Streams and lakes and one high pass

Two miles in the early morning along Piute Creek brought me down to the Pacific Crest Trail, mile 856, just at the northern border of Kings Canyon National Park. Or the John Muir Trail. The PCT and JMT are synonymous for most of the latter’s length (the JMT runs 211 miles from Yosemite Valley south to Mt. Whitney). Some people say they are walking the PCT, most refer to it as the JMT.

Three miles north I pulled into Muir Trail Ranch just to the west of the trail. It’s a rustic mountain “resort” where people pay a couple hundred dollars a night to stay in old log buildings, ride horses, and maybe do a little hiking. PCT hikers can address re-supply packages to the ranch and they’ll bring them in from the nearest post office for $55 each. There’s no road to the ranch: visitors take a boat across a lake and then either ride horses or walk several miles up to the ranch. An old 53’ Dodge Army truck is used for carting in people’s gear and hiker packages from the lake; it looks like something from the television show MASH, and apparently it’s been in service at the ranch almost since the Korean War.

The hiker services are definitely a minor concern at the ranch, and hikers are kept at arm’s length, but between the employees’ dorm and the work huts and corrals there is a small separate building for storing the hiker packages—buckets actually, mostly the five-gallon variety. On their website MTR says that cardboard boxes won’t survive the trip.

I came through a gate and a passing young woman said, “I’ll get Betty for you.” Soon a small elderly woman with a hump and a cane, in a windbreaker and ball cap, appeared, shuffling along at a glacial pace. She didn’t look at me but went right to the package building, and I followed. She opened the door with a key and with her back to me said, “Name.”

I told her and she spent a not small amount of time searching through the shelves in the dark, windowless shack. I said, “It’s green,” trying to be helpful, but she didn’t seem to notice. When she finally came out, pushing my bucket along the ground with her foot, she said, “How do you want to pay for that?” She spoke slowly and with little affect, as if she’d had a stroke at some time not too long ago. I said cash and handed over the money, and she had me sign my name in a notebook.

Beside the shack was a small red metal box and inside a power strip where one could charge cameras or other devices. Mine were still in good stead. On the other side of the small structure, underneath a stained and rickety four-pole canopy were a dozen five-gallon buckets, each with a hand-lettered masking tape label on the lid. In these one could place any extra items, such as “home-packed food,” packaged food, clothes, toiletries, and so on. Since I’d carried in a couple days’ food in my bear canister, I didn’t need everything in my re-supply bucket, so I made contributions. Some couscous (I discovered last time out that one package makes two dinners not one), packets of tuna, even a few energy bars. Some low-budget hikers come in with a plan to raid the free buckets, but it can be hit or miss, depending on whether givers or takers have preceded you.

I sat at an old picnic table and re-packed my gear. Several families passed by me on the way out for day hikes, and the fathers and mothers stopped to quiz me about my pack and my plans, while their pre-teen children waited impatiently.

The ranch was picturesque, and a nice oasis of people and sort-of civilization in the mountains, but I stayed only an hour. Before I left I hung my pack on a scale attached to the bucket building: 34 pounds. Which was a lot more reasonable than the 45 or 46 I started with from Kennedy Meadows in the middle of last month.

But still no insignificant amount to carry on the uphill portions. The path climbed steeply for most of the next seven miles, up to Selden Pass, and by late morning it was hot and growing hotter.

I met numerous other backpackers over the course of the day, thirty-three all together, all of them going south. The classic JMT hike is north to south, while most PCTers go the opposite direction…. I wasn’t really in either camp, but more the latter than the former. It seems most north-bound hikers I had met and would meet on the PCT were thru-hikers, meaning they had started at the Mexican border and at least hoped to reach the Canadian. But a few were like me, what are called “section” hikers, doing a portion of the PCT rather than the whole thing.

The hiking was strenuous but one reward was a spectacular landscape. Big trees, pines and cedar, small and fast streams, glacial lakes, wide open terrain above treeline…. At Little Sanger Creek I stepped across on the convenient stones, and sat down on the far bank to soak my hot feet and dip my bandana in the cold water and wash my head and face. Then I used my new filter to fill my two bottles…. At the outlet for the first of the Sally Keyes Lakes I crossed on a fallen log and paused to admire the smooth water and fringing conifers, the rocky slope on the upper end at the foot of a conical peak.

The trail kept climbing, and I soon passed the last of the trees, then Heart Lake, a cold, and stony and lonely tarn…. The last mile and a half to the 11,000’ pass was accomplished on tight, steep switchbacks up a gully to a narrow defile….

I hadn’t seen anyone for a while, but a young woman was perched on a large boulder at the pass and she wanted to talk. She was another sort of hiker, local and not interested in the linearity of the PCT/JMT.  She was out on her own for ten days, mostly off trail, exploring side valleys and alpine lakes, climbing peaks, sticking to the highest country mostly. Her name was Joanna and she was about thirty. She had perfect teeth and she gave a deep, breathy laugh after every sentence she spoke, and she talked without stopping for twenty minutes. She told me she works HR at Sugarbush, a ski resort near Tahoe. I said, it must be your slow season. “No,” she said, “but I took off anyway,” and she laughed.

She told me she planned to camp down at Heart Lake, but first she was thinking of climbing the ridge to the south of the pass, up to a peak.  I admired her sort of hike more than my own, and I half-considered suggesting I go down with her to Heart Lake and join in on her explorations. I thought she might be up for some company, but in the end I was too shy to ask and not sure anyway I wanted to commit to an evening of her chattiness…. I looked north over the pass, and the country looked good, and so I headed on down….

Below, Marie Lake spread over most of a large rocky bowl, the water broken up by long thin peninsulas and numerous islets. A few small trees grew scattered about the bowl, but pale gray granite dominated. Down by the lake I rested in the shade of a small copse and thought about camping but couldn’t stop myself just yet…. I descended down along Bear Creek several miles, dropping a thousand feet, and had to wade across at a mosquitoey crossing (the first ford where stones or a log didn’t offer a way across; usually one has get his or her feet wet more often on the PCT/JMT, but water is low because of the paltry snow totals of the past winter)….

Downstream a few more miles, at 9000’, I finally stopped for the day, and put up my tent next to the noisy creek in the shade of a stand of lodgepole pines. I’d come twenty miles and I was worn out.

I still didn’t break out the stove but instead spread peanut butter on a tortilla, mixed up a mug of powdered milk, and ate one of the last precious fresh carrots. I perched up on a slab of rock by a small falls and brushed at the mosquitoes as I ate…. Afterwards I washed my feet in an eddy by the falls and then got into the tent to evade the bugs and because I was exhausted. I didn’t need to use my headlamp, as I put my book down and fell asleep before dark.