The winter hike was the idea of someone in the group, either one of the two Garys or perhaps Peter or Stacy. It wasn’t my idea, I wouldn’t have thought of it. We had all been raised in the valley of California where the winter time temperatures sometimes plummets to below 32 degrees for a few consecutive hours. Yes we had been exposed to sub freezing weather. Once in my life it even snowed at my house and the snow stayed around for almost three days. All five of the intrepid winter hikers had walked to school in freezing temperatures and once I remember it dipped down to 28 so we had all hiked to school in subfreezing weather. Five times in my 14 years of life I had experienced ice on puddles around my house. We were all seasoned cold weather survivors.
As the senior members of the Boy Scout troop we came up with a plan to hike into the Boy Scout summer camp on the far side of Pine Crest Lake in the Sierra of Central California to get things ready for the troop who would hike up the following weekend. We thought that maybe if there was enough snow, we could even “break trail” for the troop so that even the little kids could make it around the lake easily. We could at least hike around the lake and have a roaring good time away from the world and in the snow, if there was any snow.
The paved road ends at Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra Mountains at about 8,000 ft. The lake in the mid 1960’s was partially surrounded by a smattering of summer cabins. These cabins are being removed as the 99 year leases on the National Forest Land expire. In fact the Boy Scout summer camp has now been dismantled and all evidence of it is gone for a couple of decades. Except for the area by the parking lot near the “store” and the bar/restaurant, the whole area was pretty much deserted of humans at this time of year. During the Fall the Pinecrest Lake level is lowered exposing the huge boulders in the bottom, and the stumps of the trees that use to be the forest before the lake was filled sometime in the 1950’s. At this time of year the lake was not only nearly dry, lowered for the winter at the dam, but what was there was frozen over and covered with five feet of snow.
During the summer a “barge” took equipment and supplies across the one point two mile alpine lake to the Boy Scout camp docks directly across from the now nearly deserted parking lot at the end of the road. There would be a plethora of speed boats and fishing boats on the lake and docked around the lake in the summer. All of these boats were gone now leaving the permanent docks running level out to a drop off into the rocky ground hundreds of yards from the frozen surface of what was left of the winter lake. In the warm summer months scouts would heft their back packs and hike the almost two miles along the edge of the lake filled to near the top of the dam and make their way to the campgrounds on a rocky trail that wound among the huge house sized boulders of granite, towering sugar and Jeffery pine trees, past the occasional dock or steps to the dock down by the edge of the summer lake and through the forest surrounding this mountain lake.
A parent, Gary and Stacy’s father I think, had dropped the five of us and our gear at the parking lot about 9am on a Thursday morning. With a total of six people including the driver and all the backpacks we had our excursion, we definately needed a station wagon (mini-vans or even passenger vans were ten years away). Gary’s dad was the only parent who had such a vehicle. There was some sort of a double holiday and a Monday in-service for the teachers so we were clear for a long stay at the camp after our hike in. Gary D. had secured the key to the dining hall and we had instructions of how to turn on the lights and the stove for the dining hall. We had plenty of food in our packs and knew there was wood for the dining hall fire place already split and stacked up there. This was going to be a great trip.
Every year that I could remember my family would trek up to the Sierra once and “go to the snow”. This entailed putting the seven person toboggan on top of the car that my dad had made, throwing on several car tire inner tubes, and a metal saucer or two. My mom would make hot chocolate and put it in a thermos for us to drink after sledding for a few hours. We drove to the point where chains were required and found a hill to sled down. Usually there were hundreds of other people from the valley sledding down the same hill. Now this isn’t your subtle Midwestern little mole hill. I am talking about a full on half mile run down a suicidally steep slope that usually ran out at a flowing stream alongside the highway. Depending on the size of your cajones, each sledder would drag their sliding vector as high up the hill as they dared and then jump on and shoot down the hill. Of course that meant that there were people above you who had larger cajones and so went much faster shooting by you as you walked up or stood getting guts to start your run. There were also weenies below who timidly pushed off on the near flat part of the hill. There was a hill with a hundred people all moving at different velocities on different lines down the hill while an equal number were trudging up the hill with their heads down pulling their sled, tube, toboggan, or saucer behind them. Ambulances made continuous round trips to the hospital in Sonora and back up to the hill transporting people who became victims of cajone size variation or down cast eyes while trudging up the hill. As a kid we would spend a couple of hours trudging up the hill and sliding down, then eat a couple of sandwiches and make a few more runs after lunch. Now this is the Sierra so the temperature was always above freezing during the day, up to 50 degrees sometimes, with a very hot sun shining down making you warm even if the temperature was not very warm. By 3pm most kids were exhausted, freezing cold and soaking wet from sweat and melted snow. The drive back to the valley was spent asleep from exhaustion, wrapped in blankets with the heater on full blast. Sometimes it took two days to warm up. So that was my, and I assume the other four intrepid hikers’ experience with prolonged exposure to the snow. Basically I had learned to look up the hill while walking pulling a sled, say a prayer when a clear line down the hill is found, have a warm dry blanket and a heater available after a few hours in the elements and get out of the snow for a week.
With that base of knowledge off the five of us trucked around the lake, spirits high, not as high as the snow, but laughing and throwing snow at each other none the less. Hiking near the parking lot was a snap. There was a base of snow about two feet deep with another foot or so on top of that which was very crusty and had to be broken through to find footing in the base. Near the parking lot the snow was trampled down by hundreds of kids running and rolling in the snow. Snow men were standing among the trees and sled trails were apparent down to the edge of the now frozen nearly drained lake. Within a half a mile of post holing through the foot or so of crusty snow, we encountered virgin snow that came up to my knee before it compressed enough to support my weight. When the virgin snow was reached each step was real work, pulling a foot out of the knee deep hole with a boot full of snow on top that had fallen in. Swinging my foot clear of the top layer of snow I would then crunch down to knee deep, finding purchase on the harder base snow below. This method of progress took about ten times the energy of just walking. Occasionally the base would break through and my foot would sink down to my crouch which pitched me forward into the snow where I became buried three feet below the surface squirming like a turtle on its back trying to right myself only I was face forward with a backpack pinning me into the frozen substrate. Of course this fall would fill my clothes with snow that melted when it hit the heat and dampness of my inner layers. I had invested in cotton long Johns to keep me warm not realizing that they absorb and retain sweat very well. They also wick heat away from the body when wet. Most of the time my jacket was unzipped because of the heat I generated post holing in the snow. When I fell, which was occasionally, the loose snow would pack inside my shirt and get down to my skin. When a spill happened there was about fifteen minutes of work to take off the back pack, stand while everyone tromp down a platform hard enough to support our weight so I could swing up the back pack. Standing on this tromped platform was the only time the snow was not directly against my pants. After righting a fallen hiker, I was not then only one to fall, we would head off again usually with a new leader.
I wasn’t the only one that was breaking trail into the camp. Each of us took our turn and each of us was challenged by the snow’s depth and the problems that the rocks and boulders would produce. The huge rounded granite rocks and boulders shed some of the snow from their sides so the white frozen bounty built up deeper near these large house sized monoliths than the trail wound around. The rock also holds heat so the snow sometimes melts around the rock making softer snow or deep holes near the rocks. If one was not careful, stepping near a large boulder could send the hiker down into the snow that might be chest deep when they reached the ground or the firm, frozen base beneath. From this hole the group would have to dig a ramp out of the pit to free the fallen hiker. We learned after several problems and avoided any mound of snow that looked like it might be in the snow shed of a giant granite boulder.
Our choice of clothing was not the most well thought out. But maybe it was as well thought out as we could manage; we just did not have the knowledge about cold and snow to make the best decisions. Because we seldom experienced prolonged cold or even prolonged wettness, we did not know much about this new venue. If my clothing got wet at home, I went inside my house and changed clothing. If I got chilled because of the wetness, I took a hot shower or stood on the heater vent inside the house. I think all my clothing on this trip was made of cotton with maybe one wool sweater. I had cotton long johns top and bottom and felt pretty tricked out by those while standing in the parking lot snug and warm. Of course after five minutes of hiking my sweat had soaked my long johns and made them functionally worthless and perhaps even turning them into heat wicks that move my body heat to the layers above and out to the air. The layers above my long johns, blue jeans, a long sleeve cotton shirt and a cotton jacket rapidly became both full of snow and soaking wet from the melting snow. None of us had thought to knock the snow off our bodies before it melted. My cotton socks, two layers, that stuck out the top of my boots and just melted the snow and wicked the water into my boot where it tried to freeze around my toes inside the boots that were always packed in a snow hole. I think I had on a polyester knit cap that did not absorb water but then again it did not retain heat with any efficiency. This was, after all, the early sixties when equipment was not well developed for the common man. And we were valley kids with no experience with the snow or the cold.
I remember my boots. I was proud of them. The guy who sold them to me pointed out the soles and said they were made of very hard vinyl. The soles were guaranteed to last the “life of the boot”. What did that mean? When the soles wore out the boots life was over? These were leather topped boots with woven cotton shoe strings. The soles were so hard they did not give much and so when standing on a rock, log or ice they gave as much traction as ice skates on a frozen pond. The soles never did wear out because they were so hard, somewhere around 9 on the mohs scale, but they nearly killed me many times because they were so slippery. The leather had been treated with Neatsfoot oil water proofing. That stuff was so bad that it only lasted for about ten minutes in the snow and then was all washed out allowing water to soak the leather increasing the already very heavy boot to about double the starting weight. When I pulled out the shoes lace at the dining hall (I don’t know why I did that), the end of the laces had frayed. They would not go back into the eyelets in the boot and it took me about an hour and the awl from my Swiss Army knife to lace my boots.
Normal summer time hike time around the lake with a full pack was about an hour and a half or little more for the whole troop. A group of senior scouts could get around in 45 minutes with full packs. There were reports of a few motivated souls making it to the camp from the parking lot in 30 minutes when all went right and no pack was carried. The winter trek into the camp took us almost six hours getting us there around 3pm. The sun was low in the sky when we spotted the dining hall with about an hour or so until it would be seriously dark. Whipped from the trek we just wanted to lie down and rest for the night. That wasn’t in the cards. We had to run around tuning on the electricity, the gas, find the wood for the fireplace and establishing our camp inside the dining hall before it became really dark (we carried flashlights but they were so sorry that they always had burned out batteries and never seemed to work). By the time dark had full surrounded the dining hall the lights were on, the fire lit and food was cooking on the stove in the kitchen. What an incredible meal we had, nothing ever tasted better and I cannot remember what it was. We had made it around the lake and were set for several days of fun and adventure.
Before going to bed for the night in front of a blazing fire in the fireplace of the dining hall, Peter went outside to answer the call of nature. He yelled for us all to come out. It had started to snow. Although I had seen snow in my life and snow had actually fallen in my town once when I was ten, I had never seen the flakes fall from the sky. When the snow fell in Modesto once, it fell in the dark of the night while everyone slept so I actually didn’t see the snow falling. None of had seen it snow before. This was incredible, huge flakes drifting down in the light from the open doorway. The night was still and quiet outside as this amazing phenomenon of nature happened around us. Well, we all donned our available clothing and ran out into the snowy night to “play” in the new snow. Snow was covering the trees and came off in an avalanche when they were shaken or kicked very hard. New snow filled the holes our feet had pounded on the way in.
The new snow made great snowballs and we threw a lot of them hitting each other, knocking the snow off the limbs of the tall pine trees causing the accumulated snow to slide off. On the roof of the dining hall the warming roof (there is no insulation in the roof or the walls since this was a summer camp) would melt the accumulation and it was coming off is huge avalanches. Later that evening we were exhausted from the hike, the prep of our camp and playing in the snow, so late into the night we retired to the warmth of the dining hall and the fireplace. Now we had two sets of clothing that were soaking wet and hanging on lines in and around the fire place. Down to our tighty-whities we crawled into our sleeping bags for a long winter nap.
Now this is a story from back in the day. I might have heard of a sleeping bag made with goose down, but had never seen one or knew why someone would want one. All of us had good boy scouts cotton sleeping bags. Gary Dull had a cowboy print on the inside of his bag. I never saw the technical data on these sleeping bags, but I assume they were rated down to maybe 68 degrees when they were new and all of these bags were very well used. Since most or all of our clothing was wet and drying there was nothing to help retain our body heat inside the cotton batted bag. We were also sleeping directly on the floor which had no insulation and sucked the heat out of the building and our bags much faster than the fire or the body heat could make new calories of heat. The dining hall was a summer camp so insulation against cold was something that was an option that had no use here. The huge dining hall became about as cold inside as it was outside as the fire burned down a bit. Night time at altitude in the Sierra would dip down to the teens. Someone had to constantly feed the fire through the night, usually the coldest of us. That was one freezing miserable night trying to stay warm, getting up to put wood on the fire, trying to get comfortable and shivering uncontrollably between.
The next morning came early because basically no one slept. One of the Garys built up the fire in the fire place and then went into the kitchen, turned on the burners of the two professional stoves and turned on the four ovens to high and opened their doors. We stood around in our underwear with our jackets on inside our sleeping bags waiting for our clothes to dry in the open oven. On the stove we had a huge pot of instant coco heating before we made our breakfast. After about an hour of baking our clothes in the oven they were dry, a bit singed in places, but warm and dry. With warm clothing on and the kitchen heated to above freezing we fixed our breakfast and ate hungrily replacing all the calories we had burned in the night trying to stay warm. It was time to start the day.
Back at the fire place the blaze we had stoked before going into the kitchen had died down to a controlled inferno and had heated the space in front of the fire place to tolerable temperatures. Unfortunately three of the ten leather boots drying in front of the fireplace had been scorched and burnt making the leather brittle and stiff. The laces in those three boots had also been burn out and were unusable. Bummer. One sleeping bag had the bottom burned exposing the chared cotton batting and the inside lining of cowboys. We fashioned shoe laces from string found in the kitchen braiding it to make it strong. The stiff burnt boots were loosened up with bacon grease rubbed into the scorched leather. The grease also made the boots a bit water proof, something that had been missing before the trip. In fact all of us smeared and massaged bacon grease into our boots to make them water proof. (This proved to be an error when a pair of boots was eaten by a porcupine in the night during a subsequent camping trip and the other boots were pestered and nibbled on by mice until the boots were given to the Salvation Army clothing drive or just dumped in the trash).
Gary C and I were going to hike back a couple of miles to the “Dry Lake Bed” which was a day hike destination for the summer camp program. We were able to get into another of the buildings, the directors cabin, and take down the wooden snow shoes on the wall above the fireplace. There was another pair over the fireplace in the dining hall. These were the long wooden snow shoes, fully four feet long, made with spruce wood and reindeer guts for the netting. There were leather thongs to tie these babies onto your feet. Gary C showed me how to tie them onto my boots and off we trucked to the dry lake bed. This was excellent. The snow shoes kept us on top of the snow and except for learning how to keep from walking on the shoes as we shuffled along, it was pretty easy going sliding along the top of the snow on the trail to “dry lake bed”. We cruised to the “dry lake bed” in just about the same time as it would have taken in the summer. Our steps only sunk down to about the top of the boot so the going was much easier than post holing through the now mid-thigh deep snow. We were even warmer when we got there because our clothing was not soaked from melting snow that was in constant contact with our leg on the hike around the lake.
In the dry lake bed we threw snow balls, followed tracks of animals and had a great time exploring in the snowy ecosystem we knew only in the summer. After a lunch we brought with us we headed back for the dining hall, some two miles away. Immediately upon deciding to return to camp, my pair of snow shoes crumbled into bits. The wooden frames were worm eaten through and through and it was amazing that they lasted as long as they did. Without the snow shoes the snow was up to my mid thigh and there was no way I could make it back to the dining hall before night fall. I joined Gary on his snow shoes and we set a rhythm, “lift left, step, lift right, step, lift left…” as long as I lifted and stepped the same distance as Gary I could ride the back of his snow shoes. We covered the whole dry lake bed before his ornamental snow shoes also fell apart because they were equally worm eaten. Gary didn’t panic and after slapping me around to keep me from freaking out, he said we could just make some snow shoes from the willows that grew all over the lake bed. We gathered switches of willows about as thick as a pencil and four or five feet long. When we had a bunch the willow switches they were bundled loosely and bent around and tied in the back with pieces of the broken ornamental snow shoes moose gut webbing. The willows spread out a bit and allowed for shorter sticks to be woven across the two foot long tear drop shape of bundled willow switches. Then we tied the things to our feet and walked off. While they weren’t as good as the ornamental ones, these sunk in deeper and gathered more snow on top; they allowed us to make very good time on the hike back. We more than made up for the hour or so spent making the snow shoes with the speed we were able to maintain on the trail back to the dining hall. By the time we got back to the dining hall the improvised snow shoes were pretty broken up and we were sinking in deeper and deeper with each step and carrying more and more snow out of the hole, but we made it back to the dining hall well before dark.
Did I mention that it has snowed the night before? There was about 8 inches of new snow on the hand rail in the morning. Well it sort of snowed all day on and off, not heavy but flakes falling all day. In the evening as the temperature dropped it began to snow again very hard, huge flakes falling silently straight down. Again we all went out after dinner and made snow forts, rolled some snow balls the size of Volkswagens, and generally ran amuck. What fun.
In the evening we figured out we needed insulation beneath us to keep from heating the dining hall floor. We actually found some cotton mattresses in the attic of the dining hall over the kitchen. (We also found some gallon cans of pudding and I love pudding). After the morning experiment of using the ovens to dry our clothing, we had perfected the technique of baking our wet clothing without burning them. In a short time before bedding down we had some dry warm clothing to stash into our sleeping bags to put on the next day. The extra dry clothing inside the cotton bags also helped to keep us warm by providing more insulation. Gary C had a great idea of heating up big rocks and put them in our sleeping bag to warm the bags. Gary D., whose bag had been burnt up a bit on at the toe by the fire in the fire place in the morning, had sewed up the end and was the first to throw in a large hot rock. The rock was a bit too hot and started the bag smoldering on the inside. He rolled the rock out onto the floor and it scorched the floor before we moved it to the stone hearth. Eventually we got the temperature right and we all crawled into bags that were heavy with hot rocks but very warm. That night we all got many hours of sleep before the fire went down in the fire place and the stones cooled and water in our canteens started to freeze.
Early the next day we fixed our breakfast and went outside to greet another 8 inches or so of new snow. What fun. We were going to go sledding on the dining room trays. Much of the day was spent sledding down a steep hill into the parade ground and making forts to have snow ball battles. It snow lightly all day.
In the evening we built a sort of shelter in the dining hall to isolate the heat inside a sort of tent we made with blankets, sheets and the dining room tables staked up. The tent inside the dining hall kept the heat very well and became a toasty place to hang out, drink coco, eat pudding, tell stories and eventually sleep soundly and warmly all night. Again it was snowing hard when we went to bed. By the morning of the second day there was another 8 or so inches of new snow on the hand rail when we woke up. All day it continued to snow lightly.
During this third morning we finally noticed that the trail we had broken on our way in to the summer camp was now completely gone, not just the footprints but all evidence of us having walked there. New snow and blowing snow had filled all our foot holes and erased our passing. This seemed to be a problem because the next day we were supposed to hike out. It was still snowing and continued throughout the day. Gary D. suggested we make snow shoes out of dining hall trays. This was a bust. The trays were too wide, sunk into the snow too far and collected tons of snow on top when we tried to walk. Much of the day we tried different things to make some snow shoes. There were no willows or willow like plants here at the dining hall but we experimented with a variety of things. Nothing really worked like the willows. As a step to making the next day a little easier we spent some time breaking a trail to the “trail” around the lake beyond the camp.
The next morning we got up early to see there was another six to eight inches of fresh snow had fallen and filled our broken trail. We packed up, cleaned up the dining hall and ate a huge hot meal. Off we trucked into the snow. Now the snow was up to my stomach. When I broke trail I would dig with my hands, lift my feet as high as I could and kick into the new snow, then step down falling forward crushing a space in front. Then start again by digging down to my knees, stepping and kicking forward and falling forward into the bank of snow. I could do about 50 steps before the next person took over. We rotated breaking trail taking about 20 to 50 steps on a rotation at the front. Now when someone fell down with their backpack the hiker was in over their head before they found a solid perch. Sometime about noon with only about half the distance to the parking lot traversed, I noticed that my boots were untied. I could not bend over to ties them and when I did find a rock or hard place to try to tie them, my fingers were so cold I could not grab the laces. The laces were frozen stiff and didn’t work. My boot was packed with snow which forced the boot open. Fortunately I had put plastic bags on my feet. I had figured out that plastic bags next to my skin, a layer of socks and another layer of plastic bag would keep one pair of socks dry and functional in keeping my feet warm. My feet were cold, but they were dry enough to not be frozen.
The hike was long and hard. We got to the parking lot before dark, but not much before dark. It took us about ten hours to “hike” or dig out. I know I had never been more tired than when we reached the parking lot. All of us were wet from sweat and wet from the snow we had been packed in for the last ten hours. Gary D called his father to come and get us in the station wagon. It was two hours before he arrived and then two more hours before we were home. It took a week to get warm and two weeks to make up for the lack of sleep.
That was one of the best trips of my life. It was maybe a near death experience looking back at the mistakes and looking at it as an adult. So many things could have gone wrong and we were so naïve about the cold. We were naïve about the snow. In fact we were downright ignorant and could easily have been another group of hikers stranded and frozen in the Sierra. Happens every year and happens to hikers much smarter and more prepared than we were. The snow god smiled on us and just made us a little cold. Sometimes I also wonder what were our parents thinking in letting us do such a stupid and dangerous thing? I guess they were as naïve as we were about snow and cold.
