Walk About Martinez

The Pacific Crest Trail thru hiking season is just beginning, and I’ve been following as one e-friend after another signs off of the PCT-List, the email forum many of us belong to, and heads off for the Mexican border to begin the 2,650-mile hike to Canada. The “Kick Off,” a weekend of training and celebration, at Lake Morena Park, just north of the border, is only a couple of weeks away, and it’s hard to sit here typing when I know my legs want to be thru hiking again.   

I want to share the next best thing however, and this is available to anybody who can use a computer, and that is following a thru hiker’s blog.  On trail, there are doctors, lawyers, artists, philosophers, teachers, carpenters, people newly graduated from college, and those making a career change who have time off, ex corporate guys, retired folks and whole families. One very experienced couple is even hiking with their infant daughter. I follow their blog, as I would love to have done that when my daughter was tiny, but I was still working then, and darn it, she grew up too fast.

If you’re interested, the two main sources for thru hiker’s blogs are:

Trail Journals, at http://trailjournals.com/journals.cfm, where you will find people just starting out and people from years past. Mango’s journal is on this site.

Postholer.com, at http://postholer.com/#, click on Search Journals and pick someone with a crazy trail name.  

Outpost, and his wife, Echo, are two of my favorite people from last year, and they’re hiking again this year. You’ll meet many of this year's “Class of 2011,” through whomever you choose to follow, and share in their adventures. Some will make it, and some will leave trail only to come back next year. Others will swear they never want to see a trail again. Hunt around, read a bit, and find a person whose style fits you and vicariously follow someone on a five-month journey of a lifetime. 

Hike of the week: For this week’s hike we are going to Briones, one of the East Bay Regional Park District’s premier preserves, and it’s just south of town. There is no better place to experience the bucolic beauty of the East Bay Hills than Briones.  During the rainy season, the trails can be very muddy. At this point most of them have dried up, but the hills are so very green right now, every shade of green. The grass is tall, the wildflowers are blooming, and the blue, black and valley oaks are all leafing out in great chartreuse clouds against the dark green of the live oaks and bay trees. It’s really a sight.

Briones' 6,117 acres are surrounded on three sides by five cities, Martinez, Pleasant Hill, Walnut Creek, Lafayette and Orinda.  And yet, when you are in this park, you can often feel so remote that you lose the sense that they are all so close. There are numerous trailheads, all of which start at a low point on the edge of the cities and climb to the ridges that make up most of Briones. All of them except one. The Martinez entrance up Briones Road is the only place where you can drive up to the ridge and start a hike without a stiff climb.

Briones Road is just a few hundred feet west of the junction of Alhambra Valley and Reliez Valley roads. Turn left onto it and drive carefully to the parking lot at the end. It’s a very narrow road. We will be hiking a 3.5 mile loop along the ridge on which you are parked, up and around the far end of the canyon below, and eventually descend into the canyon to return back to the parking lot. Here is a map of the park: Briones Road is at the top of the map.

From the parking lot, hike out Old Briones Road up a gradual incline, through a dense oak forest for one mile until you reach an open grassy bowl, a lovely place to fly a kite or have a picnic. There are several cow ponds that at this time of year are full of water and full of life. You’ll notice that the cows are fenced and the ponds have been allowed to go wild. They are full of water creatures and plants that could not survive the usual heavy stomping of a well used cow pond.  

Our trail branches right at the beginning of the meadows onto the Briones Crest Trail, which you follow for a quarter of a mile before branching right again onto the Lagoon Trail. There are two more small lakes here, the second of which is particularly beautiful. Old willow trees on the far bank give a dramatic backdrop to an idyllic setting. Mallards and coots were floating and feeding in the duckweed the day we came through. Take a moment to explore, or have a quiet lunch on the bench, and let the setting soak in.  

If you’re not up for a harder uphill hike, just retrace your steps to the meadow and eventually back to your car. If you’re up for it, continue on the Lagoon Trail for a little over a half mile and then branch right onto the Toyon Canyon Trail, which will take you down into the canyon through a dense oak/bay forest, a quintessential East Bay woodland. Water is running everywhere, but there are only a few areas in which the trail is still muddy. At one place, a clear bubbling spring emerges in the trail itself, not what we’re used to in our usually dry hills.

The trail crosses the stream at the bottom of the canyon and ascends the other side.  Turn right onto the Pine Tree Trail and follow it up to the road. It will parallel the road for a half mile to the parking lot.  

This is the time, and the Briones Road Trail Head is the place, for green hills, meadows, varicolored forests, ponds and beauty all around. If you’ve never been here, come, and if you already know it well, come back. 

Pacific Crest Trail Stories: We summited 13,153 foot Forester Pass on June 13, 2010, and felt like we were on the top of the world. Diamond Mesa, the peaks around Mount Whitney and the great glacial bowels and tributaries of the Kern River, all part of Sequoia National Park, stretched as far as we could see to the south. To the north, we looked into Kings Canyon National Park, Center Peak and the Kearsarge Pinnacles to our right, and straight ahead, the granite canyons creating the Bubbs Creek Drainage, which pours into the Kings River. The North slopes were much less melted, and it looked like the snowy world of frozen lakes and landscapes would never end.  

Directly below us to the north were two long, steep slopes that normally sport a trail that allows hikers to gradually climb or descend Forester Pass. The trail simply was not there. All was snow. But this was the kind of snow that brought out the 12-year-old boy or girl in you. If you could stop yourself before sliding out onto the frozen lake more than 1,000 feet below, you probably could slide down it without killing yourself.  Glissade!

One after another, we sat on our butts, used our ice axes or hiking poles for brakes, and slid down those slopes. We were like crazy kids. Even Mango, the eldest in the group, turned into a child in the face of so much fun. Smiles, Little Engine, Plain Slice, Evan, Double Check and his 16-year-old brother, Calorie, and their Japanese hiker friend, Shin, hiked back up and did it again. This time they slid face first, no hands, arms and legs in the air, and standing for as long as they could before the inevitable crash. After the grueling ascent, it was all part of the relief and joy of having made it over an obstacle we had dreaded and feared.

No one went in the lake, and we continued hiking cross country over nearly unbroken snow, down Bubbs Creek, past Vidette Meadow, eventually turning off the John Muir Trail/Pacific Crest Trail toward Kearsarge Pass. We needed to leave trail for resupply in Lone Pine.  

Some parties we had met the week before had found that when traveling over the snow, they were eating twice the food they had consumed in the deserts because of the cold and exertion. They weren’t able to make it to Muir Trail Ranch or Vermillion Valley Resort. These next resupply spots on trail were still possibly a week away, and they’d had to leave trail to resupply at Kearsarge Pass. Hearing these stories, we had planned for this resupply.  

No camping was allowed near Bullfrog Lake at the base of Kearsarge Pass, so we ended up camping among the jumbled granite above it. At this point, we were a morning's walk from the Onion Valley Trailhead, restaurant food and a shower.  Oh glory days, did I need a shower! Ice water is not conducive to washing in after a long day’s journey over ice and snow, and I was filthy.

The next morning we headed off, certain we’d be feasting on hamburgers, pizza, salads and beer, lots of beer, by lunch. Kearsarge Pass was another drop dead gorgeous spot, only this time the views were of the canyons and peaks of the High Sierra to the west, and the Owens Valley in all its desert splendor to the east.  The never-ending views in the High Sierras can become common because they are ever present. But each one has the power to stop you in your tracks. Smiles climbed a great rock nearby and just sat and stared for all the time it took the others to catch up.  

Heading down the pass, we ran into Ned Tibbets of Mountain Education.org and his two sons, who were filming a documentary covering the transit of all the High Sierra passes in winter. Several seasons in the making, it will help prospective winter campers find and cross these mountain passes in deep snow. Last year’s late melt off allowed him to film winter scenes in June.  

Ned is serious about safety in the mountains. He is an important member of the search-and-rescue missions all winter long in the Sierra and leads snow survival courses, primarily out of his home base at South Shore Tahoe, into Desolation Wilderness. He took his courses to the southern mountains last year, teaching PCT hikers how to safely negotiate dangerous winter conditions in the San Jacinto Mountains just before they had to make those crossings. He does this with a smile and a huge furry dog, all for a donation.  At the Kick Off weekend at the beginning of the hike, Ned had given the “snow report” and the talk on snow and river safety. If you want to know about snow camping or snow survival, you can contact him at: ned@mountaineducation.org. 

Ned’s course is so well known in the hiker community that Mango flew from Tennessee the winter before he started the trail to take Ned’s course, which he raved about. When we came upon Ned, it was old home week. Several days of intense training in deep snow can bring folks together and Ned is the kind of person it’s easy to like, and we all did.   

After the visit, the descent continued. The northeast face of Kearsarge got steeper and the trail became all the more invisible under the deep snow. We could see from our maps where the trail ought to be, off to the right, but keeping a footing on the steep slope was tough. There were large rock outcroppings and long snowy chutes between them, and a glacial bowl in deep snow at the bottom. That’s where the trail was going.  

Smiles is a great skier, competitive in Switzerland, her home, and at Whistler, where she skis 130 days a year and is still winning races, at the same age as me. She often didn’t bother to sit down to glissade a slope with the rest of us, but did it standing, in her boots and pack. She took one look at those chutes and turned to us all and said, “I’m going to ski down those chutes, but none of you follow me. You don’t have the skill to do it.” She was adamant, and waited to make sure we all understood, and then began her boot ski down. 

I slipped and slid off to the right, trying to find the trail, when I heard a panicked cry of, “Help, help, help, help....!” descending the mountain fast. I thought it was 21-year-old Double Check, and I expected to find him in the bowl at the bottom.  Shin and I raced down around the huge rock outcropping to the base, but found no one. Looking up, I could see Smiles halfway down the face, and Double Check up near a large rock island protruding from the wall of snow.  

Double Check’s 16-year-old brother, Calorie, had lost his balance on the slope, and tumbled head over heels, crashing into the rock island. Falling a few feet to one side or the other or landing on his head could easily have killed him. As it was, he had seriously gashed his leg and his brother was tending to it.  

Almost simultaneously, a short distance away, Evan also had lost control during a short glissade and cut his knee, and Mango was giving him aid, but neither of them had heard Calorie’s screams for help.

I hollered back up the hill to Double Check asking how bad it was. Mango, from another point on the vertical face, called back that it wasn’t that bad, but he couldn’t figure out how I knew Evan had fallen. It took a bit of high-volume communication echoed off the walls of the bowl before we realized that there were two people hurt.  What a mess. 

I continued yelling basic first-aid directions to Double Check until Smiles was able to climb back and take a look and render aid. She then came down the slope to me, and we both thought it a good call to go back up trail and get Ned’s help. What luck that he was so close with his EMT and search-and-rescue training. Smiles took off back up the chute.

After she got to him, Ned made it to us in a flash, working his way carefully down the nearly vertical snow face, with his sons filming the whole operation. It will all be part of the movie he's making, and none of it was staged. After looking at the wound, he decided to call in an airlift because he didn’t think Calorie could make it out under his own power given the conditions. He called in the “Sequoia/Kings” helicopter.  

After laying out every orange tent Shin and I could find in the bottom of the granite bowl to give the crew a target landing spot, we waited. When it appeared over the ridge, the sight of that helicopter maneuvering in the narrowness of those steep rock walls took my breath away. Several times I thought the rotors were going to clip the trees or the rock face. I had visions of the whole thing going up in a giant explosion and a ball of fire coming right down at us. So much for a lifetime of Hollywood action films, but it seemed a real possibility. Ultimately, the bowl was simply too steep for them to land and the decision was made to airlift him out in a basket using the Onion Valley parking lot as a staging area. 

At this point, Smiles, Shin and I, enlisting the aid of a day hiker who carried Calorie’s pack, took off running down trail to clear the cars out of the parking lot. Shin was double packed, with his own on his back and the day hiker's smaller pack in front. I like running trail, but Smiles has no cartilage in her knees after a lifetime of competitive skiing, and had gone up and down that face at least three times. Nonetheless, she ran the several miles in snow, which became dirt as the elevation dropped. We made it and were able to secure the parking lot for the helicopter.  

Waiting in the parking lot was an old pickup and a trail angel named Bryan from the little town of Independence, just north of Lone Pine. Earlier in the day, he had given a ride to Little Engine and Plain Slice, who had been hiking ahead of us, and who had no idea what had happened. They had sent him back to pick us up. The airlift took all afternoon, and Bryan waited, and eventually took us down the hill, more than 20 miles to Lone Pine, and then returned a third time to get Mango, Evan and Double Check, who stayed with Calorie until the SAR crew could get him in the air.  Those are all real trail angels.

Watching the professionalism of the pilot, his female crew member and their supervisor was an incredible experience. Cables and baskets, straps and bundles of gear all perfectly placed so that they could be used without a hitch. When I asked how much it was going to cost Calorie’s family, they said, “Nothing. It’s all part of your federal tax dollars at work.”  Not bad. 

When Calorie was flown into the parking lot, the supervisor hanging from the rig, he was placed down with such gentleness that the basket barely bumped the ground.  Just before being whisked off to a local clinic by the ambulance crew, Smiles and I were able to give him encouragement. She gave him a final kiss and he was off to get stitched up.  

That evening, and a very delayed meal of pizza and beer later, Double Check had an extra pizza baked, which he took to his brother at the clinic, where he would be for three days. Mango and I talked to Doug, the proprietor of the Hiker Hostel in town, explaining that the boy would need some time off trail to heal and, without any hesitation, Doug “hired” Double Check to work at the Whitney Portal Store for room and board for both of them. Trail angels just kept appearing. The brothers were off trail for two weeks, but as I crossed into Canada, several months later, I heard that Calorie was only five days behind me. I’m sure he made it.

As for the rest of our group, we had been drawn ever closer by the ordeal, and had seen trail angeling taken to new heights, even to the level of federal government employees, and a National Park System that provides such services. It would not be the last SAR that year in the High Sierra, but it was the only one we were directly involved in. We took a zero day in Lone Pine to assess what had happened, what the coming dangers might be and just where we should go from here. Our fellowship had grown stronger, but we still had well over 200 miles of High Sierra to go.

"God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons." —  John Muir