7/31/15 Piute Creek to Evolution Lake
12.5 miles
Today felt relatively easy. We slept a bit longer as a storm was rolling through. We broke camp around 8:10 (later than nearly everyone else we were camped next to) and headed out along side the San Joaquin river. The trail crossed a bridge over the San Joaquin, up some rocky switch backs, and into Goddard Canyon.
After hiking up and over some rocky switchbacks and along side a rushing waterfall, we met up with Evolution Creek, who would be our buddy all day long. I think this may have been my favorite day so far. In my prep reading, a lot of folks wrote about the treacherous Evolution Creek crossing with hikers knocked over by the rushing water. Since this was a super dry year in California, the water barely came up to my calves. We took our shoes off at the bank, waded in, and quickly made it to the other side. One poor guy dropped his shoes in the creek. Not good.
At this point in our journey we have found ourselves in the same group of people all day long. It is as if our pace of hiking finally settled in after 10 days. Dave and George, buddies from Pennsylvania. Manuela and her husband Dick from Oregon. Dylan and Anna from Los Angeles. Karl from St. Louis hiking the PCT. Steve and his daughter Emma from Mass. Todd, the white wolf who told me to put olive oil on my feet. The older married couple with the 50 year old younger brother that heads off on side hikes to summit the 14,000′ peaks around us whose names elude me. We are all on the same pace through these lakes and passes and it is just darn cute.
I was searching all day long for Whale Rock, a large boulder that split laterally and honestly looks like the giant whale Monstro from Pinnochio. Didn’t find it. It was the next day.
By the time we hit Colby Meadow, afternoon clouds were building up again and threatening a thunderstorm. The climb from Colby Meadow to Evolution Lake is about 1,000′ over less than a mile, so decent amount of up. As we were climbing lightening started striking the peaks in the distance and rain was coming down. So we were basically doing the opposite of what one is supposed to do in a thunderstorm. We couldn’t find a single campsite amongst the trees on our climb up and we kept hemming and hawing over whether to go back down and lose the elevation, or plow forward and camp near Evolution Lake.
In short thunderstorms are really stressful. We pushed on to Evolution Lake to find the rest of our group set up and weathering out the storm. They are easy to spot as Steve and Emma have this blue tarp tent. The storm was one ridge over and the lightening seemed to be striking about a mile away at it’s nearest. We were timing the strikes with our stop watch.
Thankfully our tarp is pretty easy to erect so we set it up without the foot print and climbed under for protection as the rain came down.
When the rain broke, we climbed out from our tents and visited with Dylan and Anna. Dylan cooked up some nice mint tea and we found out why they were on the trail. Anna had planned on hiking the JMT with a friend, but he passed suddenly earlier in the summer. Dylan jumped in and decided to go on the trip with her rather than let her hike alone. They were planning a ceremony of remembrance on top of Mt. Whitney. Everyone has an amazing story of why they are on the trail.
Karl from St. Louis set up tent next to ours. He was section hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. He had already completed Southern California to Kennedy Meadows and all of Oregon. He was south bound hiking the Sierra section of PCT then going to take a bus north to complete Washington. He recounted many stories of crossing the desert on the PCT, something that I just do not want to do. Apparently he awoke one night to a deer licking the salt off his face. Better a deer than a bear, right?! He had given up on filtering his water, claiming it was far better than some of the stuff he drank in the desert. Made me question our fastidious methodology of pumping water.
Soon the conversation turned to all the food we missed, as it always seemed to on the trail. Cheeseburgers, cheese, beer, crisp vegetables, oreos, gin and tonics (that one is me), pizza, etc. Karl also recounted that one of his friends works for Kraft foods in the Mac and Cheese division and gifted Karl with a giant bag of just the cheese powder mix. I was jealous. We purchased multiple boxes of Annie’s mac and cheese just to get those cheese packages. They are great for building camping meals.
That night the storm picked up again and knocked our tent over around say, 3 am.
Tomorrow we have another 8 miles to go before we summit Muir Pass. Then we will sleep somewhere in LeConte Canyon. We should try for a 14 mile day to make up for our 2 slower days. Honestly though, I feel a lot better than previous days. My feet don’t hurt as bad and blisters on my pinky toes are healing. And by healing I mean the entire blister pealed off and now I just take to taping up my pinkies to keep them from rubbing too much. Amazingly Kevin has zero blisters.
