After a brief rain of fat drops slapping the tent walls, last night became quiet and I slipped away into sleep. My morning came quickly, the fade from black to gray to sepia to technicolor happening fast and continuous as it often seems to up on these mountains–dawn never seems to creep in from all around, but rather is projected down onto the land directly from the approaching sun, whose presence can be inferred even if it can’t yet be seen.
After unceremoniously shoving everything into my tent when the rain abruptly began while I was making dinner, it took me extra time this morning to find where everything had gone. I have a meticulous pattern of placing each bag just so inside my tent. I always know where everything is. Even if it might looks like junk, a bunch of dirty small objects corralled in dingy and torn ziplock bags with broken zippers, everything I have with me out here is carefully considered and chosen. Everything is humped up many thousands of feet by journey’s end. That alone marks love of a thing, to toil over its portage over so many miles.
So after the chaotic dump of my possessions into the tent, it took me extra time this morning to restore order. Even then, I never did find one of my gators (and lest there be any doubt about their usefulness, by the end of the day one of my shoes was filled with sand and one wasn’t). Once I had carefully placed everything right in my pack and looked all over the site for my missing gator which never manifested, I waved goodbye to the site (always a moment a gratitude for the shelter of a bit of space) and began the rest of the long descent on the PCT/JMT from Muir Pass to LeConte Canyon.
After one mile, I saw four or five people. After two, ten or fifteen. The number just went up as the day went on. I decided that the path of nonresistance, indeed the path of embrace, was to dive deep into the social nature of the JMT. I spoke to many, even stopped for a few half-hour-long conversations (with Jerry, the semi-retired construction technology instructor who rafts the Grand Canyon every year and is on a backpacking trip on the JMT for the first time in seventeen years after a knee injury; with Walt, a retired former maintenance and law enforcement person for the National Park Service; with three other women, chatting about our hikes during what we dubbed ‘women’s tea time’). As with many things, once I decided to embrace the nature of my conditions, my situation became pleasant, even rather joyful.
My route was to head down to LeConte Canyon on the JMT and then turn east at the Bishop Pass Trail, taking it out of LeConte Canyon, over the Sierra Crest, and down out of the mountains to the South Lake Trailhead, where I would hitchhike into Bishop, a small town on the big flat of Owens Valley, to resupply. From the trail junction in LeConte Canyon, the Bishop Pass Trail climbs 3600 feet past granite water slides, pines, bluffs, lakes, meadows, all under the towering presence of toothy mountain peaks.
Initially I thought that I would not go all the way to the town of Bishop off the eastern flank of the mountains today. I thought I would hike about twenty of those miles and leave the remaining six for tomorrow morning. Then, as the miles flew by like a conveyor belt under my winged, half-gatored feet, I changed my mind and thought I would go into town today after all. Then someone reminded me about the eclipse tomorrow, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t go into town today so I could watch it in the mountains. Then I realized the mountains are a terrible place to watch the eclipse: I don’t have eclipse glasses so can’t watch the sun, and instead hope to watch the fast-moving wall of shadow as it blackens the land, but the complex topography of mountains are a terrible place to do that. There is always something, many things, much higher than you. So to town! Even though I passed delicate, red-rock-and-green-water juniper-flocked lagoons on the way down to the trailhead, a strange break from the relative continuity of high mountain terrain (tundra, rock, meadow), places which would have been sweet little camping spots, I walked right on by and made it to the South Lake Trailhead by 6pm. I quickly hitched a ride the thirty miles into Bishop, a town of about 3500 (though thrice that with outlying areas) and made my way to the Hostel California. I have a strange pink-polka dot attic room which I’ve covered with gear that is now drying or airing or both. I had a shower, and felt for a fleeting moment as the granite slabs of the mountains might, to have water coursing down them in sheets, to be told their shapes by the tracing of water. I put my dirty trail clothes back on and went to the brewpub a few blocks away for a burger (delicious) and a beer (delicious but gave me a headache).
Tomorrow I’ll pick up my resupply boxes from the post office, launder my clothes, repair a few things, eat. Take a real rest day. And watch the eclipse shadow, maybe from the laundromat window.
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