Dana Edwards. 9 /21/06

Yosemite

Yosemite is remarkably beautiful, and I am still astounded by the sights I saw throughout the course of our stay. I could go on to describe in detail the views atop Vogelsang, the picturesque Evelyn Lake early in the morning, and all the other aspects of natural beauty so unique to Yosemite. However, I think it is difficult to capture such beauty in words. In a way, doing so would only undermine it; so I will choose another aspect of my Yosemite experience to expand upon.

On Wednesday, the Beamer/Mochel pod, (which I was part of) left our base camp at Evelyn lake to embark on a day hike up Vogelsang, one of the highest points and best views in Yosemite. It was a great climb up the mountain, and after lunching atop the ridge, with a view of Half Dome and Cloud’s Rest; we began our trek down the slope and back to Evelyn Lake. When we reached our campsite, what we found was quite disturbing. Lying on the ground and atop our belongings were many horrifying Blair Witch Project-ish stick figures. They truly were frightening, and we all cowered in fear at the sight of them. In the fire pit was a pentagram, with blood smeared on the sides of the rocks and on Nathan Vice’s T-shirt. Atop our bear cans were more perturbing stick figures, but little did we know that it was inside the bear cans that the real crimes had been committed.

We were all relieved when we found out that the blood in the fire pit was, in fact, Kool Aid; and that it was probably not the Blair Witch who had inflicted these sadistic pranks on us. So, life went on; we shook the menacing figures off our sleeping bags and began preparing for a hearty dinner. Yet as we opened the bear cans to look for our meal of quesadillas and rice, we came across something suspicious, the wrapper of a Luna bar. After no one admitted to sneaking the womanly energy bar, we new something was up. However, it was when we found six more wrappers inside someone’s sleeping bag that things started getting pretty strange. Accusations went flying, “Duncan Ho, I saw you opening the bear cans last night.” , “Mr. Mochel, I always knew you had a thing for female nutritional bars.”. After things calmed down, we agreed that instead of turning on each other, we would work out what to do now that we had no breakfast on Friday morning. Later on, we also found out that our bag of skittles was in fact a few handfuls short of what it had been before, further adding to the chaos and grief.

It was decided that we would not give in and spend the night at base camp. We were going to deal with peanut butter and the few remaining granola bars to sustain us for the duration of the roughly 2 mile hike out to the bus on Friday morning. We survived the hike, but just barely. Some people’s legs just gave out. I put Raisa into my backpack and carried her the rest of the way when she passed out. Wil Weaver also passed out, but no one could carry him, so he probably became food for a bear or marmot. When we reached the buses, we fell down to our hands and knees, thankful we were still living. 

To this day, it is not known for sure who the culprits of the famous Luna Bar theft are, but the members of the Aps/Bowler/Connoley pod are highly suspected.