M and M's. I asked Turkey Tetrazzini Pete why the makers of his tent had not used a question mark: Eureka? or a semi-colon: Eureka;

"Or an apostrophe?" my dad chimed in. He was sitting innocuously on a weathered tree stump with a pair of wool socks over his hands (he had forgotten his gloves). He was sipping hot coffee. "It is rather odd," he continued, "that anyone would think of putting punctuation on a tent rainfly. I don't get it."

Soon, though, the mist cleared along with our moods. It was a grand day in the Cascades, and all thoughts of irksome punctuation blew away with the clouds. The glorious peaks reached for the heavens and declared themselves as clearly as the period following this sentence.

Loads of Clover

Happy Birthday Max!

(Near Cathedral Pass)

The prayer of St. Patrick:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, and in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Just a Moment

(Sam sliding down Lyell Fork, Tuolumne Meadows)

"In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time."

Leonardo da Vinci

Degu-Go-Round

In the early days my parents took us camping in Big Basin State Park. My siblings (Maple Sugar, Jay, Celery, J.J.) and I would pile into the gold family station wagon we named "Wheezer" (after the letters "WZR" on the license plates) for the ninety minute drive. We sat in Wheezer's back seats breathing in carbon monoxide and listening to my parents argue about which antique shop to visit as we wound up Hiway 9. We fought our smoldering car-sickness by rolling down the windows and watching the scenery fly by: the little hamlets of Felton, Ben Lomond and Boulder Creek, the artisan shops, the signs painted on burls pointing the way to Christian camps, the bearded fellows with Woolrich shirts and heavy belt buckles repairing their pick-up trucks.

Big Basin State Park, nestled in the Santa Cruz mountains, boasted some nice hikes, especially the 10 mile loop to Berry Creek Falls. The first half of this trail coursed through shaded and ferned redwood forests where your voice seemed to echo against the canopy. We ran up and down the sine-waved trail and pretended we were on roller coasters. In the afternoon we tackled the last half of the trail which cut across exposed hillsides covered with squat madrone trees, whose sunburned bark crackled and curled in the baking sun. Except for the crescendo and decresendo of insects buzzing past our ears, as well as our incessant complaining about hot and tired we were, it was quiet and still.

Back at our campsite we felt much better after rehydrating and eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese for dinner. We welcomed the coolness of dusk by chasing each other and inventing games in our campsite. On one evening we pretended we were giant degus.

What is a degu, you ask? (pronounced day-goo). A degu is basically a Peruvian rodent which looks like a gopher. That's it, it's a Peruvian gopher! In the early 1970s ("The Degu Years") we owned several degus. I don't remember how or why we owned degus. Perhaps it was illegal to own degus in the same way it was illegal to own wolverines. (I asked my dad why we owned degus, and he told me to go mow the lawn). At any rate, degus would spend all of their waking moments running on their little wheels. My dad found this very amusing. We would all be watching television while my dad would sit there for hours laughing at the degus running on their wheels. Maybe it was because my dad was just starting to run marathons, and he felt a kinship with these ridiculous creatures. Maybe it was because he secretly felt conflicted about all the gophers he had killed in our front yard. I don't know.

We would always scratch the degus right under their chins, and they would arch their heads back, exposing their pumpkin-colored incisors while making a sound of supreme satisfaction: "Ehhh...Ehhhh....Ehhhhh." It sounded like old men with hearing aids sitting around the nursing home bingo table. Then back to their wheels the degus would go, often launching their Tic Tac-shaped droppings out of the cage and onto the carpet.

Anyway, back in Big Basin we pretended we were giant degus. We ran along the spine of a fallen redwood tree bellowing "Ehhh....Ehhhh...Ehhhh...." A ranger finally came over and told my parents we were disturbing the other campers. My dad explained, however, that we were simply mimicking degus. The ranger paused and watched us thoughtfully. "Oh, well in that case, it's ok," he said. He and my dad shared a knowing glance, then he nodded to my mom. "Ma'am," he said. He then smiled and walked away.

French Toast

Southguard Lake

from Cinder Col

Kings Canyon National Park

08/29/2004

Col: a gap between peaks in a mountain range, used as a pass

The term Col is not to be confused with coulier (pronounced "cool-wah") which is the French term for chute, an example of which is seen as the deep gully on the Western face of Mt. Brewer:

You can see that the coulier pictured above is surrounded by gendarmes (from French, referring to personnel in the French police service). This term, in mountaineering, refers to rocky outcroppings which might appear to represent French police officers standing at attention. Now I've seen Steve Martin starring in The Pink Panther, and the rocky outcroppings pictured above do not look like Inspector Clouseau:

What about other French mountaineering terms, like arete, avalanche, bivouac, belay, crevasse, glissade, glacier, massif, moraine, rappel, talus, giardia and sorbet? Why is mountaineering terminology so influenced by words with French derivations? John Muir wasn't French (like Scottie, from Star Trek, and certain kinds of tape, he was Scotch). The guys down at REI certainly aren't French. Any my brother, Jay, who has climbed lots of mountains? I don't think he's French either. I don't get it.

I do thank the French, however, for their other wonderful contributions, including French toast and fabric softener.

Proofreading Prowess

During my senior year in high school, the drama club performed The Diary of Anne Frank. The actual yearbook photo below commemorated the heroic story of Anne and the actors' rousing performances:


As you can see, the yearbook editor thought the play was about a girl named Anne and her milking cows. Simple proofreading could have averted such a monstrous gaffe.

Always proofread your work, I tell our children. Read your work outloud. Read it twice. Read it carefully. Get up from your desk, eat some graham crackers, walk around the table a few times, then read it again. Does it make sense? Does it sound good? Does every sentence have a period? Punctuation is your friend! Words are powerful. Every word reveals what you believe and is a mirror into your soul.

Recently at work I sent an EMail to a client. The message was about test results:

"Based on your urine test results, there is now evidence of gonorrhea. This is great news!"

The recipient wrote back promptly. He did not share my enthusiasm that he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease. I reread my EMail. A single misplayed note in a piano chord entirely changes the pianist's intent. Major becomes minor. How did that "w" in the word now sneak in? (I had meant to say "there is no evidence of gonorrhea"). Gosh darned, maverick "w"! Lesson learned...

The Miracle of Duct Tape

My sister, Celery, demonstrates the many important uses of duct tape (or is it duck tape?). In this instance, her boot was yawning at the toes. She salvaged her boot by wrapping it in duct tape. Without the duct tape she would have hiked 10 miles up and over New Army Pass in flip flops. Youch!

Before each backpacking trip I wrap several yards of duct tape around a bear canister or a hiking pole (an old Navajo Indian trick). The tape can then be used to repair a boot, a gaping wound, a sprained ankle or a leaking fuel line in the stove. It really is quite miraculous! (Turkey Tetrazzini Pete has threatened to duct tape my mouth shut on many of our trips in an effort to shut me up. That Pete!).

Other potential but not yet approved uses for duct tape include covering my bald spot, repairing dirigibles or passing health care legislation. We shall see...