Across the Curtain

Finally...a new post. I finally have some time (lots of it) and a secure and free internet source so if anyone is still checking in here you'll have some new stuff to feast your eyes on.
The chain of events over the last month and a half has been pretty crazy, i am currently at home in NH milking the parents for another week and have already been here for two but before i get into that we'll go back in time:

The Pass at the top of Fantasy Falls put-in. Drove this one, but didn't boat it..boo

Sleeping spot at the Coloma Club - brings back some good memories

After the South Merced we did some serious driving around and got skunked left and right. I went back to Corvallis for a week and did some hanging out and drove my ass back down to Cali using a friends car. I dumped the car in Coloma and did my best to avoid the vortex , got back in my truck and rallied another 4 hours south to Groveland where i met up with Chris K, Darin McQuoid and Ben Stooksberry at 10:30 at night frantically packing their boats. The offer was on the table - get my shit sorted and join them for a 1:00 AM put-in on the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne inside of Yosemite Park or drive their shuttle and sit around for up to 5 days while they boat 30 miles of expedition style class V. Neither sounded appealing to me so i went for plan C - run shuttle and hike my ass down the GC of the T for up to 5 days while they boated. As it turned out it was a damn fine decision i made. So after 15 hours of driving that day we loaded up in Darins 20 yr old Nissan pick-up and drove 2 hours to Tuolumne Meadows, a stealthy drop-off was made and i drove out of the park finally getting to bed at 3am. I had left Corvallis at 7:30am the morning before and i was beat but the sleep didn't last long. I was up at 6:30 packing my bags and heading into the park to start chasing these guys down the river on foot. As it turns out kayaking in Yosemite is highly illegal - why? i have no idea, something about our impact on the wilderness - yet rock climbers have legal rights to place permanent gear (metal bolts) into any piece of rock in the park they feel fit. What do kayakers leave behind? nothing - we just float on water. Backwards? yes! But as this year proved - its not all that hard to boat in Yosemite since neither our team nor another that came in a week later were caught by rangers.

The drive up to the trail head - i had to set shuttle myself and thumb a ride to the top, i got picked up by a young couple from NJ. First thing the girl (who was driving) said to me was, "I'm an anxious driver, you should put your seatbelt on" I gulped and gladly accepted the ride. Anxious she was, anytime a car driving the other way passed us she slammed her brakes on, if there was a curb she hit it (3 times actually), if there were people on the side of the road she would freak out as well...i made it to the top with my life though and plotted on down the trail.

Yosemite from the road is pretty amazing itself - the wilderness side of it is even more amazing though.

Tenacity or 350 board feet of lumber

The far end of the Tuolumne meadows where the river is just about to fall off the face of the earth. Yay.

The plan from the boys was marginal at best. "We're going to take it slow and try to boat most of the stuff that hasn't been done before" For me this meant "You're gonna be slow and catching up to you on foot should be simple". The GC of the T has a hiking trail which parallels almost the entire length of the river and at some points the trail is actually in the river. I figured finding these guys wouldn't be too hard...spotting 3 giant blobs of bright colored plastic in the wilderness is easy right? right - sometimes.

The river starting its gravity fed journey to Hetch Hetchy

You can just make out the river dropping off a few other huge cascades/waterfalls up in the trees above the main falls.

Since i had to procure myself a wilderness permit, i also had to accept a bear cannister from the rangers and since i had a bear cannister and i was going to meet up with 3 very tired and hungry kayakers i figured, egh why not pack in a pound of bacon and we'll make ourselves a seriously good dinner. So i spent day one hiking fast by the meadows trying to get to the goods where i figured i'd meet up with the guys. once i got to the goods they looked a little dicey, the flow was beyond healthy (more in the good side of high kind of range) and i wasn't convinced that these guys would be doing too much paddling...the character of the river is something like this...

Beautiful scenic flat water meadows. Hows the Serenity? Which leads into this...

Bbeautiful fast moving scenic class 2. Which leads into this...

400 feet of cringing...some of these falls/slides went on for a quarter or half mile. It was kinda like - well that would go if the first 200 foot waterfall wasn't there or the last 150 feet onto rock didn't happen. Add in the high water and all the marginally runnable stuff became completely out of the question, the good stuff became marginal and the meadows carried you quickly towards more portaging.

As it turns out the guys did so much portaging in the beginning that they covered nearly half the river in the first day and most of that was done by foot. I never found them the first night so i set up camp alone on a nice island and settled down for the night. Now i was in a serious dilemma - i was deep in bear country, i was alone and i had a pound of bacon with me. I decided i was safer with the bacon in me than anywhere near me so i put on my game face (see below)

Game Face

And I Sallied up and devoured the entire pound of bacon myself - mixed in with some pasta for nutrition purposes. I didn't even have to boil the pasta - instead i deep fried it in the bacon fat.

Mmmm....baaaaacon.

I then made the mistake of a rookie. In my delarious bacon induced nausea i attempted to wash out the pot with river water and sand. As it turned out the cold water solidified the bacon grease and instead of melting away it got all over my hands. So not only was i sick from eating 3000 calories of bacon but i now smelled like a human stick of suet for any bear to come along and nibble on...dammit.

The view downstream from camp the first night...

The sunset smelled oddly like bacon grease

Camp the next morning...i survived with no bear encounters

I set out for day two and found lots more unrunnable waterfalls, great views and some good hiking.

Right around lunch time i was rounding a bend and heard the familiar voice of Chris K. Sitting in front of me, more or less on the path, were Chris, Darin and Ben. It was noon and they hadn't left camp from the night before. We caught up, told some quick stories and chatted about what was downriver. Muir gorge was just downstream and a morning of scouting had determined it to be more or less unrunnable - a half mile continuous richter scale steep boulder garden led into a completely walled in gorge with marginal drops and an unscoutable (large) exit drop. the options? pretty much only 1 - shoulder the boat and continue the portage fest. It took nearly 2 hours to get around Muir gorge, but with the flows that we had it was a better option than paddling it.

The exit drop below the true exit drop of Muir Gorge

We separated again with the guys taking to the water and me plotting by foot. By now i had determined my new shoes to be too small and the blood blisters under both big toe nails were a good indication they'd be falling off in a few weeks so i switched to my 2 dollar K-mart flip-flops and mosied on down. We spent the day leap frogging each other, enjoying a for more portages together and taking a few pics of a few drops that were run.

Ben was the only to pick this one off. The diagonal 15footer lead in was avoided with a cheeky seal launch from river left, and for good reason, the boil from the curtain was surfacing 40 feet downstream and it was doing so after the water had already passed the lip of the slide. yuck.

Ben about to be eaten by the maw

We camped that night together on river left and found out right as we were going to bed that we sharing our evening spot with some local critters.

Dont sit on one of these guys

The next morning started off quick with this good morning slide

The zoomed in version of the good morning maw...this was probably the biggest drop the entire group ran and it was styled by all.

The plan for day 3 was get the hell out of dodge. The river ended in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir where the boys had an 8 mile paddle out. The trail i was on turned 4000 ft up out of the canyon just before the reservoir and so i was off to get the truck and get to the take-out for a covert mission to get boats and bodies out without being caught by the rangers. Everything went flawlessly and the mission was done...minus a few toenails and with the addition of some serious calories.