the full report with many more photos and words is here: https://badmountain.org/lost-found-in-the-tablelands
We started from Twin Lakes/Lodgepole. After a couple trail miles, my friend took off on a traverse closer to the Silliman Crest while I chose to follow the trail, which I’d never seen, and possibly never would again.
The trail wound through the northeastern edge of last year’s KNP Complex Fire, which was interesting, but for the most part the hike was forested and mundane. Next time it would likely be much more fun to climb the long drainage to Little Lakes and follow the Crest to Silliman Pass.
The view from Silliman Pass is outstanding, a 180 degree panorama of the Great Western Divide and many of the major southern Sierra peaks in Kings Canyon. I am not a peak guy, but I *think* I could see all the way to Goddard, 30 miles away.
The view south along the Silliman Crest is also breathtaking.
We met up at Ranger Lake for the night, a perfectly nice, mundane Sierra lake.
The next morning we climbed south along a string of lakes. This was a particularly fine view down a chute from the upper to lower unnamed lakes at 9500/9600 feet.
More bonkers views back towards Peakville.
We popped out directly above Crescent Lake -- a serious lake!
You simply cannot get enough of the Silliman Crest.
Southeast of Crescent Lake lies the upper bowl of Crowley Canyon, a landscape of pleasingly low angle slabs and a bucolic stream, still puttering along in mid-September.
I took off up the last half mile of slabs to the pass. The mellow ridge separating Crowley Canyon from the Tablelands has a few possible “passes.” I chose this one, which seemed to me the lowest and most obvious. I got there first, put my bag down and took a long look into the Tablelands on the other side, waiting for my partner.
I came back to the “pass” and looked back down to the wide meadow below. No one there. I yelled my friend’s name. Nothing. Weird? I yelled much louder, my voice echoing for a long, long time off of the many cliff faces, followed by silence. I did this for a couple minutes.
Ugh. My mind started to race. I considered that if he couldn’t reply, he might be badly injured. This was bad. Was this bad? Maybe this was bad!?
I scurried the half mile down to where I’d last seen him. The terrain was easy slabs and some boulders – not an obvious place to gravely injure yourself. In my last photo of him, he looked to be walking southwest: had he chosen a totally different route across the ridge? It did look more gnarly that way and he did like to challenge himself. Was he injured somewhere in the boulders over there?
My mind ran over the possibilities but nothing really added up. Every minute or two I’d yell his name as loudly as I could, and it would return back to me in its beautifully chaotic decay. In another context, I would have been captivated by this: nature’s coolest delay pedal. But not right now. I blew my whistle a couple times (which is punishingly loud in the blowers ear, by the way).
This was definitely bad. It had been thirty minutes. I was sure he could hear me, so why didn't he respond? When does one actually hit the SOS button? Not yet but… when? I had to admit that I had no idea. I'd imagined that bad situations in the mountains would present themselves far more clearly: my partner has broken his leg, so we hit SOS. But this was not that. This was ambivalent silence.
Eventually I turned and walked back up to the pass.
And there he was, standing on top of the ridge, waiting.
He’d gone through a different “pass” a couple hundred feet east of my own, and then walked into the Tablelands to check it out. He must’ve passed through the meadow in that minute or two when I wasn’t looking.
He’d heard a couple of my yells, and yelled right back into the void, and even used his whistle. In retrospect, I actually had heard one of his replies, but it had sounded impossibly far off and higher pitched: like a woman that was miles away. It was instructive – not to mention chilling – to learn just how useless screaming your head off can be in wide open spaces like this.
But here we were, together again, the “emergency” solved. In retrospect, we’d both made a mistake or two in how we'd handled the situation, but I was again reminded just how easy it is to get caught in a weird situation out there.
The views from the Tablelands are astounding. Architecturally, it seems like an inverted basin: instead of a traditional Sierra basin that is nestled beneath a U-shaped ring of mountains, in the Tablelands the floor of the basin was thrust up and became the mountain itself.
We crested a rise along the divide, and the high point of our weekend: around 11,300 feet. We were greeted with what I’d consider the “main” part of Tablelands.
We descended to Table Meadows and wandered downstream: modest brush, boulders, slab. After our short afternoon in the relatively barren Tablelands, this mellow canyon at the headwaters of the Kaweah River was warm and inviting.
Clouds and mist clotted the serrated peaks behind Pear and Emerald Lakes.
The next morning, we were walking by 7, hoofing it through the cold morning in most of our layers to the top of the hill above Pear Lake. The morning was cool and overcast, and we had the extremely popular Lakes Trail almost entirely to ourselves.
more here: https://badmountain.org/lost-found-in-the-tablelands
