Cheating Death at Junction Butte

From this perch, I can't tell you whether Bob or Ralph thought we were going to move to the mountains forever, but I was certainly hoping for that. I was the junior member of our household of three, but the only one with wilderness experience.

Ralph was the oldest, but just two years older. I didn't know it then, but he wasn't working much because he was living under the radar, out of the draft board's range, avoiding a free trip to Vietnam as a medic or a galley slave. He'd done a decent job of it from his 1967 graduation until this summer of 1972, a stretch of time when the war raged brightly and ate tens of thousands of baby-booming young men. Without college, church or a political point of view, he'd drifted through relationships and households, with the tacit approval of his family, who of course didn't want to see him go into the army. That is why, without much camping in his background or much awareness of what it would take, he enthusiastically signed on to sell or store all of our possessions and vacate to a wilderness paradise I had described to him and Bob, the three bunkmates of 10th Street South in San Jose.

Bob's mugging maybe kept him out of the Vietnam War.

Above all Ralph trusted Bob, a strong, able 19-year-old and extremely funny in both body and soul. Bob could fix cars or anything else, build bunk beds, use a sewing machine (or stitch) to create or repair clothes. He was a convincing all-American Adonis and inspired a lot more confidence from all walks of life than the hippie-ish square junior partner with the nickname Butterball -- me. Ralph and Bob had established a relationship and adopted a way of life that required very little money, a modicum of hard work here and there, and a dash of easy cleverness to solve problems seasoned and punctuated with lots and lots of laughs (and cheap beer). When I joined the team, having flunked gloriously out of college in the winter of 1970, I had fallen yet another step behind their easy understanding of everything we faced. I would say, "We better do this" and Bob would say, "Fuck you Neice, all we have to do is this" with an inclusive guffaw (they were never mean) and off we would fly through the next perceived problem landing on our feet once again. This was Bob's talent, which Ralph depended on to get us through many adventures.

Karl and dad at Eagle Scout ceremony

That I was an Eagle Scout and had actually backpacked some 500 miles and 200 nights more than either of them gave me just enough believability for them to accept my choice of hideaway as our destination on our journey away from civilization. That and the fact that the only backpack friend that I had at the time happened to be a trusted crony of all of us named Kit Arnst, who had me and my map and compass to thank for us getting through a snowbound, trail-less wilderness a couple of years before on a 14-day slog over the Sierra Nevada crest south of Yosemite. It was that trip that Kit and I -- after bravely hand-over-handing our gear over a partially destroyed steel-cable suspension bridge over a wildly careening snowmelt-powered North Fork of the San Joaquin River -- stumbled upon the paradise that was Junction Butte valley, at the confluence of the North and Middle Forks of the mighty San Joaquin.

Kit (left) and Ralph at Lochridge house

Bob had wangled a medical deferment I believe, and I had secured conscientious-objector status with the Army draft board, but I think Ralph was feeling some heat, so that's why he agreed to go. It must have been a moment in May, another day of having very little money, when I proposed we just leave and spend a year in the Sierras, specifically Junction Butte. Kit agreed this was a good idea but he had a carpenter job that paid well and a promising girlfriend, which none of our trio had. I earned about $50 a week working at Meyberg's Deli and we all got weekend money by moving, dumping or assisting someone, but nothing saved up. When I arrived back in the Valley in early 1971, we rented a house in East San Jose near the Flea Market for about $100 a month. Even filching food from work and beers from the nearby 7-11, we couldn't afford that. Plus it was broken into regularly by the neighbors, we being the only white people on Lochridge Drive.

Karl and guitars that miraculously weren't stolen from Lochridge house.

So somehow someone stumbled on this 12x14 square-foot one-room cottage in the back of a boarding house on 10th Street south of the San Jose State University and downtown. Steve, the rotund, well-meaning but dull second-generation Greek son of the landlady there, showed us the place and the rent was $40. He loved our footloose, funny, beer-drinking lifestyle and would constantly be dropping by to ask dumb questions that drove us out of our minds. He would come to the door and knock and say, "It's me, it's me." So that became his nickname.

Bob did some work on construction with Kit, and I continued to work at the deli. Ralph bounced around, mostly begging, borrowing and stealing good music and dope. We lived off the original Togos sandwich shop near San Jose State, getting to know the workers, offering to clean up the grounds, and going in right before closing to score several leftover, three-foot long sandwiches of exotic Italian processed meat and cheese that we'd store in our tiny fridge and would live on for several days. We bought 52-cent Burgermeister quarts of beer and the occasional 89-cent Fisher six-pack to wash those stale subs down. But we were rarely hungry. We had the tiny fridge, a camping cooler and a hotplate. The bathroom was across a blacktop backyard in the main house, with a separate door but no heating. We had to use a key every time because there was a lot of It's Me It's Me's stuff stored there, including a bowling ball he swore he'd bowled a 300 game on. It was stored right under the sink, but he swore we should never get it wet.

For our comfort, Kit brought over a dozen or more leftover two-by-fours and he and Bob fashioned a crude bunkbed, which we began to build outside and quickly realized we'd have to finish the job of joining the bed-frames inside. Whether we knew at the time we'd never be hauling that bunk out of that room I don't know, but it was a factor because three 18-21 year-old guys in a 12-by-14 room can't have that many belongings in the first place. I had two pickle barrels from Meyberg's stuffed with childhood mementos stashed up in my parents’ Seattle crawlspace. I know Ralph had stuff at his mom's and Bob at his dad's, but it took one visit to the flea market to get rid of what little we had and add to a small cash pile intended to buy food for the trip.

We already had sleeping bags, so we chose from what cooking gear we had and collected canteens, a first aid kit, fishing gear, knives, tarps, a hatchet, rope and all kinds of bags. I had my Antelope pack and Bob and Ralph borrowed backpacks when we knew the time was coming near. At what point it was decided is unclear, but we lived on Lochridge in February and March, and then 10th Street for April and May. Rent for June was never paid, but it was mid June at the latest when we took off for Junction Butte. We had to stiff Steve and his mom for the rent but in the end we left the place reasonably clean and threw in the refrigerator and a brand-new bunkbed!

Getting out

The only problem was how to get there. I had a '57 Chevy given to me by my father that got into a couple of accidents and was impounded a couple of times. I tried to find a place to park it but failed and had to take it to a junk yard and settle for a measly $15. Worst deal I ever made but I did offer to several other friends for $200 who should have known better, too. We had only Ralph's VW bug to work with and it had bald tires.

I believe it was Bob who came up with the idea of trading our bald tires for new spares that he discovered were so easily available by lifting up the front trunk of the newer Bugs parked on the streets in the Rancho Rinconada (nickname: Rancho Rinky Dink), the development of Bob's upbringing, with it twists and turning streets so easily lending us escape routes. It was easily done by pulling up next to the newer Bug, opening the "bonnet," turning a wing nut, pulling the new spare and replacing with a bald tire we'd just pulled off to replace the last new spare we'd liberated. We hated the new plastic-dashboard Bugs, so we rationalized it that way.

Kit and Bob at our first official parentless campout at Big Sur in early 1969. Kit and I braved cresting the Sierra from Yosemite to Mammoth Lakes later that year after a record snowpack (read next blog entry!).

Next up was food. We had scrapped together some $200, a seeming fortune in those days, and Bob and I knew a guy named Greg who had already married and had a job as a checker in a Safeway. So we went there and threw together $200 worth of food and got in Greg's line. Our cart was completely full of flour, oatmeal, two cases of beer, and tons of beef jerky and nuts and dried fruit. When Greg was done checking it through sleight of hand, it came out to like $30. In the days before barcodes, this was entirely possible. Mission accomplished.

How we got all that food, gear, beer and ourselves into that Bug I will never know. We did have a nifty rooftop rack that Bob fashioned somehow that we tied too much gear onto. We had to keep the whole project secret from It's Me It's Me, so loading commenced about midnight. At 2 a.m., we were ready to go and Ralph went to the bathroom to leave the keys safely there one last time. He brought back the bowling ball. "We have to take this," he solemnly swore. We laughed and said sure. We pushed the Bug noiselessly from the backyard to 10th Street and fired it up. We were on our way.

Getting the ball rolling

Gas was maybe 35 cents a gallon because the 50 cents charged in the mountains was forest-road robbery. The Bug was insanely efficient, going almost 400 miles per 10-gallon tank (including the "reserve" tank, so two $5 fillups were all that was needed to get us deep into the mountains. We were giddy at our escape, we had $80, two "lids" of pot and a case of beer. And a bowling ball. Bob and Ralph, up front, came up with an idea. As we crested Pacheco Pass out of Salinas Valley, and headed down the new six-lane freeway past San Luis Reservoir, all by ourselves in the middle of the night, it was decided to launch the bowling ball down a long slope on the freeway to the lake.

As we hurtled 80 miles an hour down from the Pass, Ralph let it go. The damn ball bounced high but went backwards and Bob hit the brakes. A good thing, too, because the ball had taken another huge, spark-filled bounce and then landed 10 feet in front of us. If he hadn't braked we would have been smashed by our own joke. One lucky trio. Then the ball took off down the mile-long slope in huge, sparkling bounces, never breaking apart as we had thought it would. A car suddenly swung uphill on the other side of the freeway and it seemed to weave, maybe they saw the ball or or the sparks and couldn't figure out what was happening. But the ball took bigger and bigger bounces, launched way over the car and fell out off the freeway into a ravine on the north side. Goodbye to It's Me It's Me. The 300-game ball (which we doubted anyway) had a much grander exit from its original purpose, but it did get wet! And our luck, which Bob especially liked to test, was still holding.

As dawn broke we pulled into Bass Lake, gassed up and found a picnic grounds to have food and beer for breakfast before the long Forest Service road trip through the Sierra enclaves of North Fork and South Fork past the Mammoth Pool resort to Granite Creek Ranger Station and Campground and the trailhead to Sheep Crossing at the North Fork of the San Joaquin River. Just outside the campsite we found an out of the way place to hide the VW, covering it with branches and leaving some canned food and Sterno cans in it (in case we came back starving).

The rebuilt bridge at Sheeps Crossing over the North Fork of the San Joaquin.

At that we hefted our heavy packs and hiked down to the partially repaired Sheep Crossing bridge (now replaced by the Mammoth Trail San Joaquin Bridge), and got across the North Fork and started down to the Middle Fork. I had to feel my way as it had been two years since Kit and I had discovered the Junction Butte valley by missing a turn north to Reds Meadow and Devil’s Postpile. There were plenty of obstacles and slides along the way, a sign the place was as deserted as we first surmised. Finally the trail became obvious and we followed down to the Middle Fork.

Everything just ducky

By the time we got into the valley, Bob and I were feverish from some flu and made Ralph get us water and cook us soup. Then Ralph got the flu and we had to camp there a few nights. Bob killed the duck here in a Cargyle Creek pool, by hurling a single stone. It was an auspicious sign. Not much meat, but we kept adding water for a broth. While Ralph recovered, Bob and I scouted out the eventual campsite and a ford across the Middle Fork just up from Cargyle Creek. Once we got across to the higher, needle-covered paradise on the south side of the river, we realized it was full of rattlesnakes. That meant we had to wear our leather hiking boots all the time. (There were no other kind of hiking boots then, and the stiff high leathers for ankle support also protected against rattlesnake bites.)

The elevation was about 5,000 feet, and I thought it would be relatively snow-free during the winter. We had built the bunkbeds in San Jose, so I had an idea for building a cabin so we could spend the winter or at least stash stuff and return the next year and I had packed in some heavy sisal rope for lashing logs together. At first Bob put some thought into it, but it was obvious Ralph didn't think anything would come from it. So this became our first big disagreement and we prepared our own sleeping areas.

At time, plastic “tube” tents were all the rage and we had brought a couple. But they were much more useful as tarps so we cut them up for sleeping lean-tos and a “pantry” cover. To sleep on the ground, we dug shallow “hip holes” and covered the area with pine needles. I had a ground cloth, too, but we had no air mattresses as they were still very heavy and not very reliable at the time.

Once settled in, we spent the long hot days fishing, swimming and scouting out the various abandoned fishing camps in the area. Somehow the area hadn't been on the recreational packers' agenda for years. No fresh manure and very little dust around obviously abandoned "corrals" near campsites that once looked to hold scores of anglers and wranglers packed down by horses and mules to the confluence of the North and Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River. Old beer cans and even some bottles from the 30s and 40s were collecting in middens (old trash piles; this was before we knew beer-can collecting was a thing).

"Wilderness Cookery"

At one old camp we scored a well-rusted 5-gallon rectangular metal fuel container out of a midden. We had brought a reflector oven that Bob cooked excellent biscuits on (while the flour lasted), but now he had an idea to smoke the 8-to-10-inch trout (that we were throwing back) in the can, as featured in our bible, "Wilderness Cookery" by Bradford Angier: "Good grub anywhere with fixings that are easy to carry or to find." Bob loved that book to pieces and we went through many copies in subsequent years.

The Bob-beloved Wilderness Cookery recipes saved our meals from total repitition.

We stripped the old packer camps of wire and used our pocket-knife awl (Swiss army knives and leathermen weren't very common at the time and too expensive anyway) to puncture holes to set wire "racks" inside the can to hold trout by their punctured tails. We whittled hardwoods into chips and made a cover for the "smoker" and put it on the low fire with ample embers. I did a lot of monitoring of the coals and smoker while Ralph and Bob caught at least a dozen fish every morning for smoking that day. The big ones were fried or poached for breakfast along with wild onions from a patch we found nearby, along with miner’s lettuce for greens.

A week or so at our camp a heat wave hit. It was too hot to wear clothes, but with rattlesnakes everywhere we had to wear our leather hiking boots. So we became the naked boot campers. Cap, boots and nothing else, sitting on cool rocks near the river, bravely dipping in at times. The surging San Joaquin just to the north of camp was moving too swiftly to swim in, except for these tiny, freezing eddies. Ralph and Bob decided to go upriver and float down boots first with your head up so you could steer yourself with wet boots using the river boulders to steer and avoid getting scraped while staying cool in the water. Soon we had an established route and began to bet on races, riding down the river to a haul-out place and walking back up to re-enter the river and repeat. After a couple of days of this, we could easily soak in the freezing eddies until the skin on our toes puckered up. Being out of the water was too hot, and being in the water was normal. We were the cleanest campers ever!

Fearful hunters

About 20 days in, we were running out of jerky and starting to get sick of smoked trout and wondering if we could trap and dress a deer, preferably a small one, on the north side of the river. We constructed a "trap" out of strong, green limbs and tried to lure deer with some of the grass we saw them eating. One morning Ralph came up from fishing and said something was crashing around in the brush on the north side. We stalked what turned out to be a bear cub. At first we steered clear, fearing a mother-cub invasion of our food stores. But after a day with the cub sniffing about and no sight of ferocious mama bear, we tried to direct it into a thicket trap with some smoked trout in the middle thinking the young bear wouldn't be able to resist. And true, the cub advanced into the thicket to slurp the prize fish. I could hear Bob murmuring, "He's eating it. Eat up, little bear."

I guess the plan was to brain the bear with a rock the way Bob did to that poor stringy duck, and then slice its throat and use the thicket to drain and dress the meat. But we never got near that outcome as suddenly the cub screamed bloody murder aat piercing volume after Bob’s first rock, thrashing easily out of the thicket and scooted directly at me and the camp up the hill behind me. Scared witless I jumped behind a tree and started to scramble free-hand up the bark, which gave way, scraping and my chest and leaving a splinter near my nipple. But the bear was long gone, mewling at top speed toward the other side of the valley. Bob and Ralph had a good chuckle at my predicament, weaving puns and jibes for days afterward about Butterball’s breasts!

After four weeks or so we were running short of supplies. It was decided that I should hike back to the car, drive into North Bend, get gas, flour, cigs (probably why I agreed to do it, they didn't smoke) and whatever dried fruit and jerky I could get my hands on, drive back to the trailhead and hike down with 60 pounds of supplies to hopefully last until September.

From Junction Butte camp across the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin to Cargyle Meadow, a good source for wild onions. Wish we had that slick tram wire over the river, but I chopped down a tree instead!

Because the rivers were still too deep and fast to ford, I decided to chop down a tree so that we could walk over and back with more ease in the future. With a small Boy Scout hatchet that I kept sharpened with a hasp and a stone found at the camps, I cut into a 18-inch thick fir that was on the shore leaning over the river, tall without many branches. Unlawful as this obviously was, nobody was around and the plan was that I could fell it over the Middle Fork and it would provide passage over the river for us. I think it took me three days of chopping and rest, chopping and rest. I even taught myself to chop left-handed. When it finally fell, it made a lot of twisting noise and fell short of the north bank with a boom and a shudder, then twisted west with the current and settled between our camp and a river island. So it didn’t work and I had to rope-ford out of there.

Tired but lucky

After I bade farewell to the boys I headed up the trail to Sheep’s Crossing for an early night and early hike to the Bug. I pulled off all the camouflaging limbs and discovered the tires were very soft. Hmm, we probably should have given those switched-out new spares some extra air.

But the engine cranked and I slowly and carefully made my way along the Forest Service road to North Fork near Bass Lake intending to get gas and fill the tires along the way at a store at Mammoth Pool reservoir. But when I pulled in, I was told the generator was out of order, so the air compressor and gas pumps were out of order, too. By now I could feel the Bug weave from the low tires so I slowed to 5-10 mph and still had a few hours to go. But as I came around into western exposure the radio reception improved and I found a powerful station in the Central Valley playing Louis Armstrong singing “Hello Dolly”. Then the announcer came on saying Louis Armstrong had died that day at 69 years old, then it played his “What a Wonderful World” to end the news segment with a sign-off that it was July 6, 1971 at 11 a.m. in the morning. I must’ve arisen at 5 a.m. to make that kind of time, then suddenly it hit me it was my birthday, and I started to cry.

So now I was 19 and out in the middle of nowhere on a lonely, one-lane back road with low tires and little gas, thinking about how my mother loved Louis Armstrong. I tried to steer slowly and methodically so as not to slide onto the rims of the wheels, or worse flip over. But that’s just what happened coming out of an unending curve just five miles from North Bend. The VW’s wheels buckled and the Bug tumbled two or three times, throwing the steering wheel out of my hands and forcing me down to the passenger seat. When it shrugged to a stop, the driver’s door opened and I slid out onto the street. Luckily I only had bloody scrapes on my back and knee and avoided any head-banging. After all, I was going all of 10 miles per hour.

After I got my bearings, I was angry and shouting and kicking the car and throwing stuff and breathing hard in disbelief when a large utility-type pickup with a winch on the front came the other way, pulling up and asking me if I needed help. Yes, indeed. How fortunate to encounter this rig and there was a rare wide spot to pull off nearby; so we winched the wreck off the road and extricated my pack, where I had re-hidden our money. He offered me a cigarette and I eagerly accepted, having run out a week or more before. Hearing that he pulled out a carton of Larks and gave me two packs and then reached into a cooler and gave me two icy Lucky Lagers. Then he drove off saying he’d send a tow truck out from South Bend, and that I could deal with the wreck from there.

The beers and cigarettes calmed my nerves after the coulda-been-much-worse wreck. But it wasn’t more than half an hour before I was picked up by an older couple, driving what we used to call a “camping van” before RVs. They gave me some snacks and dropped me off in South Bend at the drive-in burger stand. The burger-stand owner, Sunny, a friendly and kind 40-ish woman, put me in touch with the mechanics next door whom my utility-truck-winch savior had already notified. Then I called USFS to report the accident and Sunny drove me to the ranger station so I could answer questions about the crash. While I was making my report the the ranger, all of a sudden the highway patrol was crackling on the radio asking about a mangled VW bug being on the side of the road. I was lucky to be right there to assure them I had a tow deal and avoid a citation. I had to give the tow lot $25 of the $80 we had stashed.

Thank you for the sunshine

Sunny, who also ran a trailer park behind the burger stand, let me stay in a free-standing pickup camper and use the flush toilets and showers available on site, then invited me for a microwave dinner (a new thing back then) at her large trailer with some beers as we just happened to catch a 1971 summer rerun of the first All in the Family TV show that we had never seen and both liked how different it was from regular boring TV. At the time, there were no VCRs. You had to watch TV according to announced schedules, especially out in the sticks. If you missed it, there were reruns. Civilization had to wait more than 30 years to get it all on YouTube!

Sunny gave me some cans of peaches and a bag of flour from the burger stand as I had no time to shop before hitching a 6 a.m. ride back to Granite Creek Ranger Station. She drove me to the ranger station and I thanked her. Oh, it was nothing, she smiled. It was fun to help. Say hi to your friends and stop by on the way back. But she wasn’t around when we came out a couple of weeks later. I sent her a postcard a few months after that from my new home in Monte Vista, but never got an answer. But Bass Lake Mobile Park is still there as of 2021.

By noon, I was backpacking down to Sheep Crossing, thinking I might be able to make it all the way back to Junction Butte. But then temptation stared me straight in the face. After all the charity from Sunny, the utility truck driver and the USFS rangers, you'd think I would have passed by the Boy Scout station wagons overloaded-with-backup foods and other useful supplies clearly visible in well-appointed back bays. This was sloppy caching even then, before Yosemite bears figured out how to break open car windows! Being an Eagle Scout myself, you'd think ethics might carry the day. But still having a rather mixed feelings about my Scouting career and clearly lacking in the supplies I went out for, I decided to break in, but just take select cans and flour, granola, etc. The intention was that they wouldn’t miss what I was taking.

The old trick of “whacking the front-wing window when you lock your keys in” applied here so I whacked a flat stone against the driver's wing window and it popped open without breaking (Bob taught this). I reached in and opened the door, and helped myself to various cans of food and supplies, including toilet paper, and repacked my overpacked pack and started down to Sheep Crossing. Lo and behold, not 30 minutes later I catch up with these same Boy Scouts, who admired the size and weight of my pack and wanted to know every little thing about our Junction Butte camp. The booty wasn’t visible but I didn’t tarry, so they may have never put two and two together when they returned to their (re-)locked vehicles.

The 60-pound-plus-pack slog down to Sheep Crossing, over the bridge, and down to the camp came with a surprise at the end. The tree I had cut to span the Middle Fork had been stripped of key branches by Bob and Ralph to aid walking over it, and the river had receded enough in the past few days to make it easy to walk to the log and over the river, avoiding our old "duck flu camp" and the chorus of rattlesnake warnings on the way through the boulder field nearby. It was like locusts, you can't walk around that many rattlers, except for that tree bridge we made.

From there, it was a cakewalk into camp and the big cans of peaches and four pounds of crappy pancake flour were well-received, but the news of the wrecked VW Bug was problematic. We decided we would, on our way out, stop at the wrecking yard next to Sunny’s burger stand and see if we could salvage enough to buy a cheap used car to get us home or call through Western Union for a money order to be cashed at a post office for at least bus tickets home.

It was an idyllic week or two with supplies and good weather. We continued to explore the shores of the rivers’ confluence for supplies and new fishing holes. One evening Ralph felt a whack on his lower leg and saw a snake wriggle away from him. But we couldn’t find a bite mark, so his jeans must have snagged a fang. We dodged a bullet there.

But a few days later, we were exhuming a “midden” of old beer cans and various bottles when Bob came across a promising wide-mouth jar with a rusty lid still on it. When he tried to turn the lid, the jar disintegrated into thick shards and cut into his hand between thumb and forefinger. Fortunately the glass mostly bled out of the wound, but getting it to stop bleeding was scary as hell. Finally we got it stabilized and got Bob into his sleeping bag to stave off shock.

Things get scary

It didn’t take long to realize we had to get out of there to a hospital. But we couldn’t take everything, and we had to go fast and light. Ralph and I packed while Bob rested and ate and drank. We left that evening to hike up to Sheep Crossing in the cool air, so we could get to the hospital the next day. How without our car we did not know.

We tried to keep up the humor with Bob’s dry observations, Ralph’s goofy jokes and my bad puns, chuckling along the way. From Sheep Crossing, I took off at first light to find a ranger at Granite Creek. But when I got up to the trailhead a couple miles before the ranger station, I found a ranger working on maintenance at our first campground and he agreed to drive me there after hearing my story. Turned out some off-duty firefighters were going out on leave to Fresno later that day so we were saved! The ranger drove me to the trailhead just as Bob and Ralph straggled in.

Ralph before the Junction Butte jaunt, where he postponed his army stint while becoming Bob's "medic" after the twisted jar injury.

We had to wait a few hours for the two jeeps to start the three-hour trip out, and rode out atop our own gear. Somewhere along the way as we were trying to keep Bob comfortable on the dusty, bumpy road I discovered my sleeping bag had come loose and my first down-filled mail-order bag from REI likely had fallen unseen down a slope. But we had to keep going.

The firefighters took us straight to the hospital in Fresno (“Do you know how many times we’ve made this trip?” they quipped) and Ralph checked Bob in while I headed with most of our cash to the bus station for a ticket to San Francisco. Ralph called ahead to his older sister Ricka and brother-in-law Robert, who lived in nice ground-floor apartment on a busy leg of Lombard Street near the Palace of Fine Arts. They had been generous hosts to us during our last year in high school when it was still exciting to go “the city” to see them for a day or for a show, or both.

At the end of my all-night bus ride, Robert met me at the San Francisco bus terminal and took me to the apartment where I cleaned up and got ready for the immediate return trip. Robert had a good union job at the railroad and had enough flexibility to take a few days off, so he brought some camping gear, including a lightweight but adequate sleeping bag for me. On our way out of town we bought a case of beer and more food, and Robert brought a lid of good pot he had just scored. That ride was when he passed to me the knowledge of how to roll respectful joints.

Robert was an early adopter of those classy little BMW 2000s that became surfers’ favorites years later, and we jumped into the little bimmer for the crusade to Fresno. My bleary head was spinning thinking about how fast I turned from sleeping-bagless bus tramp to riding shotgun in a high-performance sedan smoking excellent weed and listening to a excellent Blaupunkt radio. Robert punched it over Altamont Pass and down Highway 99 to Fresno and we picked up Ralph and Bob at the hospital (they had “slept” in the lobby for a day and half after Bob got stitched up).

Robert treated us to an all-your-can-eat “Smorgasbord” where we decided to return to Junction Butte and close up camp. Bob said he felt OK doing hiking without a pack (we had Bob’s and Ralph’s at camp), so it seemed like a cakewalk down to the valley for the third time that summer. I think we stayed three nights. But Robert loved it and came back at least once in following years. We had smoke and brought as many beer cans as possible to cool in the river’s shallows for happy hours. We dug a hole and cached some smoked fish just to see if it would last until we came back (it didn’t). We buried or tied down other pots, pans and utensils we didn’t want to see strewn all over the river valley when we returned. Bob even stashed “Wilderness Cookery” safely away for future visits (it survived for a couple of years in a baking tin).

Epilogue

As the legend of Junction Butte made it around our circle of friends, we returned in various groups (but never the original Three Musketeers) over the next couple of decades. Almost everyone I know from those days made at least one pilgrimage. It was mostly unchanged when I made my only return in 1979 on my way to Mount Whitney to scatter my dad’s ashes. But I heard in the ‘90s it became a glamping destination with muleskinning packers luring wealthy fishermen with stories of lunkers packed on dry ice for shipment home.

Later I told a friend’s stepfather who grew up in Modesto about our adventure. He nodded thoughtfully, and then related a wonderful story about his upbringing in the late Depression. His father, a civics teacher in town, would close their house every summer to save money and escape the valley heat, and brought his wife and him and his two brothers up into the Sierras for the 10 weeks of vacation from school because they could live off flour, corn, beans, fish and sometimes poached venison without leaving the whole time. Still, he was impressed we lasted six weeks plus in the modern era. I remember his benediction to the story well, and later made it the end of a song I wrote called, “Okemah to California”: He said, “The life we lived back then, you can’t live today.”

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