It’s the little problems that stop progress. How did I lose all my masks? Why doesn’t the USPS Click N Ship open? How did a birthday meal for my son Andy turn into a party for 11? We have to host it today the day before we leave! Now it seems I’m not ready. It’s the lists of gear and food. It’s checking off the list. It’s miniaturizing every item. And the culling. The culling.

Diana and Kellogg volunteered to mail our food to assigned post offices along the trail. The struggle is to guess where we’ll be. How am I fit to do this when I spend most of my day “Where am I?” and “What was I doing?

There are many things to consider, altitude, grade of ascent, weight of pack, strength, fitness and fortitude. My fortitude barely compensates for weak lungs. We start at altitude. We live at sea level. And we will be flown and driven to 5900 feet and immediately begin a 3190 feet ascent to 9090 feet. Will I make any progress on day one?

Many serious road blocks await to reach Patagonia, our first town 51 miles ahead. But we assign it an optimistic four day hike. We’ll have a 4-day food box packed waiting for Diana, or maybe Kellogg, to attach a label on the large priority box teaming with trail food and mail it four days before we HOPE to arrive. The mailing date is March 28th the same day we’ll be dropped off by a AZT shuttle driver. For $150.00 he’ll pick us up from the hotel and drive us to our start. We’ll don our packs, look forward, as though standing before the minister trying to remember our vows, and ponder 🤔 whether the fear and trepidation of committing ourselves to trust in only ourselves is ill-conceived. We won’t look back.

This will be our last day. As we eat in our solitude, a man comes running by in shorts, running shoes and a hydration vest. He was running our 61-mile route a one day run for him. Shortly he was followed by a woman. At 7:30 am they had run about 10 miles.

We went about 2.8 miles on this trail the day before, leaving us a 10-mile day. But not just a 10-mile hike, but one with an altitude gain of 2,372 feet and an altitude loss of 1,732 feet. This will be our hardest day. My recollection of doing this trail five years ago in the opposite direction was that it wasn’t hard. But I ascended 1,732 feet and descended 2,372 feet. Plus, I was 66 and now I’m 71. 

All I can say about this is that the uphill was tough, and the downhill was grueling and unending. If one more person told us we only hadtwo miles to go, we were going to beat them bloody. So, we quit asking how far it was to South Lake. 

We were so sore; we couldn’t really appreciate the parking lot which the trail dumped us onto. We had to drive some distance to have enough signal to text Robert and ask if his invitation to spend the night was still open. He responded that mi casa es su casa. He would only be there for an hour. He was heading out to camp on a ledge because that’s what he does on the anniversary his marriage. His wife died several years ago. He would put out sheets for us and we could sleep in separate bedrooms with our own baths. 

We stopped at McDonald’s drive-thru and ate in the parking lot. We arrived in time to get instructions from Robert and wish him well. Then we went to Safeway for some junk food. 

It was over.

About 3:30 AM the wind whipped the tent until it sounded like something might snap. Then the rain came followed by a large crack of lightning a short two-counts later a deep boom of thunder rolling through Le Conte Canyon. Head lamps came on as other hikers scurried to get their tent flies up. The storm continued for twenty minutes. Luckily the intervals between lightning and thunder grew until we lost sight of the lightning and only heard faint echoes of thunder. Canyons are dramatic stages with crazy quick storms pushing through. And then the quiet dominated.

Our morning revealed no damage not even a branch down. But there was water to sop up and to wring out.  At its worst, it was annoying. At 9:30 am we pack out, this would be our latest start. Eight AM is usual. 

We continued downhill on moderate terrain. At a small creek a guy was squeezing water through his Sawyer. I ask how far we were from the hordes of mosquitoes we had been hearing about. He said the distance was zero. I stood unfazed by bites and truly amazed because mosquitoes always love me. We, too, needed to filter water, but decided to get closer to our turn-off on the Bishop Pass trail which came up a little quicker than we expected. We had questions about a good place to camp. We were heading from a low spot of 8,750 feet out of the canyon, into two major squiggles on the map indicating switchbacks and major uphill.

We had heard that Dusy Valley was good for camping but was over-taken by mosquitoes. We believed that perhaps our mosquito luck was running out, so we should camp before the valley. There was a ranger station a few feet across the trail from the turn off. The ranger appeared to be absent. Then I saw a guy sitting on one of the chairsin front of the cabin. I walked up and took the other chair hoping to ingratiate myself to gain some information about Bishop Pass and water. The only information I gained was how comfortable and utilitarian a chair is. I longed to sit for an hour. 

I took a guess that there was water just down the road. I gathered our bottles and filter. And there it was a large campsite with a stream. Robin came down and helped. And then we stepped on to our last section heading onto Bishop Pass Trail and up the first of two switchbacks. It seemed endless, but at the plateau we had nice level granite. It was a bit early to stop, but we weren’t sure we’d find something this flat and then would end up climbing for another couple hours. We set up camp. I walked ahead and right away found a creek. Beautiful. There was a mix of trees and granite with enough open views to watch the skies.

We left the trees behind at Evolution Lake. Our landscape was high elevation granite dotted with lakes and covered in rock rubble. From back at the Evolution Creek crossing, at elevation 8,486 feet, and at 15 miles from Muir Pass, we had climbed two switchback sectionsand hiked upward continuously. From Wanda Lake, we only had 1.2 miles and a gain of 465 feet to arrive at Muir Pass elevation 11,991 feet. 

What a Morning! To me the surroundings at our campsite looked like Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada, a place I long to visit. We had been so lucky. No rain. No lightning. No snow. Here we go up granite feature with lakes, tarns and cirques as company. And water, plenty of water. 

Robin told me how she her maintained a steady pace no matter what the terrain. Her pace keeps her well ahead of me. So, I tried to find the pace that can keep me going up steadily without stopping. I certainly haven’t perfected it, but I’m improving.

And it seemed in no time we reached Muir Hut. Following the obligatory poses and pictures we were ready to climb down. Looking down the hill, we faced the truth. There were many patches of tricky terrain ahead. Ankle breaking rocks large and small served as detours around unstable snow patches obscuring the trail. Robin does not like downhill, and damn if she didn’t fall. We both were feeling low. Our diets were lacking. So, we stopped and set up the stove right on the trail. We chose to make the only freeze-dried breakfast we had. It tasted like the packaging. We it to our garbage at the bottom of my bear canister.

A young male hiker stopped to talk to us. He had a hiker’s guitar and looked friendly and one with the trail. However, his girlfriend had gone ahead because he was suffering from intestinal destress brought on by his trail food. Also, he had just lost his job as a music teacher. It was an opportunity to develop his next career: freeze dried hummus. It was all about the marketing. This was hiker humus. Look for it soon. 

Back on the trail we faced a snow slide straight down executed by glissading. We faced so many features with roiling, fast water lapping close to our safety. Then it seemed in a mere in a few steps we were surrounded by a bucolic forest. 

The clouds started billowing up and tinging dark. We checked our raingear and concluded it was paltry. If we proceeded, we’d get soaked. It started spitting just as we came upon a camp with many possible sites. It was empty and Robin picked the perfect site under some tree branches. In short time, we were joined by six or seven or ten, who knows, PCT hikers. The rain seemed quelled.Our tent neighbor had joined his daughter for a two-week stint on her PCT journey. When I found out he was a Trust Attorney, I asked if I could ask him some questions. He pulled up a rock and said he’d give me a consultation. Then, to make sure I’d remember his words, he made a transcript on my phone. Trail magic at the end of the day.

We woke in good moods due to sleeping on soft, level terrain, and having water close to us. Plus, even at water’s edge the mosquitoes weren’t bad. Perhaps, our perfectly safe poison,  Permethrin, that we sprayed on our clothing, did, in fact, keep mosquitoes at bay. 

We greeted some PCT hikers passing by our camp at hardy paces. Each one had a bright smile, a golden tan, and killer legs. We became salmon swimming upstream. Surely this direction only created an illusion that we were that slow. We chatted with the friendliest, mostly about my Garmin inReach Explorer Plus. The dang thing hadn’t worked yet. I scanned the northbound hikers to see who was wearing this product. Unfortunately, they all claimed they didn’t know much about them, yet they poked around with my unit and declared that it was at least on. I had this notion that Terry would worry if he didn’t get a signal from my device. What I found at the end of the hike was even though he hadn’t received any signals, he didn’t worry or care. He had total confidence in us. 

I could chock this up to one of the things I worried about unnecessarily. Both Robin and I were eager to check off dangers that lurked. Such as Evolution Creek. This can soak you and everything in your pack, so people were giving us advice as we approached it. You can enter somewhere else. You can remove your shoes. You can hoist your pack over your head. 

It is a wide creek and you do need to wade through the spring run-off. And that’s just what we did, easily. Shoes on. Comfortable temperatures. Not slippery. Ankle deep. No worries. Other then we were in a drought. 

A 67-year-old MN guy, put us on to free food at the McClure Meadow Ranger Station. I mention the guy’s age because he was proud of doing so well at this age. I was proud that he was from MN.

We watched for the McClure Meadow Ranger Station sign. Basically, it was right on the trail, but I walked past it. “It’s right here” Robin said. As we could have guessed, PCT hikers were foraging through the box while encircling it. Who was getting what? What were the choices? It was hard not to feel guilty taking anything away from this group. Robin got a tin of oysters and asked Ranger Victor, a new pal of ours, if he had TP. He gave her a roll. Perfect. Perhaps the oysters might prompt the need for more TP. It turned out of all our food choices we both liked the little bag of olives, and Robin liked the oysters too.

There was a group of six men assembled behind the food box asking about the choice of food but remaining shy about checking for themselves. They were a disparate group. One guy was in his thirties, and one was fifty, the others were approaching my age. Two presented as over-weight broken down guys. They appeared to be unlikely hikers. They left shortly before we did. About 1/8 of a mile later, we ran into them sitting on the side of the trail. We stopped to visit. Pete, the oldest with a brace on his knee, told us they were hiking to a carefully guarded secret destination. It was the deepest canyon in the US. He said they had planned this trip 25 years ago. And finally, they had time to do it. This meant traveling on a mostly cross-country route to Tehipite Dome and down deep into King’s Canyon. Pete was good at piquing my interest. I couldn’t wait to learn more. According to my feeble research on the internet from Spanish Peak to the confluence of the middle and south fork of the Kings River the distance of 8200 feet made it the deepest canyon.

We headed off to the switchbacks before Evolution Lake. We stopped for a rest and the guys passed us slowly except for Pete. He came later. He looked slow but steady and robust. As we move forward, we’d catch the guys who had gone ahead to wait for Pete. They always said, “He’ll catch up.” But we never saw him again and after Evolution Lake, we left them all behind.

At a creekside, we met one of the most flamboyant characters, Vince Connolly, or “Sugar Bon, Bon”. He was a ragging liberal. He said Michelle Obama had it wrong. It’s not, “when they go low, we go high”. It’s, “when they go low, we put our knee on their necks”. He had every anecdote, saying, and slogan modified, polished, and memorized to incite. He was nonstop anti-Trump. It was 15 minutes of major Trump bashing. 

Good thing we were on our way to some to the most peaceful and beautiful tarns on the trail. We were headed for Wanda Lake but mistook the small lake in front as a corner of Wanda Lake. It all worked out fine

I woke at 3:00 am to the sound of a mountain quail. The night had been rife with screaming wind gusts. Now it felt calm and mild. Perhaps it was as warm as the low fifties. I lay until I fell back to sleep. As far as I knew when I woke at 5:19, Robin hadn’t moved all night. I imagined our rock platform and the long view down our ledge had been there for centuries mostly in this same state of repose. This peace was ours.

We had just enough water for breakfast, which is as it should be. Don’t carry unnecessary weight. Despite things seeming as they should be, we didn’t know what we were headed toward. 

The looming of crossing that roaring creek, a river really, was a haunting menace. We knew we must get on the other side. We hiked higher over rocks, big ones, often rolling them unexpectedly. We were almost exhausted of water. All this uncertainty plagued us. Until I turned a corner and there it was: A Bridge. The most exquisite bridge. Cheers. Our trail ended and we walked over raging waters on our first bridge on the John Muir Trail, JMT. Accessible water awaited us. The terrain seemed almost flat. And real camps with totally flat tent sites were along the waterside. We chose a beautiful four site camp to ourselves.

After nine hours of sleep, I was surprised. How did I sleep so long? I lay until 5:00 am assessing my condition. What should I expect out of this day? Can we make it at our current pace? We don’t know the exact mileage for this hike. We had seen both 53 miles, and 59 miles listed for this trek. It would turn out to be 61 miles for us. Naturally, estimation will play a part in our daily expectations. Prior to our start, we had batted around the idea of twelve miles per day. That would get us there in five days. That seemed a bit out of our range. We were predicting 6 or 7 days. Seven days would put us at an 8.7 mile per day pace, and six would put us at a 10 mile per day pace. Our permit was good until June 21st. If we used all that time, we would run out of food. So, I felt a need to evaluate our pace. I figured we’d get faster as we went along, however my uphill speed was slow and I figured with Muir and Bishop passes ahead, they would slow me. 

Robin woke with dry heaves. She didn’t believe she was suffering from any effects from altitude, rather she believed the eggs at Starbucks were bad. Or perhaps it was the restaurant food. I agreed that the food was suspect. But whatever it was, she would need to eat for energy. 

We were in Humphreys Basin starting on an easy downhill without too many rocks or obstructions. We stopped for water and took breaks. I’m sure I was nagging about our daily mileage, when Robin became upset that I felt we needed to finish in six or seven days. I thought it over. I didn’t want to feel I was pressuring her. Nor did I want to pressure myself. So, I told her that we have ten days on the permit and if we go ten days, we go ten days. I’d try not to mention this again. We talked about conserving food. The portions were large, so we could try to share them. She still had no appetite. I think she would have given me her whole meal, but she was satisfied giving me more than my share. 

Our trail started to ascend. We were leaving the water far below. The trail turned rocky, and the pine trees reappeared. We entered Piute Canyon. We remained unsure where the next water source would be. We were also unsure about how the reported “Pine Creek Pass” would impact us. We weren’t going over it, but would we have some switchbacks? Also, we needed to be on the other side of the creek, which was huge and roaring.

So far, we hadn’t seen anything that looked like a tent site. But there it was. On our left with the creek roaring below, was a tent site. On the other side of the trail was a rock fire ring. Of course, you can’t have a fire, and the wind was so strong, no one would even consider it. We did sit on luxurious logs in front of the ring to eat dinner. And surprise a couple appeared. We had considered the possibility that the Zombie Apocalypse had left only us. We were relieved. They said they were with three others who were behind them. The three, Danny, Katie, and Karin, really didn’t seem to be with them. We guess the first two were the zombies. We leap-frogged with the threesome until our last day.

About an hour later, as we were brushing our teeth, a young man came from the opposite direction. He needed water. He left North Lake days ago heading on a short trail to the left of the Piute Trail. He continued cross country to Goethe Glacier and Darwin Canyon. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He seemed desperate, feral, half-crazed. We had no water to give him. We were pretty sure he wasn’t more than two miles to water.

Hikers were walking past our tent as we scraped ourselves out of the bramble and stumble onto the trail. We had unwound from our bags and tent to head up toward Piute Pass. It proved beautiful. The aroma of lodgepole pines and the graceful movement of quaking aspen prompt us to stop and inhale the moment. At the foot of the Piute Crags, the trail followed the creek. The top half of the ascending trail left most of the trees behind and the glacier carved granite benches and the many lakes dominated. We passed Loch Leven and Piute Lake. 

It proved terribly grueling. Robin’s steady pace often took her out of my sight. My push forward would stop me breathless. I recalled the symptoms of altitude sickness and now we both hadheadaches and upset stomachs. As the day progressed our symptoms remained nagging but not alarming. Afterall we were maximizing our exertion level.

The steady increase of hikers began to feel like hoards. Robert and Steve met us as they headed down from the summit without packs, left behind for an easier jaunt to the top. Afterall this is their territory and thus providing them high altitude lungs. Two women of our age were pretty much skipping up the “hill.” They greeted the guys. Granted, they too were unencumbered by packs, which seemed to make it just a walk in the park. They advised Robin to veer left and skirt around the snow to reach the summit. And without much more ado, there we were at the top. Just like magic we stepped down the lip of the pinnacle and left all, absolutely all, of the hikers behind. Along with all the people, our clearly delineated trail was gone too.

Thank God, Paul, Robin’s husband, had loaded the Gaia app on her phone. And even though he failed to give her any training, she patiently poked around on the app until she felt fairly confident she could lead us in the right direction. This wasdefinitely the road less traveled by, so that app made all the difference. This piddly trail did not resemble the highway of a trail on the east side of the pass, so she had to do plenty of deciphering. She was spot on. The entire view that lay before us was wide open granite boulders and benches only lightlypeppered with stands of brush. Luckily, rivers and lakes were plentiful. 

We were so alone, we wouldn’t see another soul during the next 24 hours. 

We erected our tent on a rock slab at 3:00 PM. We found a clump of bushes to hunker under for shade to read, write, and decompressing. Our first freeze-dried dinners were hard to stomach. Robin was really feeling badly. Still at 10,000 feet, I fell asleep before 7:00 PM with a headache.

At 7:30 AM, I loaded my backpack, my walking poles, and other equipment into Robin’s car. At her front door Bear, her dog, barks, and the cat tries to squeeze out. Closing behind the commotion of leaving, we take off for Bishop, CA. Six miles into our 316-mile journey, we stop at Starbucks for coffee and eggs. The eggs tasted suspiciously weird leaving Robin’s stomach unsettled. 

With little traffic, the drive was easy. Highway 108 was scenic, windy and forested and took us down to Highway 395. We stopped for lunch just before the turnoff to Yosemite. Down to Bishop, Siri led us to Robert’s house. His friend was going to join him for an overnight up Piute Pass. This was comforting to us because Robert was going out of his way to shuttle us. It’s nice that he had another purpose, 

We followed the guys for thirty minutes to South Lake. We packed our gear in their trunk and left Robin’s car in the parking lot waiting for our trail exit into said parking lot in eight days’ time. We continued the drive for twenty minutes to North Lake. The confusion of the hastily leaving of belongings and comforts behind unnerved us. We were exiting someone else’s car in a rushed manor. They were off and away as we were still checking our gear and using the outhouse one more time. What had we left behind? Under our too-heavy packs, we struggle for each breath. 

During our drive, the guys consulted us about our experience with altitude. As they ticked through symptoms, Robin told them she had climbed Kilimanjaro. I silently recalled how I suffered last year climbing Donahue Pass which is almost 1,000 feet shorter than Piute Pass. As they listed symptoms, I seemed to have each one. 

There wasn’t much time to dwell because it was later than we planned to leave. My hope in leaving in the afternoon was to lop off a couple to miles before we officially started and to sleep at an elevation gain that took us from 4,150 feet in Bishop to almost 10,000 feet on the trail. After dragging ourselves and packs 1.5 miles, we wanted to just breathe. We ducked behind some trees in poor terrain to pitch a tent.

It was rocky and slanted which caused silent tension between the two of us. Robin had never bought into my idea of leaving early, and now we’re suffering the wrath of a bad campsite. She had implored me to stay in town. I hoped this small jump on our permit would be a big boost to our endurance. I couldn’t take back that decision now.

My friend Robin and I are going up Piute Pass tomorrow. The pass is pictured above. On a training hike, Monday at Nisene Marks State Park, we talked with a bike rider and discovered he was from Bishop. That’s where we’re heading to hike. It’s 190 miles away from Nisene, and there he was. We asked about shuttle buses between the trail’s end and the trailhead a distance of seven miles. He volunteered to drive us if we bought his daughter’s first book which was published just before the pandemic.

Now we plan to see him tomorrow at his house. He’ll follow our car with his to the trail’s end where we’ll leave our car. Then, he’ll drive us to the trailhead. Our car will be waiting for us at the end of our journey. How sweet is that? His daughter’s audiobook is on my phone to be be read to us while we drive.