Twin Lake Off-trail Backpacking Day1

Ms.J, Mr.N, Mr.S2 and I went backpacking in the Sierra on the 4th of July weekend, 2016. Carpooling with Mr.S2, we left at 5:15 a.m. in the morning on Saturday. On the way Mr.S2 said, "I feel like I forgot something....oh no!" Then he started laughing. I said, "What did you forget? Tell me!" He replied, "I forgot a tent!" I said, "Really? Why did you forget it?" He removed a winter tent from his backpack and forgot putting a summer tent into the backpack. We called Ms.J in another car to ask if they had a 2-person's tent for him to share, but they didn't. Mr.S2 had to sleep outside without a tent. Mr.S2 also brought a wrong season sleeping bag.

On the way to a trailhead, we drove by a small dip on the edge of the road. Immediately after the hit, we noticed that we got a flat. We parked on the shoulder and had to work on it. Mr.S2 and I had never fixed a flat tire. We were actually laughing. We got stuck in the middle of Yosemite National Park and didn't even know how to fix a flat. That situation made us laugh. First, we took out a spare tire from a trunk. In front of the donut, we again laughed. We had no idea how to start. We then noticed that there might be an instruction somewhere. We found a manual in the glove compartment. Mr.S2 said, "I don't see any sections about a flat tire. Maybe there is no instruction." I said, "No, there must be a section for it." Mr.S2 inspected the book and said, "Looks like there is no section of a flat tire." I said, "No!!! There should be!" Mr.S2 said, "Oh maybe in the section of ‘unexpected happened’?" We found an instruction.

We started fixing the flat tire on the shoulder. First we put a donut under the car. Then we needed to loosen the nuts. However, it was really hard. Mr.S2 couldn't do it, so of course it was not possible for me. The nut didn't move at all even when we tried together. 

 

Because the nut didn’t move at all, we thought about waiting for Mr.N + Ms.J, but we were not sure if they were ahead of us or behind us. Then Mr.S2 found a way to loosen the nut. He used his whole body weight efficiently. Now we had to raise the car. We were not sure of how to use a jack, but figured it out. I thought, "Am I small person raising a car? Wow, this is fun!"

After we raised the car, finally we removed the flat tire. Now the donut needed to be inserted. However, we were not sure which direction the donut should be. S said, "This side is outside." I said, "No this side." S replied, "No this side." We were confused and stared at a cartoon on the instruction to figure it out. S laughed and said, "This might be a sign telling us not to go hiking! No tent, then a flat!" I laughed and replied, "Oh, maybe." The final step was to tighten the nuts on the donut. Mr.S2 used his foot to tighten them. I was double checking the instruction and said, "Mr.S2! The instruction says that do not over tighten the wheel nuts by applying extra torque using your foot or a pipe." S laughed and "K! Why did you say it now!? I just did it!" Two out of five nuts were over tightened.

After we replaced the flat tire with the spare tire we took a short break. Our hands were dirty. Mr.S2 ate salad and gave the leftovers to me, but I couldn't eat because I ate too many blueberries before (2 blueberries/mile). 

 

We were finally able to reach the trailhead with a 45 minutes late. Then we met Ms.J and Mr.N. We were glad that they were still waiting for us. However, the trailhead was the ending point not the starting point because we planned to do a car shuttle hike. This meant that we still needed to drive more. Anyway we went to Shell in the closest town to see if we could fix the flat. On the way, it started raining with thunder, then became hailing.

A mechanical engineer at the Shell glanced at the flat and immediately said, "We can't fix this, because the rim is bent." The tire itself was okay, but the metal rim was damaged. We called several tire shops to check if they have replacement rims. None of them had rims. The only place we could get it was at a dealership. If we wanted to replace the rim as soon as possible, we needed to go back to the Bay Area. People at the tire shops advice was that we should not drive for a long time or not to exceed 50-80 mph, depending on a shop.

Twin Lake with clouds

Then we went to a ranger station to pick up permits. One of the rangers saw our spare tire and said that 100 miles was the longest distance with a donut. The bay area is more than 100 miles away from there. He scared us. Although everybody scared us, we went to the trailhead. The twin lake area was civilized. I didn't know that it was a resort. We had to pay additional $ to park overnight. It was ridiculous to park in the resort area to do a hardcore backpacking.

When we parked, the first thing we heard was another thunder.

 To be continued...