But it really is a great bite-size
area for kids: 6 miles in, easy summits, passable scenery.The waking tyranny of the fabled fourth trimester is formidable but not the actual crux of parenting—not to a climber cum Caltech survivor. It is birthday parties. Climbing or hiking or even just evicting mice from our forlorn JTree Onaga House is impossible when someone is turning seven and wants to ring it in with the whole class and a virtualized anthropomorphic hantavirus vector. Looma Space, South Play, Dig It… unshaded backyards of families that I can only assume have deathly pollen allergies. We have managed to avoid Chuck E. Cheese, but the verbal acrobatics for no RSVPs grow increasingly dubious and implausible, not least to the invitee.
Some birthdayless weekends conducive to kiddy backpacking did present themselves in the warmth of summer when dragging your six year old to 11,000 ft would arguably constitute better parenting, but as I had fixated on a trail with a 100% unreservable permit quota we waited until the (much colder) self-issue season. Showing up a day early to gamble to hike the one acceptable trail in 1,351 square miles of Sequoia wilderness is of course nonsense.
But it really is a great bite-size
area for kids: 6 miles in, easy summits, passable scenery.
You steer them right but turn
around to see them grinning on a pebble.
Unfortunately there were hordes of like-mindeds despite the marginal forecast: lows in the 20s, a quarter inch of rain (except higher amounts in thunderstorms), and snow above 9k. Lodgepole, where we camped Thursday night after touring giant sequoias and Moro Rock on what I’d hoped would be a quiet day (I was wrong—what better day for free entrance than Thursday?), was obviously under one of those thunder cells.
The Marble Fork of the Kaweah
before…
…and after the
thunderstorm.
After the permit season and the abatement of the birthday onslaught came a final obstacle: a federal government shutdown. An NPS contingency plan that was coincidentally published just in time for this unpredictable budget impasse stated that trails and roads would stay open, but try explaining politics to a six year old who’s endured five hours in the car that the way is unexpectedly barred. Luckily the entrance station was deserted so we entered our cash-strapped understaffed NPS lands for free.
“Can you beat Captain
Parker?”
The exterior of our tent was soaked from rain and the interior was soaked from condensation, so we spread everything out in the car and blasted the heater until the chance of precipitation passed. Although I find the supposed misery of near-freezing rain to be overblown—in fact, damp chill is so novel to this suburban LA dad that I like it—I had promised Jeremy that Parker would return sufficiently untraumatized for future backpacking trips. We waited until Vicky-via-Garmin said the weather would turn.
At 11am we started up the Lakes Trail for Pear Lake. There was a boot scrub at the trailhead, so Parker vigorously scrubbed invasive seeds from the hiking boots we’d procured the previous day from a Walmart in Visalia. Mrs. Johnson tells us that logical reasoning kicks in towards the end of first grade.
This is the same trailhead where Nick and I started a ski traverse of the Sierra in 2011, ending in the desert in Owens Valley 309 miles (by car) from our starting point. It’s also where Kedron, Munan, Will, Garrett, Tucker, Marusa, Eric, and I ended a slightly longer one from Onion Valley in 2017 (Eric’s pics). Fifty miles of wilderness: no roads, mostly no trails, definitely no people. Improbable remoteness in the most populous state. The trash—the most egregious example being a lurid yellow hard iced tea can under the watchtower trail—and crowding in the first six miles of this stretch of Sierra are not exactly harbingers of the paradisical remoteness beyond, but the happy place is there, and I hope I conveyed its presence to Parker without also turning him into a misanthrope.
I could not remember whether my fatherhood idol, Jim Herson, ever made his kids cry on their earlier adventures, so I was pleased to discover when I reread some trip reports that if Parker cried on this trip he was merely taking a well-trodden first step towards freeing The Nose.
Parker did cry once on our trip: we forgot to brush our teeth before getting in our sleeping bags, so we went out into 25 degree temps to do so. “Why are you crying?” “I’m cold!” “But if you brush your teeth instead of complaining we’ll get to our bags sooner!” “I’m so cooooold!” (More crying, no brushing.) Perhaps my logic hasn’t kicked in either, since I keep expecting to find some instead of mysterious heuristics of childhood.
After some frustrating bilateral negotiations, the US to our Ukraine and Russia (a bright-eyed thirty something newly-minted backpacker next door) walked over to ask, “hey man, I didn’t catch your name?” Shit. Is he going to cross-reference my first name against the permit carbon copies to get my full name to report to child protective services? (Looks like mild psychosis might be in the cards along with vanilla illogicality.) Maybe I should give him a fake name? Foster parents wouldn’t take Parker backpacking—I should lie. But then Parker would ask why I called myself John and I’d have to explain that there is a government agency that can get him out of 25 degree 15 mile backpacking trips. “Hamik. What’s up?” “Does your little one want this hot water bottle?”
A timely dry tent: luxury to rival
the Yellowstone Club.
The parenting failure of forgetting a Nalgene, which serves the dual purpose of hydrating Platypus pouches that collapse under the pressure of even infinitesimal submersion and warming sleeping bags when the metabolic fires of the fat added gratuitously to dinner have yet to ignite, was eclipsed only by the gastronomic extravagance of the family to our other side. Unconstrained by the alpinist’s go-light mantra, they had packed an entire pizza. Parker watched them eat it over his bowl of unseasoned noodles. The noodles went cold as he stared. He didn’t say anything. You know you’ve messed up when a six year old is silent.
There were however some Hallmark moments. Parker said, “this is so fun!” on two separate occasions on two separate days. Both times were in the forest when it was warm near the car. But two’s not a representative sample, so let’s not draw conclusions.
After walking past the nearly thousand foot tall (but at that moment, foggy) Watchtower, where Vitaliy, Adam, Casey and I did an ephemeral ice climb called Moonage Daydream, it started to snow. Parker said, “it’s like Christmas Eve! Because it’s snowing!” He opened his mouth to catch snowflakes. The next day, as we hiked off-trail past Pear Lake and scrambled semi-technical terrain to our summit, fatigue and fear fell off the radar as the main risk factors for a missed turn-around time, supplanted by frequent stops to admire icicles and ice crystals in puddles. The boy likes his snow and ice. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Excited to see (and eat)
snow!
A particularly striking ice
crystal.
The snow intensified after Heather Lake and accumulated to half an inch. We camped at Emerald instead of Pear Lake to avoid wind exposure at the unforested campsites there. Other than the tooth brushing fiasco, Parker enjoyed a warm night in Vicky’s strap-truncated 15 degree sleeping bag, though I did fill some extra volume with my down parka instead of using it as usual as a pillow.
The storm cleared out the atmospheric filth of the so-called “odyssey of smells” between the Grapevine and the Sierra, creating views I’d never thought possible of peaks as distant as North Pal and rectangular farm plots halfway to Paso Robles. Saturday was sunny, still, and not cold enough for an actionable CPS report—good summit weather for a child with the thermal inertia of a hummingbird.
We climbed slabs from Pear Lake and aimed for the west side of the obvious north ridge of Winter Alta, where we gained the crest and scrambled on a moderately exposed (blunt) knife edge towards the summit. Parker of course ignored views of the Tablelands to the east and the lakes to the west to focus on icicles. I considered crunching into one like Kedron but decided that if Parker followed suit and the top incisor that was hanging by a thread dropped into the jumble of talus at our feet, it might tip us over from cautious enthusiasm and even near joy to nuclear meltdown, as we have lost all three of his baby teeth so far (two to his swim teacher’s pool and one to a stone retaining wall). That and there were a lot of marmot droppings on the ridge.
Class 2 or 3 ridge—a little easier
for him than Chasm of Doom.
As Parker approached the summit, I wondered—recall aforementioned parental illogicality—whether the vertiginous and magnificent panorama that was about to explode from behind Winter Alta would blow his mind. After his eyes rose above the high point and the snow-covered divide and verdant slopes of the Kaweah drainage unfolded before him, he just tapped the summit and found a flat rock to eat the treats he’d chosen from the hamster feeders in the Sprouts candy aisle. He looked weary. I hoped he was proud. It was a big day even for a kid who’s been running ten miles per week to train for cross country races.
Parker about to summit: views
unfolding, brain cycles maybe whirring.
Us on the summit with a tooth
not long for this world.
We descended from the first pass to the east and took snow covered scree and talus towards Pear Lake. Apart from pizzagate, the evening passed pleasantly as I remembered to enforce toothbrush time before cocooning in our bags. Salami was the end of the dangling tooth, which I stashed in a “don’t open this until we’re home” backpack compartment because atmospheric density at 10k is too low for the tooth fairy. We finished reading Ralph S. Mouse by headlamp and I tucked Parker in for the night. “What are you going to do now?” Parker asks me the same question every night after I tuck him in. “Just sleep,” which I did after only a few expensive Garmin satellite texts with Vicky.
The next morning Parker was so anxious to get to In-N-Out—he’s only eaten there twice but loved it on a Christmas tree excursion with the Nelsons—that he nearly refused an unannounced side trip to the top of the Watchtower. His anxiety melted away as we jogged down the rest of the trail (cue the final “this is fun!”) as my decrepit nearly forty year old tendons protested against running downhill with fifty pounds on my back. Anxiety returned when a car accident blocked all lanes of the 198, forcing us back five miles to bypass the closure, but we eventually got to In-N-Out (a meal for two for $11!) and continued home, light bribes to read easing us through a four hour drive as Parker worked his way through the pile of books I’d stashed by his car seat.
So it appears that I have kept my promise to Jeremy: 15 miles, 5000 ft of elevation gain, an 11,300 ft summit, and negligible trauma. A solid first multiday backpack and summit.
More pictures here.