R06 TR: Oct 2006 Late season trips that could have gone bad

[giantbrookie]

I have no experiences that remotely approach those posted here and I have habitually avoided anything more than an overnighter in from mid October onward. In spite of this I can think of at least three trips where conditions were harsher than anticipated.

A trip that comes to mind was my first backpacking trip with Judy in late September 1986 to an unnamed lake in Little Lakes Valley. I suppose we should have taken it as a bad omen when the bottle of 151 I had stored poorly in the car, fell out when I opened the back seat door at the trailhead and broke. This ended up being the coldest trip in my memory. In mid afternoon in bright sunshine it was so cold I couldn't cast because the beads of water that came back on the line during retrieves froze in my line guides. We then watched as a thin sheet of ice started to cover the surface of the lake before our eyes. We didn't get overly chilled though. Both of us had overkill gear including subzero bags and enormous bulky jackets. We were quite happy to hike out, though. At least Judy caught a fish on her first trip.

A few years after that trip, a friend of ours got stuck in a fall snowstorm deep in trailless northern Yosemite. He and his group got out OK but it was a harrowing survival experience that was not lost on me and Judy. That forged our trip planning strategy that has continued to this day which is to limit late season trips to lower elevations (Deso and lower) and not do any trips that put us more than one moderate day of hiking from the trailhead. I think the longest trip we've taken past the beginning of October is three days and both times we hit destinations in or on the flanks of Deso.

One sort of "changed condition" trip in fall resulted in me and Todd being miserable took place in late October 2004. In keeping with my late season strategy this had been planned as an overnighter to the Rancheria inlet of Hetch Hetchy. With the highest elevation encountered a bit over 4000' I wasn't prepared for things to be really cold (as per weather report). However the trail was closed, officially because of "landslide danger" but in actuality because of a crime scene (notorious murder suspect set personal funeral pyre, shot himself, and fire became wildfire that burned to the shore of Hetch Hetchy) so Todd and I were diverted to Laurel Lake. There was quite a bit of fresh new snow up there and the snow plus a stream crossing got us damp and cold. We arrived at the destination and quickly pitched the tent because we were so cold we wanted to get into our bags as quickly as possible. We crawled in, and Todd cooked dinner just beyond the door of the tent but reachable from within. In the meantime in the late afternoon/early evening there were some impressive rises out on the lake, but I was so cold I had no motivation to leave the warmth of my bag. As these things usually go, the next morning dawned and we had been amply warmed in our bags in the tent, so I set up my fishing gear, fired casts into the lake which showed no sign of the activity of the evening before, and skunked. It was still quite cold, so we quickly packed up and marched down to Hetch Hetchy where the waterline elevation probably wasn't much higher than 3700'. I was able to get off some casts in comfort and ended up catching a decent brown. I haven't backpacked in October since then. Lee and I were in fact ready to go on on an overnighter this weekend and the weather report looked good (for destination that is >10500'), but I caught COVID and that hosed the trip. Different sort of changed condition, I guess.

[kpeter]

Lee and I were in fact ready to go on on an overnighter this weekend and the weather report looked good (for destination that is >10500'), but I caught COVID and that hosed the trip. Different sort of changed condition, I guess.

So sorry to hear of your illness. Hope it is a light case and you get back on your feet soon. COVID hosed my father/daughter trip this summer too. I had never had to cancel a trip due to illness for 50 years of backpacking, but now we can add COVID to smoke as two additional complications in trying to do our trips. I supposed I sound like a geezer pining for the "good old days."

[giantbrookie]

I don't want to hijack this thread off of its original subject, but the COVID infection would seem to be a mild one, apparently peaking on what (in hindsight) was day two (Tuesday) of symptoms with a night in bed that featured moderate chills and sporadic cough. That seems to be the only brief period (about 8-10 hrs) during this that I ran a fever and I don't think it was very high (probably <100). Moderate nasal drip and related chest congestion peaked Monday night and has diminished since. Today I just have the mild feeling that I'm sick with something but I'm glad I was able to sleep in rather than getting up at 5 am to head to the high country. This is the first time I've cancelled a trip due to illness but there are times in the past that a sensible person would have but I didn't--the 2007 Blackchuck trip is the classic example when the doctor admonished me to cancel the trip (strep throat and 103F fever the evening before departure) but I didn't and it ended being a trip that the illness was burned off on day 1 (with help from antibiotics). Not advisable but.

Getting back to the original subject of difficult fall conditions, I figured I'd add a few minor notes on other experiences including one of the only two-night backpacking trips I've done in October. This was done in October 1997 out of Glen Alpine (Desolation W) and the trip has been referred to subsequently as the "Lunker Loop". I figured it warranted mention for the fact that I did not adequately gauge the impact of all of the fresh fall snow on our hiking. The three hikers on this trip (me, Judy, and a fishing friend of ours) were in prime physical shape; for me and Judy this was part of the amazing "Year of 100 Lakes". The postholing very much slowed down a side trip (w/o full pack) on the first day (my first visit to the mackinaw lake but I caught only rainbows) and on the second day the soft snow was so deep we gave up trying to reach a place referred to by some as 'the inaccessible west shore' of a certain lake with daypacks only. My memory could be wrong on this one, but I think it was fairly warm so I think I was drenched in sweat after going about 1/10 of the planned distance. I still haven't been to that "inaccessible shore" where legend has it that my namesakes swim, rarely disturbed by anglers. The west shore failure led to us picking up our packs and arriving at the night two destination a bit earlier setting up one of the most memorably single-day (or afternoon/evening) fishing sessions I've ever had at a lake that has since gone fishless, or so folks say. So I guess there is some motivation to try another Lunker Loop for a rematch with that "western shore" as well as to perform a sustained test on this allegedly fishless lake.

Fall conditions can make dayhikes more adventurous (and dangerous) than one would like, too. A good example for us was our "season closer" of 1992 on November 7. It was the debut of our Nissan Pathfinder but I didn't need to 4 wheel to the end of a little spur N of Sierra Buttes. There was quite a bit of snow on the ground and it completely covered the trail that led from that road spur to our planned destination, so this became an off trail dayhike with lots of tromping through the snow. The original target in those days had (you could have guessed) giant brookies, but we skunked so we hiked to a more distant lake that has a Boy Scout camp at it. The road to this camp had long been closed. We saw rises way out in the middle of the lake, so we got into a rowboat and I rowed out to the middle where Judy ended the season by catching three medium sized rainbows. I rowed us back, put the boat back where we found it, and we jauntily hiked back to our car. Our longer hike had a major issue, however, which was that we were running out of daylight. With snow over everything there was no trail to follow and we had to find out tracks. In places we could recover our tracks but in other places not. The topography near the car is really muted so my usual microtopo navigation didn't work. Everything looked the same: Trees with snow under them. We zigged we zagged we looped and I couldn't find tire tracks, let alone my car. It was now dark and very cold. Whereas Judy and I had warm clothing, we did not have overnight gear, given that it was only a dayhike. I don't think survival would have been an issue if we had to overnight but we would have been miserable. After what seemed an eternity (probably wasn't really that long), I found tire tracks and followed them to our Pathfinder. It goes without saying we were relieved and overjoyed. We threw the fish in the cooler, hopped in and I turned on the heater/defrost full blast (the Pathfinder heater gets warm in a hurry too!) and we rumbled home to the Bay Area after the most memorable season closer we've ever had. Nowadays the end adventure could be avoided with a GPS position of the car but this is still a good illustration of how fall conditions are a bit different.

[SSSdave]

Out of 214 backpacking trips, 3 have been during the first week of October but none later. As a long time Tahoe snow skier, especially one that enjoys storm skiing for fresh powder if winds are not strong, I have a considerable respect for the debilitating effects of cold as well as how dangerous it is if cold winds howl. As a landscape photographer often out on East side road trips after mid September for fall leaf subjects, also have serious heavy clothing and gear that allows tromping around in fresh snows as that is when aesthetics can be wonderful like the 2013 image above from the Conway Summit groves. Have posted on this board before why October backpacking beyond short trips even in known weather is unpleasant.

History shows over decades there have been a few early season snow storms that dumped way more than expected. One year two of us on the second week of October experienced single digit sunrise temperatures after a cold front passed through that then turned aspen leaves all black. At month end, I've skied 2 foot fresh snow at Kirkwood. When soft fresh snow is more than ankle deep it becomes a strenuous effort with each step, much worse than soft sand, and worse the underlying ground surface without an even snow base, is much more irregular than the snow surface. The really long boring night hours in a tent will get old quickly. One might think, I'll read a book. But then try turning pages doing that wearing warm gloves. Taking gloves off for every page turn or just holding a book open with gloves, quickly becomes ridiculous. Far far more pleasant to sleep in one's vehicle car camping set up with warmth, light, a chargeable smartphone, food, drinks, radio, lots more cold weather gear and clothing. Besides, anyplace more than a days hike at this time of year is butt ugly dry, brown, cold, and so dead of life one won't even hear any birds.

[Gogd]

SSDave. Yep!

Your words portray an experience even more effectively than your sincerely excellent photography. It is impossible for the uninitiated to appreciate how quickly a cold snap overwhelms, and how difficult it is to travel through snow when there is no base, forcing your feet to constantly cope with unpredictable terrain structure beneath the snow. All this and more awaits the should season camper left holding the short straw.

Your book reading description made me shudder! It dredged up some old memories I thought I had forgotten, of a couple of occasions in extreme weather when my fingers were so cold they look like gray wood, leathery, firm, numb and were almost useless. Sometimes high altitude mountaineering does that, regardless how well equipped you are. Perhaps almost as bad is the onset of that excruciating pins and needles burning sensation, that set in when I was able to rewarm them. Even days later the slightest contact felt like the sun searing the surface of my finger tips.

Ed

[Harlen]

Gogd, Thanks for the insightful stories. You lament:

Their lack of adequate preparation I can only sum up as: who listens to me anyway? Sigh...

What's the point of being a Gogd if no one listens to you?

Yours and Daisy's point about partners is a really important issue, which can lead to a dreadful outcome. Everyone should read Norman Clyde's account of a late season trip that did go bad: A Tragedy in the Sierra Nevada, from the book: Norman Clyde, Closeups of the High Sierra. It is a fascinating account of partners being way out of sync, and it leads to a shocking series of bad decisions, mistakes that Clyde would never have made had he been alone. And once they set off together to try to escape the storm, more mistakes are made that would not have been made by partners who were working well together. Anyone who reads this story carefully will find themselves trying hard to understand all that went on between the lines.

As in this story of Norman Clyde's, and several included above, the key decision is often whether to press on toward safety, or to remain in camp-- or to quickly set up a safe camp, and weather the storm. I can give accounts of each choice:

1. I had just reached the Barret Lakes/Palisade Basin area in late September, ( circa 1988) on my way from South Lake to Kearsarge Pass/Onion Valley. I was using a lightweight, fly only set up, and I learned a good lesson about how to set up a secure shelter. A wild storm blew in during the middle of the night. There were very high winds, and first sleet, then snow. I had simply pushed my stakes into course granite sand, which as I soon learned, doesn't grip well at all. I awoke to the crazy wind, and then had the windward side of the fly blow out, and cold sleet began pouring right onto me and my sleeping bag. I wrapped the fly around me, and weathered the night alright. In the morning lull, I quickly re-did the stakes, using cord, anchored to large rocks. I dug trenches all around, and headed back under in time for two more full days and nights of snowstorm. There were brief lulls, and I got out to see and photograph the amazingly beautiful wall of the Palisades to the east, which made the cold conditions worth it. There was luckily one other solo camper a few hundred yards away, and we commiserated together. He knew of Potluck Pass and the rest of the High Route, and we left together in barely clearing weather on the fourth day. We reached Palisade Lakes, and it snowed for 2 more days there, pinning us down again.
We weren't so much "pinned down," as consciously choosing to remain where we were till the worst of the storm passed. We concentrated on making our camps as dry and warm as can be, up beyond the tree line at 11,600 feet, and we were both warm and secure enough. Had I chosen to set out in the middle of the storm the first morning, I probably would've gotten myself and my gear soaked. Descending to LeConte Canyon from Palisade Basin is no picnic in fair weather, so who knows how I would've fared. The goal would've been to get down into the sheltering forest, and get a fire going. In this case, the decision to hang tight worked out well for me and my new partner.

2. On a spring ski trip from South Lake to North Lake, I made the opposite decision at the beginning of a snowstorm, and that time it was the right call.

This is the weather that greeted us in the AM, indicating a change for the worse.

And this is what it became in the afternoon-- steady 30 knot wind, gusts up to 50! We were on the slope leading up to Muir Pass, and the hut. It was a close call whether to dig in, and ride it out in a snow trench, or press on and hope for the luxury of Muir Hut. We were getting cold enough to begin to worry about hypothermia, and the loss of good decision making ability, and the physical ability to perform well. My partner wanted to dig in, and I told him that I thought we were on track to the hut, and asked if he wanted to continue another 20 minutes. He said fine, and sure enough the hut was around the corner.

Next morning, after a night of relentless wind-- the storm got a lot worse in the night, and when we considered what the night out would've been like, we were very glad we made the hut.

The damn thing is, you never really can tell what the right decision will be. Had the wind increased dramatically before we reached the hut, we would have been in a way worse situation-- potentially a white-out, higher up by the pass. You have to use your best conservative judgement, and hope for the best.

[Gogd]

Harlen,
Whenever I read a post you share of your experiences, I come away better elucidated, regardless of my own lifetime of wilderness experience. I also appreciate your prose demonstrates how much a person can love the Sierra. Your stories, herein this topic thread, are a subtle allusion to these qualities you share generously. You credit the outcomes of these trips to luck, but I smell decisions borne out of respecting one's intuition, an intuition that seems to have served you well on many occasions.

Folks consider intuition a wild ass hunch we have, almost metaphysical, mostly because we cannot articulate how we arrived at our conclusions. Research has determined there are in fact complex cognitive processes behind intuition. The reason they are experienced more as a sensation, a feeling about something, is because the mental processing behind intuition occurs without involving the parts of the brain that depend on language. Our brains communicate these findings nonverbally, in the form of chemical changes that create bodily and emotional sensations. The obvious evolutionary example of why we have intuition is the feeling we get about strangers we deem trustworthy or sketchy, before we have any apparent reason to harbor these sentiments. We all have experienced this. Our conclusions often coinciding with others intuition, and subsequently validated by actions of the individual in question.

Indeed fairly complex judgment calls, such as risk assessment, can take place as an intuitive process - the snow conditions " just seem" unsafe. In the case of the Muir Hut objective, your intuition may have known from prior experiences on the terrain that the hut was close at hand, albeit your conscious thought processes lacked sufficient data to arrive at this conclusion. Research is being conducted on animals to determine if this cognitive processing model applies to how other creatures navigate their world full of opportunities and threats. This is a pretty interesting research topic IMO.

Ed

[creekfeet]

While nothing went horribly wrong, my one foray into November backpacking was a textbook example of how not to conduct a late season trip.

The whole thing was thrown together ast minute when the school I work at was closed due to poor air quality from wildfire season. It was a Friday, and I had the next week off for Thanksgiving, so I thought it would be as good a time as any to go up to Roaring River Country. Not to mention it had yet to snow that year, so I wouldn’t have to deal with conditions for which I had little experience.

Having worked a few seasons in Sequoia into late October, I ought to have known better, but my “winter” backpacking getup consisted of no more than blue jeans, a thick flannel, and work gloves. I started out of the Sunset Meadow trailhead, and was immediately struck by the biting cold midday temperatures. But having never done a backpacking trip where I didnt’ go for a swim, I stubbornly decided it would be fun to hop in the Roaring River. I’m pretty sure my body temperature never returned back to normal the rest of the trip.

That first night sleeping in Deadman Canyon it dawned on me that perhaps it was time to replace my leaky sleeping pad, which would only stay inflated for about thirty minutes. The thing had serious sentimental value, but it had sprung an unfixable leak eight years prior, and I’d never bothered replacing it. I’ve since gained the little-known, valuable insight that having a working sleeping pad actually makes a difference.

On the second day I crossed over from Big Bird Lake into the Fergusson Creek drainage. At the top of the pass, I took off my gloves to light my pipe, and then in my stoned state I forgot to put my gloves back on. Needless to say, they ranked pretty high on my list of items I didn’t want to leave on top of an obscure pass. I spent the rest of the trip with wool socks on my hands, which wasn’t exactly ideal.

That night in Long Meadow was the coldest of my life. I slept wearing every last item of clothing I had, wrapped my feet in every stuff stack I’d brought, put a water bottle with heated water at my feet for good measure, and it still made no difference. When dawn finally broke, I thawed out next to a fire for a few hours, before finally climbing Barton Peak, not because I really wanted to, but because I figured it would warm me up.

I spent one more night at Ellis Meadow, which included an hour-long journey to find an unfrozen water source, before returning to my car. I cruised down Big Meadow Rd. thinking I had it made in the shade, until I came to a closed gate just shy of Hwy 198. It dawned on me it might put a bit of a damper on the Thanksgiving spirit for my extended family if I was stuck on Big Meadow Rd., unable to call and let everyone know I had made it out alive. But thankfully the gate was just dummy locked, so I was able to get out, and drive down to L.A. to see my fam. Thanksgiving was good, as was the Black Friday sale at REI where I bought a new sleeping pad.

[kpeter]

I have never had the opportunity to backpack after mid August, because of my work schedule. But here is a dramatized reenactment of a famous late-September near-disaster involving Charlie Hench, who fortunately was rescued in 2007.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztLq6P2zg3U

Hench was trying to reach Italy Pass from Jumble lake but had little visibility in the storm and went the wrong way, tumbling north off the spur of Mt. Julius Caesar where he broke a wrist, back, and lacerated an eye, becoming stuck on a 6' by 10' cliff ledge. Fortunately he survived until the weather cleared and he was spotted from a plane. It is quite a story. If you are curious and don't want to watch the somewhat sensationalized TV show, there are some newspaper stories.

https://sierrawave.net/missing-backpack ... -director/

What went wrong? Lots of things, but clearly he was not prepared to navigate in a snowstorm, was not experienced at route finding--particularly when snow covered the trail, went without sufficiently preparing for the weather, and did not have appropriate emergency gear. He thought the weather was improving so he forged ahead trying to get over Italy Pass. Going solo without a personal locator was nearly fatal. Not sure what personal locators would have been available in 2007, I got my first SPOT in 2009. He had been over Italy Pass once before, when he was much younger, but he said what many say after a snowstorm--the terrain did not look remotely familiar.

[Harlen]

Creekfeet writes

:But having never done a backpacking trip where I didnt’ go for a swim, I stubbornly decided it would be fun to hop in the Roaring River. I’m pretty sure my body temperature never returned back to normal the rest of the trip.

Your humorous account is just what the doctor ordered after my over-dramatic one. Really funny stuff inter-twined with good lessons for us. For example, the deflating sleeping pad, of which I now own 2! I used to repair my old thermorest in 10 minutes, but I can't find good patch kits anymore.
Your best point is that we really need to consider how much colder spring and fall weather can be. I really like your casual mountain look, but did you even have shell layers to go over your levis and flannel shirt?

Thanks for a great post.