Teens "On the Loose" Over Isberg Pass

By Karl Neice

One thing I knew at 16 years of age in 1969 is that old enough to drive was old enough to pull off a two-week backpack trip out of Yosemite without adult supervision.

The territory wasn’t virgin. Bob White, Kit Arnst and I had pioneered the parentless camping trip on at least three occasions. Once to Big Sur in February in the rain with Kit’s mom’s Buick Invicta station wagon. And the other times to the Pinnacles in Bob’s dad’s Dodge A-100 van with an automatic transmission that I could drive easily.

And as a recently annointed Eagle Scout, I had been on dozens of supervised campouts and backpackings. I had memorized the checklist, helped dry jerky, make pemmican, and pack meals in separately marked bags, rolled a “mile-o-meter” along the dotted trails on the topographic maps to make itineraries, hiked numerous “shakedown” day-trips with a full pack and earned no less than four BSA Fifty-Miler awards already.

As it turned out, I would need all these skills and some timely luck to survive the ambitious hike I had planned with Kit Arnst, a lanky Cupertino High School classmate, ardent archery competitor, and fellow lover of the outdoors. And this hike set us on our respective life courses in a number of ways, and set in motion the circumstances that led to our entire circle of friends to later enjoy the accidental fruits of our labor with many fun camping trips into Junction Butte at the covergence of the North Fork and Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River.

Looking back, I must have really wowed my parents to have been able to talk them into letting me go. It was early in the year when I came up with a plan to hike a 75-mile loop from Yosemite Valley to Devil’s Postpile, up to Tuolumne Meadows and back to Yosemite Valley. I got the maps together, made an itinerary, started gathering trail foods and gear, and took Kit on shakedown hikes at Pinnacles and Big Basin. After school let out in early June, we spent all our waking hours preparing for our big backpack trip.

We had read and been inspired by the Sierra Club book, “On the Loose,” by Jerry and Renny Russell, and their rambling through deserts and mountains. From the dedication to “Ma, who worried” to the Steve McQueen quote that accompanied the photograph of a shaded stubby Joshua Tree against a vast lit barren red landscape: “I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.” We, too, longed to be “On the Loose.”

Even though we were starting to acquire a taste for beer and spent a lot of planning time shooting arrows at a hay bale in Kit’s backyard and playing pool in his family “rumpus room,” we knew we weren’t going to be able to pack cans in. What we expected to enjoy more than anything was to smoke cigarettes and do whatever else we wanted to in a world without adults!

So off we went in the Arnst family Buick Invicta “tank” station wagon early one mid-June morning at 4 a.m., sailing over Pacheco Pass on Highway 152 with a thermos of coffee, a case of beer, and roaring down the other side at about 75 to 80 miles per hour. Suddenly a highway-patrol car came whipping down the pass at about 90 with the lights blazing. We froze and slowed down. We just hoped he would pass, as it seemed he might hit us if we changed lanes. But he pulled into the right lane, passed us, and then pulled us over. 

When the trooper stormed out of his rig and spewed roadside gravel stomping toward us, we expected a ticket at best and jail at the worst. But after asking tersely for Kit’s license, he started a tirade about how when you see the highway-patrol lights blazing you should pull over just like for a fire engine! We tried to keep a straight face as he sputtered on about how you HAFTA get over to the right, young guys like you not THINKING when you drive, and there ARE rules to the road. But when he left we just coyote-called in unison, “OW-ooh!” (this was before high-fives), when he left and celebrated with a hearty breakfast in Los Banos at that stucco-domed malt-shop cafe that was about the most notable thing in town back in the 60s.

We continued on through the dawn, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes and letting the Invicta’s automatic radio-station seeker choose the sounds and voices of the strongest stations in the area. We thoroughly enjoyed the road, the driving, the free maps, the gas stations, the snack machines, the little groceries and liquor stores and Giant Oranges. We caught Highway 59 at Red Top, a town named for the red tops on many houses, most of which used to be pickers’ shacks in this little oasis of the Central Valley. Turning north through tiny El Nido, I had been this way many times with my parents on spring and summer trips to Yosemite. We gassed up as we approached Merced, and I probably used my mom’s Chevron card, which was also the only card good at Yosemite Valley’s one gas station.

At Merced we took Highway 140, crossed Highway 49 and drove up through the spectacular steep meadows of goldfields (wild golden buttercups), redbud and manzanita. When ponderosa, Jeffrey and sugar pines gave out their scent, we rolled down the Invicta’s electric windows (rare at the time) and sniffed mightily. Ah the mountains, the Sierra! It was truly a joy ride along the twisty Merced River canyon to the Arch Rock entrance station, seeing the river at roaring stage and keeping track of the railway ruins and the CCC’s mortared-rock guardrails.

We went to the ranger station near the Ansel Adams store near the Village to get a fire permit, which at the time was all you needed for a campfire away from the campgrounds. No one asked where we were going, we volunteered the information. No one wondered or knew if the trail was opened or what condition it was in. Maybe they thought we would realize the futility and give up. But there was no condescension or even questions. I think the rangers didn’t know or didn’t care what was outside the Valley as the wilderness and trail part of “rangering” was still a few years off. 

As I remember we had a meal and a few beers and cigarettes and camped that night near the trailhead of the John Muir Trail at Happy Isles under Glacier Point on the southeast corner of the Valley, just off the parking lot. In the morning we packed and repacked our backpacks, left extra clothes, some food and beers for when we returned and covered it all with a blanket in the back of the Invicta (laughable today as bears eventually figured out what blankets covered and how to break windows) and set out on the trail to Vernal Falls and the famous Mist Trail to Nevada Falls, paved most of the way.

Karl at Happy Isles, 2017

After Nevada Falls, where our loaded backpacks and hiking boots stood out among the casually dressed and flimsily shod day-trippers, we trudged uphill on switchbacks behind Liberty Cap, the peak before the back of Half Dome, the famous sphinx on the right of every photograph or painting of Yosemite Valley looking east from that famous tunnel viewpoint. We passed the route up the back of Half Dome and hiked into the lush forest of Little Yosemite Valley, which even then was an overgrazed, over-camped, tramped-down wayside, barren of wood on the ground for hundreds of yards from thousands of cook-fires and campfires over the decades.

Black bears roamed every night through this well-established food source, and a few steel cables were strung high for campers to straddle two equal bags of edibles, soap, toothpaste and medicines — all of which attracted bears. Sure enough the bears came through that night, even before we got to bed, and they kept us awake for awhile as we had no tent to feel safe in. At the time plastic “tube tents” were all the rage in backpacking, for use only when you’d be more wet sleeping in the rain than in the condensation of a tube tent. They hadn’t invented much in the way of backpacking tents back then, so it was a tough place to get to sleep with all the campers there banging pots and throwing stones to scare off the bears.

The next day, despite our plan to reach the Merced Lake High Sierra Camp, we were beat by the time we got to Echo Creek, where all the main campsites were taken so we had trudged to site a half mile up but still near water. Without trees of any great height to hang the food from, we nevertheless stashed it as high up as we could, enjoyed a nice campfire and counted our luck the next morning when the food was still there. With the the bears being accustomed to the main campsites, maybe there wasn’t as much danger up there.

Much as I had backpacked with the Boy Scouts, the reality of Kit and I — just two high-school kids out in the middle of nowhere —began to sink in. Still it was more of a giddy feeling of impending teenage immortality. The next day we hiked another bit of forever uphill to the Merced Lake High Sierra Camp, a little canvas city with a dining tent and tent cabins scattered about the serene granite-dotted meadow and lakeside landscape.

(photo by Alan Johnson, 2018, Google Maps)
Merced Lake High Sierra Camp

But this year the late snow had delayed the usual spring resurrection and the wranglers back at the corrals were just now packing the canvas covers for the framed platforms, which still looked like the remains of a pioneer boom town. They had yet to bring in the mattresses, linen, towels, stoves and other accouterments of the High Sierra horse-camp summer. Many of the platforms needed repairs from the winter snow and winds, and snow berms covered many stair-stoop entrances and hitching posts. That was our first clue of what lay ahead. It would be weeks before that camp would open to well-heeled, horseback campers.

We were hardier than that. Combined with my optimism and Kit’s disdain of turning back so soon, we decided to proceed to Washburn Lake for the night. It was a few miles more in the late afternoon, but made up for our unscheduled stop the day before. We had underestimated the energy we’d need along with a bit of dehydration and altitude assimilation. We arrived late and set up a quick camp, not cooking but eating part of a lunch, some jerky, raisins and peanuts, before hanging the food and tending a small fire before we slept for about about 10 hours. We woke up to a beautiful hot sunny day and found a perfect lakeside campsite nearby, which we decided to move to and spend the rest of the day and night. We cooked up two dinners and ate vociferously.

Now we were one and a half days behind schedule, and began to hike up the plateau-and-switchback trail to Isberg Pass, which soon became snow-covered enough to impede our ascent. Climbing through the snow and following the dotted “i’s” carved into trees as trail markers earlier in the century, we managed to get up to Triple Creek Fork and find a dry spot just off the trail, the first of many impromptu camps we made because snow covered all the established campsites, and even most of the trail.

“I don’t know where we’d be without that map and compass of yours, Neice,” Kit said. We agreed to keep going until we had to turn back, even though going over Isberg Pass meant a very hard return to Yosemite Valley. That meant at least getting to Devil’s Postpile National Monument on the other side of the mountain range, where there would be a ranger station and a store, or trucks on the road to flag down. But that was 30 or more long miles away, and we were lucky to make five miles most days.

We were extremely wary of going over a pass of snow-covered talus without a trail to follow, let alone walk on snow at all. But here and there we picked out ways up, seeing a snatch of trail at a creek. Our early start meant the snow over the pass was corn-like and stiff, so our boots didn’t often penetrate more than a few inches. Had we tried it in the afternoon, we likely would have sprained or broken something on the sharp boulders that made the steep almost treeless ascent a life-threatening experience.

As it was we talked each other up and over the pass, pausing here and there for a “well-deserved” cigarette before descending the treacherous east side of the pass. The completely new vista east made it seem like another country, and it too was covered with snow and a long way down. Evening came early and we climbed into our sleeping bags well before dark just below a half-frozen Sadler Lake. We sipped hot cups of soup and kept a small, hot fire of sturdy pine and fir, the kind you can rarely find along trails today.

But in that snowbound June, there was almost no fire danger, and plenty of dry, seasoned dead pine on lower branches that snapped off the because they were protected from spring rains and could dry out in an afternoon (no longer allowed in designated wilderness areas). The efficient, long-lasting little campfires I learned to build as a scout were great comfort in the snowbound campsite (and later canyon ramblings) that we were to adopt as a nightly ritual. Bonfires required too much wood-gathering after a long day on the trail, even for eager teenagers.

By noon the next day we were in despair. The long slog from Sadler Lake was excruciatingly slow. We had to constantly pull the map and compass out to find the trail and deal with wet, boot-sucking meadows that the trail tried to take us through. We did see a billion trout fry and all sorts of dragonflies and birds, but no bear or cats that we feared meeting. It was bright with the sun and snow, even with sunglasses in those pre-ultraviolet-protection days.

Relentless snowfields of the Sierra Nevada

Our first destination on the revamped itinerary was Knoblock Cabin, a tiny black square on the map that we hoped was a ranger station but in reality was a dilapidated pile of crudely milled logs, long given back to the fierce Sierra winters. We were trying to make up a day and a half and now were falling two days behind. Our afternoon ended early with a constant searching for the trail through the trees after we passed Detachment Meadow.

“How do they come up with these names?” Kit asked. Some surveyor was feeling a bit detached that day, I offered. We had a laugh, probably the only one that day, and repeated our well-worn chorus: “This calls for a cigarette!”

Now another cabin, called Chetwood on the map, was our destination. But we arrived in late afternoon to a securely bolted but half caved-in cabin with no sign of anyone having been there since last season at least. It was ripe from the “spring” thaw and there was evidence of many rodents and even bear “sign,” an impressively large pile of buggy, leafy poop. We kept going.

A couple of miles more — actually a couple of hours more — we made camp after the longest and so far most disappointing day. We were supposed to be cruising into Devil’s Postpile the next day, but instead we were almost two days away, or so we thought. Luck of all luck we hadn’t seen any sign of rain, and never had to use our rain parkas and pants. But it was challenging enough without bad weather, and though the beauty of the days was small comfort to two practically lost youngsters having less than the time of their lives, the clear days and nights were key advantages to getting out alive.

The next day we slogged on, trying to get to the lip of the canyon of the North Fork of the San Joaquin River, and finally we caught a glimpse at a place on the map called Bugg Cabin. This turned out to be another splintered leftover, much of which had been used for firewood. The canyon didn’t look all that far down so we decided to go for it. After ambling for what seemed like halfway down, we began tripping on roots and slipping on rocks because it was getting too dark to see.

As we had seen nobody on the trail since Merced Lake, we decided to just sleep at a level place on the trail at the bottom of a long set of switchbacks. No sooner did we have our sleeping bags laid out when the full moon rose over the cliffs of the canyon. We didn’t even recognize what was happening for a second it happened so fast. And bright as day! Though we were so tired, we couldn’t sleep with the moon so “loud” and proceeded to get silly, yelling and coyote-howling and having several “I think this calls for a cigarette” declarations.

Finally the moon moved behind a thick stand of willows and we could snooze. At dawn, we picked ourselves up to look for a place to have breakfast and found the most perfect virgin pine-needle covered parkland site nicely appointed with a few trees and sitting logs and right above the roaring San Joaquin along a little feeder creek. There was no evidence of a campfire or even blackened rocks, but there was lots of dead bleached pine and willow within easy reach. It was an Eden and after a nearly sleepless night we decided to cache our gear, hang the food, and explore how close we were to crossing the river.

We thought we were pretty close to Hemlock Crossing on the map, but we were a good hour away, maybe a mile and a half. We packed up, but when we got there, the campsite there was still puddled, the bugs were thick and there was no bridge. It was just a fording place for horses. But no horses could cross that river, which that month was as high and wild as any I’d seen in the Sierra.

The river was just plain too high and too fast to ford. We retreated to our Eden camp, got some rest and food and came up with a plan to lash together a raft and float ourselves and our backpacks across the river. We gathered all our stuff and headed back to the river the following early morning, hoping to catch it before it swelled with snowmelt by afternoon.

We got all our rope together and lashed a decent raft, even threw a roped rock that seemed fairly secure on the other side. We loaded our packs onto the raft and started to heft the whole mess into the river. We were barefoot, not wanting to soak our boots in that era (when no one took along sneakers on a backpacking trip) and suddenly I felt a sharp pinch on my big toe. A very sharp pinch. I shifted my foot thinking it was a rock but the stinging kept increasing. Thinking it was an earwig or crawdad, I shook my whole foot around, all the while trying to do my part to get the raft into the water in a position to swing it out over to the other side, about 50 yards (not a small distance, in my memory). But the stinging kept doubling and I let out a yelp, dropping my side of the raft into the river leaving Kit to scramble to keep it from floating off downstream while I screamed bloody murder about my toe.

“Goddam it Neice! What the hell’s going on?” Kit yelled while I limped around yelling “Oh my god, jesus christ!” and the like. I could not figure out what had latched onto my toe. By the time I looked at it, I had smashed what looked like a giant carpenter ant. A neat little chunk of flesh maybe the size of a head of finishing nail (nice carpenter ant analogy) was missing from the bottom of my toe.

But there was no time for inspection as Kit was struggling to keep the raft and all our earthly belongings from going downstream. The packs were sinking the raft into the current and we were about to lose most of our stuff out in the middle of nowhere. We were risking four days and nights back to Yosemite Valley without sleeping bags or food or map and compass.

I limped back into the river, very gingerly but as fast as I could, “Goddam it Neice get ahold of that side — not that side … jesus shit” and so on. We managed to pull the now wet and heavier packs up on the rocks and out of the current. No way we were going to get across that river any time soon.

After an afternoon of squeezing and drying gear, we repaired to our Eden camp for one last night. The next day we decided to troll south down the valley of the North Fork to find a crossing. We had seen some snow bridges and thought maybe there might be one big enough to support us. But it took all day to traverse a canyon and go three miles downriver. We saw one snow bridge but watched chunks of it fall into the river, groaning as they broke up.

We made a roaring river camp and started early the next day going along the slippery canyon of the North Fork, at times going high above the river and then dropping back down toward it to promising crossings, only to be humbled by the growing strength and depth of the river. Our boots were constantly soaked from fording freshets and creeks as well as established tributaries.

More than once we were lucky to find some strategically placed boulder or log waiting for us to cross on. We began to worry if we had enough food. Never once did we worry about giardia or bears or mountain lions. There were snakes, but the rattlers gave us fair warning, at least on this trip. We were hardened by each day of pulling ourselves and our packs around treacherous reaches of rock or along precipices exposing instant death if you didn’t watch your step.

As if all this wasn’t enough of a challenge, a mayfly bloom occurred that day. Millions and millions of mayflies permeated the air. We had to put on kerchiefs like outlaws to breathe and our sunglasses — required anyway to avoid being blinded from bright rocks and snow — helped keep them out of our eyes. Mayflies are tiny pink gnats that just float through the air, a feast for birds and fish and they might even do some pollenating. You really wouldn’t want to plan to be in one, but I’ll never forget it. It went on through the afternoon. The next day there were a few, but most had just lived their whole lives, like many flies, in one 24-hour period.

At lunch we decided if we weren’t going to try a snow bridge then we should get serious about finding a real bridge over the San Joaquin and there was one, on our map at least, at Sheep Crossing. But to get there we had to get out of the canyon and somehow find a trail. We followed the map up and found ourselves back near Bugg Cabin in the afternoon, not a great accomplishment over the past few days, but we felt we were becoming “shet of the treacheries” of the North Fork San Joaquin canyon.

Actual map and compass used
for our 1969 trek. Compass
points to Isberg Pass.

The USGS topographic map, which I still have today, shows Sheep Crossing as clearly having a bridge, depicted just as it is in the how-to-read-a-map section of the Boy Scout Handbook. Looking back at Hemlock Crossing, we saw there was no bridge symbol there, it was just a ford. Lotsa luck, and we hadn’t any lately. We were just dumb kids, being in the Sierra in June in the first place. Then misreading the map, imagining a bridge at Hemlock Crossing, and not even imagining the North Fork would be at flood stage anyway in June following one of the snowiest Sierra winters ever.

As it turned out, the second-most snowstorm activity ever recorded in the Central Sierra was Jan. 20-31, 1969, a total of 13.7 feet fell and there were other storms that year not as dramatic but enough to have piled up into a spectacular winter snow depth. But without satellites or extreme sportsman crossing the Sierras on skis back then, there was no one but the foolish to find out how the trails were affected. So we applied!

But like Kit said, we never would have gotten as far as we had without our map and compass. Being able to lay the map out on a flat rock or log or bed of dry needles, line it up north at the top and south at the bottom, dial the compass to between 16 and 17 degrees east to adjust for magnetic north and tilt the map to match. Mostly our inner sense of direction and the arc of the sun gave us a good bead on our bearings, but sometimes when steep slopes would come together that sense would disappear. And when you have no trail, it takes about 10 minutes to get really lost, 10 minutes to figure out where you are, and another 10 minutes to get back to where you started. Or more. But the map and compass enabled us to see the terrain ahead or just over the hill without actually risking a precipitous climb to nowhere, or getting stuck because climbs to nowhere always require a more dangerous retreat down. We had enough precipitous situations already.

One of them was that the map I had cut off just below the Sheep Crossing bridge, so we didn’t know how far south a trail would go before it joined a trail coming northeast from the bottom of the map. Rather than take a chance that it led several hours — or even days — out of the way, we stuck to reading the contour lines shown on the map. On our last of four nights battling cross country trying to get to the eastern side of the canyon, we plotted a way from our campsite along Cora Creek to the bridge, by looking to where the contour lines were widest as that showed the most level prospects for hiking to the bridge.

Again we saw some tempting snow-bridges, but decided to just keep going to the bridge and at least see if it was there. We followed the contours, making sure not to follow them down to the river too early and have to retrace our steps. As it was we came upon the trail half-covered with snow, but it was visible. And our friends the i’s on the trees confirmed it, as did the map and compass. After a few hundred yards, the trail cleared and we gleefully galumphed down its switchbacks to the site of the bridge. It wasn’t visible until the last minute, and when we saw it we didn’t know whether to celebrate it or curse it.

"Sheep Crossing" can be seen at lower right,
just above where map is cut, so we couldn't see
we were looking into the future at Junction Butte. 

There it was, a suspension bridge some 30 yards long with half its deck ripped out and just two cables holding up one side of the bridge over the now screaming San Joaquin, which had spent the spring trying to eat the Sheep Crossing span. Another precipitous situation to be sure. We shed our packs and looked it over. We had lunch and looked it over again. We had another cigarette and looked it over some more.

Finally we decided to lighten our loads and take some gear on at least two trips each. There was about 30 feet of top cable where the bridge deck hung from a lower cable and the spraying river waited just 15 feet below, tumbling south at a furious speed. As Kit was least in favor of turning back, he was the first one to try it. Shedding sleeping bag, tube tent and other bulky equipment, he pulled on his pack and gingerly stepped to where hand-to-hand and foot-to-foot on cables only began.

It was just as harrowing watching him as it was getting across myself, but he did it and I followed with my pack half-loaded. I’ll never forget hanging off that cable and it was very tough on the hands. The lower cable was skewed north and the top one south so you had to hang the wrong way for good weight distribution and the footholds were as precarious as the hand holds. But the hands and arms had to do most of the work. I had to fight not to hurry and make sure every handhold and foothold was secure. And not look down, as the speed, pitch and yaw of the river water would make you dizzy and invite you down.

Finally I got to the other side but it was no picnic to think about doing it again. Kit wasn’t real happy about it either, but took his empty pack back across while I waited and watched. “It just gets easier every time,” we told ourselves. Of course it was easier getting back without weight in our packs but just as harrowing as the weight of our bodies was enough to struggle with in that awkward lean-back pose with a hungry, surging river making a terrifying noise clanking big rocks right below you. But we got all our dwindling supplies over in one more trip each.

(photo by Kyle R. Scharton, Google Maps)
The new "Sheep Crossing" bridge is now rebuilt
and renamed the Mammoth Trail San Joaquin Bridge.
 You can see the old footings on each side of the river,
which was the river was roaring over in June 1969.  

We were so relieved to have gotten ourselves over that we had another snack and tons of water before we happily ambled down a trail free of snow courtesy of the southwestern exposure. We thought we no longer needed our map and compass and began to climb out of the canyon, but an hour or so later we began to head down into what turned out to be the canyon of the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin. When the trail really started to head down, we stopped and pulled out the map.

To the southeast below us was a beautiful valley free of snow with several nice clearings that invited us to camp at the more-peaceful-looking junction of the North and Middle Forks of the San Joaquin River. We considered going down, but we didn’t really know how far it was because I had cut the map off just below Sheep Crossing for convenience. And we didn’t need to be lost off the map.

So we made note of this beautiful setting and began to retrace our steps, cursing the extra mileage. Two years later I returned with Bob White and Ralph Skogen in tow, over the repaired Sheep Crossing bridge to the spot, called Junction Butte, where a singular hill was carved between the junction of the North and Middle Forks of the San Joaquin. There would be our home for six weeks in 1971, where I really reached adulthood.

When Kit and I climbed back up to the place where we had left the trail, we saw our mistake. It was a switchback heading north but covered with branches from a fallen tree. As soon as we got around that we soldiered up to Snake Meadow, where swarms of mosquitos attacked us. I had never seen swarms of skeets this large. It was almost as bad as the mayfly bloom, but these girls were out for blood (biting mosquitos are always female, as I knew from Nature Merit Badge). We literally had to outrun them while pawing to pull out our bug repellant with our packs half off. We eventually covered ourselves with Cutters but still had to whack at hungry mosquitos while trudging through the boot-sucking swamp that was Snake Meadow.

The mosquitos literally would not let us stop so we made pretty good mileage that day, probably 12 miles in all, to one of our preplanned stopovers at Corral Meadow, though after dark with wet muddy boots and caked with sweat and bug juice. Not only that, but clouds began to come from the south and by dark had covered the sky. We decided to cut one of the tube tents into a big tarp and propped one end on a stick tying the back end to a tree. Once our equipment was stowed, our foodbag simply hung above us and our groundcloths and sleeping bags laid out, we climbed in and built a small twig fire in front of the opening and heated water in our Sierra Cups for some cup-a-soups and crackers

The classic Sierra cup. We used ours to heat water and soup
directly on the coals of a small, quick fire.

I don’t remember any rain that night, but there was some thunder and lightning. When we awoke, it was later than usual. We were in a relatively dry upper part of the meadow and the bugs weren’t as bad as the day before, but you had to keep moving. I think we made it six or eight miles before stopping at a place called Summit Meadow, a high and relatively exposed camp where we had time to wash up thoroughly and look forward to pulling into Devil’s Postpile and the town of Mammoth Lakes the next day.

We got up early and headed down. The trail was relatively snow-free thanks to the eastern Sierra exposure, but the downhill was long and tiring. We pulled into Devil’s Postpile shortly after noon, awed by the line of basalt buttresses that formed a wall two miles long. We weren’t there long when we caught a ride out with a couple of fishermen in the back of their smelly pickup truck into town. It was good luck as it was some 15 miles into town and saved us nearly two more days of walking. And the Red’s Meadow Ranger Station — some four miles down the road — was still closed for the season. 

When we got to Mammoth Lakes we went to a store and Kit bought some beer, having acquired a windblown look and a distinctly grizzled beard with white-blond hairs that made him look 40! We stopped at the Inyo National Forest Ranger Station along the way out to Highway 395 to report our nine-night slog over Isberg Pass and through the canyon of the North Fork of the San Joaquin River. The ranger, more savvy than his Yosemite Valley counterparts, said that trail was still closed and we couldn’t have done it. We insisted we just did it and he informed us we were about two weeks ahead of their first-of-the-season survey of the trail. We told him about the ruined bridge and the snowbound trail and he maybe started to believe us but he didn’t want to hear much more. At a visitor register there I remember signing my name and under comments next to our names: First over Isberg Pass from Yosemite to Devil’s Postpile, June 18-28, 1969. I wonder if they kept that register.

The ranger said flatly that the trail north to Tuolumne Meadow was closed as well and that we better take a bus south around Lake Isabella as he thought Tioga Pass was closed, too. We convinced him to call and find out if Tioga was open, which he reluctantly did. Turns out it was open, but he didn’t know of anybody driving over to the Valley, so we went to find out about a bus. We left and laughed about the ranger not believing us, knowing we had just accomplished something very big.

But feeling big wasn’t going to get us back to Yosemite and the trusty Invicta station wagon. That and the bus north to the eastern Yosemite portal community of Lee Vining had left hours ago. We didn’t really have enough cash to spare for it anyway, so we decided to hitchhike. We got one ride to out to 395, another to the June Lake loop and finally made the last leg to Lee Vining about eight that night.

There were no cars going over Tioga Pass that night except supply trucks that wouldn’t stop for us. So we headed up a barren hill overlooking the town and the vast moonlike Mono Lake, and camped on a shelf that may have been part of some kind of old mining access road. From that perch, we drank the rest of our beer, howled at the moon and tried to get some sleep. I remember the next morning it was a struggle to find a wide spot in the road big enough for somebody to pull over but as soon as we did we got a ride from a nice old couple in their crowded vehicle who bought us lunch in the Tuolumne Meadows cafeteria (just opened for the year) and then took us all the way to Yosemite Valley and the waiting Invicta, our “loop” complete at last.

At the Yosemite Valley gas station, we filled up with my mom’s Chevron card, and I called collect home. Of course they hadn’t been expecting a call for another week, so I had to quickly explain we’d been unable to complete the whole hike but got safely back to the Invicta and left out the scary details.

It took at least six hours to get home as Kit wanted to go a different way home, so we headed south to Fresno via Chinquapin, Wowona and Mariposa Grove at one point the San Jose radio station KLIV came in loud and clear from 200 miles away for about 15 minutes or so, long enough to play one of our favorites, “Good Old Rock ’n’ Roll” by Cat Mother. After that we got Jerry Lee Lewis out of some Merced station doing “Splody Ode Drinking Wine” as well as Roger Miller doing “King of the Road.” Later in the San Joaquin Valley we got Roger again doing “Dang Me,” the Chambers Brothers doing “Time (Has Come Again)” and the Grass Roots doing “Sooner or Later.” In the mid-’90s, I wrote a song about that day called “Radio Merced.”

We pulled into Santa Clara and my parent’s place sometime around midnight. Still I had to shower, and talk to my dad and mom for an hour. My dad at first thought we had chickened out, but after I told him we were the first ones over Isberg Pass and about the bridge at Sheep Crossing and what the ranger had said, he realized that we had been lucky (and good, though he would only tell mom that). Finally I collapsed into bed until at 2:30 the next afternoon, and only because it was too hot to stay in bed. It was a week until my 17th birthday, and 10 days later the successful Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon was launched. -- by Karl Neice, May 2003 and October 2021

Karl Neice at 17