THE SIERRAS!

Holy crap.  I don't even know what just happened.  14 snowbound days in the wilderness.  We ripped some miles through the desert, getting stronger and stronger every day, feeling like kings... for 700 miles we cruised along in confidence.  Then the Sierras punched us in the face and stopped us dead in our tracks.  We've been knocking out 100 miles every 4 days and it just took us 14 to get through the 200 miles of the High Sierra.

Out of Kennedy Meadows we started climbing.  For 2 days we went further and further into the mountains, climbing higher with every mile.  By day 3, the trail was completely buried.  The lakes were frozen.  The mountain passes got your heart-pounding with fear and amazement.  Since there is no trail to follow, we've had to rely on topo maps and compass to navigate through the frozen valleys and icy passes.  It is a constant feeling somewhere between being completely lost and having a rough idea of where you might be on the map--it is so hard to make progress when you have to constantly be watching the maps and the landscape for reference points.  How the walking on the snow goes depends on the time of day.  In the morning it is frozen, hard-packed, and slick.  This is ok if you're crossing a meadow on the valley floor or walking a mellow ridgeline.  It's not ok if you're scaling slidehill across the icy face of a mountain.  The sun melts the ice to a nice slush that is ok at first,  but gradually deteriorates as the day goes on.  By late afternoon, when the snow is the softest, every step is like walking through a minefield.  You  never know when the snow will give out and drop you into the rocks below.  This is called postholing.  It will drive you insane.  You take a step-ok-step-ok-step-DROP and your leg just goes out from under you as you spear down into the snow, keeping your fingers crossed you dont break your leg in the boulders.  This will go on for hours, and hours, and hours... AAAHH!  I could lose my mind just thinking about it. Then there are the river crossings.  All the snow melting off the mountains is coming down the hills in torrents that would like nothing more than to knock you off your feet and send you cascading through the rocks.  The rivers are all just raging and we have to wade across them, hoping hard that your footsteps will hold as the water just blasts you.

Day 3 had us deep in the heart of the Sierras and feelings completely alone in the wilds.  We walked all day in the snow, postholing every other step, crossing river after river.  We got to Crabtree Meadows and hiked 7 miles off trail to go up Mt Whitney.  7 miles of crunching through the snow just to get to the base of Whitney and when we got there all the switchbacks were buried so we had to climb up the bare rockslides.  From the top, the view of endless snowcovered mountains stabbing into the sky like shards of broken glass--it was so intense, knowing we were just going to go deeper and deeper into those hills.

After Whitney we had this absolutely maddening day of hiking towards Forester Pass, the highest point on the trail.  We missed a turn and went up the wrong way to Forester and hiked all day up into this saddle.  As we went, post holing the whole way, a pair of coyotes started howling at us from a field.  The were yapping and running circles in the snow.  From the top we looked out and saw Forester Pass was not in the correct place on the horizon and now we had to drop down the other side of this unnecessary climb.  The first step I took I postholed up to my eyeballs.  Both legs dropped down and dumped me in a hole with just my head and shoulders poking out.  Well, this just wasn't going to work.  We ended up having to scale down through the boulders to the valley below to get back on track.

(ran out of time on the library computer... more later)