The trip isn't cursed; just the TR. This is my fourth attempt. I keep inadvertently doing things that cause it to be deleted. So this version is going to be ridiculously terse.
parameters: my and friend K, who'd reserved two nights at Ostrander in mid-March. That didn't work out so well. This was our consolation prize. It had to be something K could do in two nights from home.
Toddler-free, I camped in Upper Stony Creek (an NFS CG) the night before. I took this wildlife photo through the car window on the way out.
We were permitted out of Wolverton. The plan was to drop by Long Meadow, then work our way through the Giant Forest to the Wolverton cutoff, and thence to the HST. Only being in the vicinity of the Giant Forest interrupts my usually reliable sense of place, and we wound up almost completing a lap of Long Meadow that would have been gratuitous except for we saw stuff like this:
Even addled, I can recognize when I've walked in a circle, so we were soon on track and traversing the Giant Forest:
Because I've been here before, I didn't take many pictures until camp, Mehrten Creek on the HST, where there aren't many horizontal opportunities. We foudn one that, apart from the sketchy trip to water, was grand, and an importunate marmot accosted us.
``He must be exasperated at how few people there have been this season," I hazarded.
"Maybe he just likes people," K replied. We didn't feed him, and he relented.
The next morning, we started an unspeakably pleasant ascent to Alta Peak. The trail I'll call the "Alta connector" was mercifully graded.
Cognizant of approaching senescence, K was paring down her base weight, and in the interest of that, had left her Nat Geo overview map in the car. (Already decidedly senescent, I had no intention of carrying any such thing.) So we had no idea of what we were looking at across the Kaweah drainage. Fortunately, we encountered a pair of stupendously reasonable people, who had the same questions we had, but had brought along a map to help us answer them. For my, the most exciting was the confirmation of my suspicion of where Precipice Lake (where I once spent a mind blowing night punctuated by alpenglow, moonglow, and the Perseid meteor shower) was.
Nearing the peak itself, we intersected a scrum of dayhikers huddling under the summit jumble. The last time I was here, I'd crawled on all fours across the slightly slanty summit slab, until a sprightly retiree appeared to shame me into bipedalism. Still shamed, I walked to the top, where a friend of the scrumsters shoved an 8 pound camera into my hands, to take his picture. I complied, then (once he'd disappeared from view) slathered myself in hand sanitizer. I also noticed that, unlike last time I was here, the summit register was hard to locate, causing me to wonder whether some lucky backcountry ranger had been dispatched to confiscate all summit registers as a COVID precaution.
We descended, then contoured over to Alta Meadow, where the GWD hovered bracingly.
The campsites in the flat part of the forest just to the right of the trail had been morally claimed by a largish group. So we wandered in search of somethign acceptable. We found this.
The alpenglow was insane. Including the alpenglow on the cliffs about Precipice Lake. Heightening the effect was the fact that if you looked in the other direction, you could see the lights of Central Valley places like Three Rivers and Visalia.
Day 3 we walked straight back to Wolverton and headed off to our respective homes.
