Category: High Sierra Trail

This day was full of variation and I’m exhausted, so I’ll try to keep this brief.

As I headed down from my late, last-minute chicken scratch campsite, I came to be very glad that I didn’t try to jog those last 4 or 5 miles downhill in the gathering dark to a campsite at Hamilton Lakes. The trail I was descending was a stunning feat of construction, blasted and hewn out of sheer granite rock walls, often a small line along a granite dome bordered by a dramatic precipice. There is even a place where the trail is blasted through an outcrop of rock, and hence a tunnel was made. I remember thinking to myself that if we humans can build a trail like this, we can do anything. Looking back up at the dramatic headwall above Hamilton Lake, some three thousand feet of sheer cliffs ribboned with waterfalls, it amazes and humbles me that people went and did something crazy like build a trail up there. Especially now while on this cross-country route, I cant help but appraise a place for its passability, and this place would seem profoundly unpassable. Probably it was until they built that trail.

Pika

Morning view over Hamilton Lake

Looking towards the tunnel

The tunnel

Trail grooved into the cliff

Headwall over Hamilton Lake, down which the trail goes

Even after there, as the trail made a very very very long contour high along a ridge, still there were places of dramatic relief, where on one side there would be rock or hill or tree or solid matter, and on the other side of the trail nothing but blue sky, empty space. I passed Bearpaw, a High Sierra Camp in action (a commercial establishment where guests with reservations hike 12 miles into the backcountry and then are cared for in nice canvas tents and fed delicious meals), and countless backpackers headed up to Kaweah Gap along the High Sierra Trail, as well some folks headed out. I realized as I greeted the hundredth oncoming backpacker (ok I don’t know if it was a hundred because I wasn’t actually counting) that of course there are so many people. It is Labor Day Weekend. And I was headed into the crucible: the main visitors center, concessionaire, and campground in Sequoia National Park, at Lodgepole.

Trail making a line along a granite face

Top: old destroyed bridge over a hundred foot-ish chasm

Bottom: the bridge that replaced it

Rock, trail, sky

Still, I didn’t think too much about it. I had a moment about 15 miles into my hiking day, around noon, to decide whether to take a set of trails directly to Lodgepole, or to stay on the High Sierra Trail to its end and take the free park shuttle into Lodgepole. A backcountry ranger I ran into yesterday strongly recommended the shuttle. I was leaning towards hiking, but by that point in the day the hiking had become a bit of a grind. It’s been hotter today than any on the trip so far–the thermometer on my pack read 90 degrees in the shade–and the face flies of the Kern River were back with a vengeance. It was unpleasant to be sure. The route directly to Lodgepole was two miles and 2000 feet uphill more of a hike than continuing down to the shuttle, so I ended up deciding to take the shuttle. Besides, I thought, it will be an interesting diversion to shuttle through the front country of the park.

Big mistake. I emerged at Crescent Meadow, hot and irritable, around 2pm, after twenty miles of hiking. I had at the point t accumulated such a swarm of face flies around me that I was hiking in a head net. I felt like Pigpen, and furtively glanced around at the tourists and day hikers there to see if they too had collected over a hundred of these little flies around their persons. (As far as I could tell, they had not). And there were many persons there to furtively glance at. In fact, I had to miss three shuttles in a row because they were overfull. Finally I crammed into one, only to need to transfer shuttles at Giant Forest Museum and join a huge line of people standing in the sun, waiting for the shuttle to Lodgepole. I was there for 45 minutes before I had moved forward enough to finally board the bus.

Line for the park shuttle at Giant Forest Museum

They came to see these Sequoia trees, which are pretty impressive

Lodgepole itself is a seething mess of people. There is a store here, a little counter-service restaurant, showers, a visitor center. All were overrun. I couldn’t help but think of John Muir–hard not to when you are surrounded by commodification of the man’s vision, with his quotes splashed on every kind of merchandise you can imagine–and the vast difference between his soul-saving ‘range of light’, as he called the Sierra, and this. I will say though that I am pleased with the diversity of the crowds. I heard more other languages than English being spoken in the small knots of family and friends puttering about the complex.

I waited in line at the store for ten minutes so I could retrieve my resupply box. They couldn’t find it. I have no cell or internet service here, and finally managed to get ahold of beloved husband Dan via pay phone. After several hours, we were able to determine that the box probably hasn’t been delivered yet, and thus won’t be until Tuesday because it is the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.

The food, while a shame not to have, is alright to lose. I can resupply out of the market, even though it’s a little expensive. The next resupply stop is only four days away, and that’s an easy stretch of food to shop for. What’s more difficult to accommodate is losing the maps and route info. From here I begin the last of my high routes, the Kings Canyon High Basin Route, and for cross country travel, the maps and route descriptions are critical.

I ended up finding large, 7.5 minute USGS quads for sale in the visitor center and I do have all route info on my phone, including maps. Relying on this old, glitchy iPhone 5 to steer me three days through the mountains is kind of an unsettling thought. What if it fails? I spent some time this afternoon annotating the maps and writing out the descriptions so that if the phone does fail, I have some kind of a backup.

Annotating USGS quads

I’m now tucked into a flat spot at the edge of someone else’s campsite in the campground, listening to what sounds like a campground-wide epic party. I’ll put in my earplugs and sleep well no doubt. At least I know I won’t be cold.

Last night as I was looking at the map and thinking about my itinerary over the next few days, I thought it might be nice to try to get to Lodgepole in three days rather than on a fourth hiking day like I had originally planned. This would give me a little more flexibility when I head into my last high route, which I think may have some difficult sections that would be mollified somewhat with extra time. This morning, even though I was so comfortably asleep in the homey nest of my tent, I got myself up and prepared and hiking by 6:30 (point of reference: typically on long hikes I’m hiking by 5:30 or 6 every day, but for some reason on this trip I’ve been indulgent in the mornings and often break camp around 7).

The Kern River slashes a deep gash running north to south through Sequoia National Park. At the bottom of its canyon, the elevation is around 6500 feet for many river miles. It’s bordered by steep and tall walls, stretching several thousand feet up, and if you were to climb up and follow the plateaus away from the canyon, you’d rise into high country both to the east and to west. To the east lies the Sierra Crest, areas I was intimate with only a few days ago. Today, after finally breaking away from the river, I went west.

I walked for around 8 miles or so along the river, lovely and unusually flat walking during which I had a startling encounter with a bobcat who was sleeping in the sand next to the trail and didn’t hear my approach until I was nearly upon it. It ran up the hillside and watched me as I watched it, its stub tail twitching back and forth. I’ve come to enjoy staring contests with wild cats over the years, and this one was as pleasurable as all the rest: taking in one another’s size and shape, level of concern or ambition. I didn’t linger long, and nearly simultaneously we broke from one another, me continuing along the trail and the cat slinking upslope into a patch of trees.

Ferns and forest along the Kern River

Looking back south into the Kern River Canyon from partway up the climb

By 9 or so I had come to the junction with the High Sierra Trail. I followed it west away from the river and up, a steady and determined climb of 2500 feet, after which the grade lessened but the trail continued to climb for another 1500 feet, from 6500 at the gentle Kern River up to 10500. It wound through sandy forested hills, along some meadows, along a cliff edge, and then descended to a lovely avenue of green, ramps of meadow that led after a few miles to Kaweah Gap, an unusually low spot in the Great Western Divide, a tall seam of mountains running north-south that makes east-west passage difficult.

View south from the Chagoopa Plateau (what I climbed up to) along the High Sierra Trail.

Flower medley

Self-portrait #3

Somewhere during this, from 12:15 to 1:45 or so, I did a simultaneous Contemplative Dance Practice (CDP), aligned in time with a group of dancers I practice CDP with weekly, every Friday. CDP has three parts: sitting meditation; personal awareness practice (like a physical and attentional warm up); and open space, in which we explore improvisational composition, movement, and witnessing. I let them know through email I would be joining in this way, imaging them in the studio as a kind of transparency overlaid with my world of mountains. Mine were walking versions of each part: walking meditation, walking personal awareness practice, and walking open space. In certain ways, the first two felt familiar to states I’m often in as I hike along day to day. But the last part in particular was novel: to view the landscape I was walking in through an open space lens was a meaningful shift. Suddenly the trees and rocks were part of the composition, and I was a witness from the very center. I bowed in (a formality in the practice, which is deeply influenced by Tibetan Buddhism) a few times, added to the composition as I walked: a long meadow framing a mountain with an off center rock one time; a stretch of dense forest another; yet another singing with a creek that splashed across the path. And I did imagine my dance companions in Seattle, using their bodies to make sense of their world as I used mine to make sense of this mountain land. One kind of sense among many, anyway. Such is the multiplicity of our world.

I had originally planned to camp just at the beginning of this long green avenue of meadows leading up to the Kaweah Gap. That would be a totally reasonable 20 mile, 4000 foot day. But when I decided to punch it and see whether I could sail into Lodgepole a day early, I decided to make it up to the gap, another 3.5 miles or so, or just after. I began climbing the thousand feet up there, and after a couple miles decided to stop before crossing the gap. Some hikers heading in the opposite direction said there wasn’t camping on the other side for some 4.5 miles, and it was about 6p as I was approaching the gap. It’s getting dark now at 8p, so it seemed reasonable to put off crossing until morning. But as I was looking for a place to set up camp, the inevitable afternoon mass of gray clouds overhead let loose the rain, my ever-on-hand wet friend. This was one of the heavier and steadier rains yet, and I quickly dug out my rain suit and battened down my backpack. I didn’t want to stop and pitch the tent in the rain–often when it’s raining, it’s better just to keep walking and wait the rain out rather than make camp in the rain and get everything wet, though of course this strategy depends on whether it’s the kind of rain that will stop–so I decided to hump over the gap and see what I could do with the other side.

Rain mixed with sun, the mercuriality of the mountains

Rain over the Big Arroyo Canyon (where I came from) viewed from near the Kaweah Gap.

The rain stopped as I topped out, and I began a quick descent, knowing I had limited daylight hours to find camping. I was prepared to finish my day with a 4 mile jog downhill to Hamilton Lakes if necessary. As I ran downhill in the fading light, dodging rocks and navigated patches of snow, I passed a scratched out spot in the dirt right next to the trail. I gratefully decided to stop there rather than slip into camp near 8p, rather than run down this rocky trail in the dark.

Precipice Lake, where I did not stop to camp

Sunset view from where I did stop to camp.

Though it was a long day, some 25 miles and over 5000 feet in climbing, my body feels relatively good. Both ankles are holding up ok, knees are alright, hips are strong. I haven’t had any days like this on this trip because 25 miles cross country is out of my league, but it’s nice to have one long trail day with an open stride.

Well-rested and well-fed is how I left Lone Pine. As soon as I had taken a last shower, packed up my bag, and checked under the bed for anything that may have rolled away to hide, I went to the Alabama Hills Cafe for a huge breakfast, which is not an ideal way to begin a hiking day actually. A big meal sits heavy in the stomach and can be an uncomfortable lump to lug around. But their meals just seem to be that way, huge I mean, and I would never waste food in the middle of a trip like this. Oh no. As I was finishing up my plate, two guys took the table next to me and we struck up a conversation. They are planning to hike up to Mt Whitney but are spending a couple days acclimating to higher elevations and hanging out in the Owens Valley, and they mentioned wanting to go up to Cottonwood Lakes Trailhead to look around. I mentioned needing to get up there after breakfast. They offered a ride–saving me from needing to hitch–so I drank some more coffee and ate a giant, doughy croissant while they finished their breakfasts. Three cups later, I was in the back of the extended cab pickup and we were winding up the steep road into the mountains that I had come down just two days ago.

It was a quick ride filled with pleasant small talk, and suddenly I found myself hiking along again, one foot in front of the other. For the travel from Cottonwood Lakes Trailhead west over to Lodgepole, where my next high route begins, I picked some trails of a large National Geographic map of the area, not knowing much at all about them. Part of the route I’ve chosen includes the High Sierra Trail which I have heard is lovely, and I could have mostly hiked that the entire way. It goes over Mt Whitney and overlaps with the JMT though, and I really don’t need to spend any more time on the JMT if I don’t have to. I’ve had to travel its dusty track so much already, so I chose some different trails that went through Golden Trout Wilderness and would enter Sequoia National Park from the south, at the lower Kern River Trail. I knew that I was going to be walking through the southern end of the range, but otherwise I had no idea what to expect of my chosen route.

Well. It was dusty and sandy. And after a high of 10400 feet shortly after leaving the trailhead, it was mostly gentle downhill through lodgepole and other pine forests, for twenty miles. It was pleasant in its own way, the monotony of it a little anesthetizing, and so a little relaxing. The trail wound past some cattle herds grazing on a big meadow, and I was entertained by watching a horse rider attempt to round up a recalcitrant group of cows and get them walking in the same direction. There was always at least one and often several cows wandering off, and as the rider would go to bring them back, a few others would amble away. Like the landscape inside my mind as I amble these trails, always with some part whisping off in the breeze in one direction or another.

Ah, refreshing Fruit Punch Gatorade in the mountains. I buy it for the bottles, which are the best, lightest water bottles for backpacking. Can’t bring myself to just pour out the unnatural substance inside, even though I don’t much like it.

Cows, lodgepoles, and sand.

A thunderhead built up in the sky around noon and amidst the thunderous grumbles, rain started. It would go for a bit, heavy hard splattering drops, then stop, then go, then stop, and this continued much of the day. As I continued west and continued down, the air grew smoky, lightly at first and then thicker and thicker. There is a fire in Golden Trout Wilderness, south of where I was hiking but the wind was carrying all the smoke northward. Between the smoke and the rain, it was quite an atmospheric day as I walked and walked and walked through the relatively homogeneous terrain of pines, sand, and igneous rocks.

A murder of crows against tumultuous skies

Ah, that good mountain air

Towards the end of the day the rain stopped and the trail dropped more steeply to meet the Kern River. Shortly after beginning this descent, the trail crossed a natural bridge, a hole in a mess of lava rock through which a creek flowed. And later, towards the bottom of the descent, the creek cascaded down hundreds of feet of cliff, which was beautiful through the haze of the smoke. However, it was increasingly hot, and I was being mobbed by the most annoying kind of little fly which is fascinated by faces, and persistently hovers right at the nose, less than an inch away. I was using my big National Geographic map to furiously fan them away from my face, and sometimes I’d hit myself in the nose with map. Between the heat, the little flies, the whaps on the nose with the map, the steep and slippery descent, and the haze that made it difficult to see much of the Kern Canyon I was descending into, it was a pretty unpleasant end of the day. I finally arrived at the bottom at 6500 feet, the lowest I’ve been on this hiking trip, not counting resupply days. The land is very different at these lower elevations. Less austere. Also hotter and buggier. I followed the trail across a big, sturdy bridge spanning the Kern River, entered the park, and headed north until I found a good campsite next to the river around 7p.

Spirals in the wild

This old water tower platform stood at the site of a seemingly abandoned ranger station.

Haze over the Kern River Canyon.

The natural bridge

This is typical of the forests I walked through today.

The Kern River is really quite a beautiful river. I’ll be walking alongside it for some time tomorrow before I climb 4000 feet back up around timberline, out of the heat and away from the bugs. Presumably as I head north and away from the fires, the smoke will begin to clear.

The moon is bright enough to cast moon shadows and the bubbling river and cricket song are filling out the night sounds. Well, that and a very active thunder storm to the east, probably over the Sierra Crest. The rumblings are coming in steady rolls. I wonder if it will rain tonight.

The Kern River from my camp.