Day 49

Our watchword today was “the trail is just a tool” (shoutout A. Skurka). Of the 16.3 miles I walked today, maybe 7 or 8 were on trail while the remainder were spent simply navigating to a waypoint by the route of least resistance. Very fun, especially for a big day like today.

As you know by now, I woke up today at 2:30 and was moving by 3:15. Immediately I crossed the suspension bridge over the thundering Woods Creek which sent my balls up into my body.

This was today’s first crossing of a massively snowmelt-swollen creek, and the only with a bridge. The trail steeply turned upwards towards Pinchot Pass, 7 miles and 3700 feet away. If you can do arithmetic, then you’ll notice that the average grade of this climb is over 500 feet per mile. Translation: the climb was hard. The difficulty was enhanced by my frozen feet from the myriad creek crossings, though fortunately none were more than knee high.

The first 5 miles were mercifully snow-free, and on the way we caught up with Pipe Bomb who we would hike with for the rest of the day. The last two were tough, as the approach to the final set of switchbacks was straight up a low ridge and without a bootpack. Once on the switchbacks it was smooth sailing and the three of us reached the pass just before eight.

We didn’t linger so as to maximize time on hard snow. This paid off, as the descent to the lakes below was fast and easy. The second half of the descent, beginning around ten, was through a forest with much softer snow. We opted to descend straight down towards the river, a great choice as it allowed us to pick a more level route to the bottom.

At the bottom, we had a luxurious lunch and decided to do Skurka’s alternate to avoid twice fording the raging King River in the two and a half miles to camp. When we got to the river, Roadrunner and Pipe Bomb decided that the river didn’t look bad and that they wanted to cross. Feeling agreeable, I went along and, after having one leg punch through a snow bridge up to my waist and nearly send me down the river, we safely crossed to the other side.

After marching through knee deep postholes on the other side for half an hour, I glanced over to the other side of the river to see minimal snow cover and Frogger, who slept in two hours later than us, zip by. We immediately crossed and the going got way easier. Though there was no trail, the lack of snow made the scrambling and rock hopping painless. Before I knew it we were at camp, a few snow free patches at 11,000 feet in an otherwise snow-covered valley. Tomorrow we go over the notorious Mather Pass just a few miles away, hoping to go much further to put ourselves in a good position to tackle the long Muir Pass the day after tomorrow.