Trip Advice: Mono / Silver Divide / Red and White area

[astrogerly]

You’ve had a lot of great feedback already, but I’ll chime in that Pioneer Basin is A++! We did it last summer, during the heat wave in July, and it was just stunning! We made it to that giant funky shaped lake - sorry, forgot the number off the top of my head - by very early afternoon and spent the afternoon/evening exploring. Absolutely stunning. You’d not regret spending even a day there if you have time. We definitely want to go back and also explore more of the Recesses, but won’t be until next summer with our current weekends of backpacking/hiking (unless we pull off some magic). Highly recommend the small side trip to Fourth Recess too - definitely worth it! We added it to our hike out from Pioneer to LLV.

[erutan]

The area between tully & hortense is really pretty, and you can drop down to the JMPCT pretty easily from hortense, though I'd focus more on the XC basins than the silver pass area itself with that trip time.

As someone else has mentioned, there's a section of grassy ramps that sort of deposit you into rosy finch from bighorn, and some nice ones getting up to bighorn from the creek going into mott. Bighorn pass is very straightforward, haven't done shout, pace col was a bit obnoxious and slow with all the talus, but not terrible. Grinnel col looks terrifying, cgunderson's hopkins grinnel ridge was surprisingly chill (my partner has some legit trauma with steep loose + talus mixed in and was fine with it).

If you do 4th up to snow lakes, don't go the way rogue did.

I just put a "wrinkle" on crocker col by including hopkins peak as an alternate option - it's all loose but not in a bad way ala the south side of junction pass.

[ExploreABitMore]

I did a dayhike of Izaak Walton via Duck Pass last year. The NE ridge is an excellent climb - moderate, fun C3. I made the extra effort to visit Cotton Lake and Izaak Walton Lake, both very lovely. I really wished I could have lingered longer. Tully Lake was awesome too. After coming across pics of Hortense, I really regret deciding to skip that one in the moment.

I'd love to go back and revisit that whole area myself with an extended stay.