Hiked the 5 miles to Badger Flats yesterday and had my thumb out for a ride to town by 8. Actually I just stood there; no cars came by in a half hour of waiting. But some outfitters hands had been working on the corral behind the parking area and when they finished they pulled up and offered me a ride. Dudes in pickups once again.
I checked in to the Huntington Lake resort, claimed my tiny cabin and set about doing my town chores: washing myself and my clothes (the former in the shower, the latter in the sink), restocking trail food, uploading pictures and blog posts, drinking beer and eating junk food.
I hung out at the saloon after dinner (the toughest sirloin steak I have ever gnawed on), but it was pretty dead, and my hopes of finding someone who might give me a ride to the trailhead in the morning were not realized. I phoned my daughters and chatted with them and then turned in.
The restaurant doesn’t open for breakfast so I made do with room coffee and trail mix, then packed up and walked out to the highway to hitch a ride back to the trail.
A total of 3 cars passed in an hour and a half. I resigned myself to hoofing it back the 3 miles and 1000 ft of climb to the trailhead. No point in complaining; I came here to hike and was just doing a little more of it than planned
Mt Ritter from Potter PassI eventually reached the trailhead and commenced the pleasant climb to Potter Pass, which sported outstanding views of Mts Ritter and Banner on the east side of Yosemite. After a short break, I began the hike down to the S Fk San Joaquin R, having now passed out of the Kings R drainage.
Silver Peak, where JMTers are toiling, from the rim of the S Fk of the San JoaquinThe river was full and lovely and a shade of green that invited me to strip off my clothes and dive in. It was a short swim but a refreshing one, and I dunked my clothes as well in preparation for the hot climb out of the river gorge.
A most-inviting riverNot only is the climb hot and steep, it lacks the benefit of a trail. The map shows a trail and it even has an official USFS designation (24E03) but it has not been maintained for decades and is useless. Remnants of switchback retaining walls led into dense thickets of manzanita, causing me to abandon the nominal route. I soon found myself scrambling up a steep slope of unstable basalt talus to the rim of the gorge.
The going only got harder from there. Most of the route is through deep forest where piles of deadfall trees and thick scratchy underbrush make the going slow, painful and even bloody.
A very common view on the trail between the rivers
Ancient cuts in rotting deadfalls are about the only sign that this once was a maintained trail
Sticks, deadfall and dense understory made for slow goingI labored hard for four hours to make four miles through this section. The best pathways often were provided by fallen sugar pines: I could hop up on these smooth straight giants and walk unimpeded for a whole 200 feet at a stretch.
Few of them were going my way though. Steam crossings were the worst. You’d think in a forest choked with fallen logs that plenty of logs would fall across the stream, making natural bridges. But you would be wrong. There were plenty of fallen trees in the steam gullies but they all seemed to fall parallel to the creeks. The luxurious growth of birch understory on the banks combined with the dead falls to form very effective barricades. It often took me 20 minutes to make the 20 yards from one side of a piddling little creek to another.
The real hero of this passage has been my plastic ukulele. Strapped to the outside of my pack, its neck practically invites the evil witches fingers of the underbrush to steal it away to perish alone and abandoned in the dark deep forest.
But instead it held on tight and arrived with me at camp, both of us scratched up and filled with twigs. Somehow it was still in tune when I set down to play the night’s entertainment, the old Woody Guthrie song “You’ve Got To Walk That Lonesome Valley “. I take that as a good sign.
I love that area