A mix of being a little bit too cold, the wind, the sharp rocks beneath me, and a steady ache in my hips that made every position uncomfortable, all came together and conspired against good sleep. I recall a lot of timid and careful tossing and turning, so as not to grind my ground pad into the rocks. Many days ago I mentioned that my ground pad has a leak and I reinflate it at least once every night. I could have fixed it while I was in Bishop, but I didn’t get around to it. In the words of a blog follower from years back, patch your pad hole! Maybe in Lone Pine I will get around to it. Sleep is a precious resource out here. In the meantime there is a dependable, small midnight dance of weight shifting and lung-bellows and if I wake up having only done it once, I consider myself lucky.
So again I woke up tired, feeling almost like dried up pitch, sticky and crumbly both, slow to move. From Baxter Lake I had around three and a half miles of another unmaintained trail to follow until I again met up with the JMT. The Baxter Pass Trail seems essentially abandoned, and unlike the Sawmill Pass Trail of yesterday, which was unmaintained but clearly used, the Baxter Pass Trail mostly flirted with fading into obscurity as I tried to follow it down canyon. Occasionally there would be a cairn, but often they were in surprisingly unhelpful places, such as where the trail was already obvious or where they were invisible until you already knew to be standing there (and if you did know, what do you need the cairn for?). It took some time to get out of the canyon, with many stops to hunt for evidence of a trail lost in the bogs or sometimes to backtrack to the last place I knew was correct. It is tricky to know when to abandon the trail and simply cut cross country in the general direction you know you need to go, and when to spend quite a lot of energy trying to maintain a connection to a trail that doesn’t seem to want to be found. Keeping it at hand can save a lot of route finding headache later on when the easy cross country suddenly cliffs out and requires backtracking or difficult navigation. I almost bailed on the trail a couple times, this nearly non-existent path-that-was, but each time thought better to hold onto it, because it might come in handy.
Indeed, there were several places in the descent out of the canyon where the trail displayed future-knowing as only a trail can, heading early away from trouble before I could know what was coming. Eventually it plopped out of the Baxter side canyon and, after a long traverse along talus up high, descended to join the John Muir Trail at Dollar Lake. I was on that most famous of paths only briefly before cutting cross country again, this time up a steep gully through a notch in a ridge line, headed for Sixty Lake Basin. Though the climb up the gully was only 600 feet, I found it interminably exhausting. And this fatigue didn’t quit all day long. Sixty Lake Basin was beautiful, or the parts of it I saw, but I struggled as I climbed up into and through the basin, along many exquisite lakes surrounding by grass and pines. My time there was dotted with countless small breaks, and eventually I exited over an unnamed pass patched with snow, back into the main canyon and back to, of course, the JMT. Basically, with the climb over Mount Baxter and the trip through Sixty Lakes Basin, I made a big ‘S’ shape detour, beginning and ending with the John Muir Trail and touching on it briefly in the middle too, at Dollar Lake. After dropping a few hundred feet from the unnamed pass to meet the JMT, I joined a long train of people toiling up to Glen Pass along a series of steep switchbacks built into a rather severe scree escarpment. I felt like we were all part of a conveyor belt, only instead of us being conveyed, we were the belt itself, moving along all of our belongings up this mountain side. There was a snow bank at the top that troubled some of the hikers, as has every JMT pass with snow on it that I’ve crossed. Whenever I’m asked later about how difficult the JMT passes are by hikers who are approaching them, I always answer ‘it depends on you’. On this trip, I’ve felt rather cradled on the trail, but I guess that’s unsurprising. Challenge is in the eye of talus-stomping, tired-leg beholder.
Even if technically the trail is easy, my body was limp and ragged all day today. Though my pack is only getting lighter, it weighed heavy on my shoulders. My lungs couldn’t get enough air. The flesh on my thighs, belly, and upper arms all hurt like it’s been whipped and bruised. It dawned on me that perhaps I’m getting a little worn out, and that accounts not only for the enduring fatigue but also the air of melancholy that persists after yesterday.
After the razor-backed top of Glen Pass, it was JMT all afternoon for me, until I decided to stop, which happened some 6 or 7 miles later, passed Vidette Meadows. I’m in Kings Canyon National Park and have been for some time (and mostly will be in Kings Canyon or Sequoia National Park until the end of my hike many days from now), so the trail junctions are all well-signed, a typical feature of National Parks. Descending towards Vidette Meadow, each sign had a hand written note from Ranger Mike warning of bear activity all through the area, so I hope I’m able to sleep peacefully without interruption. I certainly could use it. The next few days seem to promise some difficult travel.
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