Author: Katherine

As I take this last rest day of my journey, I thought I should return to some of the open problems I’ve brought up at various points in the story so far. In case you’ve been biting you nails (don’t! Bad habit!), here is a little bit of sweet resolution.

1. Sleep: vastly improved over that strange restless stretch the third week out. However, I never was able to fix my ground pad leak. The hole is too small to find, even after submerging the pad in a tub of water last week in Lone Pine. So I reinflate it every night, but it’s become routine enough that I barely wake up to do so.

2. MP3 player: I turned it on the day after I accidentally submerged it while washing washing lake goo off my pants. It turned on and has had no problems. As I said, I don’t use it often, but when I do I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts and they are amazing. I can’t help but feel that in the forward-leaning, fast-moving, deeply-confusing, saddening, and maddening times we live in, history is more important than ever.

3. Animals: not exactly a cliff hanger, but I get asked this a lot. It turns out that many animals, like people, prefer lower elevations and gentler terrain than many of the places I’ve been. I have seen no bears at all on this trip, who I think prefer to hang out with the backpackers in the well-used JMT campsites. I have seen many deer. No Bighorn Sheep despite traveling through quite a lot of their protected habitat. I saw a bobcat. Birds and fish. A flash of something that looked like a weasel with a stubby, black-tipped tail. Either a very large fox or a golden coyote. And many rock-loving rodents. The marmots in particular have become dear to me over the last month. They remind me of my goat Myshkin, I think because they are very fat and he is very fat too. Something in the way they waddle-run is tender and honest.

Myshkin, kin to fat animals everywhere.

4. People: the animal I’ve seen most of. I was asked before starting this hike if I would see other people very often. I wasn’t sure, but thought that when I was off trail I wouldn’t much. It turns out that only one day on the last thirty have I encountered no other people, and that was on Day 6 or so when I crossed Glacier Pass on the shoulder of Mt Banner. Even that day, I did see a party of climbers far far below me, little specks on the landscape. Otherwise, I have crossed paths with and I think exchanged words with at least one person every day on this trip so far.

5. Solitude: even with all those people, I have felt an abundance of isolation. Doing a hike like this solo is, to my mind, almost incomparably different than doing it with another person. Companionship changes everything, from decision making to feelings of safety. I find having a partner tends the mute the waves of emotional variation which can be somewhat savaging and heart-opening when traveling solo. But therein lie the riches: plumbing those depths of isolation draws me into these trips to begin with.

6. Fear: I’m also asked about this a lot. You’re doing this by yourself? people ask incredulously. But aren’t you afraid? All The Time, I answer. All The Time. Coexisting with fear is part of the research. Some days it consumes me, swallows me whole like Jonah and the Whale, and some days it and I walk along together amiably and I think of its voice as one of a friend for whom I feel love but differentiation.

I had a simple day today Around 7 I hitched 15 miles south to Lone Pine so I could get breakfast, and stayed there until after lunch. I lingered in the park and watched the steady stream of vehicles pulling trailers piled with fantastical objects, all of it covered in playa dust, of Burning Man attendees heading home. I was struck by the reminder that there are many journeys people take to enrich their lives. Riches are to be found anywhere one might choose to look.

After lunch and picking up some groceries and a sandwich to go, I hitched back up to Independence. Tomorrow I’ll head out early and begin this last stretch of my trip. I’m excited, and also lightly vigilant about some crossings, both of mountains and of rivers, that I think might be challenging. In any case, you can expect to hear from me on September 16 or September 17.

Self Portrait #4: my shadow across the four USGS quads I used in the last section, just before mailing them home.

Lounging in the park in Lone Pine.

Lying down and watching tv. As I said, there are riches to be found everywhere.

Again, the vividness and tangibility of my dreams is surprising me. Where are such (sometimes ghastly) visions coming from? One thing to say about strong dreams is this: at least you know you are sleeping deeply.

It’s staying dark longer than it was at the beginning of my trip, and I’m waking up in semi-darkness. In that soft, quiet time I did my morning meditation, and broke camp by 6:45. I had some uphill climbing to do, all headed east to make it over Kearsarge Pass, which crosses the Sierra Crest and offers a route into or, in my case, out of the mountains and down to Owens Valley. It was fast, and I was at the trailhead by 11am. This despite stopping to chat with several of the many hikers coming up the trail.

I was excited for town. I was hungry and looking forward to food not in bar form. The first group to come out of the trailhead, four guys who had spent five days climbing and fishing out of the Kearsarge Lakes area just west of the pass, gave me a ride down another one of those winding roads out of the mountains to the valley below. I only had to wait about fifteen minutes, and have been pleased with my good fortune on the hitches so far on this trip. They dropped me at the post office in Independence, where my resupply boxes had just apparently arrived that morning (so said the post master). I got a room in a small, local motel and had the best shower anyone has ever taken in the history of the world and did the best laundry anyone has ever done in the history of the world. The town of Independence has almost nothing in it: two oddly-stocked convenience stores, a strange co-op with mostly empty shelves, and a taco truck. And somehow, all these things are spread out a quarter mile from one another. I had two meals at the taco truck, which turned out to be a lot of walking on the highway. The tacos are quite good though.

I’m taking a rest day here tomorrow, to prepare for the final leg of my trip. I have one more nine day section to Road’s End, where I finish my hike. Originally I had planned for a fifty day journey, but I’ve been faster than I anticipated and it looks like it will take right around forty days to complete. My plane ticket home is bought, so the end date is firm. I should come out of the mountains on the 16th and fly home on the 17th.

I do want to say that I’ve been touched and honored by the comments and emails I’ve received, so thank you for your communications. It is, of course, nice to know that someone is listening.

Looking south from the morning’s climb.

Lovely morning tarn

As I was reading a little before falling asleep last night, the wind came up in a few determined gusts, pushing against my tent walls, but after that it quieted down and the night was peaceful. Or at least I slept through any commotions caused by weather or otherwise. My dreams have been growing stranger and more vivid as these days wear on, as though colors are stirring deep in my psyche. On my second day out (26 days ago!) I encountered a hiker who, when I told him what I was setting out to do (and who knew of all three high routes, a pretty rare occurrence), remarked that it was like a vision quest. Steve Roper, the author of the Sierra High Route which occupied me for the first twelve days or so, writes that “traveling solo along the High Route can be an enjoyable, almost mystical, experience”. Perhaps I am entering the mystical phase of my long journey now, and dreams are the portents by which I will orient. In any case, I won’t go into detail, but as I travel far during the day, so too I seem to be at night.

I had two passes today, Thunder Ridge Pass and Longley Pass. To travel from my snug camp in the bowl beneath Talus Pass, I climbed for some thousand plus feet along a cheerful brook, Table Creek, along granite slabs and meadow grass to two beautiful aquamarine tarns, a color I associate with glacial runoff. A short climb, then descent, then climb up talus and I was on Thunder Ridge Pass, looking down on a steep, talusy descent. Descending talus is slow, and getting slower every day I’m out here as my knees and ankles seem to creak more and shake more. I carefully plod down, supporting my weight with my arms whenever I can to relieve the burden on my legs. Eventually I was down a few hundred feet and the grade became gentler, and then the talus was covered in a snow field for a time which is a gracious use of all this snow lingering around here. I passed a couple lakes, bobbing up and down over humps, and then contoured around a ridge. These are the days: bobbing on humps, contouring around, ascending blocks and descending blocks, swinging one leg from the hip and then the other. In this very manner I made my way up along Cunningham Creek, almost misidentified Longley Pass but then got it straightened out, and climbed for a good while in soft sand until I stood on its top, looking down at a massive corniced snow field blocking the length of the pass.

Aquamarine tarn

The view looking down at the descent of Thunder Ridge Pass. Note the considerate snow patch.

Corniced snowfield on Longley Pass, taken from the chute.

I did expect as much. Longley is known to be a walk-up pass on the west side, and to often have a large, lingering snow field on the east side early season. Well, it’s not early season but the entire Sierra range is decorated in lingering snow anyway. Anywhere that is likely to have troublesome snow ‘early season’ will almost definitely have troublesome snow now. And this corniced, steep snow field was definitely troublesome. Both Skurka (author of the current high route) and Secor (author of The High Sierra: Peaks, Passes, and Trails, which is a kind of bible for cross country travel in the range) recommend looking north of the pass. Secor in particular suggests a Class 3 chute that can be downclimbed, and indeed I found exactly that chute and had a fun little down climb, wedged into a crack and looking over at the astonishing thickness of the snow blocking the pass. The climb was over fast, and then I was sand-glissading down a steep and soft hillside. Passes can sometimes go quick, despite all the labor involved to arrive at them. I was grateful that during my passage, the weather was relatively stable, with only a few sharp wind gusts and clouds but no rain. On the descent the rain came in small flurries, and continued on and off throughout the afternoon, but overall the weather patterns have improved dramatically over a few days ago.

Longley Pass from below. The class 3 bypass is the crack on the right side of the photo.

After passing a snowy tarn and then eating lunch next to a sparkling, limpid lake, I began a long descent down to Lake Reflection. I was expecting to, per route directions, follow a creek all the way down to the lake, fighting some willows along the way, knowing that sometimes willows simply must be fought. But only a short time after joining the creek, I saw some cairns leading across a granite rib, away from the creek.

Looking down on Lake Reflection. I followed this chute down for a bit before leaving it for the cairns.

Cairns, a pile of rocks too composed to have landed together by chance, are a rather primitive kind of sign. They contain almost no information other than that ‘a person was here, and you could be too’. When one sets out to follow a cairn trail, there are many questions: are these marking the route I want to take, or a different route? Will they continue or strand me somewhere? Will they lead me more true than if I didn’t follow them? Because the fact is, following cairns can sometimes take you somewhere you wouldn’t necessarily choose in their absence, and that may be because cairns, like a trail, are future-knowing and anticipate unseen obstacles (like cliff bands), or it may because they mark a bad route. After all, anybody can build a cairn. I’ve sometimes wondered if people ever build bad cairn trails to nowhere just to mess with others (which would be very mean). Following cairns is about trust: do you give over some authority to the cairns and trust their wisdom? Do you trust the cairn builder? Trails can be that way too, but so many people use them that the question of trust is placated by the numbers of trusters, all those hikers out following the path. With a cairn trail, it can feel like a relationship solely between you and the mysterious cairn-builder.

At first the cairns were great: frequent, easy to follow, and clearly giving a superior path to staying down in the bushwhack by the creek. But after a while, long after they led far away from the creek and high up on the north slope next to Lake Reflection, they petered out. At first they grew scarce, and then just when I was ready to abandon the cairn trail one would come back. Like a little cairn tease. So I would recommit, follow along, until they disappeared for good and I was in a place I wasn’t too excited to be. I could tell there were cliffs all around, and it took me some time to figure out how to go from there/ all options sucked. This is the trouble with following someone else’s trail: you commit, but then the trail disappears and you find yourself in a place you would never be otherwise.

I crossed some talus, then I crossed back. I descended then climbed. Eventually I could see enough of the slope ahead to plan a route across without hitting too many cliff bands, and from there I was able to make descent progress and eventually arrive at the outlet of the lake. I cursed the cairns a couple times, then laughed when suddenly a few reappeared right as I was near the end of the lakeside traverse.

I was offered two different fording options in the guide to cross the outlet of Lake Reflection and access the rough trail on the other side: either hop across the outlet on partially submerged logs, or go downstream and ford. But after the outlet, the water ballooned out again into a mini lake. I started to hop the logs, but they were unstable and too submerged to keep my shoes dry. I started to ford barefoot just past them, but the water there was deep and the bottom was actually silt-covered logs, and seemed treacherous to try to walk across. So I split the difference and forded at the partially submerged logs barefoot, carefully walking along the huge underwater trees as fish swam around my feet. Falling off seemed like a bad idea, into that tangled mass of logs. They were very slippery. Carefully, carefully. When I reached the other side, I raised my arms and gave a cheer. I was done with cross country for the day, because the lightly maintained trail led from there down to Bubb’s Creek. I survived the confusing cairn trail and cliffy shore of Lake Reflection, and I made it through one of the more interesting river crossings so far.

The submerged log jam I crossed at the outlet of Lake Reflection.

Making the crossing.

I made good time down to East Lake on the trail, arriving there at 3:30. I had planned to camp there, but it was so early that I decided to push on. My legs were eating up the fast trail, and less than an hour later I was fording Bubb’s Creek (upper thigh deep, fast water, forded with shoes on) at the bottom of the very long descent from Longley Pass (over 3000 feet).

Again, it was only 5pm. I chatted with a camper I met there briefly, then jumped on the Bubb’s Creek trail and headed east towards Lower Vidette Meadow. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because I was here before, some 12 days ago or so, while I was on the Southern Sierra High Route. I’m now entering the twilight zone part of the hike, when I will occasionally revisit places I’ve already been. From here to the Kearsarge Pass Trail I’ll follow the JMT, which I did before headed south, and this time I’m headed north. Also, in a few days time, I’ll follow the JMT north from LeConte Ranger Station north up towards Helen Lake and Muir Pass, a section I hiked south just before exiting to resupply in Bishop. My roundabout route overlaps itself some. I get to find out if in the intervening days I’ve become a different person.

Looking east up Bubbs Creek Canyon, the direction of my evening hike.

Evening hiking, setting sun.

Laying down on my inflated ground pad, inside my fluffed sleeping bag, cocooned inside my tent for the night, is a miraculous feeling. That’s where I am now, having finished cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up afterwards, sorting tomorrow’s food out from the rest, cleaned my face and hands and brushed my teeth, and gotten everything stowed properly in the tent. It’s warm, it’s reclined. It’s just perfect.

Let’s talk about last night though. The rain that had been my daylong companion stopped as I set up camp, and I had a wonderfully dry evening to cook and eat and do my end-of-day routine. But shortly after I got in my tent, it started again. Just a little pitter patter at first, but the intensity grew and grew until rain was hammering away at the tent. Then the wind picked up. The gusts were so strong they completely deformed the tent as they blew, changing its shape from something like a little spaceship to, say, a whale, and then a comet, and then a donut (for mathematically inclined readers: yes, the wind was so strong it pulled off non-homeomorphic deformations). I don’t think I’ve ever had this tent in wind that powerful, and honestly I didn’t think it would survive. It did though, as did I. After an hour or two of sitting up and helplessly using my hands to try to hold it all together, things calmed down a bit, and I could relax my vigilance enough to sleep.

The wind continued throughout the day today. There was little rain, a lot of cloud cover, and wind so strong that when it would gust, it blew me over a couple times. I had to stop walking when it blew hard so that both feet could hold the ground, or else I would be toppled. It was particularly strong when I was up high, crossing passes on the King-Kaweah Divide. There is nothing to break the wind up there. Just mountains to funnel it, make it more concentrated, and me, a little twig poking up in places that perhaps I didn’t belong.

I woke up tired, but I was worried about more unstable weather and wanted to get through the high stuff as quickly as possible. Shortly after I started walking, I crossed Pterodactyl Pass, and then made a long contour above a bowl, making my way to Horn Col. From there I made a long contour above the head of a canyon to Copper Mine Peak (and pass), where the wind was at its fiercest as I struggled along an exposed ridge at around 12200 feet. The descent from there ought to have followed an old trail from when Copper Mine Peak sported a functional copper mine oh so long ago, but the trail is hiding under snow so instead I took a steep scree hill down off the pass, followed by slipping down in the snow, and then a long talus-y descent of several thousand feet into Cloud Canyon. There were many clouds today to go with the name, scooting about in every direction as the wind gusted. At one point I was sitting on a rock and eating some crackers and jerky when a strong gust came and actually blew my full backpack down a hill.

The view from Pterodactyl Pass

Lupines in front of Horn Col

Horn Col

Me looking consternated in the wind

Copper Mine Pass from the descent. It’s the u-shaped notch in the center. You can’t see it, but Carrot and Kodak are tiny human figures descending near the top.

Cloud Canyon, and clouds.

From Cloud Canyon, I had a long uphill, first on trail for a couple miles (the first since leaving Lodgepole) and then cross country through leprechaun green grass and sparkling white granite blocks. It was beautiful, and the sun even managed to make an appearance for a while. The wind got quiet too, and I could hear my labored breathing as I slowly moved upward. I was definitely tired. It had been a long day without much rest. But there is almost no better place to be tired, than in the company of oneself and a mountain stream, at the same time both inward and outward.

Talus Creek

After the creek, I made my way over to Talus Pass and descended a couple hundred feet down some fractures in steep granite slabs, into a lightly forested bowl, my target for the night, where I’m hoping I’ll be a little better sheltered if another storm comes through.

The lightly forested bowl where I made camp.

On the approach to Copper Mine Pass, I ran into a pair of hikers also hiking the Kings Canyon High Basin Route, though they started in a different place and are over half done. They go by Carrot and Kodak (Carrot has a hiking blog too: https://carrotquinn.com/). We walked some together today, and leap frogged for most of the rest of the day. It is a different feeling to sense that there are others nearby, who might be along any minute, who you can have a conversation with. On the topic of deformation, people change the shape of the space we occupy, more than anything else. I enjoyed them, and I enjoyed the stark contrast their tenuous presence offered to the rest of my trip. I also mentioned to them my missing box at Lodgepole and my map situation, and they supplied me with maps and the written directions since they had had two sets between them. So even though the weather has gone crazy, at least there is my map problem solved.

But as I lay here, with intermittent strong gusts but nothing as fierce as last night, I’m hopeful that storm is passing.

I woke up just as dawn was breaking and packed up quickly and quietly. The raucous campground of the previous night had become quiet, and only a few people were stirring here and there as I walked the quarter mile back along the main campground road to the Lodgepole market/deli/visitors center.

I got a quick shower–3 minutes for $1–before anyone else was there, a stark difference from the line last night that stretched out the door alongside the building. All those pretty clean people with big fluffy towels. After the shower I called Dan from the pay phone, and then looked over my route information while waiting for the deli to open at 8. Breakfast, an egg and potato burrito and a cup of coffee, followed by two pancakes because I was still hungry, gave me time to make sure all my things were charged up. This leg especially I need my electronics to hold it together.

For each of the high routes I’m following, there are basically three different important sources of information that come into play: maps of the area, with specific landmarks along the route often indicated by a marker; a written description of the route; and a data book which typically gives distances between important markers and sometimes information about elevation changes. Of these three, I think the map is most crucial for staying alive and well, since with a map you can figure out your own way to safety. The written description is second most important, and the data book isn’t exactly critical though tends to see a lot of use. Because my box didn’t make it to Lodgepole on time (and I was unwilling to linger in that zoo of people until Tuesday), I’m making extensive use of my phone for the next four days until I get to Kearsarge Pass and hike out to Indepence to resupply. All three of those sources of information are on my phone in my Dropbox app. It’s tedious to use this way, and involves switching back and forth between documents a lot, but so far it’s working. I’m a little paranoid that my phone will crash, though, and what then? Well, I have those four USGS quads that cover the off route areas, so if my phone stops working I at least have maps. And with maps I can find my way, even if it’s not the official route.

I hit the trail around 9 or 9:30, a little later than I was hoping given that I had a four thousand foot climb to start the day. The air quality was only worse than the day before, thick smoking hanging heavy in the air. I climbed up a trail for a couple miles, then a use trail for a couple miles headed towards Mt Silliman. Even as I gained altitude and the world opened up around me, the smoke was so thick it obscured a lot of the views. The use trail ended at the base of a massive set of steep granite slabs, and I climbed up them, the most slabtastic walking I’ve done on the trip so far. The vertical gain was serious though, and I weaved back and forth to reduce strain on my ankles, stepping over and across sheets of water cascading down the rock. Eventually the steep slabs ended and I continued up through gullies and among rock fins.

Smoke obscuring the granite slabs I was about to ascend.

I’m about to go up this beautiful, smooth, rounded hunk of granite

Water-stained wall

As I rose the smoke seemed to clear, but in its place a thick set of clouds gathered, and then darkened, and blotted out the sun. I was headed for a pass, and as I approached its base, wondering whether I could beat the storm in a race, the clouds let loose an intense rain shower, followed quickly by immense thunder claps directly overhead. I must say it was not an ideal place to be in a lightning storm. I quickly got into a cone of safety, within a 45 degree angle of something much taller than me, which was the steep ridge containing the pass, but not too close in order to avoid splash back current in case the ridge was struck. I squatted down, feet together. And I waited there for almost an hour as the thunder shook the world and rattled my bones, as the rain pelted me, but there were no ground strikes. What does one do but exercise patience? If lightning were striking, I would have needed to keep my mouth open so my eardrums wouldn’t rupture with the shock wave, but it wasn’t so I took the time to eat a little bit, and marvel at the fact of our planet and its weather. I was relieved when the storm finally blew off to the northwest and the sky began to lighten again. I shouldered my pack and humped over the pass, an easy and quick class 2 gully.

The pass I was headed for is the v-shaped notch on the far right of the ridge.

Waiting out the thunder storm. The pass is the low point on the ridge over my left shoulder.

From the top I could see another bank of clouds blowing towards me, and hear thunder high up and far away. Indeed, part way down the other side, another furious episode of rain, and some thunder though not directly overhead, accompanied me as I dropped about 700 feet. As I contoured a ridge and began climbing up a long valley towards the King-Kaweah Divide, a ridge of mountains running east-west (which I crossed two days ago through the Kaweah Gap), yet another rain storm with thunder broke overhead, though again the thunder was distant enough that I didn’t feel the need to prepare for lightning. This cycle continued all day, and my rain pants went on and off and on and off.

Clouds seen to the south from the top of the pass.

I gained the Divide and had a lovely and long contouring traverse through a basin just below the ridge, electing to stay a bit lower in case one of the thunderheads mustered some lightning strikes, and feeling pressed to hurry along. The ridge along the divide, and frankly the basin too, were quite exposed. So while wind-driven rain interspersed with periods of calm kept the atmosphere lively, I kept a quick pace, enjoying the easy travel on granite slabs and grassy benches, but avoiding lingering anywhere for long. Eventually I crossed a small saddle and dropped into a bowl which felt a little more protected, right before Pterodactyl Pass, and set up camp in the shelter of some rocks. I stopped a little earlier than I had planned, around 5:30, but it seems like the next couple miles might be slow and have limited camping options.

The two images above are from the hike along Tablelands, the ridge of the King-Kaweah Divide.

Pterodactyl Pass, which I will cross tomorrow morning, is the middle u in the ridge.

Camp sunset.

So far using my phone to navigate is working ok. It’s not ideal, but only two more days of it and then I take trails and resupply. My box will have maps. I will be relieved. Hang in there phone!