Day 42

Sublime is the word of the day. Looking through today’s pictures (I took 68), I am struck by the trite fact that the pictures fail to capture the beauty of my surroundings. Alas.

I woke up at 3:30 for a 4 o’clock start with Roadrunner and Beer Run. I slept so well last night that this was no shock to my system, and I was doubly content as we walked around the knee to waist deep postholes probably made by our friends the evening prior.

By 5:15 headlamps were off and I was enjoying the alpenglow over my second breakfast—yogurt covered pretzels, cashews, golden raisins.

From the start until we climbed up and past frozen Chicken Spring Lake, we were walking uphill on frozen snow, so it was very easy going. Entering the Golden Trout Wilderness this morning, I truly felt like I had reached the High Sierra. Here’s some photographic evidence.

Soon I was descending into Sequoia National Park, the first NP the PCT goes through. It got prettier. I was alone because I had a double poop morning, so I decided to take a major shortcut across a frozen lake. This required a steep glissade, the first of many today. Fortunately I got by unscathed and ended up half a mile and a few hundred feet above my friends. From here, only about 8 am, we encountered our first soft snow as we descended a north facing but shaded slope towards the beautiful Rock Creek. We weren’t quite postholing so it went by pretty quickly. At the creek, we brought the party up to at least twenty strong. Though I planned on a quick lunch, there was just too much fun to be had—cold plunge in the creek, using Beer Run’s fly rod, burning my thighs in the sun, and eating far too much food to make the climb up to the base of Whitney enjoyable.

The beginning of this climb sucked, but soon I was hiking with Kiki, the Irish yogi who we caught up with at the creek, and I started to enjoy myself once again. The environs were of course off the charts pretty. Soon we caught Beer Run, Tuah, Giuseppe, and Roadrunner at the top. We strapped on microspikes and began the long descent to a lake (which we would cut across) and then a short climb up to Crabtree Meadow, the traditional Mount Whitney Base camp for PCT hikers now that camping at Guitar Lake is disallowed.

The spikes proved useless as the snow on this east facing slope was extremely soft when we began (~12:30). Instead we slid on our butts and tried to avoid postholing the flats.

On the final glissade of the day I ripped my calf open on someone’s old and frozen posthole, so I didn’t escape unscathed.

Two river crossings later we made it to Crabtree Meadow, one mile and change on a side trail from Mile 767.5. The place turned out to be a total zoo, with at least 30 through hiker camped out and hoping to summit Mount Whitney tomorrow. The scene was super fun, and my evening ended with a surprise encore performance from Kiki through excellent yoga. My alarm is set for 1 AM!