20240702 Kennedy Meadows to Bishop (mile 830)
I am, at heart, a sea-level boy. I have lived nearly my entire adult life within an arm's reach of the ocean, never directly on the coast but always unconsciously dictated to by the tide.
It is a big change to come to the mountains, real mountains, where for days and days the only real direction is up. Even in the lowermost valleys we rarely descend below eight or nine thousand feet, and climb passes above twelve thousand feet with alarming regularity.
As we rise up the scenery transitions - gone is the desert scrub and chaparral. Instead we have great sequoias and pine trees. There is water and shade, and mosquitoes are everywhere as soon as the wind drops.
The afternoons are cooler, and the hiking hours longer as a result, meaning you naturally get up later and stop earlier. The night-hiking of the desert is briefly over, and you enjoy the more natural diurnal rhythm of a daytime walker. Of course, the chilly evenings sat stationary need filling, and the more innovative among us make their own entertainment (a chessboard crudely drawn on a sheet of Tyvek).
Sleeping at ever higher altitudes does wonders to acclimatise you, but not fast enough. The hikers from Colorado fared far better than the lowlanders, all of whom suffered headaches, nausea and exhaustion in the end to some degree.
For most of us this sickness peaked relatively early on, with the ascent of Mount Whitney - the tallest mountain in the contiguous united states (the "lower 48"). The ascent of Mount Whitney is a genuine mountaineering objective when approached from the east. However, the inaccessible west, reached from the PCT via a side trail to the Crabtree Meadows Ranger Station, is a relatively straightforward hike.
"Relatively" is doing some heavy lifting there. The generally agreed move for PCT hikers is to arrive at Crabtree the evening before your planned summit, and to wake up as early as possible to try and make the top for sunrise. With no obstructions, the view extends all the way out to the horizon - a flat, orange singularity, stretching out forever, like someone has switched on a very large, very old cathode-ray television.
For Grace and I in particular this was a challenging enough day - having agreed our mileages with Banter, Two Books, Big Shrimpin' and Pope back in KMS, it was the two of us who fell behind early on. This meant that we did not arrive at Crabtree until after dark, and gave us exactly two hours sleep before having to wake up again at 1am to begin the ascent, which is around eight miles each way and goes from 10,500 to 14,505 feet above sea level (3,200m to 4,420m).
The ascent took us several hours and was without a doubt one of the most difficult, unpleasant, rewarding and beautiful experiences of my life. With the moon nearly full, it was hardly necessary to use a head torch once up in the desolate valley. To see uninterrupted over the tops of the tallest mountains I have ever encountered was breathtaking.
I have also never encountered a harsher cold, with the wind biting into my layers wherever it could find purchase, and the dizzying sunlight only exacerbating the effects of altitude, which were at that point quite severe. Clambering over wobbly rocks and along ice shelves, with certain death beckoning always on one side, I was very conscious of how poor my decision-making was becoming as the morning progressed.
Coming down the mountain I was glad to feel the effects of altitude fade away, only to feel the equally disorientating sensation set in of extreme tiredness in the face of a new dawn. This was more familiar ground, however I was more used to experiencing it with tired feet pounding the pavement trying to get home after far too late a night, loud music still ringing in my ears and only sunglasses to shield me from the reproachful eyes of Sunday's early morning dog walkers.
A group of bright eyed hikers passed me going other way, heading up towards the mountain. "They know." I thought to myself, and quickened my pace.
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If Whitney was the highest point in the USA outside of Alaska, we still had to make it over the highest point on the PCT.
Forester Pass, 13,133ft (4,009m), comes not long after the Crabtree Meadows junction, and is technically the highest point along the actual trail itself. The pass marks the boundary between Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and looks, when viewed from the southern approach, like a simply impossible gap in a steep rock wall. Sleep deprived, exhausted, and behind our friends, we dragged ourselves away from the base of Whitney later that same day and back to the trail that would lead us to Forester.
On the first evening we barely made it four miles, and we were lucky to make it even that, after a swarm of evil and single-minded mosquitoes descended on us at a creek crossing. Having not really encountered them to that point, we were unprepared - legs and arms were left uncovered and free from bug spray, and our headnets were nowhere to hand when we needed them.
Climbing ever higher, the landscape opened up yet again, and eventually we reached a snow field completely covering what remained of the approach in two feet of ice. We passed alpine tarns with ice still floating in them, and eventually even the marmots disappeared. The sky clouded over for the first time in months.
If the altitude had been bad atop Whitney, it was perhaps less severe at the pass - but still unpleasant enough to not hang around for long. The long switchbacks brought us eventually to that impossible gap in the rock that we had seen from down below, and on the other side a steep expanse of ice heading down into Kings Cayon. In the words of one joker, it was all downhill from here.
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One other character in this chapter who did not deal well with the altitude was an old husky named Loki.
Coming off trail and into Bishop shortly after Forester Pass, it became apparent that nearly everyone had underestimated how much food, battery, and bug spray they needed to make it the full week from KMS. The combination of altitude and long days, with the extremely beautiful scenery and alpine lakes begging to be swam in, meant that by the final days everyone was sweating to get to the trailhead. There was a rumour that Two Books' mum was going to pick us up on the morning of the final day to give us a ride into Bishop, which only added to the urgency (it was a 40 mile hitch otherwise, and not a particularly straightforward one either).
Steaming up towards Kearsarge Pass on the final morning, after a miserable.night in which we ran out of both gas and food, Grace and I bumped into Big Shrimpin' in the middle of hitting his Garmin satellite SOS button.
The SOS was for Laura, who had been camped up for the last few days by Bullfrog Lake with her pup Loki, an enormous beast weighting 50kg at least. Loki had sustained a mystery injury, a flat tyre of some kind, and had been refusing to move since the previous morning. Growing worried, given their location in the arse end of nowhere, Laura had asked Big Shrimpin' for help as he headed to the trailhead that morning.
And that would probably have been the end of the story, for us at least - once SAR were confirmed as being on their way we would likely have left easy in the knowledge that Big Shrimpin' wouldn't be far behind, that Loki would be swiftly helicoptered down the mountain, and that Laura, while financially ruined no doubt by the SAR fees and inevitable fines (signs everywhere at the pass saying "NO PETS"), would at least sleep easy knowing her doggo was safe. But it was at this point another friend Skittle arrived, all 6'5" of him, and on hearing about Loki put any suggestion of outside help to bed.
"Forget that, I'll carry him."
And so began the long morning, with the rest of us taking Skittle's pack in a relay, and Skittle himself fashioning a kind of harness to lift up Loki's hindquarters out of my Pack's removable hip-belt. Loki was in good spirits, but did need to rest regularly, and also managed to shit and piss all over my hip-belt. It was late morning before the car park finally entered view, and we knew that Skittle and Loki were still a fair way behind us, and that Loki was tiring.
Perhaps inevitably, two miles from the car park Loki sat down and refused to move. Despite all attempts to move him, including fashioning a makeshift stretcher out of someone's tarp, it was clear that SAR would need to be called.out after all. This was further delayed by the onset of a thunderstorm and a minor rock slide in the valley.
The moral of the story is of course to always ensure that you have made absolutely sure no one else has a removable hip-belt before volunteering your own.
