Finding a Cure for the COVID-19 Blues

Not the same park

Peter Fish says although travelers often spend most of their time in the valley, you haven’t really seen Yosemite National Park until you’ve been to its mountains.

Courtesy Peter Fish

I followed Wawona Road down into the valley. If you’ve been there, you know the view that welcomed me. The meadows, golden in fall, and the cottonwoods and oaks. The Merced River, a docile trickle this time of year, and the glacier-carved valley walls.

I recalled memories of a lifetime of Yosemite visits. The campground where my parents and I camped when I was 8, where a bear swiped the half a hamburger we left on our grill. The stretch of the Merced where we inner-tubed. The gentle trail where I took our 5-year-old son on his first Yosemite hike, and the steep trail down from Glacier Point, our most recent trek together.

But the park was different on this sunny midweek autumn day; when it should have been mildly busy, Yosemite was silent and empty. I had thought it would be insulated from the virus-rattled world outside. It wasn’t. Although the park had reopened after being shut down for three months earlier in the year, most campgrounds remained closed. The visitor center was shuttered, replaced by two information tents in a parking lot. You saw COVID cautions everywhere: posted reminders about masks, social distancing, sanitizer.

Still, it was a fine fall day that I didn’t want to waste, so I headed toward one of my favorite spots, up the Mist Trail toward Nevada Fall. I kept my eyes open for wildlife, having heard that, with fewer people in the valley, bears and bobcats were reclaiming their habitats. I then ambled across Cook’s Meadow, watching a herd of grazing deer.

I missed the people — kids gathering for Junior Ranger talks, foreign tourists exclaiming over Half Dome’s beauty in French or Japanese. I missed displaying my park knowledge when newcomers asked directions. “That’s El Capitan over there. In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Captain Kirk climbed it,” I’d say.

I’d made a reservation for a fancy dinner at the Ahwahnee, Yosemite’s grandest hotel, now socially distanced and regimented. The sparse, masked crowd of diners kept our distance from one another, grabbing our prime rib and Caesar salads cafeteria-style, in cardboard boxes. I had bought a newspaper at the valley grocery store and brought it to read, unwisely, given all the virus-related headlines. I ordered an expensive glass of wine, the type you buy when you want to toast somebody, but there was only me.

Another day, more exploring

The next day I drove to Yosemite’s south edge, to Mariposa Grove, the park’s largest grove of giant sequoias: 500 in all. The last time I had visited it had been mobbed by us tree-gazers shuffling past the sequoias like Disneyland day-trippers in an interminable line for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Now only a few of us were admiring the 209-foot-tall Grizzly Giant  and the Faithful Couple (two sequoias grown together), trying to capture the arboreal majesty with smartphone cameras.

Walking beneath living things thousands of years old, I found myself thinking about the park’s history, both heroic and troubled. Established by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, Yosemite was the first natural landscape in America set aside for its beauty. But its original inhabitants, the Miwok people, were essentially pushed off the land they called their own. (Now, belatedly, the park service and other agencies are trying to partially right these wrongs; projects include a new roundhouse for Native American cultural and spiritual ceremonies.) Over its 150 years, Yosemite has endured illegal logging, floods and wildfires, even war. In World War II, the Ahwahnee became a naval hospital, treating hundreds of wounded vets. The trees had witnessed all of these crises and more. What was a pandemic to them?

But we were not trees.

Up high in the park

On my last day in the park, I headed to the high country. Yosemite is big — about the size of Rhode Island — and while most travelers spend most of their time in the valley, you haven’t really seen the park until you’ve seen its mountains.

When I asked a ranger to suggest a moderately strenuous high-elevation hike that wouldn’t be crowded, she looked at me like I was insane. Nothing in the park was crowded. She steered me to a 7-mile round-trip near Yosemite’s eastern boundary.

I drove out of the valley on Tioga Pass Road, through an austere, exhilarating landscape of 12,000-foot peaks and crystalline lakes, and found my trailhead. I hadn’t hiked this trail before, but I had hiked plenty like it: 7½ miles round trip, starting at 8,600 feet with an elevation gain of 1,000 feet. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but it turned out that my 10 months of sheltering in place rendered me unable to easily handle high elevations and uphill climbs. After just 10 minutes on the trail, I was huffing and puffing like the Little Engine That Couldn’t.

I trudged on. The scenery was stirring but I wasn’t appreciating it. I lost the trail as it dwindled across steep slopes of loose rocks. I misstepped and slid and turned my ankle — not badly but enough that I needed to sit and massage it for a few minutes.

Weariness and muscle pain encourage depressive thoughts, and I was beginning to believe that the hike was a big mistake. Also, that the trip was a mistake, and that nothing was going to get any better — not on the hike, not in our masked, worried world. But I didn’t turn back. I followed the trail’s switchbacks up another rocky slope to the ridgetop, where I looked down at a tidy blue lake shimmering among lodgepole pines, with craggy mountains rising behind it.

Logically, one view shouldn’t suddenly make you feel better, but this one did. I followed the trail down toward the lake, found a log to sit on, then just looked — for a long time. Maybe because I had to work to get here, or maybe because I was seeing someplace new, or maybe it was just the light, but I immediately felt at ease. The light in Yosemite’s mountains possesses a ferocious clarity you cannot find anywhere else on the planet. It is, perhaps, Muir’s glow. You feel that you’re seeing the world for the first time.

The hike back was easy, and I started the drive home. The trip now seemed too short, but that’s what I always feel about my Yosemite visits. When I had cell reception again, I called my wife. “It sounds like you had a good time,” she said. I concurred and said she needed to take her own getaway.

That trip was well over a year ago now. The pandemic is better understood now, though far from over. Yosemite was a prescription for my malaise and made me reset, refocus and appreciate the beauty in the world, even when the world is struggling with its own reflection.

And because I’ve had well over a year to compile my own pandemic report card, I’m somewhat down on my progress. Core of steel? No. Fluent Spanish? No. Improved piecrusts? Yeah, but I still have trouble with lattices. If nothing else, I have a reason to return to Yosemite, if but only in my mind, and reset my symmetry. I close my eyes and see every moment: trees, peaks, lakes, the hope that we would all could come out of this OK. The glow.