I asked on BUZZ if anyone knew this area and several people replied asking if I knew about THE TUNNEL. It turns out that all the lakes in this area were combined into a large reservoir project in the 1960’s to supply power and water to Sacramento. One of the aqueducts in this system is a 15 foot diameter tunnel bored 1.6 miles through a mountain to drain Buck Island Lake into Loon Lake. Several BASKers have paddled a short distance into this tunnel on the Loon Lake side and figured it would make a good shortcut for kayak portaging.
Looking around on the WEB I found a hilarious story about three guys having the worst camping trip of their lives. They heard about the tunnel from other hikers who used it as a short-cut to get to the Desolation National Wilderness. I figured I would not make the same mistakes as these guys (like forgetting the flashlights) and would paddle through at least the first half of the tunnel. I would make my own mistakes. I tried talking to several rangers from several different overlapping offices but none of them knew anything about the tunnel! One of these rangers thought portaging a canoe or kayak on the old road would be easy. He also failed to mention that the first lake on my portaging list, Spider Lake, was closed due to human waste and over-use from the Rubicon 4WD trail. I should have guessed that this ranger had never actually been in this area, new nothing about it and his advice about the road should have been rejected.
When I arrived at Loon lake, I packed up and paddled the whole length of the lake without finding the tunnel. Finally I asked some fishermen for directions and they told me that the water level was so high this year that the tunnel was completely underwater. I had to give up on the short cut and start portaging my kayak over the mountain. By that time it was almost noon, but being High Summer I still had 8 hours of sunlight left. Even though I could not stop at Spider Lake, how could it possibly take more than 8 hours to roll a kayak only 3 miles? True, half of those miles were up 400 feet but the other half would be all down hill.
The “road” that went over the mountain turned out to be made of crushed granite that has had water running down it for years. I don’t think it has been graded since the dams and tunnels were finished in the 1960’s. The trail surface was jagged granite cobbles with an underlying layer of smaller granite gravel. This allowed the larger cobbles to slide rather than stop and let my pneumatic wheels ride over them. It was miserable work dragging the kayak up the hill. I consoled myself by repeating that Lewis and Clark did higher mountains without pneumatic wheels.
When I got to the top I figured the rest of the day would be easy. Wrong. It turned out that despite the steepness of the “road”, the sharp granite grabbed the wheels and I had to work and sweat to get the kayak to roll downhill. Several hours into this it occurred to me that if it was this difficult going down this trail, it was going to be complete misery going back up. One of the mountain bikers who passed me said “And people tell me that I’m crazy for biking up here”. Another asked me if I was a product tester.
Well, I wish I was being paid to be a product tester. I tested a Primex kayak/canoe cart to destruction and back. As I dragged the kayak over the mountain, the cart shook so badly that the nylock™ nuts started unscrewing themselves. Of course when one of them fell off, the bolt managed to stay on for another half hour so the first indication that anything was wrong was when the cart fell to pieces. It was far to late to go back and find the lost nut. I tightened the rest of them and checked them more often. The Primex cart I was using, really just two strap-on wheels, has a silly little kickstand that never worked well but it had some extra parts that I cannibalized to get the whole thing working again.
An interesting thing I noticed about the trails in this area was that few of them actually went close to the lakes. I was sort of glad that Spider Lake was closed because the trail never got closer than 300 yards to the water and then turned away. Considering how difficult the trail was, bushwhacking with a kayak would be a lot worse. As the trail approached my goal for the evening, Buck Island Lake, it turned away and became a typical backpacking trail. This means that it was crossed by roots, imbedded rocks, turned corners sharply and was about six inches too narrow for the wheels of my cart. I gave up and bushwhacked down to the water, made three trips carrying my camping gear and carried my kayak on my shoulder. It had taken seven hours to get three miles from Loon Lake.
Once on the shore I decided to paddle one more mile before sunset so that I could camp on the namesake island in the middle of Buck Island Lake. My original plan had been to portage from lake to lake before returning to the family reunion. I decided that dragging my kayak this far was already such a big mistake that I wasn’t going to compound it by going any farther. I set my gear up on the island and spent the next few days going on day hikes and worrying about the return trip.
On my first full day hiking around the area I became lost in the woods. The details of my mistakes are not important here, but I went down the wrong watershed from the Rubicon Reservoir. It was a beautiful hike scrambling over granite boulders all day long and I don’t regret a minute of it. Eventually I found the Rubicon 4WD Trail and that lead me back up to Buck Island Lake. The 4WD trail is incredible, with piles of 8 foot boulders imbedded in the dirt. I cannot imagine driving a truck here but many people do. The soil reeks of spilled transmission oil and there are broken bits of tailpipes, nuts and bolts lying in the dust. I picked up a cotter pin and wondered if it held anything important onto the truck it fell off. I was about to toss the pin back on the road but I felt like a litterbug. “Once you touch the trash, its yours”. So I stuck it in my pocket.
A day early I started preparing for the ordeal of the return over the mountain. I had explored the lake and found a campsite as close as possible to the old road. I moved camp there and started rolling the kayak empty up to the top of the mountain during the cool of the afternoon. After only a few hundred yards one of the wheels fell apart. Apparently one of the locking cotter pins had been unlocked or broken off by brushing against a rock on the way down the mountain several days before. The wheel had managed to stay jammed on without the pin until its hubs had pulled out. The wheels are made of three parts, a central hollow rim with a hub on the inside, which had stayed on the axle, and a hub on the outside that had just flown off. The cotter pin was long gone.
The cotter pin. The Cotter Pin. THE COTTER PIN! I dug the Rubicon 4WD cotter pin out of my trash bag where I had tossed it and tried it on the cart. It fit. This is almost enough to make one believe in Providence. If I had not become lost, if I had not found the 4WD trail, if that cotter pin had not fallen of some poor red-neck’s jeep, if I had not picked it up, if I had tossed it back, if it was the wrong size THEN I would be carrying the kayak and all my gear over the mountain on my back. The only partial explanation I can think of is that out of the corner of my eye I had seen that wheel strapped on the back of my kayak on the lake with the cotter pin missing. Although I had not noticed the missing pin, my subconscious had. That made me hold onto that pin when I found it on the 4WD trail. There’s still quite a few more “ifs” to explain in the chain of events. The new cotter pin isn’t the locking kind, but it stayed on for the next few days anyway. I finished rolling the kayak up the mountain that evening.
The next morning I made three trips up the mountain carrying my camping gear in drybags hanging from paddles slung over my shoulders. Then I packed everything into the kayak and rolled it down the hill and into Loon Lake. This was not as hard as I feared it would be. Perhaps I might be willing to do it again some time. No, perhaps not.