Yosemite is rippling with tourists from all over the world. We hear languages we don’t even recognize along the paths, beneath the pounding waterfalls, and in the lodge. We spend our mornings and afternoons outside. After two days of wandering about in an incessantly falling snow that has accumulated to a depth of three feet along the paths, we begin hearing rumors from locals that the blizzard is coming. This is sort of hard to imagine, as it has been storming quite heavily ever since we arrived, and the difference in what we are experiencing now, and the mythical blizzard yet on its way is somehow just easier to ignore.
On Christmas Eve, we climb into our tent after a full day of hiking into wilderness heavy and bowing over itself under mounds and pounds of snow, arriving at lakes and rivers where the great granite walls of this valley rise up on all sides and seem to hold us in an unspeakably beautiful and tenderly cupped hand.
In the night you wake up to pee. When you get back in the tent you point out that the neighbor’s tent looks like a deflated balloon. In the night we hear coyotes and avalanches all around us. One avalanche lasts for at least a minute and sounds close enough to bury us. Not long ago a good section of tents in Curry Village, the neighboring campground was buried in a similar avalanche of rock and mud. No one was hurt. Curry Village was all set to rebuild the site but geologists said I don’t think so. Are we ok? I ask you as the avalanche roars on. Hold me, you say.
Five times in the night, as the blizzard indeed hits, we wake up with jolts to an explosion of snow falling from the trees overhead and landing on our tent. The impact is so forceful and so loud and so unexpected each time, that is closer to a war zone than anything else I’ve experienced. In the morning, on Christmas Day, we wake up to an unrecognizable landscape. The snow is coming down so heavy that it soaks our boots and clothes and hair within minutes. Our tent is just a white mound among other white mounds that we assume to be the picnic table, the bear box, the bathrooms… Though our tent is still standing, two others in the campground are flattened like pancakes and snapped tent poles are sticking out of their seams.
Later on we find two men who weathered the night in one of the destroyed tents in the cafeteria warming up their chemical reaction army mre’s, and drinking stealthily from a hidden supply of booze. Shivering, bright eyed, We’re getting the fuck out of here, they say.
We meet Ed, another camper, and join him at his table for breakfast. It is 9:00 in the morning and Ed is already drunk. My wife left me a year ago, he says. I was here for Thanksgiving too. Though his tent was still standing this morning, and he came equipped with his portable video player, he pleads with me to help him get a room somewhere. His face has the haggard look of an alcoholic, his speech is slurred, and he knows from experience, that in that state he probably won’t get what he wants. Before packing up I take him over to the lodge and find him a rather expensive room at the Wawona, which he pays for in cash.
It is Christmas Day and we are loading your truck in the blizzard. We are breaking camp and this requires many trips back and forth through the path in the snow that is now up to our thighs. We are moving quickly and we are not doing a good job packing the truck because the snow is falling very thickly and twice this morning we have witnessed branches the size of our kitchen table falling off of their trees and crashing to the ground a few meters away from our tent. This is get the hell out of dodge packing. This is stuff it in with your boot heels packing and hold the rest on your lap.
Within an hour, twelve miles down the canyon, we are turning the jets off and on in our double-wide Jacuzzi in a riverside room with a king bed, wide screen tv, blasting the heat, fireplace roaring, presents piled in the corners, chocolate wrappers littering the tables, getting the chill out of our toes and already laughing about the two tents sad and popped like deflated balloons. Down here the blizzard is turned to rain. The snow line is about fifty feet above us and we can see it out the window. Propped up on what must be the softest pillows ever, in what must be the biggest bed in the world, in what could be the warmest hotel, it is a safe and comfortable place to agree that camping at Yosemite in a blizzard at Christmas, in the midst of avalanches, drunks and coyotes, in the cradle of a valley so stunning it will break your heart every time, with a loved one and a good tent, is an experience not to be missed.
