Rhinocrisy

There’s nothing to shrink the concerns of the world like a near-death experience. Nature red in tooth and claw, facing down the angry beasts of the wood, prevailing over mortality and renewing, however briefly, one’s time in this world. I have returned from Yosemite. The quotidian concerns of homo sapien urbanis seem tiny. For I have done battle with the sooty grouse, and I have lived to tell.

Yesterday Ms. Hedgehog and I woke up late in Yosemite Valley. Don’t ask me how we got there, but there we were. After a lazy morning, we went to climb the Mist Trail. No, not that Mist. This one. The Mist Trail is America’s answer to Mt. Fuji. It may be the most difficult thing you will ever do while staring at the ass of a tourist from Iowa, unless you work in a blue jeans store at Niagara Falls. It feels disappointing to reach the top of the otherwise stunning Vernal Falls because no matter how cool you may be down inside, you can see that you didn’t just do anything special. The 4-year-olds beat you to Emerald Pool, and look, they’re about to use the flood-swollen Merced River as a water slide. If you want to get a bit of that hot-stuff feeling that normally comes from a vigorous consitutional, you need to keep going. Normally that means mounting Nevada Fall, which makes the hike a 2,000-foot climb and gains it a “strenuous” rating on the Park Service’s handy guidebook. Problem was, we saw the swarms of tourists rampaging to the summit of that trail and decided we had had enough of the crowds. I get the feeling this physical-fitness kick is succeeding a bit too well, around the world if not here in the States. How the hay are we old fogies supposed to keep up with the young’uns if they’re all working out all the time? Give these kids a television already.

We went up the John Muir Trail. It was gated off because of “hazardous trail conditions” but a quick chat with the 12-year-old girl who had just led her little sister through there convinced us that it wouldn’t be too much of a risk to try. Sure enough we made it past the short icy stretch and up into the woods, where we mounted the canyon rim for the pretty hike to Glacier Point. Given our late start, we had little time to lose, as the full walk to Glacier Point would be 8 miles, which at the speed we were going would take us until about 4:30 or 5 p.m., giving us just enough daylight to descend the Four Mile Trail back to our campsite.

Everything went according to plan until we got to Glacier Point. The trails were smooth and silent except for the constant whirring, roaring, singing of waterfalls in every direction. Water trickled underfoot and a low cooing sound of a frog or bird accompanied us everywhere. The afternoon sun was cozy on the skin after sub-freezing nights and even snow two nights earlier. Our lack of warm clothes, flashlights, rain gear, trail information and overnight shelter was overcome by our having the two substances that cure all ills: theobromine and naproxen. Under their unique influence, we walked quickly.

With the sun starting to hide behind the mountains, we arrived at Glacier Point, a drive-in overlook on the canyon rim. It’s closed for winter and is silent like that hotel in The Shining. A big bird flew into a great sugar pine. It looked like a bird of prey. I went close to look. It dropped to the ground. It was a sooty grouse. Coo, coo, it said. Its voice was oddly similar to the one we had heard all day. It walked toward me. This is Yosemite, where they tell you to watch for bears. And coyotes and mountain lions. Even the squirrels and jays can be pesty, as all the animals can come to see humans as food sources, and when they are hungry, such animals can get aggressive. But no one had told me to watch out for a sooty grouse. Having raised chickens as a child I know what a bird looks like when it’s coming to grab seed from you and I quickly picked up a handful of gravel. As the bird came closer and I walked backward from it, I threw a rock at it. It didn’t even glance aside. It kept staring at me with its glassy bird eyes and cackling in a creepy low voice. I threw a rock and hit it on the back. Again, no response. This is one fucked up bird, I decided. The little lady, who had wisely kept her distance this whole time, had circled onto the start of the Four Mile Trail and I walked fast to join her. After maybe 150 feet we thought the bird was gone. I looked back a bit more carefully and there it was, flapping along behind, cooing like a maniac. I am not ashamed to admit that we half-ran onto the trail. Yes, half-runs include “bolting headlong into the bush.”

All of this would have been left to the giggles of memory had we not been forced to reenter Glacier Point a half-hour later. See, we should have looked at our handy Internet page before hiking. (Or, to be truly old skool, we could have talked to someone.) There we could have learned that the Four Mile Trail doesn’t just have hazardous trail conditions, it has “extremely hazardous conditions.” As in “This trail closed in winter due to extremely hazardous trail conditions.” While the “hazard” earlier included small icicles tumbling from a rocky precipice overhead and a patch of ice on a trail segment over a 500-foot drop, at least the earlier troubles were all on a section of trail with a nice little railing. The Four Mile Trail had no railing. Instead it had a snowdrift that smoothly connected the rock wall on the uphill side to the 2,000-or-so-foot plummet on the downhill side. We saw footprints where someone had made it through earlier but lacking ice axes and unsure how many such drifts we would encounter as the trail descended, we turned around and retraced our steps.

This time I had to push away the grouse with a stick. Night was falling. The grouse is lucky I’m such a vegetarian.

Posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 10:34 pm | Levity, Magic, We're Doomed! | feed | reply | trackback