High Sierra Topix

Today I hiked to Duck Lake via the Duck Pass Trail. I have Mammoth Crest Trail on my to-do list so I wanted to look for that trail while I was up there.

According to mammothtrails.org and OpenStreetMap, the Mammoth Crest Trail is supposed to intersect Duck Pass Trail right where the junction to the Pika Lake spur is.

Yet... there was nothing there. The Pika Lake junction was obvious, but all that was opposite of it was a rock outcropping. I even climbed it a bit to see if there was a trail above it. I hiked further down the Duck Pass Trail in both directions and could not find a junction with the Mammoth Crest Trail anywhere.

Does this junction even exist? If not, where would the Mammoth Crest Trail end?

Eigenguy,

If you check out the USGS topo for the area, the trail is marked "Location Approx." this 'trail' is unmaintained, the sites you checked probably assumed the location from said topo map.

Dave

If you zoom in with the sat imagery you can see a trail petering in and out along that ridge line. It looks like you might be able to scramble south up the hill from this point 37.5591, -118.9636 and intersect the "trail" short ways up. From the sat imagery it looks like the trail becomes more consolidated about a half a mile or so south and then west.

Conversely you could start from the other end and see where it dumps you out.

dapperdave wrote:Eigenguy,

If you check out the USGS topo for the area, the trail is marked "Location Approx." this 'trail' is unmaintained, the sites you checked probably assumed the location from said topo map.

Dave

Yeah, I've seen that on the map, but have never seen that before, at least not in this area. Several corrections were made to the trail on OSM (it's a crowdsourced map), but I am guessing nobody has mapped the part near Duck Pass.

psykokid wrote:If you zoom in with the sat imagery you can see a trail petering in and out along that ridge line. It looks like you might be able to scramble south up the hill from this point 37.5591, -118.9636 and intersect the "trail" short ways up. From the sat imagery it looks like the trail becomes more consolidated about a half a mile or so south and then west.

Conversely you could start from the other end and see where it dumps you out.

Thanks, I should have thought of that. It looks like the trail really peters out past Deer Lakes. I guess my best bet is to try to download some GPX tracks from others that completed the full hike, add them to my GPS and hope for the best. At least I won't get lost that way.

I am just glad I didn't miss an obvious junction on to the Crest on my hike yesterday!

I have hiked from the intersection to Deer lakes on the "approximate location" trail. It fades in and out, but is surprisingly clear in some stretches. It was not easy to get started on it. From the intersection, I think I hiked a hundred yards or so down the trail towards the outlet end of Duck and then cut uphill and came across the unmaintained trail after ambling cross country for a couple hundred more yards. From there I was able to stay on it about 75% of the time. The problem is that the country is open and relatively level and so there are fewer advantages to staying on trail, so people wander and it gets less use. But it becomes quite clear as it goes through the pass-lets and slots on the way over to Deer Lakes.