Desolation Wilderness 2026
Settle in! This is a LONG one….
Imagine, if you will, the day before you’re set to leave for a camping/backpacking trip, you dance with a rattlesnake while out on a trail-building project. You scoop some earth and out the snake flows. You let it writhe and swirl away, but it continues to stay in your path, almost leading the way up and down the hills you're traversing. As you prepare to head off into the wilderness, you are very aware of rattlesnakes, and you come home to tell your partner of this occurrence as she half-listens, half-attends to the many lists she’s made of clothes and food and toiletries to pack for said trip.
Cut to up and out the next day, Friday morning. Easy drive up Highway 50 to Wright’s Lake campground, and the info board upon arrival has a notice: “Rattlesnakes sighted in this campground. Be aware.” Snake energy is around. You set up camp, jump in the lake, have a beer, win a game of cribbage, eat your dinner, and crawl into the tent for a somehow long and comfortable night’s sleep on your blow up camping pads.
This was the beginning of our third annual (and final??) backpacking trip to Desolation Wilderness. And here’s how it went from there.
Around 4:00 AM Saturday morning, Jordy woke up and realized he was not feeling well. I thought, “Maybe that beer and tortilla chips? Maybe the altitude? I bet he didn’t drink enough water yesterday.” Closer to the actual, time-to-get-up morning, and again he says, “I don’t feel well. My stomach. I’m nauseous.”
I start going through what we have available. “Oh! I have a ginger candy here in my purse.” I open that candy, saving the wrapper for my Ridwell box, and hope it calms his churning stomach. Still thinking perhaps dehydration, he drinks a coconut water. Then walks into the woods to projectile vomit all that liquid right up. After a few more rounds of puking, the last one emptied him out completely, and he spent the rest of the day sweating and sleeping in a fever dream on our blanket in the middle of the trees and ferns 200 feet behind our campsite.
Mind you, we are meant to pack up and hit the Glen Alpine trail the next day, so this is the first of the pivots the CHANI astrology update advised us to be prepared for. While he rested and tried to keep water down, I befriended the camp hosts, begged a stick of butter, and got permission to move to the one site that was available for the rest of the week. Coincidentally, it was also the site Jordy had admired the night before, making a note of the number for future visits.
I mustered my energy and took many short walks through the woods to check on him, bringing electrolytes, small bites of food, and company, and then short walks the other direction, moving every last bit of our camping gear over to the next site. While the car was parked nearby, these sites were walk-ins so schlepping was necessary. He had to help me move the cooler, and he was so out of it, he didn’t fully recognize that we were moving to the other site, but wondered if we were just moving the cooler to another shady spot.
The pivot-thinking here was: if he could keep food and water down for the rest of the day, and woke up feeling better on Sunday, perhaps we just make this trip a Wright’s Lake camping trip, doing some shorter day hikes from there. If he wasn’t feeling better, keeping food and hydration down, I would need to pack us up again and drive him to help because he’d be in danger of becoming severely dehydrated.
Hurrah! He woke up thinking about pancakes (thus the begged butter) and coffee. So we ate and rested after that effort, and took a gentle, slow walk around the lake afterwards. Okay so: How are you feeling? What do we want to do? What call are we being asked to answer in this moment? He’s feeling stronger. Maybe we can stay here and do these day hikes, which we’ve done before. Maybe we head to the trail a day late, with the option to cut the hike from the five and a half miles we’d planned, to just two miles to Grass Lake if he’s not feeling up to it as we go. We have options, and just planned to take the pulse of our selves and our energy in the moment to see what made sense.
We wrapped our stroll around Wright’s Lake, planning to jump in again when we started noticing dead fish floating in the water. We walked further on. More dead fish. It’s so very sad to see evidence of these fish suffering and our realization is that the water is too warm. There was no biting chill as we dove in the day before. Refreshing, yes, but the mountain lake shiver that we’re used to was absent. That decided it. If we didn’t want to jump into this lake, we were going to pack up and hit the trail the next day.
We start organizing our packs for the hike, choosing our clothes and making our little Ziploc bags of dates, nuts, chocolate-covered cherries, and chocolate-covered ghost pepper almonds. These bags are set on top of the bear cans, in the bear box which…we did not close. Dinner done, it’s almost dark and we decide to traipse off to higher ground to watch Venus set. Gorgeous.
When we return to the site, we hear a noise. “What was that?” “Did you hear that?” I flash my headlamp and see two little eyes reflected back at me. “Oh. It’s a raccoon.” Jordy flashes his light. “Uh…no. That’s not a raccoon.” I see more clearly. It’s a bear.
Ahhhhhhh! I freeze. “Ahhhh! Jordy!” I stage whisper. “I’m scared!”
“It’s okay. They’re not interested in us,” he calmly says.
“But…It’s a bear!” About twenty feet away, looking at us with ghost pepper chocolate almond breath.
Gah! I had been so careful all weekend with the bear box. Locking it up each time I walked away so chipmunks wouldn’t get into our food, and here we leave it wide open, with all of our food available and enticing-smelling toiletries out on the table, which were now strewn upon the ground. Sunscreen and Neosporin tubes bitten through, everything shimmering with a slight smear of bear slobber. You’re meant to keep toiletries in bear cans or boxes while backpacking or camping, and I’m usually so anal about this. I suppose he must have entered the site from the table side, hitting up the orange-scented sunscreen before tiring of that and waddling over to the real score: two full and open bear cans with all of our food for the next four days.
I felt slightly bad for the little fella, considering that seemed like a lot of chocolate to ingest. I wondered if his heart was pounding like our dog’s did when she got into an abandoned Christmas stocking. Had Venus taken longer to set, he would have made it through all of our food and we would have a different pivot ahead of us. As it was, he didn’t like the pots and pans Jordy was banging to shoo him away. I wiped the slobber off, locked up the bear box, and we went to bed.
So, at this point we have: rattlesnake awareness, a violently ill 24-hour stomach bug, and a bear in our campsite. All heightened nervous system situations, with the awareness that situations can surprise us, may become dire, and may become potentially serious as we prepare to hike out into Desolation Wilderness.
We hiked the 1,800 feet elevation gain over the five+ miles, having assumed that gain would feel easier than the hike we did last year which was the same gain, but in less distance. It did not feel easier. Midway through, as Jordy batted aside my many attempts to engage him in distracting word-games, I realized, “OH! Right! This man has barely recovered from a rip-roaring stomach bug. Look, he took so much extra weight on his pack, and this hike is HARD.” We’d long since passed the two-mile bailout lake and, as we were almost out of water, we had no choice but to hike all the way to the dead-end of this trail to the next water source: Half Moon Lake.
Not another soul in sight. I had left the one hiking pole we have at home. I start stumbling a bit here and there, growing more tired, weak, and weary. At one point, I had my hands in my shoulder straps to help lift the weight off my shoulders when I fumbled a step and luckily caught my balance. Then the scenarios started playing out in my mind. I imagine all sorts of distressing situations. We are out in the middle of rocks and trees, rattlesnakes and bears, and no one else is around to help. Jordy, I can see, is struggling, depleted as he is. I realize I have zero knowledge of what to do in a wilderness emergency when calling 911 is not an option.
What do I do, for instance, if he is bitten by a poisonous snake? Do I suck the venom out? Do we keep the heart above the location of the bite? Do I leave him there with the packs and try to run to the trailhead, jump in the car, and drive to service to call for help?
What if one of us stumbles and doesn’t catch the fall? What if my hands were in my straps, I fell, and punctured my chest upon a rock? There’s no MD around to help. What if the injury was so bad, there was no real way through it? We’ve all heard of the hiker who’d cut his arm off when it was crushed between a boulder and a canyon wall. Absolutely no way I could do that to myself, or to Jordy. What would I do? My mind spun off in the Vata anxiety game of “What if?” A very dangerous place to be, especially out in the wilderness with only your tired partner for company.
So I’m now also physically exhausted, and feeling very worried about the fact and reality that I am not prepared. My herbal first aid kit contains nothing for true emergencies. I’m prepared for upset stomachs and distress from too much rehydrated food. I can stop the bleeding of a minor cut, pull a sliver, and bandage a blister. But a more serious injury?? No clue. A snakebite? Hell no. A broken bone or punctured torso? Might as well call it a day. Word games be damned. I needed a much more potent form of distraction from this mind loop.
We get to the lake. Jordy drops his pack and says he’ll hike around to find a spot with a flat area for the tent, but will not put that fully loaded pack back on. He’s planning to find the spot, come back and split the load into a couple trips. Okay. He’s never said that before, so he is clearly tired.
And then we hear it.
The howling of coyotes. Yip yip yapping, angry and lean.
Like with the bear, I freeze. Eyes open wide, I sink into myself in fear, and stare at Jordy. “Are they going to come after us? Jordy?? Jordy, what do we do?”
It’s too late to hike back out, and we couldn’t anyway–we are too exhausted. We wouldn’t anyway–”out” is precisely the direction from which we hear those wild beasts. We are out here, alone, on a dead-end trail, not having passed another hiker. All. Day. Long.
The sound stops. We unfreeze. We go together to find a spot flat enough for the tent. It’s a beautiful little spot near a delightful lake. Jordy is giddy to see a tiny two-foot long meadow growing upon a floating log. We jump into the water and pretend all is well for a short while. We swim and, while the water is still not alpine lake chilly, we see no dead fish floating.
As much as we don’t want to put the full weight back on again, we want–we need to get settled considering how unsettled we feel. So we hoist on our packs and trudge back to the site. Every few breaths, scanning the horizon, waiting for the moment when we’ll see a pack of coyotes silhouetted against the darkening sky.
What do we do? What do we do? What do we do??? It was awful. I felt my stomach drop out, replaced by a knot of writhing fear. There would be no dinner tonight. We set up camp and had some tea.
During the first section of the hike in, we walked through mugwort and yarrow, happily greeting our familiar friends. We had both collected a few leaves of each, and had chewed on mugwort earlier, when we were just tired and concerned with rattlesnakes and finding water. Mugwort refreshed our spirits then, and Jordy’s cup of mugwort and yarrow tea refreshed him yet again. I stuck with a double-bag of lavender chamomile tea, the familiar scent and taste calming me down–a bit.
Continuing to watch the skyline for the menacing outline of wild dogs, I had no plan for if this worst scenario happened. Jordy, however, did. He had gathered rocks and sticks, whittling three or four strong ones to sharp points to be used as spears against attacking coyotes.
Would coyotes attack us? We didn’t know. We had been stalked decades before in Joshua Tree as we lay on our stomachs for a long time, admiring our brand-new love and the softly shaped pebbles of the granite in the park. When we looked up, two coyotes were slinking toward us, not thirty feet away. Whew! I laughed. Ha ha ha. Isn’t that funny? When I was that young and not yet a Mom, I had no cares in the world. King cobras in the garden of our hosts’ home in Thailand? Interesting! Let’s go see! Multi-pitch rock climbs of the level that I was just able to do, climbing blindly up the overhanging rock toward Jordy, tied into the anchor, not visible to me? Sure, I bet I can do that. I don’t know if I wish to return to that naive, not a care in the world woman. But the reality and mortality of life has caught up, and I am frightened of a pack of snarling dogs approaching our desolate campsite.
Handing me a stick, he said, "Wouldn't you rather be prepared with some way to protect yourself? I think you would.” It hung limply in my hand as I tried to find a place within myself where I could even imagine fighting off the attack of a wild animal.
I melted. Tears puddled out of my eyes as my face crumpled into the stress, and fear, and fright that had been building ever since I realized we were not prepared. I was not prepared or educated enough on how to handle emergencies in the backcountry.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Halfway through the hike that day, we realized we had forgotten to check the weather update when we drove through service to the trailhead. Having been caught out in thunderstorms before, I was not excited about the prospects of that again. And then, of course, where there’s thunder, there is lightning. And where there’s lightning, there can be fire.
We hugged each other and got into the tent, not believing sleep could, or should, come.
But it must have because at one point we were awakened by the return of the howling and the yipping only…closer this time?? We grabbed each other, hearts pounding, breath jagged, palms sweaty. The yipping stopped, and for some reason, we thought, best to get out and pee. We heard nothing else. No yip yip yipping. No silent stalking. No rocks shifting under hunting paws.
Somehow, again, we slept. Or at least I did, as Jordy said he was glad to hear me snoring….And when the sun hit the tent in the morning, “Hurrah! “ We cheered. “We made it through the night!” “We didn’t get eaten by coyotes!”
We decided to answer the call of the moment and discuss whether we wanted to load up and hike back out. At least this time it would be all downhill. “It’s all downhill from here” took on a positive connotation. But if we hiked out, then what? We didn’t want to go home. We didn’t want to return to Wright’s Lake. The trailhead is near Fallen Leaf and DL Bliss campgrounds, but Lake Tahoe, being a city park of summer players, too many people.
Either not enough on the trail or too many everywhere else. Okay, Goldilocks.
We opted to pack up and hike to Susie Lake, finding a fresh campsite. One without our stink of fear surrounding it. Susie is closer to the very populated Lake Aloha, and along the Pacific Crest Trail so we thought we’d potentially feel less alone.
I think the pressure-cooker week of elements that had entered our psyches (violently ill, snakes, bears, are those thunderclouds building, stumbling trail hazards, physical exhaustion, and the apex of fear: the howling, yowling, barking of coyotes on the prowl) was enough to crack us open and realize maybe it’s time to reconsider how we plan to share our time together.
I knew that I loved the day-hike parts of our trips. The lightweight pack on my back with water, lunch, and a layer? Hiking out in the backcountry with barely a soul in sight? Yes please. Bring it on. So we dreamt of all the places in the world where we could just “set up camp.” Maybe at an Inn or a B+B where a comfy bed, a hot meal, a cold beer, and help if help is needed is readily available. And from there: hike for hours and hours.
We talked of Italy and Switzerland, of England, Scotland, and Norway. Of Greece. Of all the places in the world we’ve talked of visiting and never do. Maybe setting this time aside for further travels instead of setting this time aside at the end of summer to torture ourselves hiking into Desolation Wilderness is the pivot we should be making.
After a restful night at Susie Lake, we continued to check in with each other and ourselves, and decided on Wednesday morning to do a four-mile hike to Lake Aloha and the cliff that Jordy had been “dreaming of for twenty years.” We jumped into that cold water, tromped barefoot over the rocks, and delighted in the sunny skies and open space where we did indeed see other hikers in the distance. He stared at the cliff, imagining where to place gear and drooled over the chicken heads (a climber’s dream), while I peeled carrots and watched a marmot run beneath a rock. Then we returned to Susie Lake, put everything back in our packs, and hiked another four and a half miles to the trailhead, and our waiting car.
This was a tough hike. My feet ached. It was not all downhill because we had changed our path from Half Moon to hiking up and out from Susie Lake. I had to talk with myself about where in my body I did not hurt. My pinkies and ring fingers. My face. Surprisingly, my quadriceps did not hurt. Must be all the barre classes I’ve been doing to get stronger. Thanks, Stephanie! With each painful step, I thought, “I’ve certainly broken my arches.” “Never again.” “I am giving my pack away.”
And then we got to the car, dropped our packs, and changed into clean clothes. As we started driving out, checking the phone for when we reached service to find and book a hotel nearby, I sat comfortably in my seat, heading toward a king-sized bed and a hot shower. I caught myself thinking, as I massaged my non-broken arches, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Half Moon Lake, or what we’ll now call Coyote Lake
Spears and rocks. Wilderness protection. Happily not needed.
The gorgeous Lake Aloha.
Check out my good friend Natalie Gould’s new book! Enough Feathers to Fly. I couldn’t put it down. Inspiring, heart-warming, at times heart-wrenching. It’s a good read for conversations and contemplation. And do let me know if you’d like to borrow my pack….
