In which a flea-bitten tramp and a slovenly loafer set off on the South Loop of the Yosemite High Route and into a world of pain in which they are harangued by mosquitoes, confronted by indomitable granite buttresses and ailed by a mysterious illness…

After a surprisingly calorific two weeks at the San Francisco Zen Center, it was time for The Flea-Bitten Tramp and The Slovenly Loafer to say farewell to the temple and its berobed denizens. Because their departure date coincided with the San Francisco Pride Parade, however, they equipped themselves with some cute parasols and walked with their monastic acquaintances down Market Street on either side of a banner which said: “We’re Here, We’re Queer, We’re Buddha!” The float for the North California Furries Association trundled along behind. Amidst the rainbow and fur-clad assembly, Flea and Slov felt a tad underdressed in their drab tramping uniforms. Flea, at least, with his hiking shirt tucked into his shorts and his bucket hat with sun flap—pulled off a camp Nigel Thornbury look and got a few wolf whistles to show for it.

It was good, they agreed, to stretch the legs before heading into the Sierra for what promised to be an exacting stint of perambulation at altitude. Flea had come off a three month silent meditation retreat just weeks before and had the skinny legs to show for it. Even so, he and Slov had decided to attempt the south loop of the Yosemite High Route: an off-trail adventure that would take them up to 3700 metres and through 100+ kilometres of snowfields, boulder fields, granite slabs, icy rivers, and steep, sawtooth passes. The route was developed by Andrew Skurka, who pioneered this and many other fearsome high-country hikes. 

While in San Fran, the boys had made a new friend, Graham in whose person the qualities of saintliness and mischievousness where imperceptibly. He had kindly offered to drive them the five hours to Tuolumne Meadows where their route began, and he decided to join them for the first night in the ‘hills’.

At Tuolumne Meadows, the trio met a deliciously American park ranger called Colton Marshall who handed the crew a wilderness permit and a couple of bear canisters to keep any ursine mitts off the food. The three friends set off with a skip and made it all of five minutes before the clothes were off and they’d plunged into the paradisiacal waters flowing out of the Lyell Canyon.

After drying off, the friends walked a few hours to Vogelsang Lake just up above 3000m. Slov felt a little dizzy setting up his tent but he shrugged it off and wandered with the others up towards the adjacent pass to take in the sunset. As Slov ascended, however, the clouds began to swim in the blue and his head went strangely dense. Nauseous and confused, he struggled back down to camp. When Graham and Flea returned from their sunset jaunt, it was all Slov could manahe to croaked out a single pitiful syllable: “Heeelp.”

Slov’s friends packed down his tent and all but carryed him and his things down the mountain to the marginally more accommodating elevation of 2850m. His nausea and headache slackened just enough to be tolerable, but a sombre atmosphere pervaded the campsite. Flea cooked and ate all the couscous. Graham ate tuna and rice crackers in sympathetic silence. Slov bled from his nose and plugged it with some toilet paper. Eventually, fitful sleep overtook the party. Slov’s breath rasped in the darkness.

At 4:30am, Graham stoically broke camp and said his farewells. He had to hustle back to his car and travel the five hours back home to get to work. He left behind a sorry sight. Slov’s face was swollen, his gaze vacant. Flea was no picture of health either after a mere three hours sleep. His lips were somehow already cracked and his infirm knees were trembling under the weight of an admittedly tumescent pack. 

Just as a layer of loose soil can obscure the granite batholith of the Sierras, however, so too, beneath the pitiable appearance of Flea and Slov, lay unfracturable resolve. They sallied forth: down Rafferty Creek, down the Merced River and into the maw of the mighty Clark Range.

By noon, Flea and Slov had dropped 800m and travelled 15 kms to the foot of Quartzite Peak. 1000m above them perched its summit and a panoramic view of the Sierra. They began the slog, settling into an inordinately slow pace which they chalked up to the heat, altitude, heavy packs, and general lack of fitness. Slov shook off the residue of his altitude sickness and made reasonable time but Flea had to stop regularly to catch his breath. This represented a curious and, as far as Slov was concered, marvelous inversion of pace: in all his years of hiking with Flea he had never, ever, led the way uphill. A pit-stop halfway up by a babbling, mosquito-infested brook provided welcome respite from the sun and an opportunity to demolish some lunch wraps jammed full of goats cheese, capsicum, potato chips, tomato paste, tahini and olive oil.

When the beleaguered pair finally succeeded in hauling themselves up the sun-licked ramparts, the views were superlative. To the north-west lay the enormous heft and shapely form of Half Dome. To the north, the many bristling spires of the Cathedral Range. To the east, sheer passes and severe peaks of pallid countenance. That way went the route.

The summit register was older than either of the boys, but it contained only a couple dozen entries. In it, they thanked Skurka, the powers of geology, and their four runty legs.

After a couple more hours of walking and a precipitous drop through talus and whitebark pine, Flea and Slov set up camp and polished off the first of what would be many iterations of a backcountry classic: beans, rice and frito chips. The delicate flavours of the meal were accentuated with a smattering of dehydrated veggie flakes and a Wisconsin cheddar that boasted a complexion not dissimilar to that of the 45th President of the United States. The boys, underestimating the local mosquito population, forwent their tent fly, and slept with their faces pressed against the dark, dazzling bosom of the night sky.

Another wretched sleep, a couple of spicey excretions, and a few hundred metres walking later, Flea and Slov stood at the bottom of Lemonade Pass, which Skurka’s guide said “looks impossibly steep, but isn’t.”

As Flea and Slov were discussing their options for the route up, several large boulders detached from the ridge above and smashed down the slope with a degree of violence that was frankly unwarranted. “That instills confidence”, Flea said. He emitted flatulence. The protein-rich pinto beans had endowed it with a beefy bouquet. Slov wrinkled his large nose in disgust.

Despite the drama, the ascent wasn’t as treacherous as it appeared from below and it was not long before the boys stood astride Lemonade Pass. Slov took a surreptitious topless selfie for his sweetheart which had Flea choking with laughter when he found it a few days later. The view recapitulated the grandeurs of the previous day and aslo opened up the eastern flank of the Clark Range for closer inspection. A fine flank it was, graced with the heavenly visage of Adair Lake, which Skurka alleged to be “one of the least visited named lakes in Yosemite National Park.”

That day at least, lonely lake Adair clasped two naked bodies in her icy embrace. Slov vaulted himself off a diminutive cliff into the azure waters and accidentally inhaled a not insignificant quantity of lake water.

The time came too soon to resume the weary work of ascending Sue Pass. The boys made their first acquaintance with Sierra snow on the route up. It was soft and yielding to the foot, and less hindering than the uneven terrain of large broken rocks which presented itself as an alternative. Despite a stubborn shortness of breath and general sense of physical deterioration, Flea and Slov clambered above the pass to a nearby high point for another 11/10 view.

Mostly the boys walked in silence. In preceeding years they had whittled conversation down to a small, useless nub; there was little left to discuss between them. When they opened their mouths to do something other than gulp air it was for functional speech or for occasional but penetrating philosophical observations like: “walking over snow sucks, but walking over talus is suckier”.

The boys longest and most fervent discourse occurred while they slid down the backside of Sue Pass and concerned, bizzarely enough, the abrasive properties of mineral sand vs granite boulders. While their shoes skidded down the steep, loose gravel, Slov said: “This skidding probably doesn’t do wonders for the tread on our shoes.” This innocuous supposition rattled down the slope like the innocent pebble that precipitates a landslide. Flea frowned, “It’s probably easier on them than walking down the granite.” Slov countered that the discrete motion of stepping on the granite, while no doubt abrasive, would surely tax the tread of the shoe less than the continuous and universal abrasion of the sliding motion. Flea, whose argumentative faculties had been honed by years of competitive debating, retorted with an ingenious analogy to “tapping the brakes of a car to come to a gradual halt vs slamming on the brakes ‘in one discrete motion’” and thus the two friends succumbed to a half hour of specious metaphors, analogies, and overly elaborate chains of logic until they found themselves in a basin below Red Peak, which tore open the navel of the heavans like a bloody, upthrust dagger. All around them the rock was stained red and it would be redder still, Flea and Slov agreed, if they continued talking about abrasion. So the friendst testily desisted from speaking of the friction-inducing matter until they were able to shelter under the arbitration of their friend John, a physics teacher who would be joining them on the Great Divide Trail in a month’s time.

The boys dipped down to the Triple Peak Fork Valley where the resident mosuitoes staged an all out assault on their blood supply. Slov, already half a dozen nosebleeds short of full capacity, zealously guarded his remaining 4.5 litres with DEET and netting. Despite the relatively gentle trail and the strong incentive to hustle, Flea moved at a pace that would embarrass a sloth. Slov stepped in to take a few heavier items from his pack but, even so, Flea had to lean wearily on his poles every few hundred metres. Eventually, the boys climbed out of mosquito-ville and off-trail again, coming to a welcome halt on the long northern shore of Harriet Lake after a 14 hour day.

As they made camp, the sun leaked the last of its light into the darkening heavens as they made camp and Slov’s nose leaked some more blood into their dwindling supply of toilet paper. He coughed out some mucouidal glob for good measure. The boys seemed to be developing colds. There was nothing for it but to chow down some peanut butter satay noodles, apply copious quantities of lip-balm, and cinch up the quilts for a chilly night at 3000m. The wind blew icily across their faces. The stars pinned their cold light to the sooty fabric of the earth. Slov hoiked up another globule of phlegm and sent it arcing into the grass. Many miles had he and Flea to go, and fewer hours far in which to rest.