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What would Leonidas do?

This trip, like all of them was planned out to be quite unique. Mr. Gant is a world renowned kayaker, he’s guided trips in Alaska and Baja, he’s rescued oil tankers and towed aircraft carriers, he’s done surgery on sperm whales and midwifed for a turtle pregnant with twins. Long story short, he’s good and he has thousands of dollars in his Kayak and associated gear. So for quite a while now he’s been trying to setup a kayak type trip and to be honest I’ve been stalling. One of my fears is deep water, I’ve spent over a year or so on naval vessels traversing the Pacific and other godless oceans across the world and I’m deathly afraid of deep water. I can swim for hours on end, or I could when I was in better shape as long as it’s in a pool. But I can’t even walk out on a pier without trepidation tearing at my heart.

Well, the plan was to get up to Mono lake on Tuesday, camp on the shore paddle around the tufa formations and then on Wednesday morning paddle out to Pahoa island, camp there for the night and awake on Thursday to paddle back to shore and then drive back down to Socal. For regular readers, you’ll know that’s now quite what happened, the best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

The first challenge was loading three kayaks onto one little bitty Subaru, while it rained. Once that was done and we were on our way we had some beautiful views of snow capped Sierra peaks along the way which made for a great drive up to Mono Lake. Once we got there, the temperatures were fluctuating between the low 40’s and high 30’s. We explored for a bit, setup our tents and then launched our kayaks to explore the southern tufa field. It was great, the water was calm, the sky was red with sunset and the tufa were otherworldly indeed.

So, we got back to shore, bundled up a bit more and then lay down in our tents to snore. God knows what time it was but I awoke to the sound of someone outside my tent scraping it. It was Gant, scraping the snow off of the tent. I fell back asleep and when more broke I looked out the tent to see a few inches of snow covering the ground. The lake was choppy with wind and cold, so we decided to puss out and not make the 4 or so mile crossing to the island.

Instead, we drove around Lee Vining and the lake in general. Jared became a proud card carrying member of the Mono Lake Committee and Gant met a new girlfriend in the visitor’s center there. Then we hiked up to Panum crater and listened to the Earth’s deep volcanic rumblings from the rim. We also found a great cache of obsidian. After all this was done we decided that it was too cold, too windy, too choppy and too risky to chance going to the island in the small kayaks Jared and I had. So, we packed up our camp and headed south.

We got to Bishop and caught the 7pm showing of 300, which was a quite entertaining movie at least. After this we continued south to Independence to take part in the hospitality offered at Ray’s Den, a small motel owned by an old friend. We slept and then continued to drive south the next day, we got to Pyramid lake and paddled there for a few hours which again, despite the deep water was quite fun. I’m still stalling on future kayak trips though.

Album of pictures, located here.

Nothing special this month, just tooling around the aqueduct and checking out potential running/biking/hiking areas around here.

Breaching the Kgap, Day 2

Day two began like most do, with a nice little sunrise, though the woods around us were so deep we didn’t get much of a show. We had the first of our many days of oatmeal and raisins for breakfast. After breakfast we packed up and still not all our food fit into our mandatory bear canisters, hopefully we’d run into no bears, and no rangers.

The hike started off downhill to Lone Pine Creek, unfortunately that meant all the more uphill later in the day. It was quite spectacular though, we were still in the lush low elevations with green and granite. On the way down we saw a Mountain King Snake, which was a neat first for me. The other two I was hiking with seem to be low level herpestologists (intentional misspelling) and knew quite a bit about snakes, which I gladly made fun of.

When we finally hit the bottom, we saw our first bridge enabled creek crossing, as well as one of the previous attempts at bridging the creek. LP creek itself was a powerhouse; loud, fast, strong and impressive to watch from 30 or 40 feet above it as it raced below the bridge. At this point, everything in front of us was uphill, very uphill. We were at about 7,500 feet and the goal for the day, Kgap is at about 10,700. So we had our work cut out for us.

So we began the uphill. Along the way passing massive monoliths and un-named waterfalls like you pass parked cars on a city block. Eventually, even the mighty Gant was tired and needed a break. We found ourselves a nice pool to stop at, bandaged our feet, rinsed off in some of the most refreshing water you can imagine and just had fun (picture is confusing, I think Gant has a gun, Jared has a guitar and I have an attitude).

After that, we hiked on. Passing the inspiring and intimidating Angel Wings. Someday, I’ll be back to tackle that one, I can’t ignore that kind of challenge, but I just don’t have the skills or experience for it yet. Anyway back on track, fast forward an hour or so and we find ourselves at another one of the highlights of the trip, the incomparable Hamilton Lake. We all Gant, Jared, Josh (side note, faster shutter speed for action shots, can you tell I’m not a sportsphoto guy?) jumped into this glacial beauty, after which Jared needed more bandages for his feet and Gant needed a nap (side note2, I love having the camera, it allows me to dictate the story, how it happened and who did what, no matter what was really going on).

The only unpleasant aspect to this lake was Jared threatening to get into the lake in the buck, which was doubly funny when some random old guy showed up and jumped into the lake in his tighty blue underwear, complete with holes. To top it off, after that display he got naked to dry off, not ten feet away from us while we were relaxing on a rock eating some lunch.

After this beautiful little spot comes one of the biggest and steepest uphills of the entire trip. At the top is the Kgap and hopefully a nice campsite. So we crossed the outlet of Hamilton lake and began the ascent. It was quite a nice uphill, most of the way we got to look down on Hamilton lake, (we swam right near the big rock slabs on the right side) and one of the waterfalls that feed it. It’s a bit difficult to describe just how imposing this granite scenery and the view overall is up there. This small section of the map is called Valhalla and it truly is inspiring, this was another one of my favorite little sections of the trip, which is why our break here was so long I think. This little area is apparently also problematic for the trail as well. Way back in the 30’s they built a bridge across it, but two years later nature said no and took it down, here’s all that remains of that old bridge. Now there’s a cave to walk through.

Another mile and another thousand feet of gain later we are still hiking. It’s getting to be later in the afternoon, but we are determined to hit the Kgap, despite our numerous lengthy breaks. If you see Jared in the bottom right of this picture, you can follow the trail back about two miles, Hamilton lake is at the bottom of the picture, out of view.

Now that we were really getting up there in elevation, we started to run into snow and that wily Mr Gant can’t not throw snowballs when he sees snow. The other nice thing about getting up there in elevation is that the rarified air lends an air of austerity to the scenery. Precipice lake was mostly frozen over, and the meadows were now nothing but short grasses, but the views were still stunning.

So, when we got to the Kaweah Gap itself, we setup camp and enjoyed a chilly sunset on The Black Kaweah’s western ridge.

Thus ended day two. 9 more miles down, one of the two hardest days on the whole trip done and another beautiful sunset.

Gant, Stan, Jared and I went up on Split.  We all held back Gant, so no one made it to the top.

PS. I broke my finger here.

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

Thursday, October 9th, 2003

After work let out, Eric and I drove to Jarr’s house to pick him up. Jarr threw his gear in the car, he also brought some much appreciated drinks and snacks for the drive and we were off. The plan was to drive up to Grandview campground that night, sleep in or around the car and wake up early on Friday to drive another hour or so north to the Mammoth Lakes ranger station, pick up a permit and get to the trailhead for some backpacking fun. As we got to the town of Big Pine, where the turnoff for Grandview is, we were hungry and realized there is nothing to eat in Big Pine. So we decide to keep traveling up the road to the biggest town in the Owens Valley; Bishop to grab some food.

Bishop is less than ½ hour away from Big Pine so we get there pretty quickly and ate dinner in the coldest Jack in the Box in the world; the thermometer on my watch was reading low in the low 70’s inside that damn restaurant, so we ate quickly and got out of there into the (relatively) warm outdoors. At this point I think we all realized that it would be stupid to drive south again to the original plan’s campsite, since we needed to go north in the morning anyway. So, we figure we can find some desolate area to park the car in and sleep somewhere between Bishop and Mammoth Lakes. The good news is we were right. We turned off the 395 (highway we’d been on since leaving southern California) onto a little highway with a church on it and no streetlights. We found a dirt road a few miles down, located a good place to stash the car and slept soundly until morning came.

Friday

We woke up before sunrise, there were big gravel loading trucks driving up and down the dirt road that we had slept nearby which worked as a very effective alarm clock. After some oatmeal we got back on the road and were at the ranger station by 7:30am, but they didn’t open until 8 and the only ranger there was a fat little prick who wouldn’t issue a permit until they were open. So we took the time to fill up the gas tank, Eric bought a beanie from the Von’s in town before the strike started and we got back to the station right at 8am for our permit. With permit in hand, we got back on the 395 and continued north to Silver Lake and the Rush Creek Trailhead.

When we stepped off on the hike, my pack was just over forty pounds and I think the other two had about equivalent pack weights, though I’m not sure. The first three miles of the hike are intensely steep, without any letup at all; there were few flat spots though we took advantage of each and every one of them. The trailhead starts at about 7000 feet, and by the end of those three miles you are at about 10,000 feet. This works out to an average 19% uphill grade, which was a killer. Up to this point we had passed Lake Agnew, Gem Lake and through Spooky Meadow, into the Ansel Adams Wilderness where we then broke for lunch at a stream where we thought we were at the end of the tough part, HAH.

At this point, Eric and Jarr were both starting to form blisters on their feet. Eric because he hasn’t worn boots in years and Jarr because he had on some socks that didn’t agree with him apparently. Eric starts cutting up some moleskin for Jarr, I relax in my Sling-light and try to figure out why I’m out here hauling all this stupidly heavy gear up a mountain that really could care less about me. We’ve taken a lot of breaks on the way up this point, and this one is the longest of the bunch at about 20 minutes, that uphill really did drain a lot of energy from the batteries.

After lunch we continued on the path, eventually realizing that the INSANE uphill was over and now we are only dealing with terribly crazy uphill/downhill slopes for the next four miles, though once Thousand Island Lake and Banner came into view, it made it all this exertion worthwhile. Along the way we did pass the Clark Lakes, and through some gorgeous Yosemite-esque granite/tree combinations (side note, this area used to be part of Yosemite, but was wanted by the mining companies around the turn of the century, so it was removed from the park by Congress. I don’t mind it at all though, it’s nowhere near as crowded as Yosemite is, matter of fact we had only seen one other person so far today).

So, it’s getting onto about 3pm now and we’ve been hiking for a solid six hours at this point. We are at the East end of the lake; we are planning on camping at the West end, so we still have about two miles to go. Eric’s feet are hurting bad, since he didn’t put any moleskin on his blister points, Jarr’s blisters are doing better but they still hurt and I’m just kinda tired. We take a break at a nice point near the lake, Eric falls asleep on a rock, Jarr walks on a rock path out to one of the islands and after taking some pictures, I followed him out there. We soaked our feet in the cold lake water and relaxed for awhile. Realizing that we only had a few hours of sunlight left, we picked up our packs again and moved on, looking for a campsite.

Along the way we passed one that looked pretty good, it had a fire ring and was near the tree line so there would be some deadfall to burn, plus it wasn’t too close to the trail we were on. The only problem with it is that it was too far away from the base of Banner, where we’d be starting our summit attempt the next morning. So, dead tired, we continued walking towards the West end of the lake and the base of Banner. I had been told there would be quite a few really nice sites in this area, but as worn out as we were, we just didn’t have the energy to get off the trail and look for them, and we just kept on the trail and tried to find something close to it. Eventually, we did find one, it wasn’t anything special, the tents would need to be erected about 2 feet from the trail that people walked on and there was no fire ring, but it was good enough right then so we setup camp. Thankfully we had still only seen one person, a day hiker named Derek who had turned around a couple miles back.

After camp was setup and all the basic chores like gathering water and scrounging some wood were done we started on dinner. Eric couldn’t figure out how to use his can opener, so he had to open his canned food with a knife, while Jarr and I just had dehydrated meals for dinner. The sun set pretty early behind the ridge to our west, but the sky stayed bright for awhile and then the full moon rose which encouraged us to stay up and just relax before trying to fall asleep. The night didn’t get quite as cold as I would have expected for mid-October Sierra highlands, when we hit the tents at around 9 or 10 it was still in the low 40’s or high 30’s. Sitting there, staring up at Banner was quite inspiring; its glaciers glowed in the moonlight, and it’s reflection in Thousand Island Lake was as clear as a mirror. I wanted to make a mental tattoo of this image; I never want to forget how beautiful it was out there.

Saturday

Sometime around 2am I heard footsteps outside the tent. Neither of the other two guys heard it, and I guess Jarr had a little trouble falling asleep after that, sorry Jarr. We never did see it or find any tracks from it, but the footsteps sounded pretty small anyway. We were up with sunrise though a couple hours later, cooked up some quick oatmeal and put together our summit packs with some food, warm clothes and miscellaneous other things that might come in handy and stepped off. Our first goal was North Glacier Pass, the total distance to the peak was about 4 miles and this pass led to Catherine Lake, which was about the halfway point of the hike. From there we would skirt the lake’s south side and travel up to the left of the glacier along the talus field to the saddle between Ritter and Banner, where we would find a route to the top of Banner. By all accounts, a relatively technical day-hike with a lot of rock jumping, we were looking forward to a fun day, at least I was.

We start off good and strong, Jarr and Eric both still have their blisters, but moleskin and duct-tape keep them largely in check. The route up to glacier pass is a huge talus field, there is really no right way up, but I’m sure there are a lot of wrong ways. The rocks are all stable though, so we didn’t have too much to worry about as we jumped from one to the next. This didn’t take too long, once we got to the pass; we saw Catherine Lake, which is a gorgeous alpine lake and is actually quite unnerving to look at. Within feet of the edge of the lake, it drops nearly straight down into some very, very deep and cold water. For some reason, deep water has always made me a bit uncomfortable. I can swim almost all day long, but if I can’t see the bottom of a body of water I don’t like to be near it. Whatever though, it was sunny, a little chilly, we were halfway up the mountain and doing well on time, life is good.

Here comes the tough part. After finding a way up and over to the pass we would take to the Ritter/Banner saddle we start climbing along a very steep talus slope above the glacier. The main problem here is that the talus is unstable, so when trying to take your next step you don’t know if the rock you are stepping onto is solid or if it will slide right down to the glacier. It took us almost 3 hours to travel about one mile, and if you’ve never heard that god awful low frequency rumble that an avalanche, no matter how small, produces, I hope you never do. The source of the sound is nearly impossible to locate, at least it is for me, but it’s something that raises the hairs on your neck in a very primal way. As we approached the saddle that would take us to Banner peak itself, we were still good on time. I had set a turnaround time of no later than 2pm for the summit attempt, to ensure we had plenty of daylight to get back to camp. We still had over an hour left before this deadline and less than a thousand feet of elevation to go.

We were tired though, it was mentally exhausting up to this point, fear does that to you. Jarr and Eric had a couple close calls on the way up to this point and the rock hopping had put a lot of pressure and pain on their blisters. I noticed that my pants had a small tear in them from something I don’t really remember hitting along the way and we decided that today wasn’t going to be the day we hit the summit, so we turned around.

Unfortunately, downclimbing loose talus is just about as difficult as climbing up it and we were tired from a couple long days so we took it relatively slow and safe. On the way down, Jarr and I found a hole in the glacier. We threw some rocks into there to try to figure out how deep it was and to hear the splash when the rock hit the water underneath. I figure (entirely un-scientifically) that the glacier is probably about 10 feet thick, where we were at. When we hit Catherine Lake we took nearly a half hour break just enjoying the view and the afternoon sun’s warmth at about 11,000 feet as our nerves relaxed. Along the way down we were discussing moving our camp a couple miles back towards the trailhead; this would save us time and mileage on the trip back to the car on Sunday which would put us home earlier, plus we might be able to find something with a fire ring. At some point I lost my gloves on the way back to camp, which wasn’t too smart of me. Thankfully the nights weren’t too cold out there, or my hands would not have liked me very much.

After the long hike down, we were back. It had been a terribly exhausting day and to be honest all I wanted to do is sit down and relax for a few hours, this was not to be though, because these other two clowns wanted to move camp, damn them. Jarr and I are pretty fast at tearing down a camp by now; I still have a little advantage in tent takedown time though. Because Eric’s blisters were slowing him down so much he just packed his gear and started to gimp walk out of there as soon as he was done, without waiting for Jarr and me. Once Jarr and I were packed up we followed him, I think this little hike was the toughest portion of the weekend personally, I don’t really know why as it was just a mile or two tops. By the time I caught up to Eric he had found a site, but it wasn’t as good as we were hoping for and I wasn’t about to settle for a mediocre site after busting my ass to find something newer and better. I dropped my pack and moved up the trail, no more than ten minutes of walking later I luckily stumbled into this godsend of a site. It had two fire pits, two tent areas; it was secluded and looked out over Thousand Island Lake right to Banner Peak. It was perfect; we setup camp there, grubbed on some dinner and relaxed around the fire for a couple hours before going to sleep.

Sunday

We set are alarms and woke up at about 5:45am, packed up camp and hiked back to the car. We slogged out to this point after seven hours of hiking on Friday, on Sunday, even as tired as we were we made it back to the car in just over four hours. At the trailhead we cleaned ourselves up a bit, and started the long drive back to Orange County. We didn’t stop at the rope swing off the 168 because there were a bunch of cars already there and it looked a bit crowded, we decided it would be too much of a hassle. That sucked, that rope swing is one of my favorite things to do after a weekend, the Owens River water is refreshingly chilly, but not so cold that you don’t want to jump in. It washes off some of the dirt, stink, grime and oil from a trip and wakes me up for the drive home. What a shame it was crowded.

Epilogue

Overall though, it was a good trip. None of us had seen this section of the Sierra, and we were all amazed with how beautiful it was. There was no one to be seen, except a group of three Marines from Bridgeport rappelling down Banner, a couple other campers around the lake on Saturday and the day-hiker on Friday. We got close to the peak, and found a perfect campsite for the next trip out there, who’s interested?

Album of most of the pics from this trip