Ten days is a long time to write about, so I'll spare you the gory details. We entered the Sierras over Bishop Pass and spent the first five or so days working down to Cedar Grove, in Sequoia National Park (proper, with a road and everything). Here, the kindly folks at the Cedar Grove Pack Station (more on them later!) brought us our food drop so we could begin the southernmost 40 miles of John Roper's masterful Sierra High Route, a 200 mile long route through the Sierras (duh). What's so special about this? Well, it's all off-trail. Once you do the 6000-foot gain over 8 miles to the first lake, you rarely drop below 10,000 feet. By the way, the gain is a real nasty lady, it's all in the hot sun and it's dusty as heck.
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| Dusty after the long ascent. |
Since the first half of our trip was on-trail, let's sum up and say it was nice. We hiked, sometimes very little. We swam, often for very short amounts of time. We ate salty dried food. We lazed in the sun. We read books and enjoyed the amazing geology (well, I did).
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| Geologic contact between two magmas. With enclaves! |
So the Roper Route. We didn't have as much time as we would have liked, so we really had to push to finish it. Off-trail hiking, even in the Sierras, is slow. Navigation is rarely a challenge, but the easiest route is rarely the straightest, of course you never figure this out until it's too late.
Ennyway. We resupplied with our food bucket in Cedar Grove and hung out with some horse packers, who it turns out were going to the same lake as us. Orin and Woody, the packers, asked us over for a beer later that night when we all got to the lake (as Woody put it, "Backpacking is living, horse packing is living like a gentleman").
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| The mules had a long day too. Yes, that is our tent in the picture. |
So the horrible hike up 6000 feet ended with some Jack Daniels (from a 1-liter flask) and a Keystone and great company. We were really sorry to leave the next morning for our long day off trail.
So a bit of prologue. Nearly the entire purpose of this adventure was to reach the Lakes Basin, a remote, beautiful basin in the middle of the park. No longer reachable by any trail (since 1938), it's supposed to have some of the most beautiful lakes of the high Sierra, including Lake Marion. This small lake, ringed by high cliffs, was named after Helen Marion LeConte, one of the early explorers of the high Sierra. Our goal was to stay at this lake. The hike was long, but around 5:30-6:00, we made it to the lake. Finally, we reached the pinnacle of Sierra Nevada Lakes.....and it was hell. The bugs were horrendous. Mosquitos and ants attacked from both fronts and it was all we could do to eat dinner and dive into the tent. Ah well.
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| Marion's plaque at her lake. |
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| You all thought that wedding vow was a joke. |
A few more days of relatively benign off-trail adventures (including one heart-stoppingly steep descent) and we found ourselves back at Bishop Pass and on our way back to Las Vegas.
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| The final, and most beautiful pass of our off-trail trip, Potluck Pass. |
