For some reason I slept terribly again last night. The ground was flat and there were no sharp rocks. No bears, no wind. I was however very cold all night, and couldn’t seem to get warm inside my sleeping bag. Also my left hip has been aching no matter what position I lie in, and the pain wakes me. If you asked me in the middle of the night I would have said I didn’t sleep at all, but of course I did sleep, and probably just skimmed into it lightly, surfacing again and again.
Once awake and resolved, I tramped down the the Wright Lakes basin before crossing a ridge and dropping down to Wallace Creek and meeting there yet another unmaintained trail. Like the others I’ve followed in recent days, there were occasional cairns, occasional clear tread, and occasionally nothing. But it was easy, as easy goes, to rise up to head of Wallace Creek, its source, Wallace Lake. The sort-of trail disappeared there but I didn’t mind. I had a steep wall of giant talus blocks to climb. I like climbing these jumbled heaps of talus. The movement is similar to going up stairs, if stairs were made by chaotically throwing down a bunch of different steps and letting them land where they may. A stream rushed underneath the talus, and it was a nice soundscape to climb with. Once I reached the top, I had a long walk up a rocky, tundra basin towards Lake Tulyaino.
Lake Tulyaino lies below Mt Russell, in a tight basin at 13000 feet. No stream feeds it from above, and neither does a stream release its water. It is just a deep deep bowl of liquid snow, and the largest lake of its size at its elevation in the US, which is a lot of qualification but that’s often the nature of being special. It was an eerily beautiful lake, so dark blue it appeared almost black and resonated with solitude. I skirted its southwest shore along deeply suncupped snowfields, and then assessed my next obstacle.
Forming part of the solid wall around Lake Tulyaino is Mt Russell and Mt Carillon. One’s ridge meets the other, and that general place of meeting is the Russell-Carillon Col (13300 ft), a pass that I would have to cross. The bottom half was a straightforward steep talus slope, one of those jumbled, chaotic, and sometimes rickety staircases I am so often climbing. But the upper half of the pass looked a little more like a vertical rock wall. I had heard about this pass, and of course spent much of my over-drawn energy worrying about it, so I had expected to see something that looked frightening and impossible. However, I could see the obvious flaw running down the rock that looked easy to climb. I had a moment of confusion: for so many days I had worried about this pass, yet now that I saw it I was not, in the present, worried at all. A residue lingered though, and I was both worried and not, neither not worried nor worried. The wolf of fear had been getting quite a feeding I think, and as it paced, the bars of the cage rattled.
Suspended between fear and calm, I simply climbed the pass. It took almost no time, and once I was climbing the vertical rock up the cracks and ledges, I felt perfectly at ease and even enjoyed the kinetics of this manner of upward motion.
From the top, I could see Mt Russell, Mt Whitney, Owen’s Valley, Lake Tulyaino. It was a breathtaking place to sit and eat some crackers and salami. I studied Mt Whitney, whose East Buttress I would be climbing (via the Mountaineer’s Route) tomorrow morning, another moment in the future that has held my anxious attention. But to sit there with my little mustard packet and lump of meat and Triscuits, at the top of a climb that was pleasant instead of terrifying, I thought the climb up Whitney didn’t look so bad.
After finishing lunch, I began the long, steep, and very sandy descent off the Col down to Upper Boyscout Lake, the most popular campsite for people preparing to climb Whitney via the Mountaineer’s Route. I dropped around two thousand feet down this sand hill, surfing on my feet and wondering how there is any sand left at the top if so much of it goes down with every traipsing hiker. At the bottom I emptied out my shoes and then immediately went to ask a group of campers what they knew about conditions on the Mountaineers Route, which I knew was holding late season snow. The people I talked to hadn’t climbed yet, were planning to tomorrow afternoon, but said they heard about the snow too and that most people were climbing it with crampons and an ice axe.
I thanked them and climbed around 1300 feet up to Iceberg Lake, the launching point for The Mountaineers Route. Climbers have shaped this place significantly. The lake is in a deep cirque at the base of the east buttress, and is surrounded by rocky hills or steep walls. Over the years climbers have cleared rocks and built protective barrier walls to establish little campsites around the lake. I must say I was delighted to choose one of these delineated spaces, and never before on this trip has setting up camp felt so much like playing house.
I’m camped at 12700 feet, and already, before it is even dark, it is quite cold. Iceberg Lake is well named, and half of its surface is snow and ice. Over the couple of hours I set up my tent and made dinner, the other of half of its surface went from mostly liquid water to mostly frozen, radiating structure in a lovely crystal pattern. I am on the east side of the mountain, so once the sun tucks behind its high peak, the temperature drops quickly over here. I’m sleeping in my rain suit for extra warmth.
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