I slept in a vacant site next to the backpacker’s sites in Red’s Meadow Campground. There are so many John Muir Trail hikers resupplying at Red’s that there wasn’t a flat spot left to pitch my tent in the backpacker’s site, and I wandered out among the RVs and car campers to find somewhere else. I arrived at dusk and would be out of the site shortly after dawn, as invisible a visitor as I could be. For sleeping in a campground, which can sometimes be loud and uncomfortable, I had a peacefully quiet night, a pleasant departure from the smoke-tortured anxiety fester of the night before. I did wake up very wet though. True fact: lowland meadows often condense heavily overnight, and Red’s Meadow is at a modest 7600 feet. I gingerly packed it all up at 6am and went back to Red’s Cafe for a hot and shockingly expensive breakfast.
I spent the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon posting to the blog. There were, of course, technical difficulties, including my phone maxing out its storage capacity and apps spontaneously aborting their tasks, but by 2p I had made all the posts, done the last of my resupply chores, and was heading out of the lowlands to climb back up to timberline, that ephemeral seam between forested slopes and rocky high country.
For several miles I followed trails east and up, toward a long section of the Sierra Crest known as Mammoth Crest. The trails were well graded and I greedily inhaled the ample oxygen of lower altitudes as I climbed. At Mammoth Pass, I left the trail and cut cross country to the south, aiming for a wide sandy gully that would grant me admittance to the higher Sierra Crest above. At first the climb up the gully was only hard because it was very steep, but once I was in the sand, the climb took on a particular brutality that seems unique so far on my trip. The sand there is very soft, pulverized pumice, the slope is very steep, and the two produce ample backsliding and ankle aching. My feet, after a grueling long while of this, ached more than they have yet on this hike. Some old posterior tibial tendinitis in my left ankle flared up, and still is irritated even lying here in my tent. But, all horrible uphill sand slogs come to end. After tedious trudging, I arrived at the crest, and was able to spend the next several hours with aerial views uncommon outside of an airplane. The Ritter Range was slowly receding behind me, haze making the intervening miles feel thicker. They looked to be under a storm this afternoon, and I was glad to be beyond their forbidding and dark rocky ridges. For a place with which I was once so intimate, they feel very far away now. I am headed south. Into new lands.
After undulating on the crest, at first cross country, then on a use trail, then on the Deer Lakes trail, I eventually dropped down to the northern Deer Lake, where I am camped under towering walls of the Sierra Crest. There is no wind, no sound of rushing water. It’s so quiet that I heard a faint whistling sound and thought it was voices carried from far away, and it took a careful pause before I realized I was only hearing the sound of my own breathing.
My bag is heavier than it was yesterday, my body a little more worn. The next couple days are, according to Roper, supposed to be gentle, so perhaps I’ll find a little rest within the efforts.
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