Last Friday, my wife and our home-from-Montana-for-the-summer son made an early evening escape 300 miles up California's Hwy 395 to Mammoth Lakes, a small resort town in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. During the winter, Mammoth Mountain is a mecca for mogul-seekers and downhill danger junkies. In the summer, mountain bikers, fishermen, backpackers and outdoor lovers of all sorts find themselves drawn to this high altitude wonderland of recreational adventure.
Due to the reality of too much work and not enough vacation time, our stay this past weekend was limited to, well, the weekend. Still, we managed to come back to our Southern California home on Sunday night filthy, sunburned, sore, bug-bit and thoroughly exhausted.
If a getaway to the mountains ever really needs an excuse, this past weekend ours was to get in a fast, high-altitude hike to help us prepare for our upcoming hike to the top of Mt. Whitney next month. If you don't have your north American mountain peak statistics at hand, Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the contiguous United States. And yes, my wife and I are certifiably nuts.
We have our permit for the mid-September attempt to reach the 14,505-foot summit and have been trying to take as many hikes (as high up as geography allows without driving to Katmandu) as we can before the big day. I’ll write more about that crazy goal next month.
Our training hike this past weekend was to a stunningly beautiful, above-timberline glacial pond in the John Muir Wilderness with the less-than-dignified name of Barney Lake. The actual hike was only seven miles, but the training value was in the elevation of the destination – some 10,000-plus feet above sea level. It was a breathtaking hike, not only because of the scarcity of oxygen.
On the way to Barney (I can’t write that without thinking of Fred and Wilma) Lake, the trail winds its way past other dazzlingly blue, Jeffery pine-rimmed lakes, through verdant mossy meadows, below shear granite cliffs and over crystal clear streams flowing from under snowfields still impressively large after a record winter. I’m sure we added hours to our sunrise hike with all of the times that the three of us rounded a corner or crested a hill to see revealed a panorama of such exquisite beauty that we were simultaneously stopped, speechless, in our tracks.
I have no idea how many times I said to my wife something along the lines of, “Tomorrow, when we’re both sitting in front our computers with a week’s worth of office work ahead, remember this view and where we were only 24 hours before.” Of course, it sounded more like, “Tomorrow (pant! pant!), when we’re (wheeze! pant!) both sitting in front of (pant! gasp!) our computers with (cough!) a week’s worth of office (pant! gasp!) work ahead, remem-(gasp!)-ber this view and (gulp! gasp!) where we were (pant!) only 24 (gasp! cough!) hours before.” I’m pretty sure our shadows shifted slightly underfoot in the time it took me to utter that simple sentence. But it was worth it.
Fast forward to the next day when, in fact, my wife and I were both in our respective offices basking in the glow of our respective computer screens. I opened up an email from the too-tired Mrs. expecting to read that she desperately wished we were back on the trail dodging fresh road apples, swatting suicidal mosquitoes and sucking scarce oxygen into our lungs instead of the slogging through the mundane meanderings of our day-to-day jobs. I know that’s what I was thinking, at least.
So, imagine my surprise when I read in my wife’s email a heartfelt reminder from her that we are richly blessed to be able to enjoy the outdoors at anytime, anywhere. Even right here in our hometown Crescenta Valley. She was referring, I knew, to our recent discovery and frequent use of hiking trails not 300 miles from here, not a three, four or five hour drive from here – but more like five minutes from our driveway.
She’s right, of course. Over the past few months, many of our training hikes have been done (and thoroughly enjoyed) as close to home as the Cherry Canyon trails above Descanso Gardens, or the extreme vertical climb from Altadena up to Echo Mountain and the ruins of the old Mount Lowe Railway.
I’ll write more about our adventures in local hiking next week. Maybe I can catch my breath by then.
I’ll see you ‘round town.
Note: This is a slightly revised version of my column titled “Happy Trails” first published yesterday, 8.11.11 in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper.
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