Yosemite and a Lesson in Not Putting Things Off
Maggie Slepian
For as long as we’d been hiking together, my dad had told me how much he wanted to backpack Yosemite with me. We started talking about a backcountry trip when I was in college, but it would be nearly a decade before we made it out there together.
Yosemite was one of his favorite places in the world, starting with his first visit in 1975 on a solo road trip. He returned on his own decades later to experience the same magic, then brought my youngest brother a few years after that. “We have to hike up to Clouds Rest together,” he told me. “It’s my favorite place in the world.”
But there was always an excuse or timing conflict that prevented our plans from getting off the ground. I kept taking summer jobs where I couldn’t take time off, and when I moved to Montana after college, backpacking with my dad didn't fit into my new life. We’ll go next year! I’d tell him over the phone as I watched my summer schedule fill up each year, every week blocked off for some other adventure.
I finally committed to Yosemite in the summer of 2017. This was the start of a new chapter, I told myself. We were celebrating his retirement after 40 years of a high-stress career that had allowed for my privileged upbringing and fully paid college for myself and my three siblings. It was belated, but I was determined to make the time and space for my dad that he deserved.
With this commitment came a plan: Each year we’d visit a new national park, taking at least a week to explore the backcountry on foot. We came up with a list. We’d start with Yosemite, then tackle Rocky Mountain National Park in 2018, Glacier National Park in 2019, and string together a Utah trip after that. I pored over maps, creating road trips, researching routes, and linking together travel plans. The trips stretched into the infinite future, providing a benchmark for each summer.
***
Our first day in Yosemite, we climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls. It was a steep hike with over 3,000 feet of vertical gain, and I found myself struggling to keep up. At the top of the waterfall, he walked over to a smooth rock and sat down.
“Hey, do you mind taking a picture of me,” he asked, smiling almost sheepishly. “I had my picture taken in this exact same spot on my first road trip.”
He carefully arranged himself in the same pose he sat in 43 years ago. I snapped some photos and looked out over the valley, grateful we were finally here, that my dad had retired and found the freedom he’d put on hold for so many decades.
That night we sat in the tent cabin in Little Yosemite Village, organizing our backpacking gear for the next morning.
“How many tuna packets are you bringing?” I asked, my head buried in my food bag. My dad didn’t respond for long enough that I looked up to see him sitting quietly on his cot, surrounded by his gear.
“So Maggie, I have to tell you something,” he said. My stomach dropped.
“Remember how we told you that my platelets were low for the past few years? And it was an indicator that it might turn into leukemia?” He didn’t have to finish for me to know where it was going.
My breathing was shallow and the canvas walls of the tent cabin seemed to tighten around the cots. He kept speaking, but I barely registered what he said. Whatever harbingers of cancer the bloodwork had shown had progressed more rapidly than anyone anticipated. He was barely retired, we were just starting our delayed journeys to national parks. Not now, it was too soon.
I was silent. Ever concerned and kind, my dad asked if I was ok. I whispered a yes, then choked out “but it’s so unfair.”
He nodded, almost thoughtfully. “You can look at it that way. But it's random chance. It could happen to anyone. And I’m tough, I’ll beat it.”
I cried silently in the dark that night, and we didn’t bring it up again on the trip. The hike involved everything it normally would with my dad. Five days in the backcountry, talking for miles on end and taking awful selfies with epic backdrops. We misread the map and doubled our miles on one of the longer days, and I had a near meltdown on the Half Dome cables. When we finally stood together on top of Clouds Rest, we marveled at the sheer granite walls and mountains of pale stone stretching into the vastness of the valley. The shadow of his diagnosis was there, but I was adamant that it wouldn’t impact the trip.
***
He started treatment that winter, becoming a favorite of the hospital staff with his bottomless reserves of optimism and resilience. He took daily walks around the oncology ward, requested resistance bands in his room for exercise in quarantine, and on days when he was too sick to move around, he wrote lists of peaks to summit and regions to explore. The doctors were amazed by his response to the treatment, and by September of 2018, he was officially in remission.
We made plans for Rocky Mountain National Park the next summer. The national park trips had been on hold for the past year, but I was convinced we’d pick up where we left off. To us, remission meant cured, and cured meant we could continue with our plans like they hadn’t ever been in question. We’d meet in Colorado and tackle a four-day route, bagging iconic peaks that had been on his bucket list for years.
Then his cancer relapsed.
We cancelled the flights and the campsite reservations, but I kept that week open and drove to Rocky Mountain on the day we were supposed to meet. A notification popped up on my phone as I organized my gear at a crowded trailhead. Dad flies to Denver. I cleared it through a blur of tears and headed listlessly up the trail.
I hiked alone and took photos to send to him, feigning cheeriness and positivity. But my heart wasn’t in it, and I drove back to Montana early after cutting the trip in half.
His next round of treatment was worse. He needed another transplant, and I wasn’t allowed to visit because his immune system was too fragile. When I was finally able to fly back east over Christmas, I didn’t recognize him. The person I’d chased over rugged mountain passes and to the top of wind-battered peaks weighed less than I did, and struggled to hold himself up at the counter. But when he spoke, he was the same person who had inspired my love of the outdoors, and given me the privilege to pursue that passion. We looked at photos of past trips, laughing about stormy peaks and misread maps and squirrel-stolen food. I skipped the Yosemite photos though. I didn’t feel tough enough to look at them.
By the time I returned to Montana, my dad could walk slowly around the block, using two trekking poles for support. I set a clock in the back of my head. Perhaps by summer, he’d be able to walk around the mild paths in their local parks.
In his own quiet way, he shattered my mental clock into a million pieces. As he regained strength, he threw himself headlong into physical therapy to build muscle and increase stamina. He took each setback with grace and dignity, and sent me a beaming selfie every time he managed to walk further down the street.
Though I responded with encouraging messages, the thought of him being able to hike in the White Mountains within a year seemed impossible. But he ground on. He started walking the local trails in the woods and around farmed fields. He went back into remission. He found a 100-foot hill and hiked disciplined laps up and down, until one day in late spring, he called and told me he had walked 20 laps of the hill—2,000 feet of elevation. It was enough to conceivably hike a peak in his beloved White Mountains.
A week later, he summited Moosilauke. A week after that, the Tripyramids. A week after that, a difficult ascent of Mount Liberty and Mount Flume, nearly 10 miles with over 3,000 feet of elevation gain.
We were supposed to be hiking Redwood and Sequoia this year, but like everyone else, we had to stall all travel plans. Our trip to Yosemite is still the only national park backpacking trip we took together, the start of our long list that has since lain dormant.
I wish we’d started earlier, I wish my younger self had different priorities, I wish I hadn’t assumed there would always be a next year. This summer, we’ll be high fiving from different peaks on opposite sides of the country, but as he told me over a quarantine video chat: “be grateful you can be healthy and outside. I’ll see you next year.”