Desolation

[balzaccom]

I've just come back from another trip to Desolation Wilderness as a volunteer, doing the usual stuff: restoring illegal campsites, destroying fire rings, and talking to hikers about their plans and conditions. If you're interested in the full report, complete with a few nice photos, I've posted it here:

https://www.backpackthesierra.com/post/we-re-back

But I also had an interesting interaction with a group of hikers. Here's the scene: Two miles in from the trailhead, they were hiking towards Lake Aloha, and I was hiking on my way out. We greeted each other on the trail, and they told me about their plans. They offered to show me their permit, but I told them that was unnecessary--I'm a volunteer with zero authority to enforce anything at all--but thanked them for getting the permit, and wearing it on the outside of their pack. And they told me that there was one more member of their party, a "straggler," that I would meet on my way out.

Fair enough.

I did meet a lot of people on the trail out: through hikers on their way from Yosemite, backpackers on their way to Aloha, dayhikers on extensive loop trails, or simply out for a short hike, and even a trail runner jogging up the steepest section of the trail. But even though I asked, I never did meet that straggler.

It's enough to make someone start thinking about writing a mystery novel set in the Sierra...The Case of the Strangled Straggler.

[giantbrookie]

Neat report on some of the most scenic parts of Desolation. Interesting about the straggler thing. I think when we hike in very popular areas, such as Desolation and some of the major E side trails (say Sabrina, Bishop Pass) we run into a ton of hiker and encounter similar situations to what you did with the phantom "straggler".

It always makes one wonder. You'd think, for example, a group would, for safety, not leave their straggler behind, because we could see situations where the straggler may lose a trail or perhaps take the wrong fork. I've encountered the "missing straggler" situation (ie told about straggler but not seeing them) as well as being told of stragglers but actually seeing them. Of course I suppose there is the other sort of straggler situation where a group has an individual or individuals who take off from the entry point separately and later.

[balzaccom]

My rule is always that you make sure the group is together at every tail junction and every streamcrossing.

You don't all have to hike together, but you do have to make sure you are all going the same direction, and nobody has died.

(Stream crossings are notorious for lots of different use trails that can confuse just about anyone.)

[Kyri Freeman]

Thank you for doing that! I spent some time at least trying to better bury some very thoughtlessly placed bathroom sites at Hutchinson last week.

In Humphreys Basin last week, I would calculate that every other person I met was lost. I got lost-ish at one point (took the lower Golden Trout Lakes user trail, which is not on my map, rather than the main Piute Pass trail coming back up from Hutchinson). I immediately found two hikers who had done the same and had camped. They were talking to two other hikers who had just descended the trail and felt it was 'more a footpath than a trail' but easy enough to follow. I decided to head on up it. One of the camping hikers said something like, "we'll be following and at worst we'll all be lost together".

I never saw them again...

I lost the user trail maybe half a mile later, InReach totally useless POS for micro-navigation as it puts me about 40 feet from where I really am. It was easy enough to just continue in the right direction until I re-found the trail and then a larger user trail (so many user trails). I have no idea what those guys did and I hope it turned out OK whatever it was.