In which the beleaguered Flea and Slov confront several passes and the McClure glacier before deteriorating to the point of total immobility…

Flea and Slov awoke from troubled dreams to a pre-dawn sky the grey-black colour of gabbro. 4:30am. They hustled to break camp and cram as many miles in as possible before the sun parked up at the top of the sky and turned its headlights full beam. Twelve hard miles and three passes lay in wait: Foerster, Sluggo, and the infamous Russell, the latter of which would deposit Flea and Slov next to an intersection with the John Muir Trail, if it didn’t deposit them on jagged rocks instead.

Slov’s pillow had blown away in the night. He was able to locate the pillow some 30 metres away but could not locate the faintest whiff of physical well-being. Flea seemed to be in slightly better shape as he huffed and snuffled about camp, cooking brekkie and packing. (When making the faintest effort, Flea vocalises his breathing in small pants and moans which sound to the untrained ear like the muted pleasure of two asthmatics having intercourse.) The pair knocked back some miserly decaf coffee made cowboy style but Slov couldn’t stomach any oats. Ever the complainer, he griped about intense pressure in his neck and shoulders, sleep deprivation, clogged sinuses, and a pervasive sense of ruggedness which bordered on the hallucinatory. Flea, approximately 23% more stoic than Slov, said nothing, loosed a potent, PB satay flavoured fart and set off at his now habitual sloth-like pace.

The shattered talus fields bore witness that morning to the ponderous passage of the two boys hacking and coughing their way up to Foerster at 11,200 feet. The mixture of altitude and what seemed to be a cold made breathing a chore, but the pair made it up before 6:30 am and began a sidling descent into a vast landscape of tortured stone and frigid water. Below them lay an unnamed lake of surpassing beauty fed by a waterfall drawn from the melting snow of the surrounding mountains. A swim was in order, and what a swim! Neither coffee nor the grind over Foerster Pass had helped ease Slov’s full blown physiological debilitation, but an expeditious baptism in one of the most picturesque lakes on God’s good earth did the trick. It was only for 15 seconds—it was ice-melt at 10,200 feet at 9am after all—but he came out of that lake feeling like a human being instead of a palsied mongrel in a rubbish strewn ditch, which was nice.

The aptly named Sluggo Pass soon fell to the slow-motion onslaught of the re-energised team, who enjoyed the approach on what Skurka, somewhat hyperbolically, described as “granite you could rollerblade on.” Slov left some nosebleed at the top, like a sprinkling of holy water, except… not holy. 

At mid-day in the furnace of a drought-stricken California, the boys started a long and ill-advised ascent on the approach to Russell Pass. They forwent, at Slov’s insistence, the mellow pastures below Sluggo in the hope that a high basin immediately below Russell would give them succour and a nice spot to catch their fitful breath before attempting the 12,200 foot pass. What they found instead was the most miserable and barren accretion of rock north of Death Valley. A series of snowed over tarns shored only by rock and occasional splotches of muddy gravel. Flea was unimpressed, Slov apologetic.

They pitched their fly for some meagre artificial shade and lay down, borne aloft from the mud by a couple of millimetres of builder’s tyvek. Thus, in the reclining posture prefferred by the Romans of antiquity, they supped on their extraordinarily diverse array of snacks. Trader Joe’s, a bougie American supermarket chain with ludicrously friendly staff, had offered up to the wide-eyed pair’s delectation such treats as: dried mango strips; chocolate and candy dipped peanuts; a hefty portion of your classic trail mix; half a kilo of ‘Brookie’ (a regrettable cross between a brownie and a cookie); a little over a kilo of potato chips; and almonds. But not just any almonds!—coffee and caramel roasted almonds and almonds with buffalo seasoning so potent it sizzled on the lips, spiked Flea’s farts, and frequently inspired comparisons to ‘crack’ for its devilish moreishness.

It was such an orgiastic session of snacking that Slov got another bleeding nose. “It’d be rude not to,” he shrugged. Post-climax, as the boys decamped, all that was left to show for their sojourn was a slimy residue of mud, blood, and snot which we can only hope the melting snows will cleanse. Sated, Flea and Slov set off up the exponential slope toward a jagged notch high above. The harrowing report on Russell that the Jude Law lookalike had given them the previous day made them tense.

Fortunately, a steep scree-filled fully proved to be the least salubrious aspect of Russel’s otherwise genial character. Skurka’s instructions to follow the red, ferrous intrusions diagonally up a steep chute of scree were, as usual, astute. To the left of the chute reared the cliffs which Jude Law had evidently mistaken for the route, which was, to be fair, was much harder to read from the direction he had come from. 

Astride Russell, Flea surveyed the next section of route with the calculating look of a Bonaparte surveying the battlefield. A large steep snowfield lay prostrate upon the bedrock–the Maclure Glacier. The appropriate means of transportation could not be clearer. In the snow immediately beyond the fringe of talus that capped the pass, Slov assumed his position: bum in the snow, arms and poles out wide, legs raised. Ignoble it was, but effective. Soon his twin cheeks were racing down the slope, gravity and the great mass of the earth consorting to whisk a delighted slov down the glacial snow. He came to a creaking halt amidst a flurry of giggles, having lost 200 feet of elevation, the better part of his dignity and a little bit of blood from his ever-leaky nose. Flea was up next and, with the advantage of a pre-packed trail through the snow, he fairly hurtled down—hitting speeds unprecedented in sloth history.

The boys spent two more hours walking that afternoon. The miles were soundtracked by tuberculosis-style coughing. Eventually, the John Muir Trail and the Lyell Canyon hoved into view. They pitched camp in buoyant spirits, unsuppressed by their persistient headaches and dizziness which had afflicted them throughout the day.

Flea observed they could do a side trip on the John Muir Trail to Thousand-Island Lake. He’d seen it while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2018 and poetically described it as “a lake with a lot of islands.” Slov said they didn’t have time. Flea, confused, said: “It’s an easy twelve mile side trip on trail, and we have two and a half days before we need to catch the bus”.
“You mean one and a half days,” Slov protested.
Flea gave him a long pitying stare of the variety reserved for the logistically challenged. “Two and a half. It’s Thursday today. We catch the bus Sunday morning.”

Slov was dumb with disbelief. He’d been cracking the whip for three days (gruelling 14 hour efforts all of them) in order to complete the trip a day earlier than necessary. Flea, too sick and discombobulated to mount effective protest, had grimly acquiesced, not knowing that Slov’s urgency owed to a scheduling error. An easy side trip was in order. “Also,” Flea said, “you have blood on your face.”

After a night which dipped below freezing, dawn with her red rosy fingers shone once more. It wasn’t long before she was running those fingers across the ribs of the Sierra and the grooved valleys between them. The trail of the JMT—a well-worn groove itself—was a welcome sight after the days the boys had spent schlepping through snow, talus, and undergrowth. After the thin-aired, high-country loneliness of the Yosemite High Route, the trail felt almost like a parade, with northbound PCT hikers passing in a procession only a little less colourful than that at the Pride parade the boys had attended a week prior.

They soon crested the mild Donahue Pass. It seemed like nothing stood in the way of the boys and the many-islanded body of water of their dreams except fatigue, illness and the mounting challenge of sustaining the will to live. Alsas, these proved to be impediment enough. Flea, who had been chronically weak for three days now finally succumbed to exhaustion in the shade of a stunted pine just an hour and a half after breaking camp.

Two hours passed. Slov waited. A great number of mosquitoes assembled and began to harass him. The blood-thirsty bugs sensed Flea’s illness and left his supine form alone. Slov, lathered in Deet and sweating like a hog in the midday heat, read about the Gold Rush in the Sierras and marvelled at its scope and consequence—the great riches amassed, extraordinary damage wrought upon the land, the outlandish characters and their tragic fates—until his miserable friend rolled over, wrapped himself in his mosquito net, and slithered further into the rapidly dwindling shade. Flea, like an ANZAC soldier expiring on Flander’s fields, encouraged Slov to go on alone.

Slov, unlike a good soldier, happily did so. He trotted down the track without his pack, hoping to polish off the nine mile round trip in good time so as to return to moniter the stricken Flea. But twas not to be; the nearer but decidedly inferior Gem Lake was Slov’s muddy consolation prize: a large puddle, really, a feeble allusion to a lake of formerly much greater volume which was clearly affected by the paltriness of the year’s snowpack. It had been dammed. The dam looked overly optimistic given the meagreness of the puddle.

Upon return, Flea appeared less like a hiker in a bug net than a hurriedly swaddled syphilitic mummy. He was listening to a Dharma talk by Ajahn Sumedo entitled “Assuming the Monastic Form”, which, Slov thought privately, was quite ambitious for a person curled up in the foetal position.

Slov announced himself by blowing snot and blood into the clenched fabric of his neck gaiter. It had served as his handkerchief since that morning, when the last inch of toilet paper had been rendered into soggy, fibrous pulp by the relentless onslaught of Slov’s nasal fluids. Flea rolled over. “Don’t feel too good aye.”

Flea was unable to move for some while—it wasn’t till 6:30pm that they made their way back over Donahue Pass, retracing the morning’s two and a half miles to camp above the Lyell Canyon. Owing to the state of the bodies to which they were regrettably yoked, the boys decided to walk down the canyon the next day instead of the remaining six miles of off-trail walking over the Kuna Crest on the south loop which the Yosemite High Route followed.

The gentle 12 mile walk out back to Tuolumne Meadows nevertheless proved wearisome toil. Slov ran out of real estate on his neck gaiter and took to blowing his nose on his only pair of merino undies. Flea and Slov agreed they were glad not to be up on the cracked, granite altar of Kuna Crest borne aloft like sacrificial pagan morsels offered to the Sun.

As Flea and Slov neared the end of the route, they decided to hitch a day early to Yosemite Valley so they could more easily embark on the gruelling bus-train-bus-bus journey back to San Francisco the following day. And so, with their proverbial tails very much between their legs, they crawled coughing and spluttering to the Wilderness centre for a mid-afternoon finish. There, they relieved themselves of their bear cans and did a respectable thirty minute stint on the roadside dodging obnoxiously large American pickup trucks with freakishly wide wing mirrors. Although Flea cast unwarranted aspersions on Slov’s hitching style, claiming it involved subtle hip gyration, he nevertheless secured them a ride. And so the pair found themselves careening along Tioga road in a Mazda hatchback helmed by someone they soon realised was The Archetypal San Francisconite: Aaron.

“As a teenager,” Aaron began with minimal prompting, “I ate a lot of acid and read a lot of Noam Chomsky.” Slov nodded, suddenly nostalgic. Aaron paused to toke on his marijuana vape—”as you can imagine, I developed a habit of… looking sideways at systems”. Flea wheezed in agreement. “So I studied sociology and journalism. Worked in the papers for a few years. I was your age, living in the Mission district. Castro. Lots of chicks. Lots of drugs—there’s a Bill to legalise psychedelics in California that looks like it might pass by the way. Journalism died when the internet turned up. So I built a virtual reality startup. Tech, man. Tech fucked Frisco. I don’t like it. But it’s what we got and you gotta use what you got. When weed was legalised, I got into distribution. I used to sell it wholesale back when I was at grad school, and I’d been using it a lot for my Crohn’s. Anti-inflammatory, you know? I’ve been doing that for five years.” Flea was sitting crookedly in the backseat doing a passable imitation of an unearthed corpse. Slov’s nose began to bleed lightly. He discreetly twisted some toilet paper, freshly acquired from the Tuolumne Store, and pressed it into his left nasal cavity.

Aaron, needing little in the way of conversational lubrication to keep his bearings spinning, continued. “I live in Marin Headlands now. It’s nice. You haemorrhage money, living there, but you haemorrhage money living anywhere in the Bay Area. May as well be somewhere beautiful.”
Slov, reinforced his nose plug with more toilet paper and asked if Aaron had kids.
“Three.”
“Good being a dad? Recommend it?”
“Fuck yes. Can’t recommend it enough.” He paused thoughtfully, toked on his vape. “But not everyone’s a breeder, you know?”

The boys’ garrulous chaperone pulled up at the gas station between Tuolumne and Yosemite. Next to them was a Chevrolet muscle car with a Whippet in the front seat and no visible affiliated human. Aaron, getting out of the car: “First they legalize weed, then psychedelics, next you got fucken dogs at the wheel. Welcome to California.”

Aaron dropped the boys at the backpackers campsite in Yosemite Valley. They got culture shock. After a week in the high and lonely hills it felt claustrophobic to be squished between the vaulting cliffs with 10,000 tourists for July 4th weekend. This teeming multitude was serviced by hotels, cafes, restaurants, gift shops and gelato bars: an infrastructure which felt entirely incongruous with the surrounds. Lofty granite bastions bracketed the squalid affair of human commerce and consumption as if it were an errant clause in the long history of the Earth.

The cretinous lads pitched their tent and made the acquaintance of their neighbours, a mum, Rachel, and her two girls. Taking pity on the wretched pair, Rachel graciously fed them the remainder of their tomato spaghetti. As light drained from the valley, the boys lay supine upon their respective thermorests, assuming the dignified demeanors they will one day wear to their graves. In the hazy margin between wakefulness and sleep, Slov said, “Crazy how nice people are and how fucked up the world is.” Flea wheezed. All around them, the camp lay quiet, a rash of tents on the floor of the valley.

“Maybe we ought to do a COVID test tomorrow. Just in case.”