Jodag.NET

Friday September 19, 2003

Jarr, Lan and I are leaving Orange County for Inyo County and the White Mountains; it’s about 8:30 pm when we get on the road. The drive up was largely uneventful, except for the blown up 18 wheeler on the side of the road outside of Adelanto. We arrived at Sierra View around 2:00 am, Lan and Jarr both used the last bathroom – I use that term loosely, that we would see for the next two days. Standing around in the cold, dark, lonely night I realized I don’t really like standing around alone on dark and cold nights in the middle of nowhere. As soon as they came back, we continued driving in Jarr’s Saturn on the relatively well maintained dirt road leading to the locked Barcroft gate and arrived right around 3am, woke up quite a few of the people who had arrived before us and were sleeping comfortably with our headlights and we decided to sleep in the car – it was about 40 degrees outside.

Saturday

So, three hours later it’s 6am and we are awake but tired. I notice that Jarr is sleeping outside now, and sometime during the night Lan had tried sleeping outside as well but retreated into the car again at some point. Since we didn’t have a really tight schedule for the day it didn’t matter really what time we left the car, we fell back asleep for another two hours. Upon awaking for the second time that morning, we fire up breakfast and make some final adjustments on our packs, looked up the steep incline that was the start of the hike and began.

The plan was pretty simple; hike out about 5 miles on Saturday, setup camp somewhere, sleep for the night and awake on Sunday for a nice early and easy summit bid then hike back to the car with much lighter packs. This trip would allow Jarr some time to check out his new gear – tent, sleeping bag, pack. The slow pace of the hike would hopefully allow Lan a little more time to acclimate to the higher altitudes – the hike starts at just above 11,000 feet and ends at 14,246 feet and I just wanted to get out and backpack; it had been a pretty weenie summer for me.

So, we begin with much courage and joy in our hearts, it was just about 10am and the sky was as completely clean of clouds. In the Owens valley, about 7,000 feet below us the temperatures would reach into the 90’s during the day. At our elevation the temperature wouldn’t climb above 70, though it felt warmer than that because of the effort involved in carrying 40+ pound packs for miles in that high and dry environment. About 3 miles into the hike we reached the telescope on the ridge above the Barcroft station. Here we took a nice little break and talked with one of the egghead astronomers who was setting the observatory up for winter use. He said that Barcroft would be manned all winter long, which is an interesting piece of info for me this winter; I’d like to do a true winter ascent of the peak, and possibly sneak in the first snowboard descent of White Mountain as well. If there is someone at the station this winter that slightly increases the safety factor of a trip like that, since the Sierra View gate is usually closed and locked in November, it would be roundabout a fifty mile round trip to the peak and back. We’ll see where that plan goes…if you are reading this and interested, let me know.

… back to our story. After the telescope, we hiked another mile or so and plopped down for a lunch break just before the second big uphill stretch of land. At this point we had been traveling for 3 and a half hours and had covered just less than four miles. We fired up the stove, and boiled water for our Mountain House dehydrated meals and ate as we saw the first batches of people coming down from the peak for the day. After eating, with warm, full bellies and a friendly sun above I fell asleep in my chair, Lan dozed off on his Therm-A-Rest and Jarr walked around the area. After about a half hour of this, we got back on the trail and slowly hiked up the long, very long, incline that leads to the saddle before the peak.

This is where Lan really started to lag behind. He started feeling a headache, and his feet were just starting to hurt here. He has new boots, very nice Asolo 95’s, like Jarr, but neither of them has much experience hauling heavy loads on foot, so their feet were just sore I think. We ran into a few more people coming down off the peak, those early birds that we had woken up with our arrival at the gate earlier in the morning. Thankfully they didn’t really know we were the ones who had blazed into camp with headlights on and exhaust growling out of that 4 cylinder mice eating monster of a Saturn. As we finally trudged to the top of this ridge, we were rewarded with a spectacular view of the Silver state, Nevada. From our height of almost 13,000 feet we were looking down on damn near the entire state. No mountains high enough to block our views for long, no lush green areas or snow capped peaks like looking to the Sierra Nevada range to our west. It’s really quite desolate, and beautiful in its own way though.

So, as Lan caught up to us it was just about 4pm and we had a couple more hours of sunlight left. We were looking into the final summit uphill, and a small valley (saddle) in between where we were and where the final push starts. God that’s a steep uphill, steep, short and ugly to be honest, I don’t know who or why people would want to go up there. Figuring we could make it through the saddle and possibly make it to a campsite I had in mind about half the way up on the mountain we moved on. Lan’s feet were really hurting though and his headache wasn’t going away so the pace wasn’t too spectacular. As we got to the bottom of the saddle and started going up it was clear that we wouldn’t make it to the higher campsite I had in mind so we started searching around for a spot suitably flat, rock free and hopefully a nice view where we could setup camp. What we wound up with was a rocky, slightly slanted campsite with a great view instead. After clearing out the sharpest of the rocks we setup tents and made dinner, again Mountain House meals.

The sun dropped behind White Mountain and the temperatures quickly dropped. While the sun was shining down on us, the temps were in the 60’s, no more than half an hour after it had fell behind the mountain the temps dropped down to the 40’s and kept dropping. At this point, Lan and Jarr wisely decided to go to sleep, neither of them seemed interested in playing catch with the Nerf football I brought and there wasn’t too much else to do. Asleep they went. I waited around, I kind of wanted to see the stars come out that night – it was clear, cold and we were miles from any ambient lights so the night sky should put on quite the show. But as the sun really set and it began to get a little colder, darker and lonelier I remembered that I didn’t really like being cold, dark and lonely so I went to my tent to fall asleep too.

Sunday

For some odd reason, we were all awake around 2am and had a little conversation about nothing. Then we all fell quiet, and struggled to sleep on the slanted, slippery slope we were on. A Therm-A-rest and sleeping bag really are quite slick, we all noticed ourselves slipping down to the bottom of our tents at various points through the night. I don’t think any of us managed to get any good sleep for the second night in a row, though I would say I was personally more comfortable in my tent than I was in Jarr’s car. At about 5:40 or so, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep and it was pointless to try. Looking outside I saw the eastern horizon smudged with sun, I had about 40 minutes before it was due to come up and it was cold as ass out there. I decided to get dressed in my tent, slowly. After about 15 minutes, I was ready to leave the relative warmth and watch the sunrise. As I was sitting out there waiting for the sun to come up and bring me some warmth, I realized that I need thicker pants – I’ll try to take care of that before the next trip.

So Jarr gets up about twenty minutes later as the sky gets brighter not a bit warmer yet, just brighter. Looking forward to a very long day – hitting the peak, packing camp, hiking back to the car and hopefully getting back to OC at a reasonable time we fired up the stove to cook some breakfast and Jarr woke Lan up. I came to the realization that I need to pressurize my stove a bit more at elevation. I was used to priming it, then giving it an additional 5 or so pumps and letting it take care of the rest. After attempting to boil the water and failing after about 10 minutes I gave it 10 more pumps and the water was boiling in less than 5 minutes. I’ll make a note of that on the fuel canister before the next trip so I can’t possibly forget again.

It was just after 7am; we were fed and had our camelbaks packed for the 1 and a quarter mile hike to the peak, we set off. Lan said he was feeling better than he was last night, Jarr seemed to be doing well and I felt good too. Our daypacks were unbelievably light compared to the loads we were hauling yesterday so everything was looking good for the day. Within fifteen minutes of stepping off, Lan realized he wouldn’t be able to make it to the summit within a reasonable amount of time. I’m glad he was able to recognize this early; it probably saved a lot of time and potential trouble later in the day. He went back to camp to pack his stuff and start heading back to the car. Since he was moving quite a bit slower than Jarr and I, I figured that we would catch up to him pretty quickly after we hit the summit. I’m sure that with a little more training, hydration and possibly time Lan will be able to make the summit next time though.

At this point, Jarr and I started hauling ass up the final mile of the trail. The sun was starting to warm us up and we made very good time to the peak, just about an hour to get up there. We spent about half an hour up top, enjoying the view, reading some of the older summit log entries and just relaxing. One of these days, I’m going to go up there with enough time to just sit down and read every single one of them. Jarr added his entry, I added mine, and we took some pictures and looked for Lan. From the summit we could see our campsite and by the time we started down the hill Lan was packed up and on his way back, hiking up the saddle’s southwest side. Jarr and I ran, fast all the way down the hill to our camp. It took a bit less than twenty minutes to get down that hill after slogging up it for about an hour.

Now we have to go about 6 miles back to the car. We got to camp just after 9am and started to pack it all up. We were on our way back, packs just a little bit lighter than they were on the trip out here by 9:45. We called Lan on the radio and figured out where he was, started walking and caught up to him just over an hour later on the uphill heading back to the telescope. From this point back to the car is just over 3 miles and for the most part we stayed together for this final hour of hiking. On the way back we ran into the biggest rabbit we’ve ever seen, this thing must have weighed in at 30lbs or so, it was just massive.

Driving home we of course stopped at the rope swing by the bridge over the Owens river and jumped in to wash off the stink and sweat of the last day and a half. We rolled back into OC at around 6:00pm and that was that. Good trip overall, I think Jarr learned a little about his gear and how to use it more effectively, and hopefully Lan learned the need for conditioning. I learned being dark, cold and lonely is not cool.