We made it through the High Sier­ras and to our first town stop since Mam­moth, about 250 miles ago. It has been a long and tough stretch and we are feel­ing skin­ny and tired. We are eat­ing a lot in town and retool­ing for the final 650 miles. We have now com­plet­ed 2010 miles.
Walk­er Pass is the first road cross­ing that we have had that is open year round since High­way 88 at Car­son Pass, just south of Lake Tahoe. It’s a long stretch through rugged terrain.
We have had good weath­er which has helped us main­tain good trav­el of about 18–25 miles per day while snow. We had bud­get­ed only be able to do 10 miles per day through this sec­tion. We did have two days of snow show­ers in the High Sier­ra which dropped a cou­ple of inch­es each time, just enough to either have dust on crust or dust on dirt and make things tricky. We also had two real­ly windy days. One day while going over Gab­bot Pass, at 12,400 feet (not a typ­i­cal PCT pass, which I will describe lat­er), Pep­per actu­al­ly got picked up and lift­ed off the ground and slammed into a rock from a wind gust. Oth­er gusts we would lit­er­al­ly have to stop mov­ing in order to hun­ker sheen and not be blown over. The pow­er of the wind is amazing.
Leav­ing Mam­moth we decid­ed to veer off the PCT route at Mono Creek, after Sil­ver Pass. We could­n’t resup­ply at VVR or Muir Trail Ranch, since they were closed, so there was no need to stay low through there and go over the rel­a­tive­ly low Selden Pass (about 10,500 feet). We decid­ed to do a com­bi­na­tion of the Sier­ra High Route and our own route over 5 pass­es (Gab­bot Pass, Italy Pass, Royce Pass, Pup­pet Pass, and Alpine Col) and recon­nect with the PCT at Evo­lu­tion Lake. We then fol­lowed the PCT route over Muir, Math­er, Pin­chot, Glen, and Forester Pass. It was def­i­nite­ly a chal­leng­ing mix of ter­rain and con­di­tions with some ski moun­taineer­ing involved. The snow con­di­tions were so dif­fer­ent than a spring snow­pack so often times we were wal­low­ing in two feet of uncon­sol­i­dat­ed snow and oth­er times we were scram­bling up or down rocks and talus in our ski boots. It is a relief to have got­ten through these high pass­es before the next big storm. I wor­ry about some of the ear­ly sea­son snow lay­ers we have seen that could cause major insta­bil­i­ty once the next big storm comes in.
I’ll wrap up this update with some­thing else amaz­ing: we saw our first oth­er peo­ple on the trail since Sno­qualmie Pass area in Wash­ing­ton. We saw an overnight hik­er and a cou­ple that was day hik­ing about 5 miles north of Walk­er Pass, which would be about mile 2005 for us. Con­sid­er­ing Sno­qualmie Pass was about mile 250, it had been about 1750 miles with see­ing any­body on the trail, or rough­ly 2/3 of the total mileage!