Wednesday morning, August 1990; Bearpaw Meadow – Precipice Lake
We heard loud bark-cracking noises overnight, and Dad was up early enough to see a shy, cinnamon-colored bear cub high up in a tree. It was gone before I got up. Later in the morning, a deer came to within 20′ of the tent. It let Dad get pretty near before running off, though it didn’t run far and stayed fairly close for a while.
To our surprise, we found a faucet like any you’d find in a suburban garden at the back of our campsite and filled our canteens from it, wondering if this was the last of any such amenities we could expect for a while. Just on the other side of the campground we came upon a ranger station and about 15 beatifically smiling people, mostly women, eating and admiring their view of the Kaweah River Valley from inside their long lodge perched high on the valley wall. It was as much open space as we’d yet seen on our hike. We learned that the lodge, which the park calls a camp, is available to anyone who wants to have a longer-term access to the backcountry without having to worry about packing in their own food, water, or tent. I felt something like a peasant, albeit an adventurous one.
Day 2 was supposed to be our first difficult day and it proved to be grueling. We walked up towards the head of the Kaweah River Valley with the Hamilton Lakes and a difficult climb beyond, stopping to lunch and laze at a waterfall not far from the head of the valley, then passing three atttractive women returning to the camp we’d left behind in the morning. A few hundred feet higher was the Hamilton Lakes basin, shaped like an irregular bottle and surrounded on all sides but the bottle’s lid by sheer ramparts 2000’ higher than the basin. The lake itself was large and very pretty, but we learned as we passed the campsite there that a bear had come through the previous evening to devastate the packs and supplies of a family who hadn’t stowed them properly. We took the warning to heart.
The climb on the far side of the lake was as difficult as the map had made it seem. I had to carry Dad’s pack for the last half – which involved lots of shuttling back and forth, carrying one pack up a few hundred feet, then running back down to pick up the other and relieve Dad of it for a little while. We passed a small, unnamed lake and camped at the starkly marvelous Precipice Lake just before sunset, on a bare patch of gravel not quite fine enough to be called soil. The air got cooler very quickly and we both had to put on extra clothing.
Precipice Lake 
The lake itself was small and cold and calm, the weathered land around it seemingly made up of only five colors: a charcoal and a lighter shade of grey for the rocks in shade, an occasional patch of green where the mountain grasses could find a little eroded rock to root in, the surprising white of several patches of snow that had managed to survive the summer, and a brilliant orange-gold where the setting sun still shone on higher rocks. We left our food in our packs despite the warning we’d received earlier in the day, as the last trees we’d seen were 2000’ below us and I figured we were far above bear country. I dreamed of a woman I liked.
Backpacking With Family 