Page 29 - 20145 AMA Spring

Good Morning Yosemite
By Toby Dunn
Since I’d arrived in Yosemite Valley, a small part of me had felt ill at ease, though I loved the rocks I’d travelled to the United States to climb. I craved an ideal of wilderness a barren
desert, an open sea, an endless forest, a towering mountain face. I wanted to live as close as possible to the alien, bleak comfort of the great unknown. SNUFFLE SNUFFLE. The sound is muffled through the hood of my sleeping bag, which is drawn up around my head. SNUFFLE. I open the draw cord just enough to see a particularly obese squirrel rooting around on the ground a foot or two from my head. Many of the animals in Yosemite Valley are swollen, distended versions of their cousins elsewhere, such is the volume of the diet of food scraps left by careless visitors that they live on. I could probably overtake this vast specimen without leaving my sleeping bag. This supersized country impresses its lumbering identity on you, even inside your sleeping bag on the ground in a forest. I sit up out of my little patch of dust, and try to shake the dirt from the clothes I have been using for a pillow before putting them on. My shoulders feel sore from climbing the previous day, as I squirm into a jacket. A thin miasma of misty cloud hangs around the pine trees in damp tendrils. I gather my sleeping bag and mat, and walk through a clutter of giant trees and boulders down towards a car park, serried with rows of motor vehicles of every size and shape. Vast motor homes, trucks, shiny saloon cars sit alongside total wrecks. There are state plates from all over the lower 50, a good range of the disparity of wealth in this vast country is aptly displayed in this parking lot. My battered Honda Accord sits low down in the automotive social pecking order. I toss my sleeping things into the trunk, exchanging them for a slightly grimy coffee mug, and resecure the lid with a few strip of duct tape and a broken zip tie. Some hikers, smartly dressed in clean, well fitting outdoor clothing emblazoned with designer logos appear to try their best to affect total ignorance of my presence.
Camp 4 is a sandpitfreak show of rock climbers and assorted eccentric derelicts in a bouldery corner of the pineandmeadow valley floor. It is Yosemite’s cheapest legitimate accommodation: a Spartan arrangement of grubby tent sites and a toilet block. Camp 4 is the favoured temporary home for rock climbers who flock to the valley to scale its cliffs. The early autumn morning is freezing; the dry air is cut with the ragged roar of petrol fuelled camping stoves, and the low clunk of gear being stuffed into huge vinyl haul bags. These bags are used to carry everything one needsto live on whilst climbing the larger of the cliff faces in Yosemite, sometimes up to a vertical mile of rock, which can take many days. In this athletic commune of vibrant squalor is everything I know; Camp 4 and its environs feel as much like home as anywhere else on the planet, far from the wilderness I craved. The residents are an assortment of committed rock climbers, wannabe rock climbers, and various derelicts and lost souls who find in its anonymity, and shifting population some kind of stability. Each place in the campground is a patch of dirt; sectioned off with some lengths of
timber, with a low, metal ‘bear box’ at one side of it. The boxes are an essential of life here – the scavenging bears will tear open tents or cars to get at food or even cosmetics left
in an unarmoured container. I would regularly see bears wandering about if I woke at night, as I was always outside, but they seemed unconcerned and uninterested in me. They usually seemed far more interested in shiny SUVs in parking lots that may contain an unfinished bag of pretzels or some other tasty snack.
The regulations in staying in Yosemite Valley are extremely strict – two weeks maximum in the high season, four weeks in the offseason. The average visitor to the national park spends about four hours there. The amenities and transport in the Valley are organised with efficiency and a focus on turnaround time reminiscent of a budget airline. Rumours are flying around the climbing community that the National Park rangers fined a large group of Spanish climbers $200 each at the weekend. Dozens of them had crammed into two or three little tents to avoid paying. Rangers raided in the middle of the night, unzipped the tents, and took pictures of them asleep to identify repeat offenders. It is remarkable how similar their methods for ‘dealing’ with the problem bears and problem climbers are. The bears have been an increasing problem in Yosemite since the 1970s, when the Park authorities used to feed them for the enter- tainment of tour groups. The bears learnt quickly that the presence of people equalled food, but visitors didn’t like their cars being damaged by hungry paws. So now the bears were herded away every night by rangers firing rubber bullets.
It’s only six o’clock in the morning, and there is already a queue at the campground ticket booth to be first for the ‘walk in’ places; most places are gained by booking. A row of bodies is lined up, huddled in sleeping bags or duvet jackets, hoping to be spending tomorrow night in a tent.
A pair of Korean climbers heave several large portable padded mats, known as crash pads, over to one of the huge boulders that litter the forest around Camp 4. The pads cushion falls from small climbs of up to twenty feet or so; this style is known as ‘bouldering’. Many climbers travel to Yosemite purely to climb on small rocks like this. They have no interest in the milehigh behemoth chunks of stone, which dominate the Valley, and for which it is so famous. They will try to complete a short series of very difficult movements, often over a period of days, rehearsing them like a complex dance or an intricate skateboard trick. While one of the Koreans climbs, the other sits on the ground, knees inches from his face, contemplating the moment for the next go. They follow
each attempt is followed with a sparse exchange accompanied with gestures –
refining their sequence for
the few moves of the
climb, like a dancer in front of a mirror. Other than this, they
do not talk at
all. There is a quiet beauty
in the
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