Fire in Yosemite!
Our trust in the safety of a National Park is put to the test
The day began auspiciously with a beautiful sunrise over the tiny gem of a lake that we had found to camp next to in Nevada the night after we left Antelope Island. Pulling into the little town of Ely, we looked up directions and had some breakfast at a tasty Mexican fast food place. We had to get through the Sierras and spend at least one more night there, before reaching home on the Russian River: there was no physical way to get home any sooner with the distance and terrain we had to cover.
“We can spend up to two nights in Yosemite,” Mike said, holding his phone aloft at the National Park reservation site. “That gets us closer to home than through Lake Tahoe.”
We’d had reservations at a campground in Lake Tahoe, but Mike had received an email alert that they had been canceled due to a nearby fire in the area.
We both love Yosemite and crossing the Sierras through that park seemed like a good solution, so he made the reservations. We set off on a whole new road and direction than we’d been on before, Highway 6 through Nevada. Highway 6 is a lot like Highway 50, the one often called the ‘loneliest road.’ Mile after mile of desert was held down from blowing away by sage, greasewood, and dried patchy bunches of late summer yarrow.
Overhead, the sky began to go grey with the smoke of California as we approached the Nevada border, passing through hills shaped like volcanic cinder cones but made of sand and soft stone that sparkled with brittle bits of granite. Buzzards circled overhead; it wasn’t pretty.
We were distracted from the increasing smoke of California by seeing a band of wild horses on the side to the highway. This was one of my fondest hopes and best memories from one of our previous journeys, written about in Open Road.
“Oh, let’s stop and take a look at them!” I said.
We pulled over to the shoulder to watch the horses as they moved along steadily, grazing free, unbranded, and with no sign of captivity. These mustangs were smaller than domestic horses, but seemed healthy and had thick, beautiful coats. I noted a dun with black legs, a white mare, and a black with a blaze on its face. A colt that was maybe six months old was a bright chestnut; it stayed beside a brown mare. The big, solid dun was the stud; though the horses all ignored us, the stallion stayed between the band and our rig as the herd walked along. I was lucky enough to get a few pictures, and the horses were a good distraction.
But when we got back on the road, I noticed how smoky conditions had become.
The sky thickened and congealed, turning a terrible burnt orange. Visibility shut down as if night had fallen, but it was only three p.m. We tried to get updates on the radio but nothing was registering.
The closer we got to Yosemite, the worse the air became. The highway was still open, though all cars had their lights on to cut through the hellish glow. “I want to go home, Mike. My beautiful Yosemite is burning. I just want to go home.” I struggled to control my racing heart rate and ragged breathing—I was on the verge of a panic attack.
“I’m trying to get us there.” Mike patted my leg. “We have to get over these mountains, and there’s no easy way to do it. The pass over the Sierras through Tahoe is already blocked by fire. If we go through Yosemite, we can then go straight out the front gate tomorrow morning. I’m too tired to turn around and find some other way across the mountains. I’ve already been driving for ten hours.”
I fought to control the fear and grief that we’d been fleeing the entire trip: and now we were in the thick of it. The wildlife being snuffed out, all the people’s homes ruined, the suffering around us was overwhelming. I carried an accumulation of that trauma inside me and, even with all my therapeutic tools, hadn’t been able to deal with it effectively.
“It’s okay to have a good cry,” Mike said. “This is making me sad, too. It’s a terrible thing that’s happening to our country, to the land. It’s okay to be sorry about it. Just know that right now, we are not in any immediate danger. They wouldn’t let us into the Park if we were.”
“You’re probably right.” I put on a relaxation hypnosis recording; I had made one called ‘there is no emergency’ specifically for scary times when bad things were happening in the world. I reminded myself that, as far as we could tell, we were not in actual danger except for respiratory distress. With the car’s AC on, we could still breathe, though both of us were hoarse with sore throats.
As we turned off Highway 395 to Yosemite via Tioga Pass, I squinted to see through the dim orange glow, tears pouring down my cheeks as I listened to the recording: “breathe in peace, breathe ooouuuutttt the tension. Right now, you are safe and everything is okay in this moment…”
I really, really hoped so.
We wound up and up an up toward the back entrance to Yosemite, coming over the top of Tioga Pass. Finally the smoke a up there was a little lighter; we could see the road, and the surroundings a bit. The terror and claustrophobia began to lift as the affirmations I had been listening to helped me relax. I was finally calming down.
Mike glanced at me. “This is a national park. They wouldn’t let us in if it wasn’t safe,” he repeated. “Let’s just sleep on the valley floor tonight and leave right away in the morning. We won’t even unhitch.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “It’s already been a lot of hours driving.” That it had; and that was part of the problem. We’d nearly reached the limits of daylight and our endurance.
We approached the official entrance gate to the National Park. No one occupied the booth, which was bizarre. We had never been to Yosemite when there weren’t lines of people and multiple rangers at the gate. We stopped, reading a sandwich-board type sign propped in one lane that said “Only Campers with Reservations May Enter.”
We had reservations, so we proceeded on.
A few miles down the road, inside Yosemite itself, we hit a backup of cars and came to a halt. “They must be turning people back, or verifying reservations,” Mike said.
But that wasn’t what was happening. A blockade of firefighters held up our cars. My heart rate soared as a Cal Fire pilot vehicle with light bars on it arrived to lead our small cavalcade down the smoke-choked road.
We were confused, but followed the flashing lights; there must be a downed tree or something ahead. A pilot vehicle is a specific thing they do these days when there’s a closed lane in a wilderness area; everyone is supposed to follow that car so they don’t turn off the wrong way.
As we went along, the smoke, which had been a muffling reddish blanket over everything, changed to bright white, bulging up in thick, cloud-like billows around us.
“What is going on here! This is an active fire zone!” I exclaimed. “This can’t be right!”
Apparently, we were being led directly into the fire.
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So scary for you!
Good grief, how totally frightening!