My first weekend in the USA I was planning to go skiing. In the end, though, Jirka and Madla talked me into it and I went camping with them. Destination - little lakes southwest of Lake Tahoe, altitude about 2600m, 60cm of snow.
The evening before we left there was a small party at the Křížeks', where two things happened:
a) I drank enough that I wouldn't have felt great in the morning even if I wasn't heading out on an expedition,
b) Jirka told a story about how, when he was young, he was about to go skating with his mate Fakulta and his stepmother declared „I'm a village girl and I can tell this ice is thick enough“. A moment later Fakulta crashed through the crunching ice into the pond and started spitting water and swearing. Jirka went to his rescue and shortly afterwards was also furiously kicking his skates in the icy water. Fakulta gave him the cool piece of advice „What are you doing, you idiot, the water's only a metre thirty deep here“. Then, being familiar with Mládek's songs, they „headed for the changing rooms doing the crawl“. The „village girl“ apparently laughed the whole time until she was holding her belly and photographed the whole thing. Well, I don't know, that sort of image doesn't make me laugh (and it won't in a minute either, see below).
Early in the morning, around ten, we piled into the car and I begged for the back seat so I could sleep off yesterday's celebration. Wrapped in two down sleeping bags, I woke up with the feeling I was drowning (it was my own sweat, in the morning I'd dressed straight for the snow) 200km further on. I quickly bought a litre of Jack Daniels whiskey so we wouldn't freeze from the inside once we froze from the outside, plus some glue for my inflatable mat, which I'd burned a hole in by the fire last time.
At our destination we found out that you can't park for free even in the wilderness and we had to drive back to the gas station to buy a parking permit. In front of the gas station it looked for a while like we'd be spending the weekend in a car repair shop instead of on the snow, the car absolutely refused to start. Phew, in the end we drove off. Going back to the car on Sunday with the prospect of a tow truck is going to be a real joy :).
At the parking lot a frenzy of changing, packing, unpacking and saying goodbye to heavy non-essentials began. Ahead of us was a climb through deep snow and every kilo left in the car would come in damn handy. A quick bite to eat so we carry the food in our stomachs and off we go. Now I know what vitally important thing I forgot. Sunscreen wouldn't matter that much, Madla has some, but history repeats itself and just like on Shasta I don't have a cap. And the sun is beating down like crazy....
One last check whether the car is locked, that guy in the van across the way was eyeing it far too suspiciously. And lo, the car is locked all right, but the locked door isn't even properly shut!
So, car locked and closed, backpacks strapped on our backs and off we go. Hold on though, Jirka is looking for the map! So unlock the car, which you can do with a backpack on. What you can't do is climb inside with a backpack and get the map out. So backpack off, map out, lock the car, backpack on, check the car and off we go.
After thirty steps Jirka starts inconspicuously patting himself down again. In the end he has to come clean, he left his glasses in the car. Madla and I stand around by the trail and it strikingly reminds us of how we waited on Shasta for Jirka to run back to the car for batteries or whatever.
Jirka comes back relatively quickly saying the glasses weren't in the car, since he's had them in his pocket the whole time :).
So now we really do set off and we soon reach a distance from the car where it's no longer worth going back for anything. Phew.
On the snowy but packed-down forest trail we occasionally meet people on snowshoes. We're carrying ours in our hands, they're made for deep snow, aren't they? After about a kilometre of slipping and sliding on the packed snow we put them on just to try. And hey, walking is immediately easier!
When we came out of the forest, there's the first photo stop with a view of Lake Tahoe. Right after the photo, the weight of my pack wins out over my balance and I plant myself pack-first into the deep snow. With snowshoes on your feet it's not easy to get back into an upright position.
Right around the bend the first lake begins. Jirka heads out onto it saying he'll test how solid it is. In a moment he's waving that we can come. I'm not so sure about it, going around the shore isn't that much further. Soon we catch up with Jirka and Madla and complain that it's crunching and swaying kind of strangely. They claim it's fine, that it's just the top layer, that there's plenty of ice underneath. It vaguely resembles the sentence „I'm a village girl....“. Especially when Jirka adds that we should undo the hip belt on our backpacks, because apparently it's hard to unbuckle underwater. The idea of swimming in snowshoes with a pack on my back and the nearest shore just a stone's throw away (and the rest of the way by car) doesn't exactly calm me down. When my ankle then breaks through and water gushes out of the holes around it, I inconspicuously start heading for the shore. Surprisingly, Jirka and Madla follow me :).
From the shore there's a fantastic view of the sunlit lake with mountains in the background, I pull out the camera. With its case and batteries it's probably the heaviest and biggest part of my gear. After taking the first shot, the batteries die. Well, that's that :(.
After crossing two more such lakes, each a bit higher (they form a cascade), we take water from the last one (filtering it) and leave the last signs of civilisation behind, to spend the rest of the weekend in the wilderness with no people and no sounds at all, just mountains and pines and bears. Well, I hope they don't come too close.
The race against time begins, it would be good to pitch the tent while it's still light. Criteria for pitching the tent: a view down into the valley, wood nearby, positioned so that the sunrise catches us but the tent isn't visible from anywhere, etc. In the end we pitch the tent right next to a piece of rock uncovered by the sun, which is certainly a less romantic criterion than a view of the valley, but at least we won't have to light the fire, sit, unpack etc. directly on the snow.
I light the fire, Jirka and Madla pitch the tent. Surprisingly the fire was easy to start, from the local pines (Jirka claims they're up to several thousand years old) you can tear long sheets of paper-thin layers of outer bark. I break off the dried branches and there's instantly something to burn. To this day we don't know whether you're allowed to light fires here in winter, in summer the fines are horrendous.
While the water for the soup is heating up, Madla is already demanding some Jack. Given that I haven't eaten much today, I'm more restrained and wait until after the meal. It's about six o'clock, pitch dark, 2600m above sea level, up to a metre of snow in places, about minus 3-5 degrees Celsius. Thanks to technologies like Moira, Goretex, Fleece and Jack Daniels we're not cold. My boots will stay dry right until we leave, even though the snow will start melting tomorrow and I'll break through into a stream up over my ankle.
After dinner we got stuck into the Jack in unison and diligently. The conversation quickly turns to topics unthinkable while sober and even super-proper Madla admits the existence of dirty words like sex or erotic underwear. She insists, however, that thongs are like dental floss for your backside :).
Around half past seven (we have the feeling it's at least one in the morning) things get out of hand for Madla. Probably more than three decilitres of Jack straight from the bottle on an empty stomach is more than the slim body of a well-brought-up (and therefore mostly non-drinking) girl can handle. As her experienced medical team, Jirka and I prescribe her long walks in the snow in concentric circles around the fire. We stay sitting by the fire ourselves, debating the harmfulness of excessive abstinence from alcohol in youth. This is how it ends up :). Every now and then, when the sound of snow crunching under Madla's feet gets too faint, we set off with flashlights to hunt Madla down, give her a drink and bring her back to the fire. In the dark, in the snow and with the rest of the Jack in your blood, not an easy task. Soon we run out of water, which was supposed to last the whole weekend. To our astonishment we find out that melting snow to get 4 decilitres of water takes about 25 minutes on the stove :(. In the morning we have to find water.
At 9.30 we finally managed to stuff Madla into her sleeping bag and we all fell asleep exhausted.
In the morning we got up surprisingly well rested (and, amazingly, not frozen) to a blue sky and sunshine. My freshly patched mat surprisingly hadn't deflated, so I wasn't cold either. Madla, of course, wasn't feeling great, so although she came with us to look for water for breakfast, and she was as amused as Jirka when I broke through the snow crust into the stream, after breakfast she crawled back into the tent and slept.
Jirka and I loaded water, some bread and Besip bars into our packs and set off on a trip across the snowfields to the north. We scrambled all the way up to the edge of the saddle, from where you could see into the next valley. The sun blazed all day, so as usual the bigger problem was where to put all the clothes we'd taken off rather than being cold :). The climb up took about two and a half hours, at the edge between the two valleys we had a snack and headed back. The view in every direction, but especially into that next valley, was breathtaking. The idea that heading north a person could walk through that wilderness for days on end and not meet a living soul, just those mountains, snow and ancient pines....
On the way down we came across some several-day-old cross-country ski tracks and started laboriously designing snowshoes that would, with a flick, turn into something that slides on the snow when going downhill. Snowshoes have something like crampons underneath the boot and are better suited for walking uphill. Jirka then discovered that if the hill is steep enough and you lean back enough and shift your weight onto the heels of the snowshoes, it sort of slides. I chose the far safer and time-tested method known as the „butt-slide“. Which is why I was surprised when my backside sank into deeper snow at the fastest point of the descent and a moment later the snowshoes stabbed into the snow in front of me and I finished the rest of the hill doing somersaults, pack and all. Jirka justly repaid me for this spectacle a little later, when he clumsily broke into a run in his snowshoes to jump over the stream at the exact spot where my leg had gone through it in the morning, and ended up spread-eagled on his back in it :). Luckily at a spot where the stream is covered with ice and snow, so he didn't get wet.
We found Madla back among the living, so we had a lunch-dinner, packed up our bits and pieces and headed back to the car. The route past the three lakes seemed considerably longer even though it was downhill. We reached the car pretty exhausted and spent the last kilometre debating whether it's better to find out the car won't start right when you arrive or only after you've eaten and changed. My argument won, that if it doesn't start I'll call a tow truck straight away from my mobile and we'll eat while it's on its way. It was nonsense, because firstly there was no signal there and secondly the battery died within about twenty seconds :). Thank God the car started like new, so we had to leave it running and stinking the whole time we were packing, which utterly crushed the ecological convictions of all the scouts present (2) (even though the emissions limits law in California allows values ten times lower than anywhere else in the world).
On the way back I unfortunately had to give up my feather-lined spot in the back to Jack-afflicted Madla :).
