A Road Trip

In the summer of 2003, C-money and I were in Berkeley for a couple of weeks. One day, we were doing some bouldering near my parents house at mortar rock. We met a French guy named Tam there, who turned out to have just started a postdoc @berkeley, and was working the famous Nat's traverse. Anyway, we exchanged emails, and since I would be coming back for X-mas, we made tentative plans to do some bouldering or routes that winter.

Winter rolled around, and I escaped the cold (not quite western MA cold, but pretty damn cold nonetheless) to come back to berkeley. Things were a little hectic, and the only days we could find to climb were the 25th-27/28th. Since Tam had never been to Bishop before, it was an easy choice. Another recent French arrival friend of his named Luc would also be coming. This trip would become my most difficult and dangerous driving experience ever. This is saying quite a lot, considering the roads I have taken my own cars and rental cars on. I dont think its an exaggeration to say that we were on the verge of crashing into things for the better part of 100 miles.

Anyway, since the passes through Yosemite and the mid Sierra were all closed (this being december), we had to take a northern route, along 80, then splitting off onto US50, through placerville and on to the east side near Carson. Things got off to a rocky start when we realized that since it was christmas day, nothing was open. Undaunted, and with great confidence that the large cache of food in the back of my parents 1993 Toyota 2WD truck would last us, we pressed on. At least the gas pumps were open! Just out of placerville, the traffic came to a stop; a "people running to the side of the road to piss" type of standstill. Oh, and it started snowing. And it was getting cold. And dark. We were still optimistic though: we were all young and alert -- it would be no big deal to get into the pit (the campsite) at 10 at night. We were tough.

Three hours later, we finally came upon the thing that had caused a massive traffic jam down through placerville: A fucking caltrans chain control. It came as a great surprise that there happened to be 20 or thirty jumpered up "Chain Installers" on the side of the road, who would put your chains on for a mere $20. $20. To put chains on your car. After trying to sneak our truck through the checkpoint without chains and being turned back (I guess they arent fooled by the whole "Truck" thing), we pulled over, and with a lot of difficulty we got the chains on.

After pulling a U turn, we proudly and confidently drove through the checkpoint, at which point one set of chains shot off our wheel. The Caltrans guys either didnt notice, didnt care, or took pity on us, because they didnt say anything. Even when Tam ran out and sheepishly picked up the bits of chain that had been ejected from the wheel, they seemed to be looking in another direction. We figured that one chain would be enough to get up the hill, and we were right. I drove slowly and carefully, and after another hour or so, ended up in south lake tahoe, where the grinding crunch of the chains on pavement tempted us to remove our one remaining chain. A brief encounter with a snowdrift convinced us otherwise. By now it was snowing really really hard, and there werent very many 2WD vehicles on the road. When we finally got to the flat section before the big hill on the eastern edge of Tahoe, we opted to put our ejected chain back on the wheel. This was an even more miserable experience than before, because it was now very cold and dark. And did I mention the snow? All I remember was a big steep hill, which was not easy to get up -- I think we were still on 50. As we descended onto the east side, we were all relieved to see less and less snow, and by the time we got to the 395 intersection, everything looked great. We decided to try to take our chains off, which was a 30 minute ordeal in which we would each take a turn trying to unhook them for 2 minutes before we lost feeling in our hands. We also noticed that we had lost most of the tensioners! No matter though, the road was dry, and we could still theoretically make it to bishop that night, albeit at 4 in the morning.

It had already been a pretty long day, but it wasn't quite over!