Louse Canyon is up the mountain from the Crabtree Trailhead, in the Emigrant Wilderness Area, just north of Yosemite National Park.
Bob Cook, with whom I've backpacked annually for the past fifteen years and who was doing this seven-day trip with me, had hired a packer to take our packs to the campsite in Louse Canyon so we could hike the first day carrying minimum weight: lunch and water.
As the packer, Doug, was loading Ellie, his mule, with our packs, Bob told him,"We'll be going up the Golden Staircase [the name of the route up the granite cliff above Louse Canyon to Rosasco Lake] tomorrow morning. Leave our packs at the campsite at the base of the Golden Staircase." Doug nodded, tightened the cinch, mounted Viola, his horse, and started up the trail.
Bob and I met Doug a couple of miles up the trail as he was returning. He said, yes, he had left the packs in the campsite at the bottom of the Golden Staircase.
We stopped at Grouse Lake, where I had a good swim,
and got to the arranged campsite around 2:00. No packs! We searched behind every tree, around every boulder. No packs. Bob walked up the canyon while I rested my feet, but it was a fruitless search. We both walked the other direction, down the canyon to its end, then along the canyon from that end all the way up the canyon where Bob had just walked ("Four eyes are better than two," Bob said) and even farther. We followed hoof prints (but were they Viola's and Ellie's or those of other horses?). We hunted and hunted. For three hours we looked, probably adding two miles to the eight we had already hiked. Finally, the only thing to do was to go back.
Go back where? It would be a moonless night, so it seemed unwise to hike the full eight miles to the trailhead. Probably, I thought as I hiked, we would stop at Grouse Lake and spend the night there, huddled under a pine tree, trying to keep warm, getting up every so often to stamp our feet and flap our arms.We both had jackets, but I was in shorts. It would be a long, cold night.
A couple of miles down the trail we met two men with two rambunctious dogs. They greeted us cheerfully: "Hi! How're you doing?" Not so well, we said and explained our predicament. Immediately the first man opened his pack and took out two twenty-pound bags of dog food (!), dug a little further, and came up with two energy bars for us. He filled our water jugs, told us there were some campers at Grouse Lake, and wished us well.
Encouraged, we hiked another mile to Grouse Lake, where we saw two men (Craig and Franc, we learned later) just setting up their tent. We explained that we were without supplies and did they have anything that might help us, like, for instance, Bob said, something I could put on my legs for the night?
I said apologetically that I knew that backpackers carry only what we need. I wasn't expecting them to have anything extra.
They leapt into action. Were we exhausted, they asked, or would we like a flashlight for hiking to the trailhead?
It had already been a 13-mile day. My feet refused to go another five miles. Besides, it was a pretty rocky trail to do by flashlight. I said I was exhausted.
Craig gave me a pair of long johns, brand new, he said. Did we need food? Water? And, look, he and Franc had been considering sleeping in the open air, anyway. They would do that, and we could have their tent.
Images of sleeping huddled under a pine tree vanished with the offer.
Craig told us there was another couple camped on the lake; we could hit them up, too.
I winced at the vocabulary, but Bob and I walked to the next camp. Michelle and Anthony were standing by a fire that was cooking a fish, impaled on a stick. We explained our problem, and they, too, went into immediate action. Did we need food? Water? What could they give us to make our night more bearable? Melissa thought of the light polyester cape she carried with her on camping trips. Anthony gave us a sleeping bag liner and a large down jacket. We left their campsite with out hearts as full of gratitude as our arms were full of provisions for the night.
I had eight cherry tomatoes and four little squares of beef jerky left from lunch. That and the two energy bars the hikers with the dogs had given us would be our dinner. We would save the other two energy bars for the morning. We sat on a log to eat. I thought if Bob could turn our water into wine, we would be doing just fine. He said he didn't know how to do that, and where was that guy when you needed Him?
Thanks to the kindness of strangers what was merely an uncomfortable night was not a dangerous one. The ground was hard, and a poorly positioned rock under the tent poked Bob's back all night. We were cold (there was ice in the water bottles the next morning), but not as cold as we would have been without the tent. As soon as we saw dawn creeping through the forest, we crawled out. Craig, who was already stirring about camp, said I could continue to wear the long johns and leave them on his car at the trailhead. We took Michelle and Anthony's borrowed items to their campsite, laid them on a log, and headed for the Crabtree Trailhead.
Five miles later, well before noon, we were at our cars, and I was taking off my boots.
We were glad to see that Doug was at the pack station and not on the trail somewhere packing someone else's gear into the wilderness. We told him the packs weren't at the arranged place. He smiled a bit and said, yes, they were. We said we had looked for a couple of hours and couldn't find them. Still with that barely perceptible smile, he said he would take Viola and Ellie and go get the packs. He would be back some time between 6:00 and 7:00.
Bob and I drove a few miles to the Pinecrest Chalet, where we would spend a comfortable, warm night in a lovely little cabin with hot showers and large clean beds with beautiful white down comforters. While we waited for our packs to return, eating sandwiches at Pinecrest Lake and watching the boaters, Bob took another look at the Emigrant Wilderness map. Scouring it closely, he now noticed that there were two depressions in the granite wall above Louse Canyon that led to a spot of blue on the map indicating a lake. The first was above the campsite where we had expected to find our packs. The second led to a spot of blue indicating a lake that was named, on the map, Rosasco Lake. That meant that that route was the Golden Staircase, not the one Bob had thought. The packer had been exactly right. We had been wrong. We should have pointed to a map and said, "Here. Here is where we expect to find our packs."
As a wilderness survival story, this one really isn't very exciting. But as a kindness-of-strangers story, it is superb: the two hikers with the dogs who gave us food and water; Craig and Franc, who gave us food and shelter; Michelle and Anthony, who gave us warm coverings; and Doug, the packer, who didn't hesitate a minute about making an extra six-hour trip into Louse Canyon and, when we offered to pay because the mistake had been ours, only smiled his slight smile and said no.
(This post is dedicated, in gratitude, to Craig and Franc Volodonsk and to Melissa and Anthony Gillepsie.)
(To find out how the 75 x 75 project is going, check out the latest post on http://thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com.)
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