9×9

It’s the trip I talked about last year.

You might think that we bailed on it. We actually DID it. Just that we took a route very different from the original plan.

We started at noon on the first day from the white wolf camp and walked along the Middle Tuolumne River. We camped for the first night about a mile away from the fork to the Ten Lake Trail, on a nice little rocky hill. There were fire rings set up by rangers (I don’t think we were allowed to set up new fire rings), and some big rocks to lie on. We got a break from mosquitos before sunset, but they came to us soon once the sun went lower. We hid into the tent right after dinner to not be eaten up by those tiny evils, but it was still bright outside. We couldn’t sleep. A great number of bugs of mixed kinds sneaked inside the rainfly, including two wasps! They put on a show. The wasps had a nice meal — they caught and ate up almost half of the other bugs. When they were full and flew out, the whole place got super quiet, and we were sleepy.

We started fairly early in the morning. The progress to the Ten Lake Trail junction was a bit slow. The rain fall in the past winter/spring was crazy, and we saw unnamed streams everywhere. The trail was a bit hard to follow, but it got better once we got the hang of navigating. Our eyes were quickly trained to find all those artificial markers. We got the junction around 8, then pushed toward the Half Moon Meadow. It’s such a romantic name, and it WAS a beautiful place, but so many mosquitos! Mosquito, I probably will write this word a hundred times more in the following texts. Anyway, our dream of taking a nice break around the meadow was killed by those insects, and we ran away from that area as fast as possible (well, we still tried taking pictures for sure:).

We sat on a random roadside rock and had some snacks in prep of the big climb. It was steep, but not that hard. We got to the top around 11a, and thought that we could gain more mileage before lunch. Then we met some other hikers who kindly advertise the Lower Grant Lake to us. I had been hesitating about whether we should take that detour or not since we started planning the trip. The fact that we made to the top earlier than we thought must have boosted my confidence, so I quickly decided to give the Lower Grant Lake a visit. The 2.4 mile in-and-out detour took longer than I thought, again, due to the difficulties in navigation. Anyway, we checked that box.

We took lunch after coming back to the main trail. The afternoon started with the gorgeous view of high sierra in the distance. We got to the Ten Lakes after a rocky zig-zag. I was so happy to be in this heavenly place, didn’t realize that the nightmare was about to start. Right, mosquitos. Turns out I couldn’t enjoy the lakes, or shades, or a little break for water or food, or even pee. As soon as I stopped, mosquitos would swallow me, like a hurricane upon a canoe, a tsunami over a fishing village, piranhas finishing a wounded being. Even when I was walking, they followed me like a cloud, bit my hands unless I kept waving them in air like crazy.

Interestingly, they treated different people differently. Ziwei got much less attacks than me. We tried everything, switching positions, clothes, wearings, nothing worked. It must be me, some smell that we couldn’t notice ourselves. Or maybe I had a special magnetic field around me. No idea. I lost my mind at some point, crying, yelling, jumping up and down with my 30 lbs backpack on me. I was thinking about a book I read a few months ago. It talks about DDT. That might be too far, but I was just crazy like that.

The next headache was finding a location for camping. In the plan, we would keep going until reach the lower altitude and camp around the South Fork Cathedral Creek. But that plan was made only taking into account the concern of water but not mosquitos. At around 4p that day, we found ourselves facing a big cliff, with all mosquito army behind us. We had to climb down, but feared there would be even more mosquitos waiting ahead in the meadows.

The climbing down was again steep and rocky, so less mosquitos. The High Sierra view opened up in front of us again. But the surrounding got dimmer and dimmer while we were approaching the bottom. The valley of the South Fork Cathedral Creek, not a surprise, was another sea of meadows and mosquitos. It was very hard to find a flat surface without any vegetation to camp upon. We tried a rock in the middle of a meadow, but the mosquito army couldn’t even allow me to stand still. So we escaped, turned back to find a site. We ended up camping on a rock closer to the mountain, with a slight incline. We were so worn out an fell asleep quite fast and sound.

The third day started with that indifference feeling caused by desperation. We had lost hope and given in, prepared to be eaten up by mosquitos in the mile of meadow ahead. However, while we were packing up, we noticed that the few mosquitos on our tent were ‘stiff’. They wouldn’t fly even we shake the cloth, basically just waiting there to be killed. The coolness in the morning was helping us. So we quickly set off and went through the meadow right before the sun came out.

We started the last bit of climbing later in the morning. On the top, we found a secret little lake, with water calm like a mirror. There was also a nice creek with low vegetations and flowers along its sides. A fairy place! There was even a small glacier. Super cool. We consider it as the best portion of the whole trip. I didn’t find a name of that mountain. It’s the hill on the east side of the South Fork Cathedral Creek.

After coming down from that hill, we are on our way out. We gave up on the May Lake – both to cut the total mileage down and to avoid more mosquitos – and headed toward the Murphy Creek. We spent our last night less than two miles away from the Murphy Creek Trailhead. That soil was soft and flat, and much less mosquitos. We rushed out the last morning and reached the trailhead around 9 in the morning.

My research of shuttles were not very thorough, and there were confusions about when and where would which shuttle come. We were tired and eager to go home, so we tried hitchhiking. It took us about an hour till we met a super kind backpacker who were willing to drive us back to the white wolf camp. He was a sole backpacker who had done both the John Muir and the Pacific Crest. We had a nice chat and learnt a lot from him.

This is the end of the trip. Half a year has gone by since than and we haven’t gone on to another one yet. Missing the wild.