Kearsarge Trip
| It had been a long time since I'd gone hiking with Drew and Stephanie, and I hoped to find a particularly good place to go, especially since we had 3 days to work with instead of the usual 2 day weekend trips most of my working friends are limited to. In discussing plans for the weekend, Drew asked about a hike I took through King's Canyon a few years ago, he said it sounded interesting. That would be the Rae Lakes loop, and it's 32 miles and requires 3-5 days. I think only Evil Dan could manage that hike in 3 days, and only because he had a strong craving for a cheeseburger as the carrot to keep him moving. It took me 5 days when I tried it. During that 5 days I met people who came in the back way, something called Onion Valley, so I looked this up on a map, and it looked good, From the town of Independence in the Owens River valley, you drive from about elevation 3000' up to 9200', then you hike over Kearsarge Pass, elevation 11,760', and there are a couple of camping options within a few miles on the other side of the pass, right off the Rae Lakes loop. So this is what we did. |
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We left late on Friday evening, hoping to avoid any heavy Columbus Day Weekend holiday traffic, which worked pretty well. We arrived in the Long Valley Caldera near Mammoth about 1:30 in the morning, and camped near my favorite hot spring. The next morning we carbo-loaded at the Breakfast Club in Mammoth Lakes and then headed towards the trailhead. I'm still not sure why someone went through so much effort to build a road so far up into Onion Valley, but it sure is appreciated. The 2500' hike to the top of the pass is still very challenging, but we were all in good shape and got to the top in a few hours. The view from the top of the pass was one of the most spectacular I've ever seen, knife-edge ridges and high peaks everywhere, and the Owens River Valley 9000' feet below. A storm was blowing through to the south, and Drew commented he hoped it stayed down there, he didn't want to get caught in the rain. I theorized that if the storm hit us, the precipitation wasn't going to be rain. A few minutes later this was confirmed when I saw one of the high peaks getting frosted over with a quick, thin layer of snow, but the storm never reached us. |
| The hike down the other side of the pass was easy, and only about a mile to the first camp site at Kearsarge Lakes, which is where we stayed. There are several emerald green lakes here at the base of the Kearsarge Pinnacles, a spectacular granite formation. The lakes are at about elevation 11,000', and does it ever get cold there on October nights, my $5.45 Tube Tent offered little protection against the cold but did a great job at preventing the moisture from getting away from my sleeping bag, it was soaked in the morning. For our Saturday day hike I proposed a bushwhack down along the stream connecting the lakes with a general goal of getting to Charlotte Lake and possibly even climbing Glenn Pass (elev. 11,978') where we could look into the basin holding the Rae Lakes. As it turned out, the distance was a little greater than I remembered and so we hiked only to Charlotte Lake, admiring all the panoramas along the way. Speaking of which, I could not shoot any panoramic photographs because I forgot my fisheye lens - I've already made a tentative plan to go back there within the next couple weeks just to take some of these shots, the regular lens in the camera just can't capture the grandeur of this area! |
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Although we saw little wildlife, we saw signs. Bear prints, bear garbage
(ripped open freeze-dried meals obviously stolen from some careless
hiker), bear scat, some other prints that looked too small for bear,
we theorized maybe coyotes make it up there. And then there were the
big deer prints. They were somewhat of an oddity, the deer would have
to be huge, and this seemed a little high to be finding them at all.
When we took the trail back to the campsite, there were very fresh tracks
from the mutant ungulates. Sometime later we found a sign mentioning
that this was a big horned sheep area - aha! I think we all wish we'd
spied one of these elusive critters, but they saw us first.
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2002© Spench