Sunrise Campground to Yosemite Valley/The End
This is it. I think as I tear down camp this morning. We’re trying to get up and out early, the packing made all the easier by the fact that we’re both almost out of food, and by this point on the trail everything has it’s own home inside my backpack.
Today we’ll climb a mere 1,200 feet up to a small pass before we drop 6,000 feet down into the heart of Yosemite Valley. For the first time in nearly three weeks I think about Keith’s car parked and left unattended in an overflow lot. Boy, I really hope it’s still there.
For the first half of the day we’re the only two hikers on the trail. Switchbacking down, steeply, unrelentingly, through the trees still chilly in the early morning before the sun has warmed their branches. Just before Half Dome we hike through a burn from two years before which has transformed this once lush tree-filled valley into an other worldly grey moon scape, the land dotted with the blackened skeletons of roasted trees, as the sun sears down from on high.
Rounding the corner at the base of Half Dome and there they are! The tourists whom I’d known we’d encounter at some point today. We cruise on past the turn off to Yosemite’s most iconic rock formation, our only direction today is down. Each time we stop to let uphill traffic pass us they ask how the summit of Half Dome was. At first we answer truthfully: didn’t climb it, hiking the JMT, 18 days, yeah long, views are probably a little smokey, it’s a good challenge, yep climbed it previously. This conversation is unsatisfying for the question asker, and belabored for us and after a time we revert to the tried and true method of lying. We tell each passing tourist who asks “how was it?” with “amazing, but a little smokey” at which point they smile and move on and we are freed from the longer conversation that comes with being totally honest. Plus, we’re not being totally dishonest, the views from the top of Half Dome are amazing, and it doesn’t take a genius to presume that the smoke that has filled the entire valley will be present up there too.
The air warms around us as we pass into lower climes. Nobody passes us going downhill, we have strong hiker legs now and the complete disregard for personal comfort that comes with thru hiking. Waves and waves of tourists pass us on the uphill though, and it doesn’t take long to notice the conspicuous lack of American accents. It feels like all of western Europe decided to vacation in Yosemite this year.
Down. Forever hiking down hill, when we turn onto the Mist Trail and we’re so close but the traffic jam of day hikers is worse here than ever. I turn off the part of my brain that is keeping time and just allow myself to make forward progress when I can, allowing others to pass where I must. A Russian man presses into the back of me as I wait for a scared woman to descend the slippery steps. Mist swirls around us, water thundering as it flies into space and disappears. “Come on, come on, come on” I hear him mutter impatiently, as though we’d all decided to hold him up intentionally. Finally he skips around us on a sketchy side trail and is out of sight until we pass him 10 minutes later deeply engrossed in the task of taking a selfie with Vernal Falls.
And then, as suddenly as falling asleep we’re down onto pavement. Bodies, cars, screaming children swirl around, all oblivious to our personal victory.
Should I be feeling something more than this? I think to myself as we make our way back to the car. Am I supposed to cry, be overwhelmed with the magnitude of our accomplishment? But then again, it’s only backpacking, and while I feel proud, happy, grateful, anything beyond that is a dishonest emotional balm, applied in hindsight to give gravity to a situation, writing the story in reverse. I text my family, my friends, “we’ve done it!” Then I turn to look at the thousands of people around me, each on their own paths, as oblivious to our accomplishment as we are to theirs.
Back at the car we let the AC rush over us, the glass blocking out the sounds of the valley, so pressing and foreign after weeks in the mountains (Keith’s car wasn’t stolen, how polite) Then, giddy with delight of forward movement without physical exertion we drive to the showers. Inside I scrub myself twice over until the water stops running brown and I’m transformed from a thru hiker into just another Yosemite tourist.
I sit in the dappled shade of a bench while I wait for Keith and stare at the obese squirrel chattering at my feet, eager for food I will not give it.
Our time on the trail was wonderful, but it wasn’t magically transformative in the way you hear written about in books that are made into movies staring Reese Witherspoon. Our time on the JMT was bigger though, emotionally and physically immense in a way that pushes away everything else outside of the dirt path that is your home. However temporary that home may be.
Keith emerges squeaky clean and pink and we walk to get ice cream. Tomorrow we’ll start the drive home, merging back into our regular lives, our real lives, at least for now.
