Jennie Lake

The path rose steadily, five miles and 2100’ up to Jennie Lake. A small and noisy and beautiful stream, Bear Creek, ran along the bottom of the narrow valley, down to my right, shaded by lodgepole pine and douglas fir and choked with deadfalls. The morning was cool and sunny, a relief after the ninety degree heat of Boise, sixty miles to the south. The air was sweet with the smell of the conifers.

I had come up into the mountains to try out another backpack, one Jenifer had sent me from home. It’s smaller and lighter, plus I had culled gear and switched to a lighter sleeping back and cut back on the amount of food…. The weight of the pack was 28 pounds, and the hiking experience heading uphill was significantly different than when I  left Kennedy Meadows carrying 47 pounds….

But the pack wasn’t a perfect fit…. I had the waist belt cinched in as far as it would go, and I needed a little more. I spent much of the hike scheming how I would send it back and exchange the large for a medium; I considered all the different ways I might get a new pack back within a couple days….

Jennie Lake was small and pretty, at the foot of Wolf Mountain, a rocky eminence scattered with patches of snow. The biggest patch, a wide chute of snow, fed the tiny stream that ran down into the lake. Around the lake more mounds of snow lay in the shade of the pines and spruce and fir trees. A western tanager, orange and yellow, appeared in one of the trees just a few feet from me. The hike to Jennie is apparently popular, and there were several well-used campsites around the lake, but I saw no one on my Monday outing.

I took my rest at one of the sites, on the far side of the lake by the inlet stream. Four medium-sized trout swam over the riffle at the mouth of the stream and hid themselves under a shady cut in the embankment…. Packless, I walked up to the snowfield. The snow was littered with broken spruce bows, evidence of winter avalanches. The ground where the snow had recently melted was still torn and muddy, but a bit of greenery was beginning to intervene…. 

Back at the campsite, I sat in the sun and read a few pages of Far From the Madding Crowd, then tried out the water filter I’d bought at REI earlier in the week. It’s the same sort as Swiss Army used to treat a liter of water for me at Death Canyon Creek a couple weeks ago. It worked well. I gave the stove a go, too, since it hadn’t worked the last time I tried, and here also I experienced success. I made a cup of tea and sat down on a log and returned to Hardy, till I had finished the first half of the book. The second half waits in one of the re-supply boxes….

I felt satisfied with the hike and my gear, and I felt optimistic about returning to California and the Sierras and the Pacific Crest Trail…. I’m thinking about leaving Boise on Friday, hopefully leaving the van at Heleen and Tom’s near Bishop (I have to write and ask), then taking to the trail on Sunday…. That’s a tentative plan, but then my plans have changed and changed again over the last month….