Backpacking The Lori Ann Way
My friend Cathy has this friend Lori Ann.
Lori Ann is the kind of woman who spray-paints go-go boots with glitter and goes to the Burning Man festival in Black Rock Desert, Nevada. I met Lori Ann once at a dinner party when she was visiting from Utah and I liked her immediately.
As soon as the John Muir Trail project came up and I needed to learn to backpack , Cathy said we had to call Lori Ann.
Lori Ann is the one who taught Cathy how to backpack. She taught her to bring along waterpaints and how to pack shrimp on dried ice.
Cathy and Lori Ann once went to some seminar in Seattle about lightweight backpacking where this guy was talking about things like cutting off the handle of your toothbrush to save weight. When he said there was no reason to bring along more than one pair of underwear, Cathy and Lori-Ann squealed "eeewww!" in unison and all the oh-so-serious students of lightweight backpacking cast them disapproving looks. They thought it was hysterical.
"Oh, lighten up," Lori-Ann said.
The three of us planned a pre-John Muir backpack trip to inaugurate me into the secrets of Lori Ann-style backpacking, and also introduce me to prosaic basics like what a pack feels like, how to start a fire, etc. Lori Ann grew up with hard-core outdoorsmen so these things are in her genes and experience.
But, she got a new job and couldn't make it, so it was just me and Cathy and my dog Mac. We set off for the Kaiser Wilderness. The Lori Ann lessons via Cathy began before we left Fresno.
"This is very important," Cathy said putting a small ice chest in my car.
"We're carrying an ice chest backpacking?" I asked.
"No, it's for as soon as we get back to the car."
"Cold beer upon return," I thought, my deductive powers finally kicking in. "Brilliant."
We started trodding. Lake Huntington below us was a blue to break your heart and the sky above us was a bright enough blue to make your broken heart all better. I was a little out of breath, but I'd just come back from a practice hike up San Jacinto, so that was now old hat.
The pack part was new, however, and I didn't like it. I was harnessed in and weighed down. I was pretty sure I'd be one of those horses who refuse to back in and get hitched up. My own equipment hadn't arrived in time so I was carrying Cathy's husband Slaten's pack. In retrospect it was a good thing because when I finally did get my lightweight made-for-a-woman backpack, I knew the difference.
My second backpacking lesson, taken on our first rest break, was how to take off a pack.
"This is how to look cool, like you know what you're doing," Cathy said, showing me how to find a flat rock, rest the pack there and then wiggle out.
I found a rock, unclipped my backpack, and walked away with a deep, heavy sigh. The backpack immediately tumbled off the rock and down a small hill.
That's me -- backpacking cool.
We kept going, and I got my first real taste of what all the fuss is over the Sierra. It wasn't just blue alpine lakes and green trees as I'd enjoyed on many a day hike where I could then go home and out to dinner.There was also, as we climbed higher, hillsides covered in sparkling white rocks and tiny white and lavender flowers. Then shady wooded areas, and to my shock and consternation, snow banks. We couldn't even find the trail.
But Mac, my dog who sleeps with his stuffed toys, turned out to be more outdoorsy then I thought. He stood nobly in one spot, his square head held high, like he was posing for some Labrador Retriever magazine. He wouldn't come with us on any of our false forays, since, as we eventually discovered, he was on the right trail.
We didn't see a single person on the entire hike. Cathy was delighted. I was a little unnerved. But still when we got to Upper Twin Lake and had a view of a deep blue lake all to ourselves it did feel like we were world-class wanderers who had left the masses behind.
I set off to use my water filter for the first time. As long as you keep the little floater bobby thing from settling on the bottom of the stream, you're good. It's an amazing little contraption: one tube with the floaty bobber goes into the stream and into the filter. You pump it and drinkable water comes out of a tube on the other end, into your Nalgene bottle made of shatterproof plastic, the same stuff they use for safety goggles. Some of the guys at Herb Bauer's Sporting Goods store took one of these bottles out and shot it with a 22 rifle to see if it really was shatter proof, and it passed their test. I wasn't planning on shooting a gun at my bottle, but I liked knowing that if I did drop it, it wasn't going to break and leave me with no way to carry my lemonade.
We set up a tent (I'd done that before at three-day concerts and such) and gathered kindling. Cathy made dinner: pasta with pesto and fresh grated Parmesan, grilled French bread, a small bottle of merlot and chocolate clusters with peanuts.
It was nothing that I will manage to carry on the much longer, steeper John Muir Trail, but, still I was - literally - a happy camper. And I was learning things, like how to eat with my new titanium spork. Best to ease into these things. You wouldn't want to lug a pack and eat freeze-dried macaroni for the first time all at once.
Then Mac had a breakdown. He'd been exploring and ecstatic all day. Now he came up leaned against me and just started trembling. It was dark and it was cold and he was wet from swimming, but he's a Lab and I've seen him break ice with his paw to jump in for a little dip. He doesn't get cold.
"Oh no," Cathy said laughing. "It's hitting him. He's saying 'Do you mean to tell me we're not going home? We're going to sleep out here?!' "
She thought it was cute. I thought my dog had a point.
And indeed I had a sleepless night, awakening to find myself in peril.
My one piece of equipment that had arrived in time was a down mummy sleeping bag. The name is apropos. It is indeed shaped like an Egyptian coffin. There was a string on top and some sort of padded piece. I'd find out later that this was so you could tighten the padded part around you and make like a larvae in a cocoon if you were the sort who wanted to sleep someplace really really cold like the top of Mt. McKinley. But I thought it was a clever way to include a pillow so I sort of used the string to puff up the padding. Somewhere in my restless tossing night I somehow got entangled in the string and when I moved my arm it tightened the string around my neck. I could have been strangled.
Luckily, I was able to disengage myself before turning blue, because that would have been embarrassing. Can you imagine being medivaced because you lost a battle with your sleeping bag? Good thing I got that one figured out before the JMT.
