High Sierra Topix

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! The gifts have been opened and I'm now sitting, listening to the rain (wonderful!), sipping some coffee and doing a bit of reading.

A thought I had this morning is that I know of bits of where the old Muir trail or pre-Muir trail wandered from its current route, e.g. Cartridge Pass, Junction Pass or was it Harrison Pass(?). BUT is there a map old or that someone has compiled of the "Old" or pre route(s)?

So happy to see the snow! Hope it continues, fingers crossed. Enjoy the new year!

Merry Christmas : https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/6b ... f99a564c0f

Thanks @maverick!

That's a great webpage, thanks for the link @maverick

The trail went through so many changes, beginning soon after it was first laid out and mapped in 1915-1916, that some of it never was built as mapped and some was never even actually travelled before or after it was mapped. Several parts were changed before others wer completed. Alternative temporary routes were never part of the official route, other changes were only quasi-official. As a result, as of 2021 the entire original trail had never been through hiked, and and at least a couple of significant sections had not been hiked since 1908, or ever.

In 2021, just before Maverick started this thread, I put together the first such through-hike. Over 4 weeks in July and august of that year , a group of about 12 of us, in various combinations, did the whole route in a single trip, for the first known time, based on meticulous research and a high res file of the original route, which I had studied for a couple of years.

Attached is a video of the presentation we made in Tuolumne on our stopover there two days into the trek. The attached photo is of the Summit team on August 10, 2021. Brian Kimball, on the right, and I did the entire route. Neenah Spellman, left joined us at Evo Basin for the second half of the push.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKlOGx2Skco&t=2289s

Side note: Orland Bartholomew skied the JMT (roughly that route) in 1929. He came up from Lone Pine to Horseshoe, Rock Creek, went up Whitney, then the JMT but over Harrison Pass. He and Ed Steen, his original partner who had to back out because of money, put caches in every 10 miles or so. Bart used those and I found one of them untouched since at Upper Whitney Meadow..

In the 90s (can't remember the exact dates) Howard Weamer (Ostrander hutkeeper) and several others skied the same route.

Didn't know NPS had put together an online JMT file. That's great! Thanks for link Maverick.

Also, don't want to take away from anyone's firsts and maybe it depends on how the JMT route is described, but there were people following the "old" JMT, including either Harrison or dropping down to Anvil Camp then over to Center Basin; as well as Lake Basin, Cartridge Pass & down to the Middle Fork (pre-Mather Pass route), in the 80s at least. The route from Anvil to Center was still pretty obvious in the 70d with, if I remember right, a large post marker there.

Anyway, a fun & really interesting route to use as an alternative.

Oh, PS. A great book for JMT history is Pathways in the SKy by Hal Roth. You can still find it used at Amazon.

History of Bartholomew's trip is High Odyssey by Gene Rose.