Back in the 1980s and 90s, I was spending a good part of each year in Yosemite; a month or more at a stretch. My first lengthy stay was in the spring of 1979, shortly after I gave up on college. This was a life-changing experience—one of my life’s all-time highpoints. But after six straight weeks in the Valley I’d about had enough of Camp 4’s crowded squalor…the traffic…the hordes of clueless tourists…my peanut butter-based diet. Truth be told, while I was smitten with the place, living in Yosemite Valley had downsides and I probably would have given up on multi-week stays if not for stumbling on an ideal compromise. ◦◦◦◦◦ Right after that first big trip I moved to Colorado. Three years later, I was back in California and settled in the Eastern Sierra. May, 1984 found me back in the Valley again. This time around, I ended up staying in Upper Pines Campground with a bunch of climbers from Wyoming. Unbeknownst to me, an old climbing buddy was part of this gang. One day Lars showed up in camp, fresh off El Capitan, and straightaway invited me to join him and his partner for a celebratory dinner with friends. These friends were park employees; a couple who lived just outside the Valley at some place I’d never even heard of called Foresta. ◦◦◦◦◦ Foresta turned out to be little more than an enclave of private properties surrounded by Park land. We drove there in Lars’s beater VW van. Heading toward Crane Flat on 120, he turned off onto an unsigned road almost invisible from the highway. Dropping steeply at first, the narrow road wound its way through dense forest before skirting an open meadow with a picturesque old barn. Unpaved spurs led to quaint cabins you could just make out through the trees. I remember being amazed: here was a serene idyll, less than thirty minutes by slow-moving van from the mad rush of Yosemite Village. ◦◦◦◦◦ On our way in we’d passed a small clearing. Lars pointed out a barely visible two-track at the far side of the clearing that led off into thick timber and offhandedly mentioned having camped back there a time or two. ◦◦◦◦◦ So that’s the back-story on how I became a Valley commuter, bandit-camping along the Foresta Road. I subsequently found two more places where I could park my Toyota pickup for the night, safely hidden from view. Later I began posting up farther down the road; past the last of the summer cabins, beyond where the patched pavement ended, right out in the open. (Getting there entailed driving past seven different signs whose basic message was NO CAMPING ALLOWED.) ◦◦◦◦◦ It just so happened that the man who would become my immediate supervisor when I started working for the Forest Service, “Lucky” Lorenzo Stowell, shared a cabin in Foresta with his partner, Laurel—a YNP Wilderness ranger. Starting in 1985, I’d drop in on them from time to time. Lars’s Foresta friends, Mark and Noreen, became my friends, too. Little by little I got acquainted with other residents along with the patrol ranger who, on learning that I worked for Lorenzo, hinted that he’d look the other way if he saw my truck parked along the road. I was in! From that point on I didn’t even bother with trying to hide and at times would even be joined by a friend. My preferred spot was a half mile below Foresta at the historic McCauley’s Ranch. I’d park my truck at the end of a narrow side track beside a fenced meadow—an exceptionally tranquil spot with not a living soul around. How lucky can you get? Free camping in Yosemite! Away from the Valley’s crowds and clamor! On weekends when the Valley was insane or when I needed to give my body a break, I’d spend entire days just lounging naked by Crane Creek on water-polished granite slabs. This went on for over a decade. That’s a whole lot of glory days. ◦◦◦◦◦ The following piece is one among a dozen or so rough sketches I cranked out during my month-long trip to Yosemite in the spring of 1989. This is the first of them, with more to follow. They’re not all focused on climbing but were written for an audience familiar with technical rock climbing and climber slang. This shouldn’t cause too much confusion. ◦◦◦◦◦ A few things need a little clarification. Readers unfamiliar with my background might wonder why this lunatic is climbing alone, without ropes and equipment. Well…it’s complicated. For many years I was a “solo climber,” like Alex Honnald. The insane things Honnald has done on film make it even harder to explain to a non-climber what motivates people to risk their lives doing something that could kill them, recreationally. Honnald, top dog in an extreme sport, is in a league of his own. My own endeavors pale in comparison but they share a common thread: if you fall, you die. (Race-car drivers walk away from fiery crashes. Big-wave surfers come up for air. Solo climbers get no second chances.) ◦◦◦◦◦ My own case is quite unusual, actually. I’d been climbing for only a year-and-a-half when I started leaving the rope behind—almost unheard of for one with so little experience. This was 1978. I was twenty and, shall we say, full of myself. For me, it was all about the joy of movement; of being unencumbered by gear; of not being dependent on partners to do what I wanted to do, when I wanted. I was drawn to the pure style and total commitment factor; the ever-present possibility of death. Not to be over-dramatic but, for thirty years I went about my business knowing that each climb could be my last. This colored everything I did and gave simply being alive a real edge. Anyone who’s gone through cancer treatment or survived a near-fatal accident knows the feeling—of living on borrowed time. ◦◦◦◦◦ Now this may sound strange, but climbing without protection forced me to be extremely conservative. Since I wasn’t pushing myself the way climbers routinely do when they have a rope to catch falls, I was never able to fully achieve technical proficiency and stuck to routes with relatively large, secure hand- and footholds. On the other hand, only a few years into it I started doing things “on-sight” (a term of art for “without prior knowledge”) that were near my lead-limit—that is, nearly as difficult as anything I’d attempt to “lead” using a rope. Even among soloists far more talented than myself, this is seldom done…intentionally. And I was doing long routes—in Yosemite, several of them from valley floor to rim. And that’s a whole lot of unknowns to have to deal with on the fly. ◦◦◦◦◦ Unroped climbing is a highly personal pursuit; more spiritual quest than sport. For me, purity of intent was imperative because soloing is a game where ego-gratification and a need for recognition can literally prove fatal. Accordingly, I made a conscious decision to not trumpet my accomplishments (what climbers call “spray”) and would often head off without even letting someone know where I was going. In fact, only a few of my closest friends had any sense of what I was up too. Starting in 1988 I took to carrying a pair of lightweight ropes for bailing out if a climb proved too hard or rappelling from the top of routes with no walk-off descent. This opened up a whole new arena and in turn upped the ante, risk-wise. While I scared myself many times over the years there only a couple of truly close calls. But by the late 80s I was doing climbs on-sight rated 5.10 (my lead limit) and it grew increasingly clear to me that I was pushing my luck; it was only a matter of time. Just one mistake. Here’s what saved me: Toward the end of this month-long trip in the spring of 1989 I turned my ankle over, hopping over a mud puddle in the dark. This was a severe sprain and over the next year-plus I never allowing it enough time to heal properly it kept getting reinjured. As things turned out, a bum ankle more or less put an end to my serious solo climbing phase. Thereby extending my life expectancy by decades.
Insects Rule
Lucky me: another high-spring sojourn in Yosemite Valley. Once more, I have the good fortune of finding myself in one of the most sublimely beautiful places on Earth. Not only that, I’m here at the perfect hour—winter fading into spring—with an entire month to witness the slow drama of life’s return. I know from my first long stay here ten years back that enduring some wet weather at the outset makes what comes after even better. And now, right now, it’s all happening at once: Bird song from dawn to dusk. And, pretty much wherever you happen to be, the sound of moving water. All the falls are raging. Animals big and small are back on the prowl; countless seeds have germinated. Stately oaks are leafing out. (Dogwoods!) Just like that, the grays and browns and tans have given way to thirty shades of green. In May, the air here is an elixir. It’s like food.
The one down-side: bugs. As of now, insects rule. One onslaught after another. At this time of year some new variety of six-legged annoyance makes its annual debut practically overnight. Each new arrival quickly makes its presence known, dominates the scene for a time, then starts to fade into the background as your focus turns to the latest batch of buzzing-biting whatevers. You accept the fact that every heaven-on-Earth comes with a price.
After I showed up (April 21st) it rained off and on for several days, during which time it snowed at least a little each day. Frost in the mornings. Then it warmed up a bit, with periods of scattered showers and intermittent sun. In other words, typical spring weather for these parts; not great for climbing to be sure but it knocked the mosquitoes and flies on their asses. The truth is, bugs haven’t really been an issue until maybe ten days ago, when spring came on full bore. In short order each of the tribes regrouped, bent on making up for lost time. It’s been bad ever since. I can live with it.
A week after my arrival the sun came up in a cloudless sky for the first time. I’ve been staying at my usual spot down below Foresta. After breakfast I headed into the Valley and whiled away the hours doing several of the old classic routes on Sunnyside Bench—getting back in the groove. Drove to the Village after and bought some food.
By the time I got back to McCauley’s it was almost dark. A wave of warm, moist air hit me as I climbed out of the cab. Crickets, cricketing. I opened the camper hatch, dropped the tailgate, switched the overhead light on, and went back to the cab to deal with a pile of gear and get organized. A couple of minutes later, I was about to crawl into the camper and get supper started but stopped in my tracks. What’s this? What are those delicate flickering shadows on the tailgate? Ducking down, I peered in.
Oh, dear. A couple of hundred tiny flies, give or take a few dozen, were circling the light in a mad swirl—little brown jobbies known in outdoorsy circles as “face flies.” The ones that travel in flocks, don’t seem to eat, never rest; that don’t bite or even so much as land on your person; whose specialty is hovering about the head, with sporadic nose-dives into ear canals or up nostrils. As harmless pests go, they’re annoying in the extreme. (Glasses wearers can count on one getting penned behind a lens and, while trying to escape, ricocheting off the old eyeball a few times.) Seeing as how they hadn’t shown up on previous evenings, this was probably their first hatch of the year.
I remained calm. Not my first bug-rodeo, after all! Fortunately, this is one type of insect invasion that has a simple remedy I came up with it on my own. My butane-canister camp lantern was right there in the gear crate. I lit it, set it on the ground about ten feet from the tailgate, and killed the overhead. While the decoy did its work I sat in the dark on my little folding chair, sipping a beer, and watched as a new bug-cloud gathered around the lantern globe. I wondered—not for the first time—why insects compulsively drawn to bright lights don’t all head for the moon when it rises.
Fifteen tranquil minutes went by. It was well past suppertime and hunger drove me back into the camper. After turning the lantern off I crawled in, pulled up the tailgate, and dropped the hatch. Switching the light back on, I was greeted by maybe a hundred stragglers, all of whom resumed doing figure-eights around the twenty-five watt bulb. Now, I typically prepare my dinner on a cutting board placed on the floor right in front of the tailgate, which is usually down. I sit cross-legged right behind the cutting board, my head almost touching the low ceiling and about a foot away from the light. This put my face within the intruders’ orbital path so they were bouncing off my glasses and forehead. Nope, unh-uh…this isn’t gonna work. So, before getting out my dinner stuff, I wadded up a couple of paper towels and proceeded to go after them by slapping the wadded-up towels against the ceiling, all around the light. Mangled carcasses drifted down, accumulating on the floor in a roughly circular patch. When all but a handful of plucky survivors were dead or dying I swept the casualties into a small pile with my whisk broom. I was slightly shocked by how many there were. Staring at the little heap, I had a passing thought that, all together like that, they looked pretty nourishing. Pure protein…. That snapped me right out of my calorie-deprived reverie and with one fell whisk I sent them all into the gap between truck bed and tailgate. It’s not as if I was seriously considering garnishing my cheese-and-rice tacos with dead face flies. But still, random musings like that one show me just how feral I’ve become.
At a certain point, somewhat after the fact, I realized that several of my vertical adventures had distinct insect “themes.” By this I mean not just bugs in general but some specific variety of six-legged vermin that I had to contend with in the middle of a climb.
My first insect-themed event: Attacked by Ants.
I’d just rapped from the top of the three-pitch Regular Route on Pharaoh’s Beard. (Got pretty haired on a first pitch but that’s another story.) Before heading down to the truck, on the off chance of finding something else to do, I took a stroll along the base of the cliff band. Lo and behold: on a clean, seventy degree slab, there’s this shallow dihedral split by a nice-looking hand-size crack (my fav). Not too steep. Sweet! This route, if it was a route, didn’t appear to be getting much traffic—no chalk marks; no bolts or fixed pitons to be seen. The crack itself started thirty feet off the deck atop a sloping ledge, then pinched off at another ledge maybe a hundred and thirty feet up. I’m pretty good at judging a crack’s difficulty just through visual inspection and this one looked 5.8ish; maybe 5.9 at the last where the rock got a bit steeper. If there were no fixed anchors already in place at the top, I could easily rappel from a small tree. It looked doable.
I geared up. The first moves were hard; solid 5.10. (Basically, a boulder problem.) Clearly, no one had passed this way in a long time: I had to scrape moss and lichen off the holds and the ledge itself was buried under soil hummocks covered with layers of pine needles and fallen debris. The crack took off from the left side of this dirt-pile, starting out as a trough that gradually morphed into a classic, straight-up dihedral.
One problem: the soil-covered ledge was teeming with Yosemite’s ubiquitous “oak ants”—a species notorious for going absolutely berserk when disturbed. Oak ants will attack anything that moves and, to make matters worse, emit a foul-smelling odor when they’re pissed off. You typically don’t have to deal with these little buggers on established routes, for two reasons. One: even moderately popular climbs have been stripped of all soil and vegetation so there’s not much in the way of ant-sustenance or potential nest sites. The other reason is that cracks and handholds on well-traveled routes are caked with the powdered gymnast’s chalk climbers use to keep sweaty hands and fingers dry. Oak ants’ bodies are laced with formic acid. Gymnastic chalk is powdered calcium carbonate—a very “basic” (that is, alkaline) substance. Anyone who’s taken high school chemistry knows that mixing acids and bases causes a violent reaction. Accordingly, ants loathe the stuff. For them, hiking across stretches of chalk-encrusted granite must feel like walking barefoot on red-hot coals.
But here I was in unsullied wilderness: veritable ant heaven. The ledge’s residents, by now well aware of my presence, mobilized for action. They were already launching off my boot-tops so it was time to get a move on.
The first bit was easy and I made rapid progress. Unfortunately, it became clear right away that this choice handcrack was the ant equivalent of an eight-lane freeway. There was a steady stream of two-way traffic inside the crack with numerous off-ramps leading out onto the faces on either side. Each time I’d pull a hand out of the crack to reset it higher up there’d be several ant combatants attached—pincers sunk into the thin skin on the backs of my hands; others, trying to get purchase on my leathery digits. By this time it was too late to turn back. I haven’t a clue whether it’s by scent or through vibration or some other exotic insect-sense, but every time I so much as touched the rock all the six-leggers in the immediate vicinity dropped whatever they were doing and waged war. An oak ant platoon came after me in true kamikaze-fashion—giving no quarter, asking no quarter. Banzai!
So this is how it went: each time I pulled a hand out of the crack there’d be several glommed on. These got wiped off on the rock or on my pants. I’d try to brush off the new assailants crawling up my pants legs and even tried blowing them off of my upper arms but that didn’t work too well. A few got under my shirt and were biting tender parts. Their ammonia-like stench filled the air. (Fortunately, it doesn’t bother me all that much.) The entire pitch went on like this. When the angle steepened near the end, the crack did indeed briefly turn 5.9 so for the last few moves I had to focus and gave up on trying to defend myself. I pulled up onto the ledge with that familiar wave of relief mixed with mild exaltation. But this time around, kicking back and taking in the surroundings and letting that expansive sense of gratitude wash over me—standard summit fare—wasn’t an option. A fast exit was in order. Before uncoiling and tossing the ropes I tried to rid myself of hangers-on but fresh troops were already advancing. Rappelling, my guide hand shucked ants off the trailing ropes like corn off a cob.
Back on firm terra, there was more de-anting to be done. I’d stashed my stuff near the base and they were all over my pack and exploring the insides of my approach shoes. Well—all in all, if not strictly fun, that was an interesting excursion; an old school adventure-climb with a Welcome to the Wild Kingdom twist.
My next insect-themed episode—call it, Mauled by Mosquitoes—took place the following day on a route near the base of Cascade Falls. Mosquitoes haven’t been much of a problem up to now but on this day, in this place, they reigned supreme.
My plan was to try and get up Golden Needles—a two-pitch-long crack in a giant corner. The guidebook description made it sound like just my kinda thing but I’d never seen the route in person. This was one of the first really warm days and it was quite humid as well. On the approach, wearing nothing but shorts and an old holey T-shirt, I was dripping sweat. The bloodsuckers zeroed in.
This encounter wasn’t particularly dramatic. Nor was it cause for serious distress, seeing as how I spend my summers living next to a half-mile-long meadow and have learned to endure mosquitoes with a degree of stoicism. Evidently, a new crop had just emerged from those swampy bogs down by the river and hundreds of them, seeking the source of all that CO₂ I was emitting, gathered ‘round me in a diffuse cloud—so many of them I could hear the high-pitched whine of a thousand wings.
At the base I booted up. The climb started out as a double-crack on one wall of the near-vertical dihedral. I was at their mercy from the get-go; completely defenseless. So they had their fill, going for my arms, legs, back, neck, shoulders, face; anything exposed. My sweat-soaked, threadbare T-shirt was no barrier—they could bite right through it. At least there were no ants to deal with this time.
Reaching the belay I took a brief rest, waving one hand about my face all the while. I started up the second pitch but up ahead it looked harder than anticipated so I downclimbed to the anchor and rappelled. After pulling the ropes, I noticed that my right thigh was liberally smeared with blood. Searching for hitherto unfelt abrasions and finding none, it finally dawned on me: the blood was from all those times I’d leaned my body into the right wall of the corner for added friction and in doing so crushing bloated mosquitoes mid-gorge. Well, I hope they enjoyed their last meal. There’s no telling how many times I got bitten. Lucky for me, for some reason I don’t get the itchy red welts—fresh bites tingle for a minute or two and then they’re gone. I suppose it’s possible that having been bitten a million times has made me immune.
A third insect-themed climb—let’s call this one, They Fell from the Sky—came a week later. I’d been psyching myself up for some time to try a more or less forgotten climb on Lower Brother: the left-side route on Absolutely Free Pinnacle. Up to this time I’d never tried to solo, much less on-sight solo, a multi-pitch route of this level of difficulty—two solid 5.9 pitches and two 5.8s; close to dead-vertical. On the long and devious 4th class approach I was more tense than usual. But the oracle had spoken; I was going for it.
Starting up the first pitch, right off I felt something raining down—some sort of particulate matter. Dirt or grains of sand getting blown off a ledge? I didn’t pay it much heed at first but as the pelting of what felt like grains of rice continued, something finally clicked. Oh, yeah—it’s those “suicide-leaper bugs.” Bristletails, they’re called. I’d experienced this once or twice before but nothing like this—not as a continuous bug-shower.
Bristletails are a type of primitive wingless insect related to silverfish (inoffensive creatures typically found among piles of old books and magazines). Bristletails superficially resemble silverfish but are strictly outdoor dwellers. Unlike their cousins, bristletails can leap impressive distances. The kind that live around Yosemite are a mottled grayish-brown color—a motif all but invisible on both granite and forest floor. From up close, though, they have this exquisite, multihued iridescent sheen. Bristletail locomotion is very distinctive: a loose-jointed scuttle broken up by minuscule, nearly imperceptible pauses. This gives their slinky-slithery way of moving-about a weird, stroboscopic sort of effect—mesmerizing to watch.
At the first good rest spot I had a chance to look around. And there they were, all around me. Hundreds. Virtually invisible, but with so many moving at any given time, the rock surface seemed to be moving. (Unless you’re tripping on mushrooms or LSD, solid rock generally holds still when you look at it.) Wow. After a minute I pressed on.
And here’s how it went: when I’d reach for the next hold or jam, the approach of this immense foreign object—my hand—provoked all those nearby individuals to flee; presumably towards safety. On this near-perpendicular rock face, “fleeing” meant launching themselves into space. Of course, once I got going there was little time to dwell on being pelted by bugs. This was serious work, after all. Twice, I reached stances where it was possible to stop for a quick breather. Hanging off one arm, I’d shake out my pumped forearms in turn. Each time I’d switch arms, down they’d come; bouncing off my sweaty corpus. Not a real bother since they don’t burrow into your hair or crawl down your shirt—they just keep on going. So you don’t feel infested, which is nice.
Considering that my being there posed no mortal threat, this leaping-off-the-rock thing seemed a bit of an…overreaction. After all, scurrying to the nearest hiding place is the preferred plan for defenseless creepy-crawlies everywhere. For a creature so impeccably camouflaged, freezing in place would work really well. But bristletails are endlessly on the move; holding still is not their forte. Nor is slinking away and hiding. Instead, the mere proximity of an outstretched arm triggers their jumping instinct. Which, as it happens, may not be such a bad thing seeing as how these critters can fall any distance without suffering injury. The slightest updraft might safely deposit one on a nice sunny ledge. Or out in the forest. Wherever a bristletail lands, I imagine it would do fine. But for me, clinging tenaciously to a near straight-up-and-down rock face with big exposure: given my circumstances, the very thought of blindly leaping—leaping, not to certain death, but instead to safety and security….
Well. I did think about it, oh yes. Which resulted in an indescribable, cellular-level revulsion. Thinking about it also made me feel ponderous and heavy. Without a doubt, were I up on El Cap with two thousand feet of nothing but air beneath my feet, they’d scatter and fly just the same. The ride down would take a little longer, that’s all.
Visualizing that made me almost dizzy. You see, climbing unroped both narrows and expands one’s focus. It amplifies and intensifies. Any old thing can take on existential overtones when it’s just you and the rock and eternity.
One last incident that, technically, shouldn’t be lumped in with the others since it involved mites. (Mites aren’t insects—they’re arachnids.)
A few days later I went back to Absolutely Free Pinnacle to try the seldom-done but classic Center Route. On the rock, it was once again raining bristletails.
I was at a rest stance. Breathing deep…calming the mind. Just above my stance I noticed a thin stream of moisture flowing down the rock; last vestige of runoff from the recent rains. An out-of-place color caught my eye. Something moving. Something red.
Red velvet mites are minute, vibrantly colored spider-relatives that feed on other tiny, crawling-creeping things and those creatures’ even tinier eggs and young. They generally live underground but come out en masse after the first heavy spring rains. Velvet mites would be invisible were they colored like bristletails. Instead of being camouflaged, they’re a shimmering crimson red; legs and antennae, too—a warning to would-be predators that we taste awful. (Apparently, velvet mites are so foul-tasting that they lack predators of any kind.) Their body is covered with a dense coat of silky hair, giving them that velvety shimmer. Under a magnifying glass they’re really quite beautiful but it’s hard to get a close-up look. Like bristletails, velvet mites never sit still.
They were everywhere. But what first caught my eye was the hundreds of them lined up along the length of that inch-wide seep—on both sides. Apparently, mites get parched from all that running around and need a good long drink from time to time. They were coming in to water like a herd of thirsty cattle. Scores of them, going and coming, coming and going. Lapping it up. There were no empty slots; new arrivals had to muscle their way in. From my viewpoint, just inches away, it seemed as if I were observing the scene from a helicopter, a thousand feet off the ground. As if I were peering down on a herd of bright-red, eight-legged water buffalo gathered alongside a muddy watercourse on some African savannah. It was a little, shall we say, disorienting. Again: normal sensibilities and perceptions get altered when your very life depends on fingertips and toes and having a cool head. This is one of the reasons I solo—it helps me see the world through new eyes. Everyday things sparkle and glow.
©2025 Tim Forsell 15 May 1989, 24 Mar 2025
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