Trek with a dead auntie July 14 - August 4, 2002 about our limp load, a practically immortal man, and a drain that fought back.

	Sid with a dead auntie

It started quite innocently, when Martin came to borrow a backpack for a hike with his colleague and his small daughter. During five days they wandered through Trinity Wilderness and returned with a collection of beautiful pictures. A week later, at our usual time, that is, Friday four thirty p.m., we began to ponder where could we go for a short trip, to find there a pretty natural scenery, but not to find holidays crowds. Actually, under Martin's influence we came up with our year-old idea about a hike to Relief Reservoir, including a night spent in Emigrant Wilderness.

	Among rocks, we found a spot barely large enough to accommodate our tent, but certainly no place to hammer any pegs

We packed some stuff already on Friday, to give us a "head start". That might have been the real reason for our turning our house upside down in the morning, for since our moving in we had forgotten where we have put things; e.g. after twenty minutes of hectic searching for a magenta bag, it turned out to be dark blue and sitting orderly in a closet where it should have been. Of three spools of cloth tape that we positively own (meant to hold carpets together, but good for fixing bruised knees, emergency fracture splinter, boot repair, shoelace replacement, backpack patch...), however, we could not find any one. The biggest shock was a disappearance of my camera. It usually drifts around on my desk, in the vicinity a USB cable for sucking pictures over. This time, it was not on my desk, not inside the desk, not on a rack, simply nowhere. I admit that the worst was my feeling that somebody must have "teleported" it from that desk of mine. I was sad thinking that maybe we are not living in such a safe location as we used to think, and that we would have to put a chain on a gate in the fence to our back yard (we don't lock it now), seal all windows every time we leave the house and stop relying on deterring effect of our window screens. Fortunately, it has eventually turned out that my camera was (apparently since last weekend) silently accompanying Sid on his daily work commute, hiding inside a chaotic heap on his back seat. It was a huge relief and we, equipped thus with happy spirits, embarked on our trip.

	It could be a tarn - except there is a concrete dam.

A turnoff to Yosemite bled most of the holiday traffic of highway 120. We congratulated ourselves to being so smart and continued on a quiet road all the way to Kennedy Meadows. There we parked our wagon, put on real boots and loaded our backs with our packs. First section of the trail leads more or less horizontally, across a beautiful meadow, with an obligatory bubbling creek. Even there, Sid began to mutter that his waist strap was not quite working and that he was dragging all the backpack's weight on his shoulders. We swapped our bags (my waist is considerably thinner and I managed to tangle the strap so that it was not getting loose), and continued up, while the landscape grew more difficult. The trail to Relief Lake is frequented by horse teams, and leads in a canyon, with boulders and smaller rocks, often ground to a fine sand. It's very treacherous -- sometimes your foot disappears to your ankle, other times it slips over well hidden pebble, or - in a careless moment - smears a horse pie. Besides, it is horribly uphill and a two foot step that a horse normally scales, forces a human with a thirty pound load on her bag to a gymnastics performance.

	In the morning we finally began to feel like taking pictures

To add insult to injury, Sid's luggage began showing it real nature, that is, not one of a high-performance backpack, but a hidden shape of an ordinary rucksack of "Dead Auntie" type. The term come from Martin and describes a luggage, which will always limply hang off your back, jab in your ribs or cinch your shoulder blade, strangle a little, sway inelegantly, and refuse any cooperation. An Auntie would tire an ox, one could not tolerate it for much long. We had no other way that keep swapping bags; it was interesting how much influence a type of a bag on one's back would have on briskness of one's step.

	Comparing to Sierra rocks, even Hippo seems diminished

When we finally beheld Relief Lake, we were so worn out that no cheering broke out. All that was left was finding a spot to camp, a feat easier to plan than to perform. The reservoir has been built in a deep canyon, with slopes that don't offer much horizontal space. A few flat spots hid, to our frustration, heaps of miscellaneous junk, perhaps remains from the dam's construction that would be too much hassle to remove.

We threw down our backpack and scaled the slopes up and down, searching for any acceptable location, hopefully devoid of rusty boilers, transmissions and similar machinery. First we found other campers, who naturally usurped the best spot in the whole area. We would have to accept a second class, but by the time we were completely resigned to our fate. I don't remember how we brought ourselves to pitching a tent, cooking dinner and similar exercises, but by nine o'clock, we were climbing into our sleeping bags, fed and happy.

	A mountain creek runs through series of waterfalls, without much audience

We woke up happier yet around eight. A tiny rocky peninsula with our tent transformed into a romantic cove, sparkling clean water of the reservoir was throwing blue sparks on boulders all turned pink by a rising sun, cute birds sang their morning songs, simply a piece of wilderness just like from a poster. Eleven hours of sleep turned our lives optimistic again.

You can bet that we packed our auntie better this time, for our trek back, to force her to cooperate at least a bit. It's more fun downhill anyway, and so we could finally admire all the beauty around us. Although we have seen it all last year, one forgets in few months how breathtaking a wilderness can be.

	No, there's no bear following us.

A heavily suntanned old man greeted us at our Wagon, rummaging in a car next to ours, asking how our hike was. We first though that he was simply being polite, but his huge, maybe twenty gallon, completely stuffed backpack spoke for itself. We started talking and in a minute I began feeling like the greenest greenhorn in America. Randy (that was his name) said nonchalantly that he did a three week hike over Sierra every year, and that he was seventy six, and that his wife told him to join some club, for what if something should happen to him. Well, he said, at least I'd die in a pretty place. He told us how he gets his drinking water, showed us his home-made "pemmican" -- a dehydrated mix of vegetables, fruits and meat; he described a camp shower that he uses sometimes and so on. Absolutely fantastic person. Just so you can imagine -- he said that now that he's gotten old, he stopped working as a ski instructor and skis only a little -- about sixty days in a year...

	Auntie with a dead Hippo

We succeeded in feeding my Hippo at a local restaurant. Last year, months after we left, we got suddenly charged extra five dollars on our credit card, and we had to go through a hassle of disputing it. As we now watched a waitress and two other people helping her, completely confused, stumbling through the dining room, and not being able to sort out orders from multiple guests (about ten people altogether), even a paranoiac like my Sid had to agree that those five dollars did not entail any ill faith, simply chaos. To be sure, we paid cash, for who knows where could such server drop our bill this time.

On our road back, we carefully diverted from a frequented Yosemite route, using only country roads back to our house. And since it was only late afternoon, we were looking forward to washing all those stinking, sweaty clothes. When Sid cursed during his brief random checking of our garage, I assumed that only a drain hose jumped out of a sink and it's only our usual garage flood. Alas, it was not so simple. The hose was in its place, but the sink refused to drain. We tried out all available household methods and finally resolved to call an external help. Yellow pages are filled with plumbers' ads, promising prompt response within 45 minutes, during weekends, holidays, nights -- simply a buyer's market! The first lady dispatcher claimed to be hearing for the first time in her life that anybody should go anywhere on a Sunday; they would not work on Sundays. She was quite puzzled when told that they advertise it. It was the same with three more companies, so we gave up at the fourth and invited a snake-equipped specialist for Monday morning. Long live false advertisement...

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