Month: June 2015
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Gettin’ Buzzed in the Sierra
One of the weirder aspects of hiking in the southern Sierra: about a dozen times per day, you’ll hear a really loud noise, look up…and, if the sky is clear and you look in the right direction, see a pair of F–16s blazing past really, really fast. (More often, though, you look up and see…
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Day 68: Without Words
Today was the most beautiful day of hiking of my entire life. That’s not exaggeration, that’s simple truth. I almost don’t want to even write about it, because it was so perfect. I want the photos alone to tell the whole story. (If you click through to only one set of photos at the bottom…
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Day 67: Welcome to the Golden Staircase
Our days are absolutely defined by passes: going up, being on top, and coming down them. They’re our landmarks, our goals, and our nemeses, all at once. This section of trail has a mountain pass every 10–30 miles; most passes are at or over 12,000′, while the valleys in between range from 8,000′ to 10,500′.…
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Day 66: Amazing, Exhausting Mountains
It’s incredible how much more tiring it can be hiking up and down these Sierra passes compared to everything we’ve done before. We’re doing two-thirds or three-quarters of the mileage we used to do, yet end up utterly exhausted at the close of the day. Part of it’s quantifiable: we climbed 3,600′ today to reach…
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Day 65: Back Into the Beauty
The stretch of trail we’re entering now may just be the most beautiful backpacking I’ve ever done in my life. (The PCT follows the JMT — the John Muir Trail — for the next roughly 200 miles, and we’ve hiked the JMT, so I’ve been here before.) We’re camped tonight at Rae Lakes, three incredibly…
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Day 64: This Program Temporarily Interrupted
Hi, folks — this is just a brief note to let you know that we actually ended up returning to Bishop for a couple of days for reasons beyond the scope of this blog. Everybody is perfectly OK, nobody was hurt, nothing to worry about. We’re headed back out on the trail tomorrow, and eager…
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Day 62: It Sounded Like Thunder
It sounded like thunder, only it just kept going on and on for a full minute or so, just after we’d made camp for the evening. It took us a few moments to realize what we’d just heard: part of a mountain falling down! The Sierra are full of faces that are just loose scree…
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Day 61: When They Say Small-Town, They Mean It
Independence, California is a very small town. Within one day, we’ve walked the entire length of the town, and, I think, done pretty much everything there is to be done. It has three restaurants: one is open for breakfast and lunch, one is open for dinner (and oh, it’s a weird one), and the other…
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Day 60: Mountain Spectacular
Even if you don’t normally look at the photo gallery I add to the end of every post, take a look at this one. (Hover over one to see a bigger version; click or double-click to go to Flickr, to see the full-size version.) Some days the mountains make you hold back, like yesterday —…
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Day 59: Judgment Calls
Tonight, we’re only eight miles from where we camped last night, unexpectedly — and gladly. While we were planning to go over Forester Pass, the highest point on the PCT, today, and yet tonight it still remains nearly five miles off. Instead we made camp at something like 3:15 PM — incredibly early — and…
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Day 58: The Most Epic of Days
Today, I felt like more of a hiking badass than ever before on this trip, or even in my life. We climbed the tallest mountain in the continental U.S. through snowfields and ice on rocky ledges, hiked for 15 hours straight, and walked 23 miles while ascending and descending over 5,000 feet each. As Bucket…
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Day 57: Anticipation
If there’s one word for what I feel these days, it’s this: anticipation. Anticipation because I know exactly what’s coming next — we’re about to get to Mount Whitney, and, with it, hit the John Muir Trail. Bucket and I hiked all 220 miles of the John Muir Trail in 2012, and so we both…
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Day 56: Up and Down the Sierra (and Up, and Down, and…)
We’re camped above 10,000 feet for the first time on this trip these past two nights. In fact, we’re only 40 feet higher tonight than we were last night. Yet if you think that means we had a flat, easy walk today, well…yeah. No. Now that we’ve made it to the Sierra, the trail just…
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Day 55: I Found It!
Mile 712.76: 36.14393 N, 118.14433 W, 7962′. This is where the High Sierra begin. You come over a pass, make your way through a small pine forest, and then, as you exit the forest, you’re suddenly in a spectacular High Country meadow like only the Sierra have. It goes on for miles and miles, grass…