The Sierras in 2011 had unusually high snowfall combined with late snow and a cold Spring. These three combined to generate very high runoffs during the prime hiking season. Lance, Kevin and I collected and donated to the Restore Hetch Hetchy organization to hike from Tuolumne Meadows through the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne to the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The City of San Francisco arranged a welcoming party for us at the end of our six day hike that included eighteen US Park Rangers (many prepared to fight off a terrorist attack) to ensure that we did stick our feet or any other extremity into the City’s sacred drinking water.
The rest of this description describes how Lance engineered a ferry system to transport nine backpacks across a creek that had grown to fifty feet in width and more than ten feet in depth.
The Park Service has plenty of budget from the City to pay for firearm wielding rangers around the dam, but no staff to provide guidance that a popular hiking route was impassable due to high stream flows. A month earlier a similar lack of attention by the Park Service led to the death of two hikers attempting to hike past a water fall that flooded the path around the reservoir.
The log that in most years enabled crossing the creek was two feet under water. The cascades upstream were raging as shown in this picture. It was possible to cross on the log by shimmying with water up to your armpits. Shimmying across with a pack as not advisable as the crawler would easily lose balance with the top heavy, soaking pack and wind up going downstream in the strong current. Walking or crawling across the log with a pack was not an option.
There were no alternative places to cross the creek in either direction and dou
bling back was not an option without a food drop. Through the efforts Lance Olson a plan was devised to tie air mattresses together. A later version interweaved the air mattresses.
Loading a pack on the raft. After the first pack was loaded, our guide swam across with the rope which he then used to pull the raft across. He was very cold and exhausted by the time the last pack was ferried across.
Pulling the raft across with a cord. It is heavier so it is not visible in the water.
Fishing line was tied to the backside of the raft and kept taught so that the raft went across on a straight line -- Keeping the raft from drifting downstream in the current which would risk it getting caught in the brush; this also ensured the ability to pull the raft back for the next trip.
You can see the fishing line that kept the raft from drifting; the larger rope used to pull the raft across with the pack is not visible because it is submerged in the water.
After the pack was unloaded, we pulled the empty raft back across using the fishing line. Keeping it from getting tangled required two people.
I need to find pictures of us crossing the river shimmying across a submerged log. There was definitely a current that made it hard to sit up on the log even with legs wrapped around the log.
