The family that backpacks together

My grandfather started hiking in the Sierra 70 years ago. It's a tradition that keeps our clan together -- and lets indifferent nature caress our souls.

By Gary Kamiya

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Photo by Gary Kamiya

Aug. 21, 2007 | I was lying in my sleeping bag about midnight, looking up at a vast bowl of stars, when a shrill shriek pierced the blackness, coming from someplace to the north. The high wail was followed immediately by a confused cacophony of barks and grunts and more keening cries, a silvery many-tongued outcry moving rapidly from west to east. My dog sat bolt upright, ears pricked up, quivering in every muscle, as if he instantly knew that these were savage relatives who could kill him. The yelps and cries faded, disappearing in the direction of the high mountains. They left an impression of wild, unstoppable power, as if a dark caravan had ripped through the night. That run of the coyote pack -- were there three of them? six? 10? -- echoing from somewhere on the vast 600-foot-high granite face on the north side of Buck Lake, stayed with me all day. It felt like the magnificent and terrifying voice of the wilderness itself.

My grandfather first went to Buck Lake, in California's Emigrant Wilderness, just north of Yosemite, in 1937. He and his buddies hiked 16 miles to the lake (his pals rode horses part of the way, but he insisted on walking) and spent a week or two fly-fishing, telling tall tales and having a great old time. Grandpa's Buck Lake trips went on for 30 years, until he was in his 70s, and became a part of my family's lore. Grandpa was born in 1894, and he remembered a horse-drawn wagon trip he and his family took across Northern California as the great adventure of his life. He started delivering the mail on a rural route in a horse-drawn buggy. He was part of that single, remarkable generation of Americans who went from growing up in an agrarian-dominated society before cars -- a life in many ways little different from that of a medieval peasant -- to witnessing the moon landing.

In those days, just about every man who lived in the country hunted and fished. Grandpa, a tough hombre who drove stove oil and gasoline trucks across the Central Valley for years, and prided himself on his ferocious physical strength, was no exception. I remember marveling at his fly rod, and how he could drop his fly on a fish's nose 30 yards away so gently that it didn't make a ripple when it hit the water. We grandchildren were all scared of his 12-gauge shotgun with its legendarily painful kick and could barely muster the nerve to blast tin cans with a .22.

My grandparents bought a 320-acre ranch in the Sierra foothills above the Gold Rush town of Murphys in 1943. A fair chunk of my mother's side of the family lives there, and those of us who live elsewhere have been going up there ever since. More than any other single thing, the ranch has held our unruly clan together. It also helped instill an abiding love of nature in us. But grandpa's hunting and fishing legacy died with him. Grandpa took my uncle David, one of his four children, out deer hunting a few times, but David was so appalled when he shot his first buck that he inwardly vowed never to do it again. He gamely went out on a few more hunts but never again pulled the trigger even when looking down the sight of his .270 rifle at a deer. Grandpa, who was a kind man, understood and didn't insist. The rest of us also failed to become sportsmen. Only one of his children -- his youngest daughter, Aunt Wendy, who had dreams of being another Annie Oakley -- took up the gun or rod, and practically none of his grandchildren have.

But the Buck Lake tradition didn't die. Grandpa never took his own children there, but David decided to revive the expeditions. He organized a backpack with his two sons and two of his nephews, my cousin Jonathan and me. We hiked in and had a glorious time. That was 32 years ago, and various combinations of the clan have been going in ever since. We're the newfangled breed of outdoorsmen -- we go into the high country just to be there. My brother went in with his daughter when she was a babe in arms. We took my mother on her first trip to Buck when she was 64 years old. I can still remember the deep joy on the face of my late uncle Bob, who was a sociology professor at CUNY, when we first climbed to the top of the face above the lake, an easy ascent that to a novice looks like climbing Everest. On my last trip there, I had to leave early and hike out alone, and fast, because a horseman from the pack station rode in and left a message that my wife, who was seven months pregnant, was having difficulties and might be about to give birth.

That was 11 years ago, and the little girl who was supposedly about to make a premature entrance into the world (she didn't) is now 10 years old. Last week I took Celeste and my 18-year-old son Zachary into Buck for the first time, joining my mother, who's now 77, Uncle Dave, who's about to turn 70, Dave's partner, my brother and sister and their daughters, and cousin Jonathan. The concession we made to age and hedonism was hiring a mule train to carry our gear, allowing us to sit in chairs, eat salmon pasta and fresh vegetables, and drink wine at 8,300 feet.

Next page: To tell the truth, I wasn't exactly enjoying it myself that first day