intellectual properties

mountain escapism pt. 2

(this is related to part I: the yosemite trip report, but is separate enough in content to be its own post.)

“nothing is more bourgeois than being afraid to look bourgeois.”
-andy warhol.

comment in response to a long and very involved thread (see below) about some of the (sub)cultural issues in my little community. thread probably not interesting to much of the general public, but that quote is fabulous and pretty much dead on.

it also dovetails nicely from the recap of my weekend, as one of the things that was incredibly obvious, sitting on a patio of a campground where “tent cabins” are $100 a night in Yosemite valley, is that being “outdoorsy” is a hobby only afforded by the Affluent.

part of the reason we chose to do this trip now was not only because it was my birthday, because i’ve wanted to climb Half Dome for a while, and it was a less-crowded time to go to Yosemite, but also because jay and i needed to get the fuck out and spend a weekend doing something else, something outside, something away from internets and cities and parties and work and the world we live in most days.

the discussion that references the Warhol quote centers around cliquish behavior in this small community that is more or less based on fashion choices, some of which are only attainable with ample amounts of disposable income, and what that means or represents about the community’s values as a whole (valuing “hotness” over “goodness”, valuing doing something “artsy” over doing something “real”, etc.). this is, of course, a subject close to home for me, as someone who thinks a lot about what clothing means to our culture, it’s hard to get my head out of that specific thing and into what the greater issue is, because honestly: it’s not the fashion that the problem.

as my friend stephen pointed out, and with a lot of community comment, and as i have written before, particularly after burning man 2006, there is a lot of tension in my community (in simplest terms: the burning man community) as we all struggle against classism, white privilege, affluenza, and, i guess, one of the great weights of privilege, existential angst. i think this weighs heavily on all of us. what do we do with all this opportunity? all this time, all this money, all this freedom that we have as members of the American upper middle class, most of us without children? year after year it’s discussed in the burning man community: what is the best use of this context we were so lucky to have been born into?

while it is a privilege and a gift to be born into this and i’m sure many question “how can you worry about this when there is so much else to worry about in the world?”, as we’ve seen with many a celebrity who has lost it all via excess and has been culturally documented in hundreds of Great Gatsby/Less Than Zero type pieces of modern art and literature, wealth does not mean happiness, and often, it brings a great amount of stress and weight (which often also leads to apathy/ennui) to those who are conflicted about what to do with it. many a rich kid has gone down the path of excess to the point of no return, and many a person of disposable income in my community is severly conflicted about what to do with it. do you spend your hard earned dollars on hedonistic adventures like burning man, fancy clothing and travel because you deserve it? or should you be doing something else for the world, and if so, OMG - WHAT?

it’s a heavy question, and we then start to quibble and judge each other on the choices made in this context: judging those who choose to spend all this time and money on their own personal art and leisure (calling them vain and hedonistic) vs. spending it on, say, working for or developing a non-profit that services those outside of your own circle of artists/dancers/musicians. and then those who invest in art and leisure and not public service defend themselves with the (valid) argument that art is important to humanity and if it were not for art, life would be incredibly utilitarian and boring and so much beauty would be lost - and beauty does indeed have great value in this world.

these tensions start to show up in the sort of conversations that happened there - many pointed out, and on some levels i agree, that even HAVING such a lengthy discussion about such a subject as “the cool kids aren’t being nice to the not-as-cool kids on the dancefloor” is sort of silly on the surface, but stephen’s point was that the way we are treating each other within our community is symptomatic of how we treat those outside our community, outside our class, outside our culture, and that it is not good.

i’m gonna leave the discussion of that subject at that right now, but how this all ties back into our trip to yosemite is that when we were looking at photos of Half Dome earlier this summer, it looked like a frickin’ REI convention. everyone is dressed the same in the ubiquitous hiker uniform: khaki shorts, North Face fleece, hiking boots, sun hat….and often with lots of hiking-specific gear and gadgets attached to them. i realize that much of that is due to functionality, but does it have to be so predictable? isn’t there just as much of a wardrobe cult among the outdoor-gear heads as there is among the trustafarian peacocks? sitting in Yosemite Valley on Saturday afternoon watching the crowds of mostly white families herd through the campgrounds, i was hard pressed to find ANYONE who wasn’t wearing the Hiker Uniform and everyone looked Upper Middle Class. before we left, jay and i had repeatedly half-joked that we were going to wear some of our more outrageous but still entirely functional disco-camping gear to the top of half dome out of rebellion against this conformity and throw a little mini-rave when we got to the top. because the weather was so cold when we did the ascent, i wasn’t able to fully put on the outfit i had packed for that occasion, but was wearing my furry fleece hat and the bottom part of an outfit by Bad Unkl Sista. on the hike down that afternoon, i was able to wear more of a non-traditional hiking outfit, but due to wearing my backpack wasn’t able to fully buck the Hiker Uniform then either.

why so much resistance to this? why so much resistance to the “mainstream”? as i get older, as many other people can also attest, you get more and more pressure to “conform”. maintain a regular job. buy a house. get married. have kids. look normal. i guess i’m feeling that pressure more and more, not from any particular source, but just….from society…and the more i feel the pressure and am not conforming to it, the harder it is to make choices about things without feeling conflicted, especially when it ties back into this idea of the privilege/responsibility of my class. is spending our time,energy and money doing the things we’re doing just a juvenile sort of rebellion without any real impact on the real problems of the world, or is being part of a counterculture contributing to the world in a meaningful sort of way? (interesting side-link: The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can’t be jammed)

when i got back and read that quote by warhol it really struck me: is my fear of appearing to be one of the American Bourgeois - whether it’s the version that is the hikers on Half Dome or version that is the Feathered Hat Mafia at burning man - just a huge sign that i AM part of the bourgeois, and that brings so much weight i can’t deal? (this reminds me: after having a similar discussion to all of this at a campout with this subculture earlier this summer (Raindance), we had (jokingly) assigned two complementary essay topics to some of our campmates: Part I: “What is Real?” and Part II: “What’s Your Damage?”)

being out in the wilderness did nothing to resolve this for me, by the way, as i more or less opted not to think about anything much while i was out there except how beautiful it was. ah, the luxury of escapism. something else the white and privileged are really good at.

mountain escapism pt. 1

after taking the cat back to the vet for a check-up (she’s mostly fine now and does not require surgery), we left friday evening and arrived in Curry Village in Yosemite Valley a little after midnight on friday night where we had rented a tent cabin for 2 nights. saturday we went for a nice long day hike around the valley (around Mirror Lake, which was dry (watch video here) to get acclimated to the elevation and to get our muscles warmed up, and went to bed really early after sunset. the valley was full of families and day hikers, although a bit less crowded than it is in the summer, but still a lot of children and noise. we had to sleep with earplugs in.

sunday morning we got up, ate breakfast, did some last minute preparations, packed our backpacks and put all our extra items in a bear locker, and took off for what would be jay’s first ever overnight backcountry backpacking trip and my first one in 10 years. our ultimate goal was the top of Half Dome: 8,800 feet in elevation and 4,700 feet from where we started. each of our packs weighed between 20 and 30 lbs (despite best efforts to pack lightly), and so the ascent was slow and the first hour or so was full of a lot of stopping, catching breath, adjusting, and silently wondering if we were overextending ourselves, considering we hadn’t *really* trained at all, either cardiovascularly or muscularly. i mean, i went to the gym a few extra times the week before, but that’s nothing really to prepare you for 5 miles of an uphill climb with 25 lbs on your back.

still, after an intense warm up period we slowly but surely made our way up the trail to Little Yosemite Valley, to the campground just below Half Dome (at 6100 feet). it took us about 4 hours to go about 5 miles. the campground is nestled into a nice redwood grove next to the Merced River, about 3.5 miles from the top of Half Dome. it was warm and sunny, and we set up camp, hung out by the river, built a fire and met some of our campsite neighbors, including Mati, a fellow Burner, and a man with his young (9ish?) son. we determined that we wanted to summit Half Dome at sunrise the next day (my birthday, Monday, 10/1, and also Mati’s birthday too!), as a) sunrises are beautiful, b) we wanted to beat any crowd there might be and c) i have a thing with sunrises and mountains and what better way to start a birthday?

monday morning, we awoke at 4:30am, woke up Mati and the three of us started the 2700′ ascent in the cold darkness. although it had been a clear sky when we went to bed, the moon was now covered in clouds. still, the moonlight peeked through and the trail, being so well traveled, wasn’t hard to follow up up up through the trees, except when we got to the first rock climb, before the cables, where it was a bit hard to tell which way to go. when the trees disappeared, so did the trail, and in the early dawn it was a bit difficult to distinguish any established rock path from just plain rocks. still, we knew the basic direction and kept moving upward, now more or less just climbing up rockface. there was one other person ahead of us on the trail, a man named Jim whom Mati had met back down in the valley. he was sitting waiting for the sun to come up/for it to get warmer when we got to him, but as it didn’t appear that was going to happen, he joined us.

so over the first rockface we climbed, using both rock steps and just scrambling up granite, and reached the bottom of the cables that lead up the side of halfdome. these steel cables and horizontal wooden slats provide the only support for making the final 400 feet of ascent up the granite face, which at points feels like a basically vertical climb. the pictures just do not do it justice in terms of how steep it is, especially near the top, and how small you are, like an ant climbing up the side a garden wall. i was using the full strength of my arms to pull my body weight upward with the cables, my feet providing the traction and legs also pushing. it was incredibly cold, just after dawn, and gusts of icy wind were blowing. even with my gloves, my fingers started to go numb, so, waiting for Jim in front of me, i alternated putting them in my mouth.

it only took about 15 minutes for all 4 of us to get up to the top, and once we did we discovered that indeed we were the first ones there. a wide empty expanse of granite and amazing view of the horizon and surrounding peaks greeted us, but so also did a cold harsh wind and gray sky:

we found a rock shelter just at the edge of the face and alternated huddling there for warmth and getting out to take photos. we had hoped that the clouds would burn off and we’d get a warm sunrise, but they never did. every sunrise i’ve ever spent on top of a mountain (Cadillac Mountain (1,530 ft) in Maine in 1997, Poon Hill (10,500 feet) in the Himalaya in 2003) has been extremely cold and windy, so i guess i should have expected that. due to it being extremely cold, we didn’t hang out up there that long - about 45 minutes. i imagine on a nicer, sunnier morning i could hang out up there for hours. it was nice, though, that we were the only people. in the summer, thousands of people do this climb every day, including a lot of children, and i’ve heard it’s rather crazy at the top.

so then came the descent. i myself found the descent down the cables to be really fun. i have zero fear of heights as long as i feel in control. the cables and my steady footing had me feeling really confident, and if it weren’t for my freezing fingers i would have practically slid down that face like i was on a zip line if i could have. however, i was also keenly aware that jay, behind me, was not descending anywhere near as fast as i was, and so i stopped at waited a couple of times, although with the wind this made me even colder. when he got about 3/4 of the way down, i just went for it and zoomed! it was super fun. if it were warmer, i might have even gone up and come back down, knowing i will most likely never get the chance again.

by the time we started descending on the actual trail, the sun was coming out and we kind of wished we had waited a couple of hours, but there were also then a lot of people coming up, and we wouldn’t have had the fine experience of ascending/descending and being at the summit with just the 4 of us in our group either (i mean, look at these photos from peak times in summer, where there is more or less a traffic jam on the cables and people who get impatient start walking on the outsides. this is SO UNSAFE as, like i said, it is sheer rockface and so vertical. we had the luxury of being able to take it slow and use both hands on both cables both up and down. these people standing outside of the cables are INSANE.). we got back to camp and after saying goodbye to our hiking pals and a couple of shots of birthday scotch, we took a long nap.

we woke up in the early afternoon to a glorious sunny day, and debated whether to stay another night in the campground, as planned, or pack up and hike the 5 miles back down to the valley and get a hot meal and room for the night. plan B won out, as jay and i are just not very good at keeping ourselves entertained in the middle of the quiet wilderness. it wasn’t warm enough to hang out at the beach and swim in the river, the campground was fairly empty of other people to hang out with, and we hadn’t really brought anything to do. the only option was to go for another day hike, and we decided if we were going to hike, we might as well hike out. so, we packed up camp and started the descent back to Yosemite Valley.

on the way down, we took the shorter but steeper Mist Trail, which follows the Merced River and two amazing sets of waterfalls. this trail is mostly a series of rock stairs instead of a path, which with 20-30 lbs on your back starts to hurt your knees after a while going down. still, it cut 1.5 miles off the distance to the bottom, and plus it’s much more scenic. we reached the valley floor and were back at the car again at about 6:00pm.

so, in essence, we did 2/3 of the Half Dome hike in one day (with a nap in between), having done the first 5 mile leg to the campground the day before. doing all 15 miles from the valley floor to the summit and back down in one day would be killer, but not impossible, but i don’t think i’d ever want to do it, mostly because of the elevation change and not having time to acclimate. my lungs were hurting as it was, but maybe without a full pack it wouldn’t be so bad. thousands of people do it every year, but i’m not sure how many of them know what they’re getting into or would ever want to do it again.

monday night we then drove out of the valley and back west on hwy 120 and stopped in the quaint little mountain town of Groveland, where we rented a room at the historic Groveland Inn bed and breakfast. the room included a fabulously comfortable featherbed, a deep bath tub, and teddy bears! we had a late dinner at the mexican restaurant across the street (where they put PORK in my SALAD DRESSING (!?) - gah. the only bad thing that happened all weekend, so i let it slide without much bellyaching…), i took a hot bath to soothe my severely aching leg muscles, and we settled in for a good night’s sleep. tuesday morning we had a delicious breakfast, watched some television (always a treat for us now that we don’t have one at home), and then made our way out of the mountains and through the hot and sunny central valley home.

it was a challenging yet beautiful weekend, and despite the residual aches and pains i feel all the better for it. though thousands have completed the same journey, it was no small feat and i’m proud of both of us for having done it.

for the follow-up post about other thoughts related to this trip and the some of the context of my life during which this travel occurred, see here.