Day 44 – Kearsarge Pass… Again
Originally published on Mason Hikes the PCT 2017.
Mileage: 0 (7 non-trail miles). We are camped at mile 789.
Since we took an accidental zero yesterday, we needed to get back to the trail today. That meant hitching out of Independence and hiking Kearsarge again. Yay for uphills! 🎉
It’s Fourth of July weekend, so we figured a hitch wouldn’t be too hard, but it turns out that hikers around here aren’t big fans of hitchhikers. After starting to hitch around 8:30 and dancing for every car we saw, we eventually got three people in a car around 9:15. It was decided that Flame and I would stay to find another hitch because we hike the fastest and could catch up.
We tried and tried to get a ride, but our hitching dance wasn’t working today for some reason. We had no success for another 45 minutes until around 10, when some hikers named Ken and Sonya stopped for us with their dog Owen. We threw our packs in the back and drove to the trailhead, talking about the conditions in the Sierras the whole time. They’re planning to start their third JMT hike in about two weeks, so they were nervous about the snow and rivers. We did our best to accurately convey what it was like back there, thanked them for the ride, and started our hike.
Our full bear canisters weighed a ton, but without having to worry about water, our packs were reasonable. We scurried up the trail in no time and caught the others a few miles up. We decided that swimming in the lake was necessary, so we all stripped down to our bathing suits and jumped in the freezing cold water.
Even though we were at a lower altitude than the frozen lakes we’ve been swimming in and it was incredibly sunny today, it was still SO COLD.
After a bit of sunbathing to warm up, we started climbing up to the hard part: snow. We had happily slid down these same trails a few days ago, but now we had to undo all of the fun we had glissading by climbing up stairs in the slippery, wet snow. 😓 If someone can figure out a way to temporarily reverse gravity so that we can glissade uphill, they’ll be a billionaire.
Along the way I met some PCT hikers that knew of Muffin Man, though my trail name’s origin story is evolving rapidly through the grapevine. They told me that an older guy was looking for me to say goodbye because he was leaving the trail after some slips and close calls in the recent mountains and rivers. His trail name is Pressure-D (?), but I don’t know anyone with that trail name, so my guess is that it’s Jim. Poor guy 😕
At the top of the climb, we ran into a ranger named Victor that had just taken a shortcut OVER a mountain to get to the top of the pass, which looked pretty insane. It turns out that he grew up in Virginia Beach, graduated from Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School in 2010, and knew a few people from Norfolk Academy, my old school. Crazy how small the world is.
On the way back down to the trail, I ran into even more people I knew on trail (AHHHH they’re catching up!), including Rabbit, the gracious recipient of my mom’s PCT fruit cake at Hiker Heaven. He thanked me again because he absolutely loved it, and I’m glad he took it off my hands because each piece weighed about 2 pounds and probably had 3000 calories in it, so I couldn’t eat or carry more than one.
We stopped at the unexpected lake with the trail junction sign in it again and Flame took a quick dip while I napped until the others arrived. We worked out logistics and decided that doing Glenn Pass tonight didn’t make a lot of sense, so we found a camp spot, set up camp, and called it a day at around 5 PM.
As much as I love relaxing around alpine lakes, today I was feeling slightly frustrated by the combination of the Sierras and the time limit on my leave of absence from work. I would love to finish all of the California PCT by the time I need to go back to work, but snow, creeks, and resupply have made the Sierras a very slow section. In the past three days, we’ve done about 5 trail miles (14 other miles), which is not a sustainable speed for finishing, so hopefully we’ll get used to the snow and improve our skills so that we can keep progressing forward at a reasonable pace. We’ll be facing some of the most challenging snow and rivers in the trail in the next few days, so we’ll need to be both careful and focused in order to make it to Vermillion Valley Resort with the food we packed out of Bishop, but I believe in us! Tomorrow will be a good test!