Introduction

Lizy and I visited our friends Kasia and Jeff in Mammoth from August 2–August 5, 2024. Kasia and Jeff were staying in Mammoth for the summer, and we stayed with them in the apartment they were renting. I didn’t take notes at the time, so I’m mostly writing this post from memory two years later, and some of the details will be vague. What I can write about are the stories that most stick out in my mind, and to fill out the post, I’ll add some details from research.

Trip to Mammoth and First Evening

We didn’t start driving until after lunchtime, as I did a half day of work. We drove through Yosemite. The drive was nice, but Lizy sometimes got uncomfortable as she was pregnant, so we had to stop a few times. She did a great job, though, considering how pregnant she was.

We got to the apartment around 11 pm and spent about an hour catching up with Kasia and Jeff. They had been doing a lot of climbing in the area, Kasia had just gotten back from a conference in China, and Jeff had been swimming a lot in the lakes. Jeff told us how much he loved swimming, but it was so cold he had bought booties and a hood in addition to his wetsuit.

We set up our bed in the living room and went to sleep around 12:30 am. At around 12:45 am, Lizy went to the bathroom and felt what she believed was her water breaking. She came back to bed and told me. I told her to lie back down and we would get it checked out in the morning.

“What if my water broke?” she said.

“You need to get your sleep,” I said. “If your water didn’t break, it’s better for the baby to get sleep. If your water did break, we’re in a horrible situation either way.”

“Ok.”

We lay there for fifteen minutes. I could tell she was freaking out. She wouldn’t be able to go to sleep anyway.

“Let’s go to the hospital,” I said.

We drove around the corner to Mammoth Hospital. Since the town of Mammoth is quite small, the hospital is quite small. In the emergency care wing, there was one doctor and a couple of other staff. She told us she would call the local OB-GYN to wake her up and she’d come to the hospital within an hour. Then she walked us to a smaller waiting room. Right before she left, she dropped this bomb:

“We don’t have any delivery facilities at this hospital.”

“But what happens if I have to deliver this baby?” asked Lizy.

“Don’t worry, we’ll either helicopter you to Bishop or back to the Bay Area. But probably Bishop. They have a big enough hospital there.”

Then she walked out of the room.

Lizy and I sat in the waiting room in shock, both scared about what was going to happen next. We talked to each other in bursts of tired, manic energy. I was so scared in that moment that we were going to lose the baby, and I can’t even imagine what Lizy was going through.

The OB-GYN came in after about thirty minutes. She was an older woman with a calming presence. As soon as she walked in, Lizy and I felt better. She started asking the emergency doctor where the sterilized speculums were. The emergency doctor said they only had the one she was holding. The OB-GYN tried to use the speculum to examine Lizy, but for some reason it wasn’t working. So she started rummaging in the back of the room through other speculums.

“Don’t worry, these are still mostly clean. They’re just not sterilized.”

We didn’t know how bad that was, and we didn’t really have a choice. She ended up finding a clean enough speculum to examine Lizy and swabbed her.

“You can relax. It doesn’t look like your water broke. It was probably just some fluid that had built up during the drive or something. I’m getting this swab just to be sure.”

The swab came back negative. We thanked the doctors and quickly made our way back to the apartment. We finally went to sleep around 4 am. It was a really tiring day.

Devil’s Postpile National Monument

The next morning we were quite tired because of how little we slept, but we decided to stick with our original plan of checking out Devil’s Postpile. Lizy, Kasia, and I went without Jeff, as he needed time to work on a research paper he was writing.

The Devil’s Postpile National Monument exists to protect the Devil’s Postpile geological feature. The phenomenon is a section of rocks with uniform cracks, creating the appearance that it’s composed of hexagonal columns. The phenomenon is similar to how, if you look at mud drying, the cracks often form a hexagonal tiling of the mud, except in three dimensions. This rock formation is called columnar basalt and is formed when lava uniformly cools. As it cools, it wants to contract but is constrained because it’s surrounded by rock. To relieve the stress, it cracks, and because the cooling is uniform, the cracks tend to join at points at 120-degree angles, forming hexagonal columns. I think my explanation is a little jumbled because I don’t quite understand the physics. This example of the phenomenon is particularly cool because the top of the columnar basalt was flattened by a glacier, so when you walk on top of the columns, you see a two-dimensional cross section, which allows one to see the hexagonal tiling really well.

On the drive to the national monument, we were told at the entrance that we had to park there and take a bus to the trailhead. Lizy said she was pregnant, so she needed to be able to drive to the trailhead. The park ranger seemed to agree.

“Finally, being pregnant has delivered some perks. I thought I was going to get better parking in more places, but at least we don’t have to take that bus.”

The hike from the trailhead to the Devil’s Postpile geological phenomenon was pretty mellow. We spent a while looking at the columns and getting photos. On the way back, we walked up above and over the pillars and saw the cross section of the columns.

Swimming at the Lake

The next day, Jeff, Kasia, Lizy, and I went swimming at Horseshoe Lake. On the way to the lake, Jeff told us this was one of his favorite places in the world. He reminded us again that it was really cold, though, so we brought our swimming wetsuits. He said we might be cold because we didn’t have hoods and booties like he did.

At the lake, we decided not to put our stuff at the main beach area and instead hiked around the side of the lake till we found a semi-private beach where we unpacked. Jeff looked at the main beach in the distance and said how glad he was we were here in private instead of sitting at that crowded beach, looking at us to agree. Lizy and I told him it was nice to have the private beach, but we didn’t really mind sitting among people on a more crowded beach. That would’ve been nice too. Jeff disagreed. He couldn’t even come to the lake on the weekend because even this semi-private beach got crowded. It completely ruined the lake experience for him to have to sit near people.

I set up our beach stuff and got ready to swim. I put sunscreen on my face only since I was going to wear a wetsuit that would cover the rest of my body. I figured I’d try swimming without the wetsuit first, just to feel how cold it was. The lake wasn’t that cold at all. I mean, it was a little cold. It wasn’t warm, but Lizy and I had swum in much colder water without wetsuits. I remembered one time in particular.

When Lizy and I went backpacking in Desolation Wilderness a few years back, we set up camp late in the evening when it was already dark and getting cold. Lizy felt sweaty from the hike to our campsite and didn’t want to go to sleep without washing off, so she convinced me to jump into a nearby lake with her. I think that was the coldest body of water I’d ever gone into at that point in my life. And afterwards, we had to get out into the cool evening air.

Horseshoe Lake wasn’t that cold, and it was a hot day, so it felt refreshing to be a little cold, and you had the safety of knowing you could get out at any point and be warm in the sun. Jeff and I swam laps back and forth across the lake—me in just a drag suit, and Jeff in his full body armor. Lizy came into the lake as well for a bit, and I spent time swimming beside her. I didn’t want her to be alone because she was pregnant.

Evening Woes

After dinner, I started to realize how sunburned I had become. I had never put my wetsuit on and had never applied sunscreen to my body, and I was now red all over. When we went to go to sleep, it hurt to lie down, but I eventually fell asleep.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a fever from the sunburn. I didn’t even know that was possible. Luckily, Lizy had some Tylenol handy, and my fever came down enough for me to fall back asleep.

Breakfast Crepes

The next morning we got crepes at a food truck across the street from Jeff and Kasia’s apartment.

Roast Beef

Before leaving for the drive back to the Bay Area, Lizy and I agreed to buy something for lunch, as we’d be driving through Yosemite during lunchtime. That way we could stop at Tenaya Lake and have a little picnic. On Google Maps, I saw there was a bakery on the way to Yosemite that had sandwiches. Lizy couldn’t eat cold cuts because of her pregnancy, and she has a food sensitivity to chicken and turkey, so she was somewhat limited in what kind of sandwich she could eat. I called ahead to see if they had a sandwich she could eat. On the phone, I found out they had fresh roast beef as a topping, so we decided to go.

The bakery smelled good when we got there. It had two rooms connected by a small hallway. The first section was the bakery proper, and the second section was the sandwich part of the business. They used bread from the bakery but had their own line and ordering procedure. Once we got to the front of the line, Lizy ordered a roast beef sandwich.

“Sorry, we don’t have roast beef today,” said the woman at the counter.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “I called ahead and asked, and they told me you had roast beef.”

“We have roast beef, just not today.”

“I just called.”

“They probably meant in general. We don’t have a phone line at the sandwich part of the bakery. You talked to someone from the bakery side. They would have to come to this side to check what we have, and no one came over here to check.”

“Why would I care what you have in general?”

“Sorry, sir. I didn’t answer the call. I don’t really know what they think over on the bakery side. We don’t interact with those people much. They just bring the bread over to our side. You’d have to go to the bakery side to ask them what they were thinking on the phone.”

Lizy was just standing there, both speechless and increasingly annoyed. She got so annoyed that she had to walk out of the bakery to get some air. I didn’t want to find another place to get lunch, so I convinced her to get a sandwich with just cheese. I told her she could leave a bad review of the place later to get some retribution if she wanted.

The Drive Back

The drive back to the Bay Area was somewhat uncomfortable for me. I was very tired, as I had not slept much because of the fever from the sunburn. Also, sitting in the car seat felt painful with the sunburns rubbing against my clothes and the seat. It was always nice to be able to see the majestic nature of northern Yosemite on the drive, though.

We stopped for lunch at Tenaya Lake as planned, and even though Lizy didn’t have the sandwich she would’ve wanted, it was still a nice place to eat lunch with the lake in the foreground and the mountains in the background.

I stopped just past Yosemite to swim in what I thought was a lake on Google Maps but turned out to be a little—I guess you would call it—watering hole. There were some locals jumping off a cliff into the small body of water that continued into a river. The water cooled down my sunburns a bit. After that, we drove the rest of the way home.

Conclusion

The trip was fun and exciting but also filled with one of the scariest moments of my life. We didn’t sleep much for two of the three nights we were there. The trip ended up convincing us not to do any more big travels while Lizy was pregnant. If we were home and something went wrong with the pregnancy, at least we’d be close to the hospital. In the end, nothing did go wrong with the pregnancy, and Lizy went on to give birth two weeks after her due date.