(This is the first in what might become an occasional series of posts having little or nothing to do with photography—the “Not Photography” series for those of you who keep track of blog categories.)

A simple photograph of Duck Lake that I saw posted elsewhere today reminded me of a backpacking trip I did some years back, so I thought I’d tell a bit of that story here. It is not a story about photography, believe it or not, though I will add one gratuitous photograph “just because.” ;-)

Lakes Below Duck Pass, Afternoon Showers. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. August 5, 2005. © Copyright 2005 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

I have backpacked for decades, almost entirely in California’s Sierra Nevada, visiting almost every portion of the range, though not by any means every place in this sierra of almost infinite variety. A few years back I made a rough tally of the total number of “trail days,” not counting non-backpacking trips, and it totaled up to something closer to two years than to one—and I’ve continued to backpack since that time.

Over the years I have covered the better part of the famous John Muir Trail (also called the “JMT”), but in pieces and spread over many trips. The trips have ranged from a couple of days in length, when I perhaps only touched a very short segment of the trail, up to several of two weeks or longer when I spent days along its length, often hiking alone but sometimes with friends, and on two memorable trips with my wife Patty. I’ve been over some sections quite a few times, including several areas in the Southern Sierra of Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks and a many in and around Yosemite. A few segments begin to feel like old friends when I return to them.

But there is one section that I have not yet covered. It stretches from Purple Lake to about the Muir Trail Ranch. 

Back in 2005 I joined a group of friends for a 14-day backpack trip that was supposed to rectify this. Our trip began at Agnew Meadow near Devils Postpile National Monument, and would end two weeks later after exiting through Dusy Basin over Bishop Pass to South Lake. I was already quite familiar with both ends of this route. I had backpacked many times into the area near the Minarets and Mount Ritter and Banner Peak. I had also been up and into Evolution Basin from the west, over Muir Pass and down into Le Conte Canyon, and I had visited Dusy Basin a few times. On one small trip many years earlier I might have just touched a spot along this section of the trail on one night. But between those two endpoints is an area that I had overlooked in favor of other areas that I know to be quite spectacular, especially the magnificent and isolated high country between Evolution Basin and the Upper Kern basin from Forester Pass to the Whitney Trail Crest.

Our trip began well. We headed up the trail as if we were going to Ediza Lake, a familiar access point for exploring the Minarets area. But after passing Shadow Lake we instead turned south on the JMT, passing over a section of the trail that has its attractions… but which does not compare to some of the more alpine areas found elsewhere along its length. We joked that this was sort of obligatory section of the trail that we had to cover if we were to be able to say we had hiked the entire JMT. In two days we traveled from our trailhead to Reds Meadow… and back to the relative civilization of that place, with its “car campgrounds,” many visitors to Devils Postpile, a restaurant (!),flush toilets (!), a store (!), and more. The next morning we were again on the JMT, heading south through the low elevation terrain of the San Joaquin River drainage. On the fourth night we arrived at Purple Lake, which I remember as a very pretty little subalpine lake with some beautiful flowers that I photographed.

But that night something didn’t seem right. I’ve had a relatively charmed life on the trail, never getting sick or injured. But on this evening I felt like I was “coming down with something.” I didn’t feel particularly bad, but it was the sort of feeling that often comes before the flu or the sort of cold that convinces me to go to bed for a day. And there we were at the start of  a section of the JMT that would take us about a week to traverse, a section that does not provide any easy exit options—and half of the bad options would take me out to relatively remote west side trailheads where I imagined myself arriving alone, sick, and without a vehicle. The other options were equally unappealing, involving eastward exits over high Sierra crest passes to trailheads of varying degrees of remoteness.

That evening I thought long and hard about the options: continuing on in hopes of feeling better, or doing the smart thing and exiting here where I could be in Mammoth Lakes in one day. I told my trail partners that I wasn’t feeling well and alerted them to the question this raised, promising them that I would make a decision in the morning.

I did not sleep well, partly because of how I felt physically but also, no doubt, because of the worry about making this decision. It would have been easier if I felt great (obviously!) or if I felt really awful, but feeling “somewhat off” made the decision that much more difficult. I woke up early and still did not feel right. Unhappily, I told my friends that I should do the conservative thing, and that I thought that it would be best for me to leave them and hike out.

Disappointed, I packed up my camp, loaded my pack, said goodbye to my friends, and headed back to the north with, as they say, a heavy heart. As I walked I thought about many things: the fact that this was the first time I had ever cut a trip short for a reason like this, disappointment that I would not cover that last bit of the JMT this year, my uncertainty about whether or not I was doing the right thing, the practical issues of how I would get myself back to my car at an entirely different trailhead than the one were I would exit. And all the while I was paying very close attention to how I felt—not terrible, but not quite perfectly well either.

I covered the beautiful first part of this trail with its long views of the panorama back in the direction that I would not be going and eventually came to the junction that would take me past Duck Lake and over Duck Pass to Mammoth Lakes. A thunderstorm was coming in and there were dark clouds over the crest. As is often the case, I did not want to “suit up” for rain so I kept walking even as a few sparse drops fell, thinking that it might not develop into anything serious. I was wrong. Suddenly it began to rain hard, and I now recall parking myself under some poor shelter, quickly covering my pack, and putting on rain gear before continuing slowly toward the pass.

Crossing the pass—the rain had now let up—I began the descent toward the trailhead above Mammoth Lakes. There were still thunderstorms about, but they had moved off a bit and sunlit began to appear here and there. (The photograph at the beginning of this post was made at about this time and place.) I continued down the trail, musing about the need to hitchhike a couple of rides in order to get back to my car… and then I began to feel like I was recovering by the time I reached the trailhead!

Oddly, this was somewhat disappointing. Given the distance I had covered, and the pass that I had crossed and then descended, and the distance that my group had travelled in the opposite direction, I realized that my thoughts of turning around again and trying to catch up were not realistic. They would now be two days ahead of me and traveling faster as they adapted to hiking after nearly a week on the trail, and I would have to travel solo and without a wilderness permit for perhaps a week if I hoped to catch up.

There are perhaps two postscripts to this story that I can share here.

First, after going back home I realized that it might be a whole lot of fun to try to get back to the Sierra and backpack solo up and over Bishop Pass to meet the party as they came up from LeConte Canyon. So I did, and on the second day of my solo trip I hiked down toward the canyon and found a nice rock to sit on along the side of the trail and wait. The looks on their faces as they unexpectedly came upon me after 13 days on the trail were priceless!

Second, I still have not hiked this section of the JMT!

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

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