I decided to title this blog “Good Cop/Bad Cop” because it is always easy to write about our National Parks looking through Rose Colored Glasses in a Ken Burns description, and that’s what most writers do. But, the parks have a dark side I think could use a little light. Both GC/BC are accurate descriptions. The parks would do themselves a favor by marketing the reality of todays parks and drop visitation numbers which in turn saves the park. Instead, all you see in media presentation of the parks are those wondrous things for which they have been set aside. You will learn of the “Dark Side” and the “Dirty Little Secrets” that are attached to these nature niches if you have the time to read “Bad Cop”
Good Cop: Yosemite Valley has “The Good,” “The Bad,” but no “Ugly.” Yosemite Falls is the fifth highest falls in the world, El Capitan is the highest unbroken cliff face in the world, and the trees here are some of the largest and oldest on the planet. The Valley floor sits at 4,000 foot elevation and the sheer canyon walls soar from its lush fen and forested edges. One of the first things I noticed was the wildlife in Yosemite doesn’t run around with a chip on their shoulder. At first I thought it was that California Glow, Peace and Love, Let It Be and efforts by the Rainbow Coalition Wildlife Management Team. As it turns out with a hundred year history of no hunting pressure this is truly where deer have no fear, bear enjoy dining with you, and squirrels are overly, neighborly.
Bad Cop: You might not want to read the Bad Cop portion of this blog. If you cannot tolerate reality, skip these scenarios.) It took a lot of computer thumping to finally book a string of eleven days in Yosemite Valley. It’s campground bingo. If you want to stay you have to be willing to move every other day. It’s like musical chairs--only with Campers. Every morning we all get up and move to each others sites.
Many national parks, including Yosemite, have their own jails. I had not been in Yosemite for an hour before human conflict raised it’s ugly head. We arrived at our “Reserved Site” late in the afternoon and found another vehicle parked in half of it. We parked across the street in an empty site and found the campground host. He came down and found that the vehicle belonged to someone in the Sherpa Base-camp site next door. It was a tribe of young guys with more vehicles and tents than sites are allowed and one of them decided to take ours too. They said he was around and would be right back to move. The camp host said I couldn’t stay where I was parked because that was someone else’s reservation. He asked if I would park our motor home in my site next to Sir Edmund Hillary, Jr.’s truck until he returned, and park our car over in Sherpa Base-camps site. Trying to chill, get along, go with the flow, mellow out, get into the Yosemite State of Mind, we said yes. That was our first mistake. A ranger with no Cojones came by before we went to bed and did nothing. He should have written a ticket and called a wrecker. Climbing Boy never returned--until midnight when he decided he should organize his gear and his truck right next to our window. He woke up Gaila, but I snored through the whole episode.
By morning, not only was the truck still parked inches from my door, my car was boxed in by more Climber Boy cars in their site which should only have two vehicle. That did it. By now I realized that they all knew he wasn’t coming back until late. He was on the side of a mountain somewhere. They had been messin’ with me, lying to the gutless ranger law enforcement officer driving around with blinders on, and taking advantage of my good nature. Unfortunately, like Teddy Roosevelt who helped set much of this park preservation system in place, I “Walk Softly but Carry a Big Stick.”
I decided to have a good Ole Marine Corps Reveille at six o’clock in the morning. I walked over in the middle of Sherpaville and started screaming orders and kicking tents. I was so convincing, people in other campsites who where doing nothing wrong got up and started moving their cars.
“OKAY BOYS. YOU WANNA #$%&$ WITH ME? WHO’S DRIVING THE JEEP WITH CANADIAN PLATES? WHO OWNS THE RED TRUCK IN MY SITE? I WANNA SEE HEADS COMING OUT OF THESE TENTS. I’LL HAVE A WRECKER AND WORTHLESS RANGER HERE TOWING ALL THIS SHIT OUT OF HERE IN TEN MINUTES IF THINGS DON’T START MOVING. I’M TAKING A SHORT WALK AND WHEN I GET BACK I WANNA SEE THAT SHIT HAS DISAPPEARED.”
That got all their attention. They started coming out of tents everywhere. Most of them didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Poor Gaila was in the motor home watching me bark orders in the middle of all these tree tall young guys and just started writing my obituary. As it turned out everyone was real cooperative after that. They got to get up early and enjoy the morning sunrise, I got possession of the site I rightfully owned for two days, and the the worthless ranger didn’t have to do anything.
I’m not really a big bully. It is actually something I learned in the Marine Corps and fine tuned while the Personnel Manager of a Pie Company. It’s not how tall you are, it’s how loud you are. It’s all about volume control. I actually liked these these guys. I just couldn’t tell them because they were acting like a bunch of assholes.
Good Cop: I don’t want to sound like I’m softening, but I am finding a lot of great hikes and solitude not far from the maddening crowd. This valley, full of trinket merchants, can easily compare to the temple where Jesus threw out the peddlers, but is only about one percent of Yosemite. It IS necessary to fight your way in, establish an Alpha, top-dog status among inconsiderate, un-enforced fellow campers but then find those niches of nature that take some sweat equity and grab some alone time. My guess is that 99% of the visitors here never get more than a mile from the nearest trailhead. That is the passport to sanity. I have been a National Park supporter for over fifty years but now I realize that the patients are running the asylum. Leaving the maddening crowd behind is as easy as a short hike or a backcounty permit to Yosemite’s lofty magical places. Snow melt has swollen the many waterfalls that surround the valley and continue to redefine its shape in a process so slow that you really can’t wrap your mind around it. The Merced River rushes by our campground doing the same.
Bad Cop: The saga continues. I have tried real hard to get my California Glow on. I thought I was getting into the Zen of camping, living the moment, feeling free and easy. I decided not to let the Sherpa Base Camp next door irritate me. I was actually more irritated with the park service because they enforce nothing--I thought. Even though the Sherpa Pigs were doing everything wrong the rangers were afraid to go into their site and do their job. But, after midnight they knocked on MY door and said I had to get the ice chest out of my car. Again, I was sleeping through the whole episode but Gaila was shaking me awake and yelling through the window that their was no food in it. “Doesn’t matter. Store it in a food box.” By the time I was conscious the ranger was gone and I had to get out of bed to take an empty ice chest out of my car. No food in it. Bought it at Walmart for insurance because the refrigerator was acting up. I guess the bears in Yosemite are smarter than the rangers. They know an ice chest means food. I go out and look over at Sherpa Base Camp--ice chests and coolers scattered on the ground everywhere. Two cars and a camper parked in the site and out on the road, five tents and two people in sleeping bags on the ground, cooking gear and food items on picnic tables and on top of food storage boxes. The night before remember, my car was parked in Sherpa Base Camp because they had half my site occupied (with the same ice chest in the same backseat)--BUT DID THE RANGER WAKE THEM UP AND COMPLAIN---NOOOO. I’m thinking these kids must belong to the Superintendent. They have some kind of Yosemite immunity. They break every rule in the book and nothing. They are the Teflon Dons of the valley. I don’t make this accusation without cause. After jolting Sir Edmund awake and evicting him from my site I noticed his red truck with Colorado plates parked the rest of the week directly across from the Park Supers office in a small private looking lot that only official “Ranger Club” vehicles should be able to drive into. Luckily we are moving today to another campground, another site. I may even find new campground management with enough backbone to “Give Peace a Chance.” I know that Sherpa Base Camp will be as happy to see me go as I am to be gone.
Good Cop: Yosemite has 400 full-time, year-round rangers. It is obvious that is not enough to combat the invasion of visitors that begins each spring. Another, 400 reinforcements are being brought in right now to help repel the Spring Offensive. Not wanting to do battle anymore than I had already, the backcountry office and I were on a first name basis. Having never hiked here before I was confused on where to backpack. In addition, Yosemite had 156% of snowpack this past winter. They call it, “Sierra Cement.” Snow here is very moist and heavy as it is formed when a mixture of wet Pacific wind slams into the High Sierra Range. If you have any question on how harsh it can get, read the “Donner Party” history. To get higher into the backcountry it is necessary to visit this area in the middle of the summer. One of the top ten hikes among Packtoters like myself would be the John Muir trail. It is a spectacular 200 mile trek that is unfortunately still under seventy inches of snow this spring. I will get close but the John Muir will have to reside on my “bucket list” still longer.
Bad Cop: Okay, we are into day four and after 96 hours of humming Kum ba ya and John Lennon’s “Imagine” my nerves are soothing and my temper is less seething. I am starting to understand the park service management plan. I didn’t understand at first. They have so many rules, regulations and laws that visitors must follow, rangers had to be recruited from the ranks of prestigious law schools around the country. Then I wondered, “why would a law student become a ranger?” Actually they are the law students that flunked out. The park service needed a large Corps of Employees that could automatically look perplexed when asked a direct question about any particular rule. To fine tune this system they also needed law enforcement rangers that would not actually enforce regulation. Again, I didn’t understand this the first couple days. I was following all the rules. Every time I questioned the campground host about twice as many vehicles and people squatted and partying in the sites next to me he would say, “That’s really not enforced.”
Another problem is doing any full day hiking. Because of the reservation system we are in a new site almost every day. The “Rule” is, “If you occupy a site before noon you will be charged a camping fee for the night before.” I thought that meant we couldn’t move until noon every day. That was before I found out that rules are not enforced.
There are black bears in all the campgrounds. I know this because rangers come through the campground at night blasting air canister horns at them. Between Sherpa Base Camp and annoying rangers I think I will be sleep deprived by the time I leave this valley. Let me quickly take the bears side of the issue. After a long winters nap the bear wakes up extremely hungry. Wafting up from the valley floor comes all these delicious fragrances--steak, hot dogs, potato, onion and mushroom stir fry, fish, corn casserole, barbecue chicken, baked beans, smoors and more. All that is available as a natural food source for bears in the spring is grass. Tell me, if you’re a bear are you going for the grass or the campground? We all know the answer to that. I know bears are smart but they are not as smart as people. So if the park service can’t educate people on food handling, how are they ever going to educate bears on food snatching. This story is older than Yogi Bear, and yet the park service still has no clue. Stop honking at bears in the dark and “ENFORCE THE RULES YOU SPEND ALL WINTER DREAMING UP!”
Good Cop: It took us a few days to learn all the rules that aren’t enforced in Yosemite. Gaila was talking to a ranger about the possibility of switching reservation sites if something came available. In the conversation she mentioned we would be here eleven days. He said, “You are only allowed seven days in Yosemite.” That surprised us. Most parks and forest service campgrounds are 14 days. Seeing the panic in her eyes he said, “Don’t worry “I know nothing. Did you say seven or eleven.” Gaila said, “SEVEN.”
Not all rangers have attitude problems. There are many dedicated individuals who do a tremendous job. As the park service has grown over the years it has become a bureaucracy like so many other government branches. It is easy to criticize a system that is saddled with the task of protecting natural places from the very society of people that have set them aside for generations to visit and enjoy. It is truly a “Catch 22” and I should not expect perfection from such a precarious mission.
Bad Cop: The first day in Yosemite Valley we decided to first orient ourselves by riding the shuttle system from one end of its route to the other. What we learned was this. “Never get on another shuttle bus.” It was worse than most New York subway rides I have been on during rush hour. You could walk the route faster because of all the road repair traffic stops and traffic jams from all the people who had already given up on being shoe-horned into a shuttle bus. We opted to ride our bikes everywhere. Best decision we could have made. Not that you can day dream on your bike. The walking/bike paths are a gauntlet of very confused people from all over the globe. Some walk/drive on the right-side of the road, others, left. My first attempt at mastering the bike trail from the campground to the visitor center almost turned into tragedy. A had a bare encounter. I was momentarily staring at a women who I thought was taking her pants off. By the time I realized she was just adjusting them down, before pulling them up, I almost ran over another women.
Good Cop: We have met a lot of wonderful people here in Yosemite. Of the thousands that are here you just spark with certain people and become fast friends. If you think of the place as a small city instead of hypocrisy on nature it helps psychologically and keeps you from climbing Half Dome and doing a Full Gainer. As much as I grouse I know I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. I keep telling myself as I look around at the crowds and traffic jams that this valley could be full of fish. If John Muir had not saved it, it would have been dammed just as they did Hetch Hetchy. Being situated less than a days drive from one of America’s densest population centers explains part of the reason this valley is clogged everyday with twice as many vehicles as parking spaces. The logistics problem this valley faces everyday to feed, house and directionally control these numbers is enormous and handled impressively--not to mention waste removal. The only place similar that comes to mind, that I have seen it done better, is Disney World.
Bad Cop: I find it almost humorous how the park service glosses over the Valley history. At a ranger talk we attended the speaker described the valley as occupied by the Native American Miwok & Paiute for thousands of years. When gold was discovered and the 49ers started moving into the valley the tribes were chased out and driven to the other side of the Sierra range. That is all very true, leaving out the small historical fact about genocide. Many tribe members were massacred for being so bold as to not leave, others hunted for years and exterminated as coyotes still are today in most of the country. They wouldn’t be happy here today anyway, an ice cream sandwich costs $4.50. When I got to the counter with my Nutty Buddy I just said, “Shoot Me!”
Good Cop: We rode our bikes as far as we could down valley, then caught a shuttle that had just opened for the season to El Capitan. We wanted to see climbers on the sheer rock face. We talked at length with a photographer/ex-climber who had a scope set up on two climbing teams going up El Cap. He gave us a lot of information on how it is done and the equipment used. When Gaila asked if anyone ever fell he said, “Yes, like yesterday.” A guy fell 60 feet down a chimney rock formation the evening before, landing unconscious on a ledge. They could not rescue him because of nightfall. He never regained consciousness and they brought him down in the morning. Often these climbers are hanging by their nuts. Seriously, the equipment they wedge in the rock face cracks are different size metal ends hooked to heavy wire harnesses. These devices are called “Nuts.” So not only do you have to be nuts to climb El Cap, you have to have nuts.
Bad Cop: Ninety percent of the people I meet here in Yosemite Valley are from Southern California. Southern California is like bungy jumping. You want to try it once, but if you survive you never want to do it again. I think many of the problems I have encountered here in Yosemite are from my lack of perspective. If you come up here from Southern California where 23 million residents out number the population of the whole country of Canada, this place must feel like dying and going to heaven. What I perceive as a zoo, they perceive as utopia. Here you can walk around at night and be relatively safe, if you’re not carrying a fresh baked chicken. At home most of these people expect to be pistol whipped every time they go shopping at Walmart. I think Arnold, the Governator, who is completely out of ideas on how to balance California’s budget should do some camping. An idea hit me over the head immediately after being here only one day. TAX GENERATORS! Californians love generators. Most have at least one. You can’t camp in California without electricity. Californians with one-man tents and light-weight gear still have at least one generator to power their hair curler. If Honda could only design a muffler on their super-quiet high tech generators that turned the puttering of exhaust into birdsong the campground chorus would be tolerable.
Good Cop: I decide I was going to climb Half Dome. I was told their was a lot of deep snow on the approach, the cable posts were not installed for the season, the wooden steps were not attached to the cables, and to get to the top climbers would have to lift the heavy cable from the rock and use it to climb. A picture in the Park newspaper showed hundreds of people climbing. They have even gone to a permit system on summer weekends because so many people want to climb Half Dome. How hard can it be? Well, I found out. I backpacked to Little Yosemite Valley and set camp, then kept moving to the foot of Half Dome. I hit deep snow, but used my hiking poles to get to the area they call “Sub Dome.” Although I saw a lot of hikers coming down the trail early in the day I found no fresh tracks in the snow approaching Half Dome. That should have told me something. Once over the Sub Dome I could see the cables hanging off the rock face. They were cold and damp. Why had I not thought about bringing gloves. I had my down mittens but I didn’t want to ruin them for one round-trip to the top of Half Dome. Then I spotted the “Glove Dump.” Many people throw their worn gloves in a pile near the base of Half Dome and leave them. I sorted through and found a nice, Smurf Blue pair of “Power Grip” gloves. Now I felt like “Spider Man.” I started up the cable hand-over-hand. I could see in the crevasses I crossed, iron poles and wooden 2x4s that make up the step system during the summer season. After two sections of cable I fell (pun intended) into a rhythm. I would climb a section, have cardiac arrest, climb a section, have cardiac arrest. It was all working just fine. But how high is this Half Dome anyway? The steep angle of the Dome blocks out the view of the top and the bottom. Every new horizon on the cable brought into view more rock and more cable. I kept climbing sections then stopping and seeing if I could suck all the oxygen out of Yosemite Valley. My arms and shoulders began to fatigue, my heart was pumping, my lungs were screaming for more oxygen, I wondered how many sixty year old fools they found at the base of Half Dome every year. I finally hit the summit. It was so foggy I couldn’t see my hand unless it was touching my nose. I rolled over on my back and waited for my pulse to come back to normal. There was still some snow on the top. After all that work I couldn’t see a thing. After three-quarters of an hour I felt refreshed enough to try the cables again in reverse. I decided to take my time because eternity is forever. I now understand how people fall to their death every year attempting to climb Half Dome. It is no cake walk. I’m sure the cable posts and steps make a big difference but this climb claims victims every year.
The next morning a woke early and did a 16-mile loop trail to Merced Lake and then a high route back near Half Dome again. Massive amount of snow in the high country, but the route was well marked with cairns and blaze. I made it back to camp by four o’clock and decided to pack up and hike the five-miles back to the valley. Eating dinner with Gaila sounded better than preparing my five-year-old packet of freeze-dried ChiliMac.
Bottom Line: Come to Yosemite with a backpack!
