TR: Rush Creek to Thousand Island and some words of caution
Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2012 7:43 pm
This is both a trip report and a cautionary tale.
My fiance, our dog and myself drove through Yosemite to Lower Lee Vining Campground on Saturday 6/2. Its a satisfactory and lightly used campground off of Tioga Road just West of Lee Vining. We were pleased to find Jessie from Toy Story in the Bear Box:
We got our permit Sunday morning and headed to the Rush Creek Trailhead near Silver Lake. The trail heads pretty much straight up past the ugly and very low Agnew lake and the prettier Gem Lake, which are both hydroelectric retention lakes. From Gem lake, an additional climb takes you up to the Clark lakes. We found a lovely site on a ridge just North of the Clark Lakes. As we arrived in the afternoon we noticed clouds building over the Ritter Range. As you might know, Sierra T-storms follow roughly a 4-5 day build cycle. By closely watching the sky each day you can roughly predict when the storm will occur.
We woke up to brisk windy but sunny conditions and headed toward Thousand Island Lake at the base of Mt. Banner. On the way you are treated to some very nice views down the South Fork San Joaquin Valley.
Once we arrived at TI, the weather looked considerably worse. Banner was half shrouded in clouds, which meant that the cloud stack was at least 1.5k thick.
It soon became apparent that something wicked was brewing.
Rather than bailing for lower elevations, we stupidly staid put and choose what would be a really bad site to pitch our tarp:
High winds and hail started in earnest. The sound of the hail was deafening.
After a number of hours, many inches of hail built up around us. Suddenly, the hail switched to rain and this melted all the hail around us. This lead to massive flooding of the bench we had pitched our tarp on.
The flooding occurred within seconds and my fiances down sleeping bag partially wet. I had a synthetic quilt. We quickly shoved our bags into a backpack and prepared to move the tarp. It was near sunset and we didn't feel it was advisable to try to walk over any ridges in a T-storm to leave the lake. I rapidly tore down the tarp and ran further up the slope to find a better site. Due to the flooding, I only recovered 6 of the 8 stakes but I placed this at key positions to provide maximum stability against the winds. My fiance huddles with our dog under her poncho and then ran up to meet me. I instructed her to get under the now pitched tarp while I ran back down the hill to retrieve our backpacks and grab our additional warm clothing that we hadn't been wearing. I was successful in grabbing our backpacks and stuffed our food and stove into one. I grabbed a clothes bag and thought I had stuffed it into the other bag. There were some remaining items that had been scattered under the tarp that I deemed non-essential. My body temperature was dropping and I didn't want to remain out in the elements much longer so I ran back up to the tarp to strip off my wet clothes. At this point we realized that we didn't have all of our warm clothing and the down sleeping bag was quite wet at both ends but dry in the middle. We knew that our biggest enemy was hypothermia so we devised a strategy to make it through the night. We sand-witched either on top of each other or next to each other on a 20" wide NeoAir on top of frozen ground. We used the damp sleeping bag as a quilt over both of us and our 18 lb Terrier. We used the synthetic quilt to block gaps that the sleeping bag didn't cover.Fortunately, we each were wearing a warm hat. This strategy proved effective at trapping sufficient core heat to stave off hypothermia as temperatures plummeted during the night to the low teens. It was a sleepless night but we worked together to and kept cool heads to stay alive. Fortunately, the sun rose to clear skies but all our our gear and the entire landscape around us was a frozen winter wonderland. 5-6 inches of snow fell on top of the hail all running water on rocks was frozen. We had to chip our gear which we had left at the first campsite out of inches thick ice that formed over the flooded site. We were able to dry enough of our gear to get dressed and pack out. Snow dusted the entire region down to at least 8.5k. The trails are blazed, which made following the snow obscured trails easier.
I had tarp camped for many nights but had never experienced such adverse conditions. I do think that my many years of backcountry experience helped us survived once things degraded to a life threatening situation. I came away from this with many lessons:
1) I should not let my zeal for carrying less to compromise safety
2) I should not let the relatively warm winter and relative lack of snow in the high sierra to pacify me into thinking its summer. June is still June and inclement weather should be expected.
3) I should think more carefully about moving higher with an impending storm.
4) I should examine the topology around a chosen campsite more carefully when rain is expected.
More photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 559&type=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
My fiance, our dog and myself drove through Yosemite to Lower Lee Vining Campground on Saturday 6/2. Its a satisfactory and lightly used campground off of Tioga Road just West of Lee Vining. We were pleased to find Jessie from Toy Story in the Bear Box:
We got our permit Sunday morning and headed to the Rush Creek Trailhead near Silver Lake. The trail heads pretty much straight up past the ugly and very low Agnew lake and the prettier Gem Lake, which are both hydroelectric retention lakes. From Gem lake, an additional climb takes you up to the Clark lakes. We found a lovely site on a ridge just North of the Clark Lakes. As we arrived in the afternoon we noticed clouds building over the Ritter Range. As you might know, Sierra T-storms follow roughly a 4-5 day build cycle. By closely watching the sky each day you can roughly predict when the storm will occur.
We woke up to brisk windy but sunny conditions and headed toward Thousand Island Lake at the base of Mt. Banner. On the way you are treated to some very nice views down the South Fork San Joaquin Valley.
Once we arrived at TI, the weather looked considerably worse. Banner was half shrouded in clouds, which meant that the cloud stack was at least 1.5k thick.
It soon became apparent that something wicked was brewing.
Rather than bailing for lower elevations, we stupidly staid put and choose what would be a really bad site to pitch our tarp:
High winds and hail started in earnest. The sound of the hail was deafening.
After a number of hours, many inches of hail built up around us. Suddenly, the hail switched to rain and this melted all the hail around us. This lead to massive flooding of the bench we had pitched our tarp on.
The flooding occurred within seconds and my fiances down sleeping bag partially wet. I had a synthetic quilt. We quickly shoved our bags into a backpack and prepared to move the tarp. It was near sunset and we didn't feel it was advisable to try to walk over any ridges in a T-storm to leave the lake. I rapidly tore down the tarp and ran further up the slope to find a better site. Due to the flooding, I only recovered 6 of the 8 stakes but I placed this at key positions to provide maximum stability against the winds. My fiance huddles with our dog under her poncho and then ran up to meet me. I instructed her to get under the now pitched tarp while I ran back down the hill to retrieve our backpacks and grab our additional warm clothing that we hadn't been wearing. I was successful in grabbing our backpacks and stuffed our food and stove into one. I grabbed a clothes bag and thought I had stuffed it into the other bag. There were some remaining items that had been scattered under the tarp that I deemed non-essential. My body temperature was dropping and I didn't want to remain out in the elements much longer so I ran back up to the tarp to strip off my wet clothes. At this point we realized that we didn't have all of our warm clothing and the down sleeping bag was quite wet at both ends but dry in the middle. We knew that our biggest enemy was hypothermia so we devised a strategy to make it through the night. We sand-witched either on top of each other or next to each other on a 20" wide NeoAir on top of frozen ground. We used the damp sleeping bag as a quilt over both of us and our 18 lb Terrier. We used the synthetic quilt to block gaps that the sleeping bag didn't cover.Fortunately, we each were wearing a warm hat. This strategy proved effective at trapping sufficient core heat to stave off hypothermia as temperatures plummeted during the night to the low teens. It was a sleepless night but we worked together to and kept cool heads to stay alive. Fortunately, the sun rose to clear skies but all our our gear and the entire landscape around us was a frozen winter wonderland. 5-6 inches of snow fell on top of the hail all running water on rocks was frozen. We had to chip our gear which we had left at the first campsite out of inches thick ice that formed over the flooded site. We were able to dry enough of our gear to get dressed and pack out. Snow dusted the entire region down to at least 8.5k. The trails are blazed, which made following the snow obscured trails easier.
I had tarp camped for many nights but had never experienced such adverse conditions. I do think that my many years of backcountry experience helped us survived once things degraded to a life threatening situation. I came away from this with many lessons:
1) I should not let my zeal for carrying less to compromise safety
2) I should not let the relatively warm winter and relative lack of snow in the high sierra to pacify me into thinking its summer. June is still June and inclement weather should be expected.
3) I should think more carefully about moving higher with an impending storm.
4) I should examine the topology around a chosen campsite more carefully when rain is expected.
More photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set= ... 559&type=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;