Day 50

Today was a big day, the first twenty plus mile day since we hit the snow, ending with a big group at Mile 835.3. The hiking was an interesting mix of technical and very cruisey hiking. Fair warning to my mother (and anybody else faint of heart): there is a paragraph below hidden behind a reveal-me button which you should not read.

We began walking at 3:15 in the moonless pitch-black of another world. After making some serious navigational errors—the highlights are getting cliffed out a quarter mile from the trail (this earned me a bent trekking pole to go with the one I snapped after Whitney) and walking to the middle of a frozen lake before either of us noticed our unstable footing—on the approach to Mather Pass, the climb ended up being technical and fun. After a long arcing bootpack acrosss the entire steep face of the mountain, the tracks suddenly turned straight up the very steep slope—think sixty plus degrees of hard-packed icy snow. After about one hundred feet of this (all by headlamp mind you), Roadrunner and I both noticed a boulder field to our right and decided to try our hands at scrambling instead of painfully jamming our toes into tiny steps chopped in the last few days while risking falling to almost certain death. The scrambling was rarely exposed, fun, and very easy, mostly class two with a few class three moves. Before we knew it we were thirty feet below the cornice which currently forms Mather Pass; a couple swings of my ice axe and I was on the top.

The last picture gives a good sense of the options. Our plan was to meet Frogger and Pipe Bomb at the top for sunrise, so even though they were about forty five minutes behind, we lingered for awhile hoping to see it for ourselves. However, we got up there 5:15, so by 5:40 we were freezing and far less excited about catching the sunrise. This is the best I got.

After the initial descent, it was smooth sailing towards Palisade Lakes, hustling across the massively sun-cupped snow while it remained firm. About five miles from the pass, the trail began descend precipitously and the snow disappeared with it. The next seven miles were a cruise to the bottom alongside the boiling Middle Fork of the King River, returning to sustained desert speeds for the first time since entering the Sierra.

We lunched by the river and decided to knock a few miles off of what will certainly be a long day tomorrow by ascending the first 2,000 feet towards Muir Pass. The valley we walked through was indescribably beautiful—I declared to Pipe Bomb that we were in a crazy place, and he agreed.