Inviting, Illegal Water

The next day, we left our campsite and made our way down a long, narrow, windy road into the northern part of the park at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. It was again supposed to be extremely hot, and as we found out once we reached the reservoir, it is much lower in elevation and consequently substantially hotter (well over 100). We were hoping to do a short hike then take a dip in the lake’s inviting, cool blue waters to cool off. Unfortunately, there are very strict regulations against such actions as it is a part of the drinking water for San Francisco. Maybe I’m ignorant, but having such rules seems pretty stupid when there are plenty of bugs, fish, birds, and mammals that leave their excrement and decomposing remains in the water system. It seems to be a pretty huge oversight if you’re not filtering and treating your water, pretty much regardless of where it comes from. However silly the regulations might be, Faith and I elected to be law-abiding citizens, so we only allowed the spray from the waterfall that we hiked to to cool us down. We found another couple there who begged for some food and water as they had brought only a 12oz water bottle on the 5 mile round-trip hike to the waterfall. We filled their water bottle several times and shared some snacks. They stayed for a while longer to recover, so we left them and headed back to the car. The hike back was hotter than the hike to the waterfall, so I hope they made it out okay. It was a very hot day and only getting hotter, so we climbed into our toasty van and made our way up and out of the valley into the cooler, higher elevations of the Sierra.

As we drove back towards Yosemite, we stopped at our campsite for the evening to scope it out. I didn’t have a lick of data there, so we kept driving and eventually found a lodge where I had decent data (no free wifi) and could get some work done. The data was pretty spotty, however, so we called it relatively quickly and looked for a body of water to cool down in. We drove down the road a bit and soon came to a lovely little mountain stream where we could swim and once again rinse off the day’s sweat and dust. We both felt much better after the dip and headed to our campsite to set up our tent for the night. We still had some time before the sun set, so we did some face masks together before snuggling up in our sleeping bags.

The next morning came quickly, especially as we and all our neighbors wanted to beat the day’s heat. We were wide awake at 5 AM and getting ourselves prepared for the day. We packed up and hit the road back to the valley to get a hike in and do some work with hopefully decent connectivity. We parked our car in a nicely shaded spot at the Curry Village then walked up to Mirror Lake, which is more a sort of series of ponds than a real lake. We walked back to the village and found that there were copious amounts of ripe black raspberries along the route. We picked a few before finding a quiet lodge with blazing fast free wifi. By “blazing fast” I mean 0.6 Mbps wifi… which is still technically connectivity, but hardly good for much. Unfortunately, I had several meetings, all of which were spotty at best. While I worked, Faith did some reading, made us lunch, and picked a heck of a lot more berries. As the heat of the day peaked, I took a pause, and we picked some more berries on the way to a swimming hole. We met some lovely other Idahoans and had good conversation with them before the Merced River’s chilliness convinced us it was time to exit its waters. We meandered our way back to our vehicle and drove back to the campground of the previous night.

We stopped at a pull off along the way to enjoy some reasonable data connection and have dinner for the night: berries drowning in some half & half we got from a camp store. It was positively divine. The berries were fresh and sweet, and the cream was creamy. Though maybe lacking in some nutrition, it was an excellent meal we would happily repeat. Our new camping spot was just four spots away from the last spot, so I’m sure our neighbors were a little surprised to see us arrive, leave, then arrive once again. We pitched our tent and spent some time lounging reading and working on the blog while protected from the mosquitoes outside. Our peaceful evening was interrupted by a man who walked over from a nearby site.

Visitor: “I have a small thing to ask. We have sites 22 and 24, and you are at site 25. Would you switch with us so my group can be together? It’s just a small thing to ask.”
Us, still sitting in our sleeping bags in our tent: “Uhh.. we’ll take a look, I guess.”

We took quick stock of the situation and politely declined the offer to move our established and comfortable home for their much-less inviting campsite. I don’t know why, but they did not pitch a tent nor put a thing at site 24, so clearly our declination did not keep them from camping together. This was not the last we saw or heard of our neighbors, as we were quite loudly and rudely awoken at 12:54 AM by them talking loudly to each other, opening and closing the metal bear boxes (i.e. screeching metal sound), and shining bright flashlights all over the place as they did something at site 24. Suffice to say, we were extremely dissatisfied with our experience. I don’t know if it was a cultural difference, but they clearly had no conception of what the term “Quiet Hours” meant. Aside from that rather intrusive incident, we slept soundly, preparing ourselves for another day of hiking and hiding from the sun.

Animals Seen

• Dead sea gull in the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
• Squirrels
• Crows
• Turkey vultures

Stats

• ~40 miles of driving
• 6 miles of hiking
• 2 river swims
• Hundreds of berries eaten