The Hidden Lake

Writer William Faulkner had a name for autumn light in California.

“Treacherous unbrightness” he called it, I think because starting around September the sun dips from its summer peak but loses none of its fierceness.

Indeed, fall in California is the hottest, driest season, when hillsides go brown, chaparral shrivels into bony brambles and water, everywhere, evaporates.

I thought about those words, especially the treacherous part, one autumn morning a while back when my wife, Kate, and I set out on a three-day backpacking trip through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.

Kate and I love backpacking—our second date was a hike up a mountain—but this trip was different. We had a 10-month-old baby girl, Frances, and we’d flown all the way out to Yosemite National Park from our home in New York City.

For the two nights we’d be in the wilderness, Frances would be staying in a cabin with my mom, Robin, and her friend, Coverly. The idea had sounded perfect when we’d first thought of it. Kate and I would get to satisfy our hunger for the great outdoors while my mom got uninterrupted time with her first grandchild.

Setting out from the cabin, though, in the raw air of a moun­tain dawn, I suddenly wondered, What exactly were we doing? Would Frances panic without us? Were we being irresponsible? What if something happened?

I forced those worries from my mind as we ascended an oak-lined trail from Wawona, the cluster of cabins where Fran­ces, below, was proba­bly settling down to a breakfast of yogurt and oatmeal.

An opal morning sky was just turning transparent mountain blue and the air smelled of sage and manzanita. Ahead, in the distance, we could just glimpse the granite face of Chilnual­na Fall, a 690-foot waterfall cascading to­ward Wawona. There was no sound of water.

“Your mom said it has been a dry year out here in California,” Kate said. “I wonder if the fall is flowing.” Soon we came to a dry creek bed and stopped to drink from a water bottle.

I pulled out a map. “Hmm,” I said. “This isn’t marked as a seasonal creek. It should be full.” We looked in the creek bed. Not even the sand was moist.

“Streams will be running closer to the peaks,” Kate said, pointing to a blue shape on the map. “That lake at least will have water. Come on.”