Sequoia and Kings Canyon: Getting to Know a Boy Scout

Humbling.

There's a saying in life (or at least among screenwriters who are above explosions as catharsis): crisis reveals character. I don't know if it was Plato, or repeat viewings of Showgirls and Dubya reading children's stories that drove the point home, but it is a handy key.

I met Tim while on a bike ride up to Ventura County one Saturday a few months ago. I was riding along by my lonesome; so was he. I asked where he was headed, we were going the same place and pace, and so we rode along and chatted for a few hours. (I know, it could be a gay romance novel.) That's one way I make friends with strangers now that semi-conscious flashes of Hollywood nightlife play a less frequent role in my social life. So I didn't know Tim any better than that: we rode bikes together a few times, that's it. First impression: he seemed like a cool dude.


Starting Out Shooting the Wrong Foot

On Thursday, Tim sent out an email proposing a weekend trip to take a bike ride someplace scenic, like Sequoia National Park. He planned to drive up to Visalia, get a hotel, then do a 120-something-mile climb up through Sequoia and back down to Visalia. I'd never been to Sequoia, and had been meaning to go. But based on my limited knowledge, this plan seemed haphazard and ill informed. I told Tim that Visalia is--how does one say this delicately?--not an ideal vacation destination, and that it was miserably hot in the Central Valley during the summer, well over 100 (sounds cooler as 37 for rational metric users) every day. Apparently he hadn't done much research, beyond seeing a road on a map that went from Visalia up into Sequoia for about 120 miles (sounds even longer as 193 k. Isn't metric fun?).

A hastily unplanned trip was semi-assembled Thursday night: we were to leave the wiggedy-Westside in the early afternoon to beat traffic and secure a camping spot at a cooler elevation of about 7500 feet. Make a fire, smores, all that.

On Friday, I got all my camping and bike gear sorted out, got the trusty old four-cylinder, manual-transmission Toyota 4-Runner out of hibernation in the garage, and waited. By 2, I started to worry. At 4, I accepted that we were fucked, and Google Traffic confirmed my worst fears. At the worst possible time, 5:15, Tim showed up. In his defense, he does not control his workplace. In my defense, I did not tear his testicles from his person like an angry chimp.

As we packed Tim's stuff into my truck, he told me I didn't need to bring my tent; his was big enough to share. I took this gesture as an olive branch for his tardiness, accepted, and left my four-person tent on my porch. Off we went.

Slowly. It took two-and-a-half hours to get from Santa Monica to Valencia, about 30 miles. In that time, I learned that Tim didn't drive stick, forgot the maps at work and didn't have food, so I'd do all the driving and guesswork/navigating and we'd be stopping along the way to shop. I was okay with that; I only had enough coffee in my camping gear for one cup. My like of coffee turned into a conversation about food. We're both pretty health-conscious (surprise), we'd both read Fast Food Nation and such and agreed on what garbage people will gladly consume. I also learned that Tim is a diet-conscious vegetarian who eats fish, milk and eggs, doesn't drink alcohol regularly, never touched a drug, and doesn't drink caffeine because it has severe effects on him. At around 11 that night, we stopped at In-N-Out before hitting Target in Visalia to get camp food. (In our defense, nothing better than In-N-Out was open, except for a suspect food truck--authentic and Mexican, not all LA cupcake-yuppie.) At Target, Tim grabbed a 24-ounce Mountain Dew from the point-of-purchase fridge that he finished before bed. A 24-ounce Mountain Dew has 110 milligrams of caffeine; a can of Red Bull has 80.

The 4-Runner climbed into the beauty of the Sierra Nevadas for over an hour; unfortunately we saw only as far as the headlights shone. But this was not a climb one would do on a bike in 100-plus heat. We got into Sequoia National Park after midnight, seven hours into what could've been a three-and-a-half hour drive. In the park, we found all campsites within the first 30 miles were full. A little after 1 am, we jacked a reserved car camping spot deep in the park. Fuck it.

Tim pulled out his camping gear. He unwrapped a new headlamp from its packaging, and began looking for batteries. It was a full moon--no big deal, he could see fine. Once he'd gotten the headlamp working, he unpacked a Marmot tent, a Marmot subzero-rated bag, Thermarest pad... Really nice gear, and it was all brand new, in the boxes, wrapped in plastic. (He must've spent a month's rent at A-16 Adventure.) After watching him struggle for a moment, I helped him set up his tent, and discovered it was a two-person featherweight backpacking tent--a very tight two-person tent, the kind where you have to sleep with your roommate's feet next to your head to fit. I honestly didn't care, but it was pretty funny when he discovered the tiny footprint of his fancy new tent. We heard yelling and a lot of car alarms going off about 200 yards uphill, but we couldn't see anything but flashing lights. Not our problem, we crashed.

This tent ain't big enough for the both of us.

Needless to say, mapless and all, we were both in the dark about many things. In the morning, we awoke to fresh, cool, cedar-tinted mountain air. We were in a grove of about 150 campsites called Dorst Creek, and apparently a bear had been roaming the area breaking into cars all night in a quest for food. Hence the alarms.

Boy Scout Becomes Him

We geared up to get rolling. Tim had forgotten to bring any cycling food, so I gave him two of my Clif bars to get him through the day. As we pedaled and chatted our way up and down various valleys and mountain sides, we decided we needed nicknames for this trip, for whatever reason. As mentioned, Tim never puffed the magic dragon, had barley sodas in his fridge from a party weeks ago, and I'd have been surprised if he'd kissed the forbidden flower or even tried a non-missionary position. Based on our brief conversations, I knighted him "Boy Scout" for his drugless, drinkless, innocent ways. He liked the nickname--typically the sign of a poorly-chosen nickname--but to me it fit. Boy Scout became him. I told him I was already PJ or "Puddle Jumper" based on an OCD-ish habit I had as a kid of never stepping in puddles. My dad called me that, so I'm partial to it. (I didn't mention I was also known to my brothers and others as "Puh-Puh-Puh-Pat" for my stuttering and other speech impediments as a child, and "Phantom Pooper" for reasons that shall remain undisclosed.)

Legs like tree trunks.

We rode about 20 miles to the main grove of sequoias, which contained the granddaddy of all trees, the General Sherman. It was breath-taking, majestic, awe-inspiring, etc, etc. Words won't do the experience of seeing it in person justice. It has all the detail and twisted wonder of the most spectacular bonsai tree blown up 10,000 times normal size. Big Sherm isn't the oldest sequoia at 2700 years old, but it's amazing to think this tree was already 700 and huge when Joe found out he wasn't the baby's daddy, Jerry Springer-style. Looking at Big Sherm is a little like pondering the stars--an ego-check to your fleeting, insignificant wastes of days during your speck of time on this floating particle of galactic dirt. And there's no cell reception there, which really drives the message home quite profoundly, since it's impossible to relieve your existential angst by diddling for emails or sending a flick via Blackberry messenger to let other people know "where you at?"

Not touristy enough, Tim.

Our little Boy Scout Timmy was as taken aback as I was by the silent majesty of this magical grove of dinosaur trees. Maybe more so, because he jumped the fence and touched the tree to--and I quote--"feel its energy." (He lives in Venice, so I guess I should expect him to want to get all up in a tree's chakra points, even if he doesn't do drugs. Someone has to tweak those Venice Beach stereotypes.) The giant sequoias themselves are almost as sensitive as Boy Scout, and only grow in very specific conditions with regard to sunlight, water, temperature, latitude, elevation and soil. So the groves occur only in very special pockets where the stars align for them, which is why they are such a rare yet massive treasure.

Of course, as we're passing Big Sherm for a second time on the way out of the grove, some dickhead Germans are smoking cigs at the base of the tree. Here we are at John Muir's altar, and they're both puffing away with their three-year-old daughter at their feet. I made a remark about the insensitivity of smoking cigarettes in one of the most precious, rare and endangered forests on earth, a place they'd donated Euros and tread halfway around the bubble to see, which received a nod of approval from an old lady on a bench nearby. "Told them!" I thought to myself. However, I was rebuked for my self-righteous buke with: "Are you a ranger? Then fuck off!" Typical Germans. Rules, moral and otherwise, apply to everyone but them.

Boy Scout heads for another tree tunnel.

Second Impression

We rode around all the major sights of this part of Sequoia, through the tree tunnel and all that unholy crud, then rode another 30 miles to the General Grant grove of sequoias. It was also awesome (strictly in the sense of inspiring awe), but suffered from being second place, literally and figuratively. Imagine you've never seen one of the famous European cathedrals. Yada yada, you're on the steps of the cathedral in Chartres. HOLY SHIT! It's truly a religious experience the first time. An hour later, you're at Notre Dame in Paris. Well, yeah, it's amazing, no doubt about that, but it's not the first place and the first time. (Maybe I should've gone for a sexual metaphor here instead of churches.) Anyway, the General Grant tree is as impressive as the General Sherman; it wasn't anticlimactic, just not as climactic or impactful. (I mix a mean metaphor.)

Turning around to climb back to our campsite after 60 miles in the saddle, the elevation proved too much for Boy Scout, and he limped home a while after me, then sat there in a daze, unable to move for about a half-hour. Such grand plans... Our 75-mile/3500 calorie day killed him, but just imagine he'd have tried that 120-mile trip? Since he didn't bring anything to drink, I gave him an orange soda to get some sugar in his blood, and made dinner.

She was hungry, too.

How prophetic the Boy Scout nickname would prove surprised even a jaded asshole like me. For dinner, he'd brought a can of baked beans. Actually, that was all he'd brought as a meal for this two-day cycling epic--one can of baked beans. Knowing this wouldn't cut it, and that he'd never ride tomorrow if I didn't pump him full of carbs, I made a whole box of mashed potato flakes. (Isn't baked beans and mashed potatoes an English delicacy?) As I finished cooking the potatoes (dumping the flakes in boiling water), Tim was struggling with the concept of can. Yoda may have coined "Do or do not. There is no try." But Boy Scout clearly had a "can I open a can?" Zen-thing going. (Ponder that, Confucius: Can I open a can? It's like a snake eating its own tail.) He was trying to stare his way into a can of beans. Chaucer would've had a field day with this.

"Do you have a can opener?" he asked. This struck me as an extremely odd question in so many ways:

1. He had a Leatherman multi-tool in his hand. 
2. How had he been planning to eat? 
3. What the fuck, man? 
4. He had a Leatherman multi-tool in his hand.

I answered the only way that seemed to make sense: "You're holding a can opener."

Only now do I realize that Boy Scout's multi-tool and knowledge of its multi-myriad uses may have been as new to him as his sleeping pad. (Only when packing to go home did I realize he'd never inflated his self-inflating sleeping pad.) Boy Scout did not know that every Swiss Army knife and multi-tool has a can opener; if the simplest of models only has three tools, it's the thing that's not a knife and not a bottle opener. I extracted the tool and handed it to him. Nope. I took the can, pierced the lid and got halfway around the rim, then handed the set-up to Boy Scout. Suffice it to say that I had to open the whole can. After that, Boy Scout considered eating with his hands, since he had no utensil. Fortunately I dug up a plastic spoon.

Thank God for tent vents.

I will say that his blood sugar was clearly low after bonking and spending eight hours in the saddle pedaling at altitude. I sympathized somewhat; I was not untired after the previous day's grueling drive and the same 75-mile ride. Boy Scout is a smart guy, but obviously his camping/survival skills are on par with my understanding of female psychology. He was clearly new to this game and trying to learn the rules on the fly.

Boy Scout was much more coherent after eating. For my part, I had picked up a box of Target brand red wine during our stop in Visalia, and I got a little less coherent. Naturally, at this time a very large bear dashed right through our campsite with a dozen happy, laughing Latino dudes running after it with flashlights and yelling, banging pots and making noise.

Not the bear.

I'd seen a bear. This was a long time coming, and I became a bit emotional. (It definitely could've been the 2008 vintage from the vineyards of Target that I'd consumed.) I'm not Timothy Treadwell or anything weirder, but I have always respected animals that can kill humans. I always hated fucking Nerf and the Nerfing of the world. Fuck Nerf. Let the bears and big cats live in the wild. Tough it out. Don't like it? Stay indoors.

Kings Canyon 

Go deep.

Clouds above, clouds below.

The next morning, I felt the effects of Target's version of Jesus' beverage of choice. Surprise. But Starbucks Via coffee packets are stronger than Alka-Selzer, and mountain men don't whine about hangovers (nor drink Target wine and resolve its effects with Starbucks). Today's route (which I finagled from some local cyclists the day before) would take us to Cedar Grove, an area in the depths of adjacent Kings Canyon National Park. We started out somewhere around 8000 feet up in Sequoias, and rode 20 miles down-mountain--wheeeeeeeeee!!! It was obvious we'd hit the bottom of the canyon after the first 20 miles, because for the next ten miles of this there-and-back loop, we were climbing again alongside the very rapid-filled Kings River (rapids are a sign of steepness) to Cedar Grove. I already had a feeling that Boy Scout wouldn't make the climb out of Kings Canyon.

Wheeeeee!

The road keeps snaking down like this for 20 miles. What goes down must come up.

Kings Canyon National Park is a huge park featuring a series of steep granite canyons carved by ancient glaciers. I think. The centerpiece is Kings Canyon itself, the deepest gorge in the US (suck it, Grand Canyon!) with vertical drops of up to 8,000 feet--that's like a mile-and-half down when you look over the ledge. Despite its rugged beauty, the park is pretty much off the map among national parks, because very few roads access it--well, one road accesses a small part of it. To plagiarize: "Vehicular access is even more limited than Yosemite as the dead-end canyon approach drive is the only road of any kind within the 462,000 acres of the park and so extended hiking is the only way to visit the wilderness areas."

"Hello, Moses."

Grizzly Falls. Grizz are extinct in CA. Sad irony.

By taking away roads, you effectively preserve the wilderness from the to-do list of about 99% of the population, which includes trusted resource stewards like oilers, miners and loggers. (Then again, if there were oil, they'd find it and find a way. Not having resources is also precious.) I mean, if there weren't a road to the sequoias, or through Yellowstone, how many people would hike even five miles to see them? I'd say about 1%. Look around you.

Don't even need to leave the car.

But I digress; I always do. We were on the only road. And the ten-mile climb up to Cedar Grove, after the 75 miles of undulating roads the day before, had taken its toll. Fortunately, they sold ice cream sandwiches at the campground at the end of the line. I ate one, and was ready to work my way back into and out of this massive gorge. But Boy Scout seemed to lack motivation; he was taking too much time which we couldn't afford to lose. I'm no sports psychologist, but mentally I could tell he doubted himself, which Yoda would've also detected. Boy Scout was thinking of trying, not convinced of doing. After backtracking ten miles downhill to the low point of the gorge, the 20-mile climb out began. And it was now around 11 in the morning and getting hotter by the minute. I began the climb. As luck would have it, Boy Scout got a flat.

This was no fault of his--flats happen. To his credit, he had a spare tube. What he didn't have was a pump to inflate said tube. He had a CO2 cartridge--probably the worst tool ever sold to a cyclist. They're great for one tire, but should you get a second flat, you're empty. And his CO2 cartridge was already empty. Luckily I had a pump and we changed the tire under the midday sun in 100-degree plus heat, using a lot of energy we could ill afford to waste. Though his tire got pumped, his morale had taken another swift kick to the mesolimbic system. He just wasn't going. He was struggling, and later told me he was seeing spots. I went as far as the only water stop on the climb, filled my bottles and knew he wasn't coming any further.

I left Boy Scout at this cougar bar. Shocking.

Once again, a recurring theme of my life's story appeared: I was on my own. For 17 miles. Uphill. LET'S DO THIS. And boy, did I suffer for those hot, unrelenting miles. But I was going to keep going whether it was 17 more miles or 200. That's what I told myself. And it felt like 200 miles. But I would not quit.

I wasn't concerned about Boy Scout, he'd hitch a ride in an RV or something. It's not like I could carry him, and I had my own very real mountains to climb. I only hope he'll be more careful about getting into situations he's not prepared for or can't get himself out of in the future. What would he have done if we'd hiked down into real backcountry? Hitched with a backpacker three days later? That's not really an option. He might've dropped $15K on a helicopter rescue, if he was with someone who could relay the message when there isn't any cell reception. Bottom line: Boy Scout hitched out of Kings Canyon and was fine, but later sent me his photos, and they leave doubts. Mostly about his "lifestyle."

This is a picture Boy Scout took after I went ahead. Curious.

Boy Scout's ride out of the canyon. Again, a curious lack of sleeves.

Aesop's Take-Away

I hope Boy Scout learned a lot, and a bit about self-reliance, rugged individualism, and all that mumbo-jumbo. In places where your character is still considered more important than your possessions--you know, places where people aren't phony facades projecting what they want you to see of them like a Facebook profile, but are judged by their actions--mountain men are the most respected. The West is not all paved-over with Applebee's--just yet. It can be a tough place where water doesn't fall from the sky. (In fact, water is fought over and hoarded like gold.) The West used to make and break men. There are reasons the tough, self-reliant cowboy and mountain man characters evolved in the West, and not in Poughkeepsie or Honolulu. I will not enumerate them here. It's definitely not about having lift on your truck.

I am not a poppa to preach to anyone; I am filled with poo up to my ears and seeping from my faults. But on this trip, I hope Boy Scout became a little less soft, a little more of a mountain man. Boy Scout may have been naive about camping or riding 120-something miles over the Sierras for his first taste of thin air, but that doesn't say anything but that he may simply have lacked experience. Crisis may or may not reveal anything; but I know experience builds character.

Call me a self-hating optimist, but I'm positive he learned just as much about my salty, idiosyncratic character as I did about him.

We're still on speaking terms after 140 miles and 20,000-plus feet on the bike in two days. To me, that's basically a good road trip.

Watching Boy Scout grab a Mountain Dew Code Red from the mini-mart on our last fill-up was a classic finish. Love live Boy Scout. I had a blast.

But, damn, this was like novella length.

Dick!