This year I have been planning on going to Peru for some high altitude trecking, up to 5200 m if my body cooperates. Since I live at sea level, I thought it might be a good idea to spend some time between 3000 and 4000 m as an acclimation hike. So I decided to do the Southern end of Roper's High Route again. I had had a great time in 2021 and the Sierra is never a wrong place to spend some time.
As last time I took the shuttle from Visalia to Sequoia NP that is run by the Visalia Public transport Authority. I made my way to the junction of Lodgepole and Hwy 180 and hitchhiked from there. Within 45 min I was picked up by a commercial driver who took me to Grant Grove where he had to do business. There I stood for about 5 hours without getting a nibble for the remaining 32 miles to Cedar Grove or Roads End, my destination. Two drivers offered me money, but that was not my problem, the ride or lack thereof was.
As 5 PM arrived I started to hike along Hwy 180 to get out of the NP into the National Forest where it would be legal to camp at large. I attached my printed sign with my destination (Cedar Grove) to the back of my pack and started walking. Within 20 min Julie and Kimball, a mother/son pair on a car camping trip stopped and loaded me up to deliver me to Roads End where the ranger station is located. While I had planned to pick up my permit the afternoon before the start of my hike, this obviously did not come to pass. The ranger station closes at 3:30 PM and Julie and Kimball dropped me off at around 6 PM. I got so lucky with these two! That Julie would see from the passenger my hitchhiking sign seat seems like a minor miracle to me.
A ranger had told me "You can't walk to Cedar Grove" and she was right, the road is narrow and winding, without a shoulder for most of it, and the lines of sight for both drivers and you are rather short: they don't see you coming and you only see them at the last moment. Not Safe, and that for about 30 miles!
The take-home lesson for somebody who hikes from the West side of the Sierra to the East side and does not intend to go back to the trailhead in the West, is that you probably should budget two days to get to Roads End, just in case.
At Roads End I stealth camped illegally and was at the ranger station at 6 AM cooking my breakfast. The ranger showed up shortly after 7 AM and proceeded to issue my permit. This was an efficient transaction as he pretty quickly realized that I knew what I was doing and there was no need to get into all the gory details of the Instructions speech that they usually give. I was climbing up along Copper Creek by 7:25 AM
This is a 5500 ft climb, about 1600 m, so this takes some time and, coming from sea level, I was huffing and puffing. Luckily it was not quite as hot as it had been in 2021 and all the little creeks and springs I remembered along the way were running so that I could keep the cooling water coming.
This time I noticed the cairn for the side trail to Grouse Lake by the right side of the trail as it flattens out near the 10 k ft mark and I was off to the races for the last somewhat convoluted two miles which brought me to Grouse Lake. Next morning, after the requisite orienteering error, I made it up to Grouse Pass. I recalled that there was a ledge heading down to the right, in the direction of Goat Crest, but somehow I could not remember how I got on it last time. Instead I took the ledge leading down to the left, away from Goat Crest, reached the bottom, did a 180 and headed for Goat Crest. From up there I had a beautiful view of the Palisades far away to the North and back over Sequoia/Kings canyon NP.
The descent to the Lower Glacier Lake was as entertaining as I remembered. There was a little bit of snow to contend with and I received some useful information from two women who were going the opposite direction from mine and had just come up to where I was starting to descend. It's often easier to see the extent of the snow and how to wind through it from the bottom than from the top. All in all, the descent on skier's left was mostly easy over ledges and ramps even if it was not always painfully obvious whether a ramp would "go". I had to contend with talus for maybe only 30 ft pretty close to the bottom, and it was stable and straightforward.
I passed the open meadow at the bottom on the right side, mostly at the margin of the forest, then crossed the East Fork of Dougherty creek, found the faint use trail that runs within 20-50 ft of the creek on the right bank losing it occasionally. I did not quite make it to Horseshoe Lake as I had planned, because of huffing and puffing, but had a very nice camp at Upper State LakeLake.
The view of Marion Lake below Red Pass was as memorable as I remembered: what a color! There is a use trail running from Red Pass through the willows and it is worthwhile to make sure that you are on it. Fairly far down the trail runs fairly far on skier's right and that transition is not all that easy to get right. Eventually the use trail delivers you to one of the chutes down to Marion Lake. However, do not take this chute! Go back up about 200 ft and scramble up the slick rock face on your right (Marion Lake at your back) and once on top hike down the ridge on its left side (Marion Lake ahead of you) until you can get down into the gully below on your left. There is some talus, then a grass slope, then some willows that you can get out of by squeezing out to the left onto a grassy slope that takes you down to the trail that runs along the lake's shore to the little meadow with the rock bearing the plaque in memory of Marion LeConte. As had been the case a few years ago, the bugs were insane near the water, but almost nonexistent at the top of the ridge behind the rock bearing the plaque, a mere 75 ft above.
This year again Lake Basin got the better of me. It is not that I made the same mistake again as last time, I found a new way to screw up. I ended up too high in the valley after getting trapped between the lakes and ponds, the hanging valley and the swampy area in the valley's bottom. Eventually I made it to the same camping spot I had used years earlier on the lake below Vennacher Needle and Frozen Lake Pass.
Next morning I made my way along the shore of the lake crossing massive talus to eventually reach another meadow-like grassy strip which, as I recalled from a few years ago, goes up quite a bit of the slope towards the pass. Eventually, though, you have to face the talus. This time, as opposed to last time, I turned right and climbed to what had looked from my campsite like a giant rock. It was, in fact, a slab of bedrock and not a big piece of talus. You could either pass it on the right or pass to the left in front of it. I chose the latter course and, climbing over smaller talus, made my way towards the pass reaching a sort of ramp leading up to it. I had hoped it would be more solid than I found it to be, but the climb up to the pass was over in pretty short order. Shortly before the top I saw some Sky Pilots blooming (Polemonium sp.) and true to form, they warned me that things were going to get real. The standard explanation for Sky Pilots is that they grow at altitudes greater than 10,000 ft. However, I have found that they grow where the path becomes challenging (the two reasons may not be unrelated, of course). Your mileage may vary! Glorious view back whence I came and to where I was heading.
The descent was just as bad as I remember: a steep dirt slope with few foot holds and plenty of ball-bearing like small rocks to make it "interesting" and keep all circular muscles in your body maximally contracted. After about 200 ft it's mostly just bad talus. This year there was a major snow field at the bottom that was icy in the early morning and I was happy to have packed my microspikes. More talus down to the circular lake at the bottom of the moraine and a long lunch break, well-deserved even if I say so myself.
The walk-up to Mather Pass was straightforward and was notable in terms how few people were on the JMT. I encountered five people where usually I would pass, be passed or encounter someone every couple of hundred feet. I camped well above the Palisade Lakes once I had passed a pretty strongly flowing creek coming from above on the right.
Next morning I made it past the outlets of the Palisade Lakes and then left the JMT to climb up on the right towards Cirque Pass. I was up there pretty efficiently as there was hardly any snow to contend with, very much in contrast to my going the other way on the Southern Sierra High Route a few years ago, where snow pretty much had clogged the entire stretch from Cirque Pass down to the near the JMT. On the other side there was some snow, but not bad. I climbed the knoll on the other side of the outlet of the lake below Cirque Pass, headed right on its top and made it down to the small lake at the bottom of Potluck Pass. I found the faint trail in the scree on the left (on climber's left), but did miss the point where you are to enter the ramps and ledges on your right. I pushed on in the scree and reached the pass eventually very much on the left margin. There was no potluck dinner served to me! Bastards! I asked to speak to the manager and this impertinent twit made it sound as if it was all my fault and most certainly not that of High Route Inc. The bloody cheek!
The hike over to the "inconspicuous saddle" was straightforward, mostly on slickrock, and from there I reached the Upper Barrett Lake. Here the sky looked ominous and I decided to camp somewhat early. I had barely erected my tent when hail started to come down, followed by light snow and later in the night very wet snow. My tent lost about 50% of its internal volume over the course of the night, in part owing to my whacking the tent walls from the inside to make the accumulated snow on the outside slide down the sides. However, the Tarptent Dipole did not efficiently shed the heavy snow, even with my banging the tent walls from the inside. To boot by morning the inside of the tent was covered in a quarter of an inch of ice from frozen condensation.
I woke up to a sunny morning in a white winter wonderland with a total accumulation of about two inches. I let the sun do the job of defrosting my tent, packed up my wet gear and made my way to Knapsack Pass. This time I attacked it in the center and made my way up by way of two small meadows which led to nice ramps which allowed me to gain altitude reasonably quickly. I think I have figured this one out! Hopefully I will remember next time.
Snow on the down slope into Dusy Basin made things interesting for a while until I exited the ramps and ledges to the right at around 3400 m. Here I found a use trail through the willows that made walking mostly very easy. I passed by the lakes below Bishop Pass and intercepted the Bishop Pass trail which in turn led me to Bishop Pass and down the other side towards South Lake. I camped at its shore as it was too late to have any hope of catching a ride at South Lake TH down to town.
Next morning I had an hour's worth of hiking to do to reach the parking lot and within 10 minutes I had a ride to town with a local who had had a morning stroll and was heading home for breakfast.
Post Office, supermarket, outfitter for stove fuel, Mexican breakfast, Mexican lunch, one or two cold ones, fixing my camera clip took up all day and next morning came way too early. I wanted to be on Hwy at the Paiute Reservation border by 6 AM in order to catch a ride to South Lake TH. I counted on a fisherman wanting to go early and that was exactly what happened. I was let off where the South Lake Road takes off to the left as my ride provider was heading to North Lake. I walked for a bit and then was picked up by a group of PCT hikers who took me all the way to South Lake TH. I was walking the Bishop Pass trail at 8:05 AM.
It took me to about noon to reach Bishop Pass and I reached the bottom of Le Conte canyon by about 7 PM. The stretch from the outlet of Dusy Basin to the very bottom really drags. The trail is rocky, there are many built high steps to retain the sand/soil and water diversions, the slope of the trail is shallow and the number of switchbacks endless seeming. I was exhausted!
Next day I was low energy and I did not catch fire all day. I was happy reach the Muir Hut, had a longish break and made my way to the Lower Wanda Lake where I camped, well short of the goal I had set for myself for that day.
Next morning I continued on. I had never been in LeConte Canyon or in Evolution Basin and I enjoyed the scenery very much. JMT traffic was moderate and early in the morning you could walk at leisure.
The approximately four mile off-trail section from the outlet of the Lower Evolution Lake to the lake below Snow Tongue Pass is not really technically difficult, it is just that lines of sight are rather short and when you are being cliffed out at the end of a ledge it is not always easy to make the right decision to either go lower or higher because you do not see what is coming up past the obstacle you are trying to get around. I tended to be at the upper end of the range between 3450 m and 3570 m that the guide book suggests. I came out about 100-150 m above the lake below Snow Tongue Pass and proceeded to make a rather bad decision. The guide instructs you to make your way to the pass from the shore of the lake. I was already above the lake, so I did not see a reason to first go down to it. Instead I was going to go up the ridge to the right of the lake (climber's right) and then contour over into the main drainage higher up. Looked ok on the map, alas, I found myself cliffed out with no conceivable way down to the main drainage and had to climb down all the way to the lake and then do as instructed. Three and a half hours wasted!
I found myself at the top of Snow Tongue Pass at around noon and anxiously peered over the rim into the void below. Holy crap! The eponymous snow tongue was not in evidence, it was all dirt and scree until very close to the bottom where a snow field was waiting. After some reconnaissance I went for it and it was pretty bad. I went down the funnel below the pass after having entered the slope at the small notch that Roper mentions. I was scared and tense the entire descent, but lived to tell the tale and that in the end is all that counts. I am, however, happy that I am old and that I won't have to do this ever again!
The talus from the Wahoo lakes to the moraine above Humphrey's Basin is some of the worst I have ever had to contend with, my God! It consists mostly of huge blocks with giant holes between them. So you think that you see a line to take and then you are rudely stopped by those holes and have to turn around and try something else. By the time I reached the tarns below the moraine I was thoroughly pooped and frustrated. Owing to my orienteering error on the other side and the slow progress across the talus around the Wahoo Lakes it was impossible to reach Elba Lake as my hike plan required. I had to make the decision to cut my route short as I was half a day or three-quarters of a day short and, knowing the terrain between where I was and Mammoth, I could not persuade myself that I knew how to make up that amount of time. So no Bear Lakes Basin this time, :(.
I will likely do the Sierra High Route again, it is just so beautiful. However, I will not go down Snow Tongue Pass again. If need be, I will either make a second reservation to go over Paiute Pass after resupply in Bishop or will go over Paiute Pass not quite legally on my permit from Roads End (Note for those not familiar with the rules: if you leave the wilderness (say via Bishop Pass), you must reenter the wilderness via the same pass you left it by or void your permit). However, if you return via Bishop Pass you get into Humphrey's Basin either by going over Snow Tongue Pass (see above) or Alpine Pass, which has a reputation for horrendous talus.
On the way down from Humphreys Basin to North Lake the flowers were incredible, both in terms of abundance and variety. At North Lake I got a ride to, walked down the highway to the junction with the road coming down fro. South Lake and after a while got a ride to Bishop
