Last night some folks at the hostel had quite a raucous party. There was definitely drinking, and definitely drunk screaming, for many hours late into the night. I put my earplugs in and fell asleep anyway, only rousing from sleep if the screaming surpassed whatever the decibel rating of my earplugs is (it happened only a couple times). Despite this amusing beginning, sleep was solid and I woke up early so I could pack up, get breakfast, and then catch the shuttle run by Eastern Transit Authority that travels between Bishop and South Lake Trailhead, 30 miles or so up into the mountains, twice a day. I first heard about the shuttle as I was hiking to the South Lake Trailhead before visiting Bishop, and I was very pleased to find out about it. Unless a trailhead is obscure and infrequently used, hitching from a trail to a town is often pretty fast. People on trails tend to feel an immediate kinship and desire to help one another. But hitching from a town back to a trail can be quite difficult sometimes: passing cars are much less likely to be headed to a trail than anywhere else that street might go. A shuttle makes that particular problem disappear.
I slipped out of the hostel past a few revelers passed out sitting up in the living room, and went to a nearby cafe for a coffee and a bagel sandwich, and was ready to catch the 8am bus from the stop a couple blocks away. I waited until 8:30, staring down the vacant street, and then called Eastern Sierra Transit to find out if I needed to have made a reservation first. No, said the man on the line, but yesterday we stopped running the shuttle on weekdays and went to weekend only service.
But of course. I’ve become unmoored in time out here, so easy to do. School is back in session in most parts of California, and once school starts again, hiker support services begin to wind down. I went to the dumpster across the street and ripped off a piece of cardboard to make a sign that said ‘South Lake’ and walked over to Line Street, which was the road out of town towards the mountain. It was South Lake or bust baby. Hitching was my one way out of town.
I thought I might have been there for hours. I walked a few blocks until I found a small patch of shade under a tree canopy and waved my sign, smiled, held out my very tan thumb. There’s nothing quite like hitchhiking to become aware of the gendered mannerisms we use, perhaps especially some of us women, to appear non threatening and charming. A kind of shrinking of stature, a retracted presence. Better to look harmless than powerful. I would guess many women have trained in this skill set since childhood, and many draw from it subconsciously on a regular basis. It’s a nuanced strategy while hitchhiking though, because demure gets you a ride, but badass keeps the sketchies away. In any case, I was there for maybe twenty minutes before someone pulled over, a guy who runs a personal shuttle service for hikers. He had some hikers to pick up from North Lake and could give me a ride to the turn off to South Lake, which was most of the way there. You’re lucky, he said, you’re getting the ride for free today. He dropped me off way up in the mountains, and minutes later I was picked up again, by a woman in her sixties whose license plate read ‘WMNHKR’. Not fifteen minutes later I was at the trailhead, preparing for the long uphill. It was 9:45a. Not bad at all.
The long hike back over Bishop Pass was quicker and much less painful than I was anticipating. Though my bag was full of food, it carried well and my legs felt energetic. My left ankle’s wee tendon is still a little tetchy, but overall my body was in good form. After getting to the pass in short order, I dropped almost a thousand feet down from Bishop Pass into Dusy Basin before leaving the trail and heading south cross country again, making my way along granite humps towards Knapsack Pass. The ascent of Knapsack was speedy and straightforward, though finding my way through the ribs and gullies of Palisade Basin on the other side took a little more time. The jagged mountains of the palisades stood to the east, many over 14,000 feet tall. I wandered past the Barrett Lakes, and an empty tent whose owners were probably climbing the nearby mountains. As I was climbing up past the lakes and heading for Potluck Pass, I slipped on a slanted piece of talus while scanning the route ahead and smashed my shin into rock. At first I though it would just be a bad bruise, but quickly blood began seeping through my pants. I pulled the pant leg up and saw a hole in the skin, the kind that generously bleeds deep red blood like an artesian well gushes water. My first aid kit is in the bottom of my backpack, so everything was sprawled across the ground and I was elevating my leg to stop the bleeding when two guys approached, always a genuine surprise out in the anonymous arms of nowhere.
“Everything ok?,” one of them asked.
“Yes, fine, I just slipped off this rock and gashed my shin.”
“Do you need help?”
“No, I think I’m fine, though I’m running out of bandaids.” I’ve used so many for just this kind of talus-related injury on this trip. My first aid kit has never gotten such a good workout on a hike before.
The guys gave me some extra bandaids because they were heading out tomorrow. They had ice axes and crampons, so I asked what they were up to. They’ve been on a twelve day traverse, roughly following a line similar to the Southern Sierra High Route, the route I’m now on, but from south to north rather than north to south, and they’ve climbed every 14000 foot peak along the way. They had just finished that very afternoon, with a traverse of Thunderbolt Peak, North Palisade, and Mount Sil, the jagged and imposing crest of mountains I had been skirting along. We talked about our respective trips (they seemed impressed with mine, but frankly their project seems to be in an entirely different echelon–still, it was kind of them) and I plied them for information about two climbs: Mount Sill (14153 ft) which I will attempt to climb in the morning, spending half of tomorrow on it, and Mt Whitney’s Mountaineer’s Route. Both are class 3 ascents, but both have me a bit nervous. I haven’t mentioned this before but I’m afraid of heights, and while I love the physicality of climbing things, exposure can be alarming. Sometimes when confronted with heights my feet begin to throb, and my body almost seems to manufacture a sense of vertigo as though to justify the sudden icy grip of fear. While my route doesn’t have to go up Mount Sill, Dixon & Wilson, the authors of the Southern Sierra High Route, strongly recommend the climb as a side trip and I did want to summit some mountains while on this hike. In addition, I want to see whether my nervousness coordinates with reality–I haven’t in general found the passes to be threatening, and many of those are class 3. All these specifics are to say that I’m exploring my trepidation. I am plowing my fear field. I am tilling that good, rich earth and finding out what grows there.
After we bade goodbye and my leg stopped bleeding (it clotted nicely), I repacked my bag and contoured over to Potluck Pass, being much more attentive with my steps. After a quick descent, I made camp in a little grass glen next to a stream. Tomorrow morning I’ll rise early and thread my way up into the tight cirque between Polemonium Peak and Mount Sill, and see what can be made of my feelings.
One sad note for the day is that I lost my yellow pee rag, that bandana always hanging off my backpack (a pee rag is a woman’s best friend in the wilderness). On this trip my pants have received many compliments, but I was most flattered when many days ago a JMT hiker called out to me ‘hey, I like your pee rag!’ as we passed one another on the trail. Godspeed dear pee rag. May your new horizons be as practical as your old ones.
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