Yo-Ho, Part 7

In Which Ursus Americanus Finally Makes his Appearance...at Least Once

This being the last day for the parents to frolic in Yosemite, it seemed necessary to hike again, Dr. Morton notwithstanding. We decided upon a double-header. The trails to Taft Point and Sentinel Dome start from the same trailhead off the road to Glacier Point. The first is about 2.5 miles round trip, the second around 3.5*. This offered, then, a total round trip around six miles, with the chance to get back and start packing.

For we had plans in the evening. Ron Kauk's HD film, Return to Balance: a Climber's Journey, was appearing at Yosemite Village, with Kauk as the emcee. Earlier in the week it had taken no particular arm twisting for Em to persuade the parents that it would be a good way to wrap up the week.

Apart from that, and one more hike, plans now began to devolve to the primary question of finding a bear. The previous day, Em had spoken to a hiking couple who had been on all the trails we had been on and had seen four bears, while we were batting zero, apart from nearby camp racket and a few scat piles. Going up Glacier Point Road and hiking there seemed promising. If that failed, walking to the film and back at dusk, via the back trail from Housekeeping Camp to Yosemite Village, seemed like it might meet the bear quota.

I skipped the boots and opted for sneakers, hoping that this would keep Dr. Morton's disagreeable toe under control. This had some limitations. The absence of lugged soles underfoot meant no big rock scrambles and no getting anywhere close to the edge of anything, but half a loaf is better than none.

Last Hike: Taft Point and Sentinel Dome

So off again down 41 and up the Glacier Point Road. For once we seemed to be ahead of the pack--we even beat the tour buses out of the Valley. This made parking easy. Since we'd already chosen Taft as our first destination, we were off quickly.

The trail begins in yet another burnt-over, partially grown-in piece of woods: perfect bear country, but no poop and no bears. Since the parking lot is slightly higher than the point, the walking was chiefly downhill. Bears? No bears. When we got into the grown-in woods again, no bears, but a small herd of deer clearly not on the Park payroll. They continued feeding, but also watched the humans carefully and kept their distance.

Em had been developing a theme all week, that in Yosemite there must be mountain bears and valley bears who didn't get along. She suggested that the mountain bears scorned the valley bears who didn't know how to tear up a log and eat grubs and ants. The valley bears would laugh at the mountain bears, who didn't know what a cooler looked like and couldn't rip a car apart in five minutes. Possibly, we agreed, there are also mountain and valley deer.

Before one reaches Taft Point, it's necessary to pass a feature called The Fissures. We had done our homework, so when we came out of the woods and onto the rocks, we were looking out for The Fissures.

Just as well. The Fissures are just what they sound like: narrow separations in the rock, that go down, and down, and down....


This is no place for tourists who expect to be nannied. The only place with any sort of protection is on Taft Point itself, where there's a very modest guardrail. The following shows almost all of it.



One wants to be alert because, having passed one fissure, the next will appear almost (we hope) before you know it. If you miss, well, it's been said, at one step you're 7500 feet above sea level, and at the next, 4000 feet above sea level. This fall is, as the link says, squish-you-like-a-bug fatal.

With a view like this, there was no one objecting to the photo break, except Mom, who didn't altogether trust that silly little steel railing. Neither did Em, entirely. As she leaned out from it for the shot above, she said "this is where I scare myself."

And still no hint of bear. Apart from the rock squirrels and the deer, the only non-human signs we saw were horse or mule droppings and hoofprints. A mounted ranger patrolling this piece of the Pohono Trail: talk about a job! I'm sure the shovel-toting ranger we'd seen Wednesday would rather have been mounted.


We returned to the trailhead, still in hopes of seeing a bear, and arrived still out of luck. The guidebooks say that Sentinel Dome is a more popular hike than Taft point, which turned out to be true. We were looking for under an hour out and the same back, but that didn't allow for a fairly brisk hiker traffic that slowed nearly everyone up a bit.

From a trailhead whose altitude pushed 8000 feet, Sentinel Dome (8122 ft.) is a much less intimidating prospect than it is from the Valley: it rises pretty much straight up until the immediate vicinity of the summit dome. This trail is flat and fairly comfortable until it reaches the final approach to the Dome. This is another of several places in Yosemite where the Park Service put down asphalt once upon a time. They are letting nature have its way with the hardtop now, and apparently won't be replacing it. Between the summit rocks and the uneven asphalt surface, the going isn't difficult, but it is hot.

Mr. Slippery Sneakers drew the duty of tending the backpacks whilst the female family units continued to the top of the Dome, another couple of hundred metres.


I may have got the better of the two deals. Em reported that nothing remains now of the ancient Jeffrey pine at the top of the Dome, made famous in an Ansel Adams photo about 1940. The tree died over 30 years ago and finally fell in 2003.

This is another place where people who want to keep their kids need to keep hold of them. Apart from the surprise fissures at Taft Point, that summit is fairly flat, and the danger is obvious. Below the top of Sentinel Dome, the rocks and gravelly soil slope gradually toward the edge of the abyss, which also has no guardrail. I tried the slope, below, a little in my sneakers and quickly backed up: very slippery.

The conversation with other hikers was good, but the eavesdropping was better. Consider this tidbit that passed between two women coming up from Glacier Point:

a: I hope we won't be too late to start dinner.

b: Don't worry; I have a roast in my trunk.

Something made me think this person would be hearing from the bears very, very soon.

Finally Waltzing with Bears

We got back to trailhead soon after 1 p.m. and headed back to Housekeeping Camp. After the breeze at the top, the valley seemed especially hot, so we didn't get much done in the packing department: in fact we napped by turns until it was time to fix supper.

Everyone had a flashlight when we started out for Yosemite Village soon after six. The plan was to walk back again if there was enough light left after the film, and otherwise to take the shuttle. You might say this was putting everything on one throw in the bear sighting department.

There were no bears en route to the village, apart from yours truly. Once we reached the bike path, my wife decided the best place to be was on the left side of the path, leaving the rest of us centre-right. I was still a bit raw from the previous day's experience with pedestrians on the bike path and raised an objection. I was voted down, so I dropped back a few feet to give any oncoming bike traffic a fighting chance. After we got past the deer-watching crowd, a camper on his own mountain bike came smoking down the path and dodged around my determined spouse, missing her by inches. As soon as he was past, our traffic safety expert leaped to the right side of the path. I said nothing, but I suppose said it eloquently.

I recommend the film, for its insights as well as its heart-stopping videography. Some of the free-climbing was on cliffs and boulders at low heights, Kauk said. This was apparent in some shots, but not in others. Em commented that even though he was being self-deprecating, Kauk's free climbing technique was at an off-the-charts degree of difficulty, whether he was 10 inches off the ground or 1000 feet.

Some time in the past, I recall learning that Islamic muezzins use a simple test to determine the difference between day and night: whether they can distinguish a black thread from a white. My wife has long subscribed to something similar. When we left the theatre under the faintest remaining hint of twilight, I was not surprised to hear her decree that there was enough light to walk back to Housekeeping Camp. So, off we went to locate the start of the trail in the "daylight."

We found it, turned left, and started. We had no sooner done so than another trail user came in from the parking lot less than ten metres ahead of us. This user was dark, furry and quadrupedal. We had our bear at last, although not quite under the conditions we wanted. It stopped. We stopped, shining our lights on the bear. (Note: it takes much longer to tell this than it took to happen.)

According to the NPS playbook, when a party on foot is surprised by a bear at short range, they should bunch together, shout loudly, wave their arms and flashlights and in general try their best to look like Bigfoot and scare the bear off.

Did that happen? It did not.

Em was in the lead. She said "bear" a nanosecond before me. (My wife has no night vision whatsoever, so it was fortunate she was not in her usual leading position: she would have walked right into it.) With our next breath, we said "bus" in unison, executed a smart about face, and retreated to catch the shuttle. The bear was still standing there and watching until we turned the corner, when I thought I saw it slowly move away. We mentioned this to the next couple we saw, who shrugged and said they were going to the parking lot, not the path. Considering the direction the bear came from, that parking lot is the last place I wanted to be, in a group of less than 30.

It was, I think, about 200 pounds: that is, noticeably larger than a very large Newfie, although much bulkier. It didn't make any aggressive gestures or noise, but seemed to be waiting to see just what it was up against. Em's size estimate was about the same. Mme No Nightvision couldn't contribute to the discussion. Em had also seen that the bear had the ear tag showing it to be one of the Park's Bad Attitude bears: not necessarily dangerous to humans, but an outlaw.

What was interesting, at least to my daughter, was that she and I felt interest, not fear. I've been there before--not necessarily with big animals with sharp pointy teeth, but in dangerous situations. Very often, there simply isn't time to be afraid. One goes from discovery of the situation to response. In this case, we weren't feeling any fear even in reaction. My spouse sort of um-hummed to this conversation, so we can but assume she agreed. We shuttled back to Housekeeping Camp and walked to our unit talking loudly and playing our lights around. There was some packing preparation to do before leaving in the morning, which we did and then settled in: with an oversight.

Em had brought a very large citronella candle, which we had been using for the past couple of nights rather than fuss with the gas lantern. This thing sat in a flared tin and had a plastic cover on it. It didn't seem to be a particular critter magnet, so we gave it little attention.

In the morning, we found the tin just outside our enclosure, empty. The lid was neatly sliced in one place and sat next to the tin. The candle, which probably weighed a couple of pounds, was gone.

As we packed, my spouse kept coming back to the candle. There were no footprints in the dust outside the enclosure (not even ours). There was no other sign of disturbance. We'd been shooing ravens away all week. Therefore, it must have been a raven. At first I went along with this explanation whole-heartedly, until I considered how much the candle weighed. I kept my reservations to myself, because I didn't think it wise to tax my wife with the likely presence of a bear within a couple of metres of her as she slept.

So yeah, it was a raven: just a damn big one.


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* No two sources agree exactly on the mileage of these trails: this is an average. One problem is that you can reach both from Glacier Point, and also from a service road just short of the Glacier Road parking lot, near Washburn Point. Parking is now discouraged at the service road, but hikers can get at the road from Washburn Point. Why bother? The joint trailhead comes before the traffic at Glacier Point and is nearly midway between the two destinations.