Red's Meadow

            by Joshua Caraco

 

I stood and looked through a ten-mile valley with a mountain behind and jagged rock faces on either side.  I had been looking at the beautiful rocks all day as I hiked through the valley, but what caught my attention at that point was the sunset; it was something out of a Van Gogh painting.  Wispy clouds swirled from an orange-yellow into a salmon pink and finally a pale purple before fading into night.  I walked back down to our campsite in the dark and thanked John and Christina for inviting me on their John Muir Trail hike.  Nature is something special.  Being out in the middle of nowhere enjoying a sunset from 10,000 feet above sea level was all I wanted; it was all I needed after a long hard year of school and family problems.  John was one of my brother’s best friends.  Christina was John’s girlfriend.  John didn’t invite me on the trip because of my brother’s death, he invited me because of the love of nature he knew I had (and will always have for that matter).  The sunset that night was surprising and amazing, but nature always surprises and amazes me.  What I didn’t expect to surprise me on the trip was the people.      

Two days after the sunset we stayed at a campground called Red’s Meadow, which is next to a national monument named Devil’s Post-Pile.  From our trail book the monument looked tacky; when we got there it was a different story.  The rock formation was carved by the melting of a glacier.  It appears as perfect octagonal rods standing next to each other, solid.  It looks like Superman’s fortress of solitude without the cave.  Red’s Meadow is an attractive place to stay because it has a “resort”: a café, store and showers. The store, café and showers are the only ones for miles.  

Our first order of business upon reaching the site was to set up tents.  This was a little difficult because the site seemed very crowded, unusually crowded for a place out in the middle of nowhere.  After setting up the tents we went to take showers.  With several days hiking without having a shower it was an event.  The showers at Red’s are very large individual stalls made of stone.  The faucets emitts what we referred to as “one temperature fits all” water.  For soap we had only Doctor Bronner’s, which most hikers know merely gives you the illusion of being clean by causing you to smell like peppermint. 

            After showers we walked out of the campsite to the road.  At the road we turned towards the resort.  “Oh man, I can’t concentrate,” John said. “All I can think about is a beer and some food.”

            “Yeah that sounds really good,” Christina and I agreed.  It really did. We packed good trail food, but the thought of “resort” food and beer was rather exciting.

We got up the road a little ways and found two cabins.  “I’ll bet that’s it,” John said.  We walked into one of them.  “So is this the resort?” we asked the energetic, young brunette who was working there.

            “Yeah, this is the café and that’s the store,” she said pointing.

            “Do you have beer?” John asked.

            “You can buy some in the store and bring it over here.”  We all sat down and started to look at the menu.  Cheeseburgers. Oh yes. Greasy burgers and beer. 

“Josh, why don’t you order us two double cheese burgers and whatever you want and we’ll go get some beer.”

            “Deal,” I said, being the only one under 21 and also quite comfortable sitting.  The brunette came over and noted two double cheeseburgers and a patty melt.

            When John and Christina came back they had a six-pack of Sierra Nevada.  This was the best Sierra Nevada I have ever had; it wasn’t water.  Up at high altitude, and after a long day of hiking, two beers will get you a little more drunk than it will at sea level.  This is not to say that any of us got sick, or to the point where we couldn’t walk straight, or even to the point where we couldn’t make coherent conversation; it is only to say that when the others started to arrive, and follow in a similar practice, it was like a party.

Adam and Sarah were two who we had met on the trail earlier in the week.  We had noticed them at the campsite and told them to meet us at the resort if they wanted.  They sat down around the same time our food showed up.  Earlier in the week, while on the trail, we had learned that Adam had gone to the same high school as John, Bishop O’Dowd, but was two years ahead.  This was one reason we were excited to see them at Red’s.  We started to talk.  Sarah grew up on the east coast and met had Adam in Santa Barbara.  They were hiking at about the same pace as us, but they were going to hike the entire trail.  They would be out for even longer than their pace would suggest due to little excursions along the way. 

“My friend, Jessica, she went to O’Dowd too, maybe you remember her. Anyway, is meeting us here with some shrooms so we can just be out for a couple of days trippin’ in the wilderness.” 

“Was she really hot?” John asked. 

“No, she’s super cool though…oh you must be thinking of Jessica Rodriguez.” 

“Oh, yeah.”

“She was definitely a looker.”

“That’s not really the design of our trip but yeah not much of a better place to trip.” 

While we were talking and sipping on beers with Adam and Sarah, a strong guy of about five-eight came in and sat down next to us. His name was Nick, and he was fascinating.  John asked him why he decided to hike the trail and he responded,         

“Well, about a week and a half ago I got fired from my job.  I looked at my wife kinda jokingly and said, 'I should go hike the John Muir Trail or something.'  She looked right at me and said, ‘Yeah, you should’.” He nodded as he told us.  “So I packed some stuff, pretty rushed, and mailed my food drop; I don’t even know if it’s gotten there. Then I came out here.”

            “That’s awesome,” I said.  He was very calm when he told us his story, I didn’t think that telling him being fired was awesome would offend him, and come to think of it I really didn’t think at all; I was too impressed.  It didn’t offend him; there was some kind of acceptance for out of the ordinary things.

            “That’s really cool that you have a clear vision and purpose being out here.  What was your job?” was John’s initial response.

“I’m an engineer from Minnesota.”

“I think I’m gonna have to find ways to get fired from my jobs… Yeah, mom I got fired again.  Guess I’m just gonna have to go do some hiking,” John said while Christina, Nick, Adam, Sarah and I laughed.  Nick then asked us where we were from and where we were going to school.  John had just graduated from Boulder and Christina was in school at Vanderbilt; we were all born in Berkeley.  When the question got to me I explained that I was still in high school.

“You know that’s pretty cool,” Nick said. “I wish I could have done something like this when I was in high school.”  Yeah, I thought, this is pretty cool; I am the only high-schooler around here.

            The door opened.  Three men and a woman with the look of backpackers entered the café, none of them high-schoolers.  “Cheeseburgers,” one of the men said, looking at the food on our table.

            “Yeah,” we said, laughing with understanding.

They sat down and started to look at the menu.  “Get a double cheeseburger,” I said.  “I got a patty melt and it was good, grilled onions and all, but they charge the same amount for like half the food and I’m still kinda hungry.”

“Thanks,” they said. 

The woman was a vegetarian; she ate fish though, so she ended up with a tuna melt.  Her name was Sarah.  She had curly red-brown hair.  She was about five foot six.  She was a teacher from Seattle.  She had a philosophy similar to Nick’s, that things would work themselves out. 

“My car is parked in Yosemite Valley.  I don’t really have any idea how I will get back from Whitney.  I plan on just getting there a day before I need to, in order to get back, and trying to hitch a ride to my car,” she told us later.   

            “You all JMT hikers?” John asked.

            “Yeah,” they answered. “You too, huh, man there seem to be quite a few of us.”  This made me look around the room.  It wasn’t a very big place, just room for the table I was sitting at, one other large rectangular table and a few chairs at a counter.  With just ten of us it seemed fairly full.  Something was happening, which not many hiking the trail that month expected.

Two more guys entered the café and sat down at the large table with Sarah and the other three.  Ben and Nate were the names of these two brothers.  Ben was about six two and pretty big.  Nate was about five ten and not as big but in great shape.  They were hiking the entire trail in Crocs.  Crocs, if you don’t know, are rubber shoes with holes in the tops often used for gardening.  Their soles get no traction.  You can buy them for about thirty bucks in any outdoors store or pharmacy.  Hiking the John Muir Trail in Crocs would be like playing football in ballet shoes.

Many more entered the café that night, people from all over the country, from Texas and Tennessee to Berkeley and Seattle to little towns none of the others had heard of.  Most of the people were in their thirties but ages ranged from me to Herb and Al who were in their sixties and seemed from a different time, especially with names like Herb and Al.  Most were men but there were a handful of women also.  We discussed why we were there.  We shared tips about blisters and stories of what we had seen.  The words George W. Bush and Al Qaeda were never mentioned.  There were no arguments between science and religion; our science was when to get up and what to eat, our religion was the outdoors.  Perhaps thirty hikers in all gathered that night in a café meant to hold only a few families who took buses to get there.

As we walked away the next morning we said no formal good byes.  We expected to see many of our new friends on the trail and thought we might be camping with some of them that night.  We walked through Inyo National Forest, which  looks like what an ant would see walking through a pile of burnt sticks that a child has attempted to make a fire with.  I thought back to the night before.  Nate had asked the waitress if she had ever seen the café get like that; she replied, “Never.”