California 2012, 9

In which we meet an old friend, a celebrity, and some big trees

Before the Tuolumne cancellation, our plan had been to do our half-day ride up there. Plan B was to check out riding at Wawona, but those stables were closed for the season. So we opted to return to the Valley stables and try for a repeat.

As it turned out, Mother Nature had intervened earlier in the year, with a rockslide that buried a portion of the former route. We would have a different ride after all.

When we arrived at the stables, I couldn't help asking after the health of my former mulish companion, Hobbes. The head wrangler asked how I knew Hobbes, and I said I had ridden him last trip and we had got along well. With a suspicious twinkle in her eye, she said, "then you shall have Hobbes!"

Two years have aged us both, but I think Mr. Hobbes needed a little dose of Just for Mules, especially for his face. Mule years don't go by quite as fast as dog years (they can live active lives past 30) but they do go by faster than human years. But there he was, with that same sloe-eyed disregard for most of humanity and everything else that goes on hooves. I greeted him enthusiastically, which took him off his guard. I doubt he remembered my voice, but since I knew what I was in for, I spoke to him confidently. That made a difference.


We went over for the riders' equivalent of the Sorting Hat, in which the wranglers match up riders and animals. There was a big crowd of riders this trip, 13 in all, and several of them had a decent level of riding experience. And that is how you go to Yosemite and get to ride a horse instead of a mule.

I've been looking at the pictures Em took of me on Hobbes, and they will never darken the day. Barring some real equestrian training, I think I'm doomed to sit a mule exactly the way I sit on a bicycle. There's something about sitting in a saddle that winds up with me crouching. There's evidently nothing for this in my gene pool. Christine rides rarely but sits an animal very well.


Em has not done much more, but she's got the same posture-on-a-horse gene. Fortunately, Hobbes couldn't see any of this. As usual, I think my posture got better as we went on, but I have no visual evidence for that.

Christine and Roxanne

Christine drew a pure-white mule named Roxanne, the most identifiable animal of the lot, and the most famous. Lori, the wrangler who led the string out, told me that Oprah had ridden Roxanne during  her 2010 trip to Yosemite. Thus, Roxanne had a real claim to fame. Although Hobbes had the love of all the wranglers for his quirky personality, he remained a legend in his own mind. Emily drew Melvin, simply a (mostly) cooperative mule.

The announced plan was to have the horses lead the group. Hobbes heard this and edged himself into third position, just behind a Danish woman who clearly knew horses. His initiative wasn't lost on some of the more assertive mules, and the horses-first plan went to hell in short order. Since everyone was in line, Lori shrugged, and said to me, "Hobbes thinks he's a horse." Actually, I think he believes he is superior to horses.

For most of the outward trip, Hobbes was a model of equine decorum. He kept pace, didn't nudge the arse of the horse in front and only ate when there  was a pause. It was almost disappointing.

I said to Lori "I think Hobbes must have had a good breakfast."

She replied "why? Is he farting?" (Oat-fed mules get gassy sometimes, I gather.)

I said "no: he's not eating anything." She chuckled.

This route to Mirror Lake was about the same grade as the one we took two years ago. It had more blacktopped section, and it was here Lori told us about the 1970s paving project. The wranglers didn't like the blacktop and the animals didn't either. It was just as slippery for them as for humans.

With the dry summer the remnant of Mirror Lake had vanished. This is the long-term plan, since the lake is artificial, and NPS wants to restore the meadow it had been. Our route passed us along one shore of the lake, not into the bed. I expected some objection from Hobbes about this, but he continued to behave himself. I was beginning to think he had mellowed with advancing age.
 
We reached a rockfall and stopped. This vast slide was apparently not the recent one that had blocked the other side of the loop, but one about three years old off Half Dome. It was impressive, with a volume somewhere in the six figures of cubic yards. At this point we turned around. By turn around I mean we each turned our animals around and started back. Proud Hobbes now found himself third from last instead of third from the front. Even though he must have done this before, he now became, well, Hobbesian.

We had paid little attention to the mule behind us on the trip out. This animal was now in front of us, and a little fractious. Hobbes objected. He began trying to butt-nip the mule. He also decided he'd gone long enough without a snack, and out came his bag of tricks to get some food. He went for overhanging branches, for tree bark, for lichens on rocks. Whenever the line slowed, which was now more often as the animals picked their way over the slippery blacktop bits, both Hobbes and the mule in front tried to dive into the pine needles  along the trailside. Hobbes and I began to have contests of will over this behaviour.

Early in the return we heard, and felt, a loud rumble behind us. I asked Lori if that was a rockslide, and she agreed that it was. The mules seemed quite undisturbed by this: after all, it didn't affect them where they were, but it was interesting that they could distinguish between threatening and non-threatening loud noises.

The return route bent easterly, away from the rocky path and into sandy woods covered with oak and pine. The morning had worn on at this point and a day that had started cool was warming up. The Hobbes dining routine was also warming up. In fairness, it was the difficult mule in front who often started the dives into the pine needles, but Mr. Hobbes was not the mule to let another mule get ahead of him in the food department. We were past the halfway point on the return trip when the difficult one took a deep plunge off the trail and into the pines, and Hobbes instantly followed suit.

This was clearly too much. I pulled the reins and dug my heels into his side to get him to stop, or at least pause. I then pulled sharply on the right rein, nudged his right flank and said sharply, "Hobbes, that's enough! Let's go!" To my surprise, Lori's, and possibly Hobbes', he turned right and walked back onto the trail, in the process taking place ahead of the difficult mule, who was still entangled in the woods. Behind me I heard Lori shout "that's wonderful! Voice command!" She got  Mr. Difficult out of the pines and we caught up with the rest of the string. After that, Hobbes continued to try it on, but he paid more attention to my voice. From all I've read about the history of humans and mules, to be a true honorary muleskinner I think I'd have to both drive them and swear volubly at them, but it was a moment of confidence. I should try riding more often, I thought, but I have enough hobbies.

Perhaps I'll see the old boy again. Without referring to Hobbes specifically, Lori said that horses and mules over 15 years or so get moved to Tuolumne Meadows, where the rides are mostly flat and in the meadows. It's a sort of equine assisted living up there. Presumably the animals of the mule trains that supply the High Sierra Camps are younger and stronger. I recalled hearing last time that Hobbes was 12 then, so his retirement date must be coming up in another year or two. Whether I do or not, he's helped me lose most of my anxiety about riding, so I owe him a vote of thanks.

Christine was still a bit stiff from her fall on the Four-Mile Trail and Dr. Daughter wanted to see how my leg was holding up, so we decided on a hike that was easy to get to and not too long, in the Merced Sequoia Grove. This is a few miles past Crane Flat on the Oak Flat Road. It's another -ish distance, three-ish miles  or four-ish miles. (Choose your source: the map supports three; plus side trips it's pushing four.) This is something to do when you want a short, moderate hike, some nice woods, and not much company. It's hard to hike by oneself in Yosemite, even in September, and it was a treat to have hikes minus crowds two days running.

The Sequoia part of the grove is much reduced, but there's partial compensation from the ponderosas and redwoods. The Sequoias are few but stately. The others are more numerous and hardly less impressive. It's a good place to get a grip on the differences between the two largest kind: the Sequoias with their massive girth and the redwoods, tall and slender like some giant's arrows.

As a hike it's another fool's paradise, since one starts high and goes downhill to the grove. We met a solo park ranger at the bottom who explained much of this. He showed us where the trail continued southward into the Stanislaus National Forest. Entering the grove from the National Forest end requires a fair amount of local knowledge, the ranger said. One look at a topo map, and the spaghetti tangle of lumbering and mining roads that lie beyond the park boundary, and you catch his drift. I followed the park trail some distance past its official end, but stopped where the recent fall of a couple of redwoods had torn up most of the trail. This was much like the damage one sees to sidewalks after urban trees fall in a storm, save the the redwood's root system is vastly larger. Someone standing in the bottom would be nearly out of sight from the trail.

I keep saying trail, but this is actually a woods road. Most recently, it has served a log cabin to which a Yosemite superintendent of some 70-80 years ago used to retreat now and then to decompress. The cabin was built near the centre of the remaining Sequoias and is used for education programmes now. But the road began in the 19th century, as the stagecoach road from Merced to Yosemite. In that time, with more big trees around, this must have been a stunning approach to the valley.

We had read, and the ranger confirmed, the pitiful tale of lumbering the big trees. At first, 19th century loggers supposed they were just like redwoods, only bulkier, and began felling them enthusiastically. It wasn't long before they realised that the wood, magnificent as it was when growing, had no commercial value proportionate to the effort of felling and moving the trees. It was only good for such things as fence posts and rails, and small boxes (cigar boxes, for example). Despite this knowledge, some California lumbermen kept taking Sequoias for years, stopping only when they went broke trying to turn a profit on this immense undertaking. By then, of course, the damage had been done. The slow-growing Sequoias couldn't make good the damage that had been done. The surviving trees appear to be under some other form of environmental stress which is not well understood.

We began the hike--and now it was truly a hike--out of this strange and isolated wood. We saw nothing but ravens and Steller's jays, although the ranger said there are bears and coyotes in the woods. The only sign of coyotes we saw was some scat as we came in; they are skilled at watching people without being seen, so there might have been 50 and we wouldn't have known it.

The trailhead here has a privy, and we followed Rule #2 and used it, which was just as well. There was trouble at Crane's Flat, where Em stopped for gas. The proprietors of the gas station-cum-general store were having some construction work done. The backhoe had taken out the underground power line, and then the backup generator had run out of gas, so there was no power for gas pumps or anything else. We got some still-cool soda and headed on.

Em's car is a hybrid and, while she says she's not a dedicated hypermiler, she knows how to get the most out of the car. Since we now needed badly to save gas, she put on an impressive hypermiling demo, helped by the topography. The drop from Crane's to the Yosemite Valley floor is some 2500 feet in ten miles of road. When you can put your hybrid on electric and cruise down this, the mileage numbers reach stupefying levels. As I recall, the Civic peaked out at 114 mpg and held that until we reached the valley. Coming back (Crane's is the nearest gas) wouldn't be so impressive.