A bite-size area for kids: 6 miles
in, mini summits, forests on the approach, alpine at camp.Birthdays are a special crux of parenting. Obviously the fourth trimester is terrible: I’d assumed that 40 hour El Cap pushes and regular Caltech all-nighters had prepared me to handle newborns, but the majority of humanity really does suffer through much worse than the contrivances of big walls or double problem set Thursdays. Infants eventually learn to sleep, but birthdays never end. Everyone has one. Everyone is invited. And despite the birthday paradox they seem to be uniformly distributed throughout the year. We have managed to avoid the anthropomorphic hantavirus vector so far, but the RSVP no acrobatics are getting increasingly dubious. Scheduling this trip around birthdays was crux #1.
To be fair, birthdayless weekends for kiddy backpacking did present themselves in the warmth of summer when dragging a six year old to 11,000 ft might have constituted better parenting, but since I’d fixated on a trail with a 100% unreservable permit quota we waited until the (much colder) self-issue season.
After the birthday onslaught came crux #2: a federal government shutdown. We were due to start our trip only one day into it, so I wasn’t sure if the parks were open. I found an NPS contingency plan that said trails and roads would be, so when we arrived at the entrance kiosk I was only a little relieved I wouldn’t have to explain the locked gates to a kid who’d been strapped into a car seat for five hours. The kiosk was empty, so we entered our cash-strapped understaffed NPS lands for free.
A bite-size area for kids: 6 miles
in, mini summits, forests on the approach, alpine at camp.
Parker grinning on a gigantic
boulder near camp.
Unfortunately there were hordes of like-minded people 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 the thunderstorm…
…and after the
thunderstorm.
Our tent was soaked inside out from condensation and rain, so we spread everything out in the car and blasted the heater until the chance of precipitation passed. Although I find the misery of near-freezing rain to be overblown, I had promised Jeremy that Parker would return sufficiently untraumatized for future backpacking trips. We waited until the clearing Vicky mentioned in our morning satellite message exchange.
At 11am we started up the Lakes Trail for Pear Lake. There was an invasive seed boot scrub at the trailhead, so Parker vigorously scrubbed the hiking boots we’d bought 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 bright 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 paradisiacal remoteness beyond, but the happy place is there.
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 the mysterious heuristics of childhood. After some frustrating bilateral negotiations, the US to our Ukraine and Russia (the bright-eyed thirty something newly minted backpacker next door) walked over to ask, “hey, I didn’t catch your name?”
His approach was so clearly prompted by Parker’s distress, and neighborliness has hit such lows in America, that I assumed he wanted my name to report to child protective services. I considered giving him a fake name, but 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, rhymes with comic. What’s up?” “Does your little one want this hot water bottle?”
A timely dry tent: luxury to rival
the Yellowstone Club.
The catastrophe of forgetting Nalgenes, which not only warm sleeping bags bags before the metabolic fires of gratuitously fatty campfire fare ignite but also fill Platypus pouches that collapse under the pressure of infinitesimal submersion, was rivaled in magnitude by the gastronomic extravagance of the family to our other side. Unconstrained by alpinist go-light mantras, they had packed an entire cold pizza. Parker watched them eat it over his bowl of unseasoned noodles. The noodles went cold as he stared in silence. You know you’ve messed up when a six year old is quiet.
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 fell off the radar as the main risk factor 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 too.
Excited to see (and eat)
snow!
A particularly striking ice
crystal.
The snow intensified after Heather Lake and started to accumulate. We camped at Emerald instead of Pear Lake to avoid exposure at the 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 whether the vertiginous and magnificent panorama that was about to erupt 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, shuffled down a bit to a flat rock, and found 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 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 when I tuck him in. “Just sleep,” which I did after only a few expensive Garmin 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.