Day 5: Wednesday 24 October
Timing is everything.
(Continued from previous post)
Until… I awoke to a 6.45am Skype pinging through from a highly esteemed colleague. I’ve still got bits to do for work, so it was a friendly check-in to see when I was likely to be available to action them.
I also had a suite of Whatsapps from various people asking me various things about my availability for X, Y or Z. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy and lucky to be invited and included but I’m looking forward to getting to the desert and having quite literally nil contact with the outer world.
I’m scraping all the tiny particles of 3G available intermittently here to write these posts and upload photos, but this is going to dry up soon so I’m milking it for what I can get.
Service interruption.
My legs are on fire / feel like they’re decomposing and my Nurofen Express are erroneously in the fucking bear bin.
Service resumed.
I wrestled with getting up for as long as was acceptable by normal adult humans staying in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I was wide awake from 6.45am but the prospect of getting up and fannying around going to another campsite for a shower and having to make breakfast and move to my next site was all too much to take, so I rode out the inertia with guilty pleasure and finally decided to surface at 8am, and only then because my bladder couldn’t wait any longer.
Upon egress of Oliver, I was pleasantly surprised that the world was not as cold as I had envisaged it would be. Definitely the warmest morning so far.
In the bathroom, I bumped into my new pal Kelly who asked if I’d heard the gossip (“no Kelly, no I have not heard the gossip. I have quite literally nobody to talk to.”)
There was a bear onsite last night!
She and Eric had told me that it’s rare that they ever come onsite, and rarer still at this time of year. Plus, they all have tracking devices so that the rangers can monitor their movements and intervene if necessary.
Now, call me crazy, but the ranger can’t have been doing a good job for the bear to actually make it to the campsite. Nevertheless, given I’ve been joking about the bears coming to get me to my mum who has in turn been shitting it, this news absolutely thrilled me.
Until this evening when, at my new site, I find myself at the very periphery of the campsite and likely to be one of the first in the bear’s path. Good job I made a nice chili. Hopefully he can figure out how to get into the bear bin a bit easier than I could and chow down on that instead of on my substantial human carcass.
So fresh and so clean.
Five days camping, and five hot showers in a row. Today’s was the most painful in that I had to clear up my site, put all the stuff I’d decanted into the bear bin back into the car and then drive to another site to have it, but it was a good one. Powerful shower head, central heating in the bathroom, towels, lockers, hairdryers and all free of charge! I’d read somewhere that you had to pay for them, but this was not the case this morning. What a Brucie!
Breaking the not so fast breakfast.
I’ve been a bit greedy for food for most of my life but definitely on this trip and each morning so far, I’ve prepared a full cooked breakfast banquet together with Gaston. Not today however! I’m turning a new leaf, and trying to remember I need to be beach body ready for Mauritius in a few weeks, as I should really be for every other day in my life but ever so conveniently just forget to care about.
So, this morning, I had something that was kind of like Special K, although not Special K. It looked like Special K, was made by Kellogg’s, had all this fancy nutrition chat on the front of the box but was so saccharin, it made the milk taste like it was a sugary milk flavoured milkshake. I appreciate that doesn’t seem like it makes much sense, and believe me, milk flavoured milkshake is not how I’d like to go down in flames, but I can assure you that this is the only way to describe it.
Take a hike. And then add more miles onto it BECAUSE YOU’RE A DICK.
Yosemite offers her visitors a spectacular array of trails, tracks, climbs and even theatrical productions. So many beautiful things to see, hear, do. Oh the splendour that awaits the Yosemite visitor!
I knew that today, I’d want to do either one big hike or two smaller ones. There are so many to choose from, most of which range somewhere between 2-6 miles and 1-3hrs. They range in level from easy to strenuous, and being the top athlete I am, I thought I’d start with a “moderate” hike and build up to a strenuous hike up Vernal Falls tomorrow.
Valley Floor Loop Trail is penned as a magnificent route with minimal gradation, that takes in so much of Yosemite’s famed beauty. At 13.5miles long, it was certainly one of the longest routes available, but the promise of gentle inclines, top sightseeing and a gloriously sunshiny day made it the no brain option.
No brain is definitely how I’d describe myself in the dying phases of this hike. It seems a shame to ‘ramble’ past all the beautiful sights I took I’m, but as with the Half Dome view earlier on in this post, I wouldn’t be able to articulate them if I tried so I’ll put some photos up. Probably the ones I’ve already posted on instagram.
It also seems a bit of a shame to bypass a recount of so many reflections made during the walk. I’ve been on my own for the best part of five days now, and somehow, I’ve not managed to spin myself into some black hole of anxiety and despair, nor have I been neurotic about – well, anything. Nor have I felt that I’ve been counting down the hours. My days, and my mind, have been pleasantly full – how and of what, I can’t quite narrow down. Tonight by the campfire for example, I was sat there for a total of five hours. I cooked dinner, I made a fire, I started writing this page, I listened to my full “Moody” Spotify playlist plus the Lost in Translation soundtrack, and I can’t tell you one instance where I wondered what time it was or how long I’d been there. I only came to bed because the fire died.
Anyway, I digress. The hike.
It all went wrong after Bridalveil Falls.
For the most part, it was pleasant. Exactly what it said on the tin. I took in the splendour of El Capitan, felt sick seeing climbers dangling from his vertical stone chest, caught a couple in their mid-fifties in a raunchy embrace, and got up to Bridalveil Falls (precisely half way around the Valley Floor Loop) where I found a waterfall that featured actual falling water.
I had left over pasta for lunch whilst gawping at the dickheads who had scrambled up the wet rocks under the waterfall, kind of hoping they’d slip which would teach them a lesson for being daft buggers but clearly hoping they only sustained minor to moderate injuries, not total death.
When lunch was safely housed in my stomach, I set off again for the second half of the loop. Fall is in full flow now, and the pathways are blanketed with gorgeous mustard coloured leaves. I really, really enjoyed he next two miles. I encountered nobody, and spent time wistfully evaluating a number of things that have been in my head lately.
Then, I hit a crossroad.
Simply put, the crossroad offered too many directional choices (two instead of one). Neither direction particularly screamed as the one I needed to take to get back to Oliver who was parked up by Camp 4 (traditionally the base camp for the mad bastards who think it’s a good idea to scale the face of El Capitan (again, you’ll need a visual reference for this – available at kershytenbags).
I did, however, know I needed to get back down to the river, and as long as I could find a path that ran alongside it, I would meet a bridge which would take me back to Oliver who was parked up like a good boy over near Yosemite Lodge.
I did not make a good choice.
The route I took sent me down every false path in the bloody park. It felt like the last few miles were some kind of hiker’s purgatory and I wanted to shoot myself. Not least because there were fucking mozzies all over my person and they wouldn’t fuck off no matter how many times I told them to. What had been a mostly enjoyable trek was becoming the ruin of my mental and physical well-being and I needed to get out.
I’ll skip through the volume expletives and fury, but it was all reminiscent of when I did a marathon a few years back and the mile markers told me three times, at theee separate miles that I was only three miles away from the end. They did not see the best side of me.
Oliver!
Eventually, I made it back. And I have never been quite as pleased to see any animate or inanimate thing. Clapping eyes on my beautiful Oliver, I knew that a bond had been forged. He had been waiting for me, mentally willing me back to him.
We were in this together.
As my sorry carcass depended upon him as a support whilst I stretched out the day that I thought would never end, I realised that he was a part of this trip too, not just a vessel to get me from A to B.
A new flame.
I spanked a small fortune ($65) in the supermarche, mostly on mozzie repellant and firefighting items. Kelly and Eric weren’t my neighbours tonight but having had the sweet taste of a roaring campfire, there was no way I was going to take anything to chance, so I bought all the fire lube and kindling I could find.
This, married with my new skills and knowledge of How Fires Work produced a roaring beauty that kept going for 4.5hrs. I was very proud of myself.
Whilst the fire was picking up, Gaston and I decided it was a chili night. Given this is The America, I could only find a massive slab of mince so ended up cooking four vats of the stuff. Not my finest work – not enough onion or garlic and missing the bacon. But definitely a gastronomic win, all things considered.
I’ve just accidentally deleted the last eight paragraphs of this post and after realising I lost all of Day 3’s post earlier today, I’m going to cut my losses and call it a night. There wasn’t much more to tell anyway, just some whinging about washing up and quick wins when disposing of dirty dish water. Sexy stuff.
Today’s highlights
- Bonding with Oliver
- Realising that there are in fact some things in life I am very happy not to do (climb vertical granite cliff faces)
- Blitzing 25,000 steps
- Unexpected hot and free (!) showers
- Sustaining a fire all by myself
Kershy Ten Bags 