Tuolomne Meadows (mile 943) to campsite along Waugh Lake on the Rush Creek Alternate (which we’re taking to avoid the smoke from the Lion fire burning west of Mammoth Lakes, and is nearly identical length to the PCT)
Total PCT miles hiked: 1315
Due to our early start Keith (Starman) and I arrived at the Sierras when there was still a lot of snow, and decided it wasn’t safe to attempt a crossing given my skill level. We elected to flip up to northern California and hike southbound (SoBo) back to where we left off near Lone Pine – giving the snow a chance to melt out. During this flip the PCT milage will be counting down, but I’ll include a tally of our total milage hiked so that you can keep aprised of our progress in a linear fashion.
Calories are a panacea. My legs are tired, but no longer leaden, my mood is elevated as we leave Tuolomne Meadows around mid morning. Hiking through a wide flat valley with the Lyell fork of the Tuolomne River cutting a lazy path through the center, it’s aquamarine waters and white sand bottom capture the morning light, capture my attention again and again. Though the sun is already high in the sky there is a gentle, buttery glow to the light, like a summer evening when everything is soft and warm. The sky above us is hazy as smoke from the Lion Fire wafts over from just west of Mammoth Lakes and the PCT, coloring the world orange yellow and nostalgic. The smoke pools at the cul-de-sac end of the valley, the trail taking us deeper into the haze and the world glows like sunset before noon. But never mind that, the trail simply hooks a right turn and begins to climb through the trees, up up away from the valley floor until it is nothing more than a meadow in the distance. Out of everything green and growing and up to the grey granite peaks that thrust into the sky like so many broken teeth, like a fist full of knives. The range of light. A landscape made to be rendered in black and white so as to allow the eye to linger over every shard and snow field. Ansel Adams had it right.
Water flings itself down drops and rocks, splattering to join it’s siblings in the form of creeks that turn to rivers that thunder through Yosemite valley and finally out onto the planes of the Central Valley and into the drinking faucets of San Francisco. An anticlimactic fate for water that melted from snow high in the alpine, flowed through America’s most famous national park only to end up in Mark Zuckerberg’s toilet bowl.
This is the high Sierra. Despite the fact that our maps call everything between Kennedy Meadows and South Lake Tahoe the Sierra, only a third of those miles are essential high Sierra. High alpine lakes that glimmer bright blue over clean white snow. Mountains that are almost too big to exists, all cliffs and dramatic plunges. Land so high and steep almost nothing grows here. There is nothing like it in the rest of California, the rest of the trail. Almost nothing like these mountains exist in the rest of this country.
As if to welcome me to the jagged dreamscape I spot a marmot at the top of Donahue Pass. I see another five in the next few miles – a quality welcoming committee. Let me just put this on record, I love marmots, they’re my favorite high alpine mammal. Looking like a wobbly beaver with a small bushy tail they waddle in an undulating fashion as they make their way across the tundra. It’s adorable. I cannot think of a better way to be welcomed into the most beautiful section of the PCT.
Note: this isn’t my picture, but I wanted to show everybody how cute marmots are, so I stole this pic from the internet.