20240714 Yosemite Valley to Bridgeport (mile 963)
In his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums Jack Kerouac's main narrator, Ray Smith, takes a trip out of San Francisco with fellow zen poet and general mountain-man friend, Japhy Ryder, to climb the Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada. I read the book following a field trip to the Cairngorms in Scotland during my first year at university. A friend had recommended it and I related to the main theme: the conflicting pull of both town and country. The dilemma posed by the story is simple: how to participate in the enlightening power of nature, while not missing out on the wild San Francisco jazz parties?
Granted I was living in Enfield, not California, and I had only just seen my first mountain at this point. But it resonated all the same, and would be a common thread which I would return to in the decade to come. It was something which I had been aware of as we rushed to get into Yosemite Valley, obviously an unmissable side quest in its own right, but also partly due to the logistical impossibility of streaming the England vs Netherlands Euro 2024 semi-final on trail. As much as I had embraced the past months of simple living out in the wild, habits from the past life had not totally gone away.
In the end we managed to watch the game, barely, having strung together a patchwork of streams across two phones and the laptop of a Dutch couple road-tripping the western US, and who just happened to be there at the same time as us. It had been a difficult watch, with all of us variously getting kicked off the cafe WiFi, and, after missing the last minute winner from Watkins, I vowed to watch the final in a proper bar with a real television.
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Hitching up out of the valley could not have been more starkly contrasted to the journey down into it. Directly beneath the imposing verticality of El Capitan (2,308m) we had a silver haired couple stop for us in a van emblazoned with a flower power 'magic bus' mural (Bristol Jasper, who we had been hiking with since Red's Meadow, informed me that they were 'dead-heads', a new phrase for me). The ride back up to Tuolumne Meadows was no less beautiful, though rather than riding in the back of a pick-up we perched on the rough-and-ready wooden bench in the back of our new hippy friends' van-slash-apartment. At the trailhead we ate dinner with them and drank wine before ambling off into the night to walk to a campground six miles away, just outside of the draconian camping restrictions around Tuolumne.
When we arrived at the tent site it was late and dark and a strange crew greeted us with suspicion. Apparently there to fix up a public campground and make it fit for visitors, they seemed primarily interested in mocking our British accents. They were drunk and dancing around a large bonfire when we met them. Even in the gloom the campground looked a bit of a state: nothing but some half-built outbuildings and a dozen cheap wardrobes and closets in various states of disrepair. In the morning they had built the fire back up and sat around smoking cannabis, and were taking it in turns to go down to the lake to brush teeth and spit in the water. We filled up our water, trying to avoid the soap scum and Colgate flotsam. Everyone seemed a little lost. I spoke to a young man named Tanner from Utah pacing in circles on the shore. "I love your accent!" he said, "Are you from New Zealand?"
It was later that day that we reached the junction of the PCT with a side trail that would, we believed, take us back out of the mountains to the east, towards the town of Bridgeport. This would involve a couple of high passes, and would probably mean far fewer hikers than on the well trodden PCT. We eyed the darkening sky with trepidation at this thought - since the day before there had been frequent threats of thunderstorms, and the forecast suggested that the next couple of days could be the worst of it. But we had read on FarOut that Bridgeport had a sports bar (Rhino's Bar & Grill), and our decision had been made. We turned off and headed up the overgrown side trail, off the FarOut red-line (and it's reassuring comments on water sources and tent sites), and into the unknown.
The reason I had The Dharma Bums in my mind for this side trail was that I had noted on our maps that we would be climbing up Matterhorn Canyon for a big chunk of the first day. Characteristically, the side trails in the Sierra are usually sizeable hikes in their own right, and are one of the reasons why progress through this relatively short section of trail takes so long - the remoteness (if you need to carry seven days' food to hike five day's trail, that's going to slow you down).
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The PCT is of course just a means to an end, and all of the many side trails are a worthy day out in and of themselves. This trail in particular passed through a stretch of country stunning enough for Ray Smith and Japhy Ryder (the barely concealed pseudonyms of Kerouac himself and poet Gary Snyder) to have come all the way up from San Francisco. It made me smile to think of them peering down that very same valley that we were slogging up on that July morning. In his excellently researched project, Retracing Kerouac, J. Haeske identifies the likely route taken up the Matterhorn as following Horse Creek from the Twin Lakes area, bringing them up the eastern face of the mountain before eventually peering down into our canyon. Kerouac himself does not reach the top of the mountain in the book, stopping short a little way before the summit. Through fear or exhaustion, he is pinned to a ledge while Snyder pushes on, but finally has an epiphany that leads to him joyously running the rest of the way down - and led to the coining of a saying: "You can't fall off a mountain."
70 years ago it would have been some feat to make that climb, as they did, so late in the season. As we circled around the Matterhorn clockwise, following Sawtooth Ridge via Burro Pass and then Mule Pass, and finally down to Twin Lakes, I thought about those sun bleached grainy photos that had sometimes cropped up in my research of the PCT, of the OG thru-hikers who had first decided to walk the trail from Mexico to Canada. More often than not they did it in Levis and carrying huge steel-framed packs, and without the aid of GPS or a smartphone, and I reflected on how dependent we were on technological advances in order to enjoy this wilderness as we were.
I had the football on my mind too though. It had been an underwhelming tournament from England's perspective, but a final was a final. At one point a huge cricket flew straight into me, at which point I deftly chested it down and had to resist the urge to take it on the volley with my left foot. Was my focus on not missing the game taking away from the pure enjoyment of the trail?
All afternoon the ominous cracks of thunder could be heard echoing around the valleys, until eventually the sky darkened and harsh white lightning split the tension and lit up the clouds. As we began our final descent, fat heavy raindrops began to fall - our first proper rain on the trail. We resisted stopping to pull out our raincoats for a while but it soon became clear that this rain wasn't easing up any time soon (all of this I took as a good omen for the English game).
That night we camped on the shores of Barney Lake and watched the uppermost tops of the mountains turn pink as the sunset peeled through the clouds many miles away behind the walls of our enclosed little valley.
In the morning we ran the remaining miles and ate breakfast at the diner by Twin Lakes. We had no trouble hitching and a charming old couple let us stow our packs in the back of their truck and ride in the rear passenger seats. "Have you heard the news? Donald trump has been shot. Don't worry, he's okay, but it's happened." We had already clocked some of the Trump 2024 flags on our walk down through the campground and gathered that we were probably far enough from the urban core of California that we should watch what we said, none of us being wildly in favour of another Trump presidency. Jean and Johnny, the elderly couple who had just picked us up, were absolutely lovely though. They had been taking summer trips to Twin Lakes for 56 years, first as a young couple, then with the kids, and now with the grand kids. They dropped us off on Main Street and carried on to church. "God bless you all!"
It turned out the Main Street was the only street, and we set about finding a room. This took no time at all, and we found availability at the Bridgeport Inn. Interestingly, J. Hearske speculates that this could have been the fancy establishment where Kerouac and Snyder went to eat after their own mountain excursion. If so, it has certainly fallen on hard times since. Splitting an $80 twin room there three ways made it one of the cheapest town nights on trail, something we promptly set about rectifying in Rhino's Bar & Grill over the road.
The football never did come home, but it was nice to be able to watch it in a suitable setting. We ended up staying there for nine hours eating bar food and drinking PBR, and ultimately watching the Copa America final too. A great day by any stretch of the imagination.
