TR: Kearsarge Pass 8/4 - 8/7
Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2013 10:16 am
The plan was to do two shortish (4- and 3-day) eastside trips in one week; I figured if I was going to drive all the way to the Owens Valley, I might as well get the most out of it. The trip areas were dictated by my Brewer project: I had to get photos from locations Brewer explored in the summer of 1864. The first trip would be over Kearsarge Pass--Brewer's exit route after exploring the Kings River high country.
I got permit and trailhead campsite reservations months in advance, since I was starting from an extremely popular trailhead and had no flexibility. Friday night I got all my gear ready, and I left Saturday morning around 7 am. I got to the Eastern Sierra Interagency Visitor Center a little after 2 pm, got my permit, and headed up to Independence and Onion Valley.
Which is where the first problem came up. As I was heading out of Independence--still on the alluvial plain, not yet into the switchbacks--I suddenly realized that I had almost certainly left my backpacking clothes (carefully gathered and packed into a single bag) at home. I pulled over, looked in the back, and...yup. Not there.
Now, this isn't necessarily as problematic as it sounds. I take Thoreau's words to heart ("beware of all enterprises that require new clothes"), and my "backpacking clothes" are pretty much just...my clothes. I buy clothes for work; when they're no longer presentable enough for work, I wear them on the weekends; and when they're too worn to wear in the city, I use them for backpacking. Since I did have a change of clothes with me, that wasn't much of an issue.
The problem was the socks. The thick cotton socks I had with me just weren't going to cut it.
So I headed back to Lone Pine, bought sock liners and some very expensive outer socks, and headed back to Onion Valley.
Later, at my campsite after dinner, the second (and bigger) problem reared its head. I started setting up my stove for the morning, and....the fuel bottle cap broke. Rendering the stove useless.
Which was decidedly sub-optimal.
I took a quick mental inventory of my food supply, and figured out that I had enough cold food to get by on (cheese & crackers, jerky, Clif bars, and trail mix). I would be carrying a bunch of pasta & sauce that I wasn't going to eat, but on the other hand I could ditch stove & pot weight. Coffee was an issue, but I discovered that instant coffee made with cold water isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. So I went ahead with a cold-camp trip.
(Afterwards, when I told Jody about subsisting on cold food, she said "that's so sad...it's like something out of a Dickens novel." To which I replied, "well, I am reading Victor Hugo, so maybe it's only appropriate.")
Day 1
I got everything packed up and hit the trail right at 7:00 am. The early part of the trail is well-graded, and I made pretty decent time by my (uphill) standards--about an hour to Little Pothole Lake, another half hour to Gilbert. Along the way I passed a bunch of guys coming out from a South Lake to Onion shuttle trip, which sounds like a pretty good way to hit the highlights, and then a smaller party all the way from Virginia who had also done that route.
Past Flower Lake is where the trail really starts to climb, first in long lazy switchbacks up the slope above the lake, then in an endless set of tight switchbacks up the cliffs to rise above Heart Lake. This got kind of tedious, and I was really glad to level out (briefly) in the bowl below Kearsarge Pass.
Here I met a family doing Onion Valley to Whitney Portal: 4 adult brothers and their father, who had done the same trip with his father when he was 17. (He had brought a blowup of a photo of them on Whitney from that trip, which would be featured prominently in the Whitney photo from this trip.) This sounded like such a great experience--sharing with his sons the adventure he had been on with his father. But then, I'm sentimental that way.
I pushed on up the long switchbacks to the pass. I started really feeling the elevation, and on the final approach I was stopping every five minutes or so to catch my breath. But I did get there, a little after 11:30 am.
There were a dozen or so people stopped at the pass (including that Whitney family), half of them on their way out. One woman was talking to her mom on a cell phone; a little later, someone else was checking the baseball standings. Not exactly a wilderness experience, if you know what I mean, and I found the whole scene very off-putting.
But it couldn't detract from the view.
After 15 minutes or so I saddled up again and started down toward Kearsarge Lakes. After a few reasonable switchbacks there's a steep, loose, rocky drop to the Kearsarge/Bullfrog junction. I ran into a couple guys coming up this stretch who asked me where the "gondola"--the aerial tram--was. I told them I'd been looking for the one on the other side, without any success.
From the junction the trail just kind of plummets down toward Kearsarge Lakes. There were people camped at the first two lakes. At the third lake, I took a minute to decide between crossing over to find a place on the east side, or staying on the northwest side; I chose the latter, and passed another two parties as I followed the shoreline. I found a reasonably isolated campsite with a swell view on the nubby peninsula where the lake narrows.
And now, a rant...
There's a 2-night limit on camping at Kearsarge Lakes (for some reason I thought it was 1 night, but I'm not sure where I got that). Hiking up from Onion Valley I met some folks who said they had spent the last 4 nights at Kearsarge Lakes. The campsites that were there when I arrived looked like they had been there a while, and were going to be there a while longer. In the evening a German woman walked up to my campsite and said she needed to retrieve a bear box stashed there. She said her family had been using my spot as their cooking area for the last two nights. So there's a two-night limit, but it seems like pretty much everyone ignores it.
And by the way, next morning I passed two campsites within the forbidden zone around Bullfrog Lake. One of them was about 50 feet from the sign saying "no camping".
What the hell is wrong with people?
End rant.
Anyway, Kearsarge Lakes is not a place you go to for solitude, but it is beautiful. After settling in I took a stroll up to the highest Kearsarge Lake. Someone had told me to just follow the stream up, but I realized they can't have meant it too literally (lots of willow, and granite ridgelets going every which way); I followed the valley up at a respectful distance from the stream, and that worked okay.
Returning, I stayed close to the shoreline, and got a different angle on the big Kearsarge Lake.
Late afternoon reading, dinner of cheese & crackers, more reading in the evening, and bed.
I got permit and trailhead campsite reservations months in advance, since I was starting from an extremely popular trailhead and had no flexibility. Friday night I got all my gear ready, and I left Saturday morning around 7 am. I got to the Eastern Sierra Interagency Visitor Center a little after 2 pm, got my permit, and headed up to Independence and Onion Valley.
Which is where the first problem came up. As I was heading out of Independence--still on the alluvial plain, not yet into the switchbacks--I suddenly realized that I had almost certainly left my backpacking clothes (carefully gathered and packed into a single bag) at home. I pulled over, looked in the back, and...yup. Not there.
Now, this isn't necessarily as problematic as it sounds. I take Thoreau's words to heart ("beware of all enterprises that require new clothes"), and my "backpacking clothes" are pretty much just...my clothes. I buy clothes for work; when they're no longer presentable enough for work, I wear them on the weekends; and when they're too worn to wear in the city, I use them for backpacking. Since I did have a change of clothes with me, that wasn't much of an issue.
The problem was the socks. The thick cotton socks I had with me just weren't going to cut it.
So I headed back to Lone Pine, bought sock liners and some very expensive outer socks, and headed back to Onion Valley.
Later, at my campsite after dinner, the second (and bigger) problem reared its head. I started setting up my stove for the morning, and....the fuel bottle cap broke. Rendering the stove useless.
Which was decidedly sub-optimal.
I took a quick mental inventory of my food supply, and figured out that I had enough cold food to get by on (cheese & crackers, jerky, Clif bars, and trail mix). I would be carrying a bunch of pasta & sauce that I wasn't going to eat, but on the other hand I could ditch stove & pot weight. Coffee was an issue, but I discovered that instant coffee made with cold water isn't nearly as bad as it sounds. So I went ahead with a cold-camp trip.
(Afterwards, when I told Jody about subsisting on cold food, she said "that's so sad...it's like something out of a Dickens novel." To which I replied, "well, I am reading Victor Hugo, so maybe it's only appropriate.")
Day 1
I got everything packed up and hit the trail right at 7:00 am. The early part of the trail is well-graded, and I made pretty decent time by my (uphill) standards--about an hour to Little Pothole Lake, another half hour to Gilbert. Along the way I passed a bunch of guys coming out from a South Lake to Onion shuttle trip, which sounds like a pretty good way to hit the highlights, and then a smaller party all the way from Virginia who had also done that route.
Past Flower Lake is where the trail really starts to climb, first in long lazy switchbacks up the slope above the lake, then in an endless set of tight switchbacks up the cliffs to rise above Heart Lake. This got kind of tedious, and I was really glad to level out (briefly) in the bowl below Kearsarge Pass.
Here I met a family doing Onion Valley to Whitney Portal: 4 adult brothers and their father, who had done the same trip with his father when he was 17. (He had brought a blowup of a photo of them on Whitney from that trip, which would be featured prominently in the Whitney photo from this trip.) This sounded like such a great experience--sharing with his sons the adventure he had been on with his father. But then, I'm sentimental that way.
I pushed on up the long switchbacks to the pass. I started really feeling the elevation, and on the final approach I was stopping every five minutes or so to catch my breath. But I did get there, a little after 11:30 am.
There were a dozen or so people stopped at the pass (including that Whitney family), half of them on their way out. One woman was talking to her mom on a cell phone; a little later, someone else was checking the baseball standings. Not exactly a wilderness experience, if you know what I mean, and I found the whole scene very off-putting.
But it couldn't detract from the view.
After 15 minutes or so I saddled up again and started down toward Kearsarge Lakes. After a few reasonable switchbacks there's a steep, loose, rocky drop to the Kearsarge/Bullfrog junction. I ran into a couple guys coming up this stretch who asked me where the "gondola"--the aerial tram--was. I told them I'd been looking for the one on the other side, without any success.
From the junction the trail just kind of plummets down toward Kearsarge Lakes. There were people camped at the first two lakes. At the third lake, I took a minute to decide between crossing over to find a place on the east side, or staying on the northwest side; I chose the latter, and passed another two parties as I followed the shoreline. I found a reasonably isolated campsite with a swell view on the nubby peninsula where the lake narrows.
And now, a rant...
There's a 2-night limit on camping at Kearsarge Lakes (for some reason I thought it was 1 night, but I'm not sure where I got that). Hiking up from Onion Valley I met some folks who said they had spent the last 4 nights at Kearsarge Lakes. The campsites that were there when I arrived looked like they had been there a while, and were going to be there a while longer. In the evening a German woman walked up to my campsite and said she needed to retrieve a bear box stashed there. She said her family had been using my spot as their cooking area for the last two nights. So there's a two-night limit, but it seems like pretty much everyone ignores it.
And by the way, next morning I passed two campsites within the forbidden zone around Bullfrog Lake. One of them was about 50 feet from the sign saying "no camping".
What the hell is wrong with people?
End rant.
Anyway, Kearsarge Lakes is not a place you go to for solitude, but it is beautiful. After settling in I took a stroll up to the highest Kearsarge Lake. Someone had told me to just follow the stream up, but I realized they can't have meant it too literally (lots of willow, and granite ridgelets going every which way); I followed the valley up at a respectful distance from the stream, and that worked okay.
Returning, I stayed close to the shoreline, and got a different angle on the big Kearsarge Lake.
Late afternoon reading, dinner of cheese & crackers, more reading in the evening, and bed.