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Our overall plan was to get up to the Big Pine lakes basin and remain there until Sunday morning when we would pack back to the truck and head home. Once we got to the basin there would be plenty of scenery and potential areas to explore, while leaving basecamp right in the middle, or packing it with us on a daily basis. This plan was to change though, because of one route-finding mistake.

Once we stepped off, right out of the parking lot the snow was deep. It was still relatively early in the day, so it was still hard from freezing overnight but was largely unconsolidated, which is hard to walk through even with snowshoes. We took an early break to setup a “before” picture right after the first falls, this break was a bit on the long side and hadn’t really been earned, since we were only hiking for about 20 minutes to get to this point, but it did feel good. The sun was warm and the air was cool, the view of the palisades was inspiring and the young day was looking promising overall.

As we hiked on we missed, more appropriately I missed, the critical junction of the trail we were on and the one that would take us up on the east side of the creek we were following. Mistakenly, I identified a pair of ski tracks heading over to the west side of the creek as the trail we should follow. I knew the trail we wanted was on the east side, but since I saw no sign of it we followed those tracks, which appeared to be at least a week old. On the east side of the river, we faced a horrific climb; over just more than 1/10th of a mile, we climbed over 140 vertical feet. Needless to say, at the top of that rise we were both spent.

So, at just over 3 miles and 3 hours into the day we found ourselves well short of my original goal for the first night, but too tired to continue on. We dropped our packs in a grove of trees with relatively shallow snow and took a well deserved break. After a little while we decided to explore the surrounding area a bit to see if we could find a good spot to setup camp. The winds had really been howling that day, so we were looking for a spot that offered as much protection as possible. Leaving our packs behind, we hiked north along the trail we were pioneering, since the ski tracks had long since disappeared.

After a small, very nice hike without the packs we figured that we could move further up in the canyon without too much difficulty. For the most part it was flat up there and as tired as we were, it didn’t look too insane. So after much gnashing of teeth, we put the packs back on and continued on through the snow, which had softened throughout the day which allowed us to sink in even deeper with each step. We only made it a couple more miles before finding an excellent spot in a place called Cienega Mirth. This spot had great access to the creek for fresh water; it was shielded from the wind and was well off the trail (since we had been well off the trail all day long…).

We dug out a tent pit, a kitchen, a bathroom and a shoddy system of trails between each spot and then fired up dinner. After eating there wasn’t much to do as we were both tired, beaten down and completely wore out after our hike up the hill. We got into the tent, got situated, realized the floor we had dug out wasn’t as flat as it could have been but didn’t care enough to do anything about it. We were asleep within minutes.

Friday

Friday morning arrived, right on schedule and we dragged our sorry asses out of the tent and back into the world. Since it would take a terrific amount of motivation and effort to move our campsite into the basin where we had planned for it to go originally, we made a change to the plan. What we would do instead was to just dayhike up through the canyon we were in and into the Lakes Basin to see the lakes, the Palisade glacier, the Palisade Crest and anything else that looked entertaining. Sounded easy enough, no packs on our backs, just snowshoes, camera gear and some grub.

We left camp and followed the river up less than a 1/3rd of a mile and found a summertime Ranger cabin. We crossed the river on a convenient log at that point and found the trail that we were supposed to have been following since yesterday. We followed this trail as far as it went, before it petered out too, there really isn’t much if any traffic up there during the winter, so the trails are quite indistinct.

Eventually, we found 1st lake; saw where 2nd lake was and the general layout of the basin. The Palisades were unfortunately just out of view, behind Temple Crag, the Inconsolable range wasn’t showing us its highest peak, Cloudripper and the lakes themselves were pretty solidly frozen over. Nevertheless, it was a fine spot to stop and enjoy the thin air, clear skies and empty shores of the lake. We were perched on some old structure, but we couldn’t figure out what it had ever been used for. Not too long into our break, we saw the only other human we would see on this trip. His name was David and he was ski mountaineering with his dog, Teton up to Mt. Sill. With his skis on and being able to follow our freshly broken trail he had made it to 1st lake in less than a day and had another four or five miles to go before he’d set up camp.

He broke with us for a bit, and then set off again over the frozen lake. After he was gone, we followed his tracks out onto the lake, took some pictures and started the uneventful hike back. The only thing left to consider was what we were going to do on Saturday. Since our camp was in a canyon, miles from the lakes basin, we only had one direction to go for dayhikes and no desire to move camp up to the basin. The one direction we had to go was how we had just got to first lake. If we wanted to follow our same tracks, that would be no problem, but then we’d just be seeing the same scenery (not that I have anything against any scenery in the Sierra) over again.

In the end we decided that packing up camp and hiking back to the truck to call it an early weekend was a good plan. Along the way home we would travel through Death Valley though, to take a look at some completely different landscapes and experience wildly different temperatures than what we had been through for the last two days though.

So Friday night we took some time to take sunset pictures, none of which really came out (for me at least), had some dinner, some hot chocolate and just relaxed with fresh socks and booties on in the kitchen area. As night came it got colder and colder, so we eventually got into the tent and tried to sleep. I did learn a new trick at this point though, in the past I would boil some hot water and fill my Nalgene with it then put that in my sleeping bag to warm it up before I got in. This time, I boiled water and partially filled up my CamelBak bladder and put that in my sleeping bag. When I got into the bag, I noticed that this worked extremely well as a hot pad on sore muscles and bones.

Saturday

Saturday morning again came on time, we had been in our sleeping bags for exactly 12 hours when we got out and I had successfully used a piss bottle so I didn’t have to gear up, go outside into the howling cold night and piss. Anyway, after those long 12 hours in sleeping bags in the tent we once again moved back into the real world. We broke camp and started following the real trail back to the truck. Along the way we noticed that I missed the trail junction by only 10 or 20 feet. The trail we followed back to the truck had some fresh mountain lion tracks heading in our direction. They continued all the way down to the parking lot, where we were able to get into regular clothes, shoes and relax for a bit.  We never did see the cat though.

We took the drive out to Death Valley, met some interesting people, were afraid of other people and took a hike up the Eureka sand dunes. We then tried to get to Scotty’s Castle, but it was closed by the time we got there. After this we drove back to Orange County.

Photo Album of trip