I went backpacking with Greg and Andrea in the Ansel Adams Wilderness this Thursday through Sunday. Greg and Andrea are backpacking veterans, which is good, because I'm mostly a newbie.
This map is easy to read, but it's missing Clarice Lake.
This map has more detail, but it's harder to read.
We drove up on Wednesday afternoon/evening. It's about a six hour drive. We stayed at a Motel 6 that night at about 8000 feet elevation. I found it hard to sleep because I could feel my heart and lungs working extra hard.
Thursday morning we had our last restaurant meal, picked up our wilderness permit, and drove over to the shuttle stop. Our trailhead was in Devil's Postpile National Monument, and no cars are permitted in when the shuttle is running. So we rode the shuttle in to the Agnew Meadows trailhead, which you can see in the center right of the map. The map says it's at about 8300 feet elevation.
From there it was a fairly easy descent northwest into a valley and past Olaine Lake at about 8100 feet. The ground isn't very fertile, and on the trails the ground turns to thick dust, almost like dry beach sand. On this busy section, the trail was very dusty. Bleah.
The trail passes Olaine Lake on fairly level ground in a forested area, so it felt somewhat like an eastern pond with nothing special about it.
From there we turned left (west) and climbed steeply up to Shadow Lake at about 8700 feet. This lake felt more like a Sierra Nevada lake. There was forest on some sides, but other parts of the lake were hemmed in by cliffs and rock falls.
From here we could also clearly see Mount Ritter and Banner Peak, our 13000-foot landmarks for the rest of the trip.
I think we had lunch in the vicinity of Shadow Lake. Here I would have my last and only cheese puffies for the trip, since cheese puffies don't compress very well into bear canisters. Mmm... cheese puffies.
From there we continued west uphill to Ediza Lake at around 9300 feet. When we finished the final climb and came out right next to the lake and a beautiful Alpine meadow with rugged snowy peaks behind them, I couldn't help but break loudly into song: "The hills are alive with the sound of music..." Greg didn't like that so much. Nor did he like it when I transitioned to "High on the hills was a lonely goatherd". And apparently my short snippet of "Doe, a deer, a female deer" got stuck in his brain for the rest of the day.
No camping is allowed on the south shore of Ediza, so we circled around the west side to the northwest side, where Greg followed his nose to a beautiful campsite high above the lake. Nearby was a nice stream where we could refill our water bottles using our filter pump.
We set up our tents and then wandered around the lake. Greg had brought his fishing pole and some fish-cooking gear, but although he caught a number of one- or two-pound fish throughout the trip, he decided to throw them all back.
There were three or four other groups camped near the lake, but none were bothersome. In any case, a waterfall on the south side seemed rather loud in comparison to the extreme quiet that otherwise would have been present. In fact, at night the waterfall sounded an awful lot like a highway in the distance. Har.
Greg made a delicious dinner of pasta with meat sauce. That was the last meal that didn't need to fit into the bear canister, so of course it was the tastiest.
Then we went back down to the lake and watched the light disappear off the mountains and the stars come out. We also saw a few satellites during the trip.
Andrea had read that Thursday at 7:52 was the perfect time for photographers in Yosemite to recreate the conditions of one of Ansel Adams' famous photos: "Autumn Moon: the High Sierra From Glacier Point". But for us the moon didn't rise above the high horizon until after 8 o'clock. Since it was quickly getting cold by then, we headed off to bed.
Again I had trouble sleeping due to the altitude. Also, while my mummy-style sleeping back is very warm, it doesn't allow much movement, and I needed to move around to keep from cramping up. Finally at around 1 a.m. I realized that my body heat had warmed up the ground enough that I could unzip the sleeping bag and use it as a blanket while I slept on my camping mat. I had to make sure that the sleeping bag touched the ground on all sides, however, because otherwise the breeze through the tent vents was very cold.
My new tent is built for one person and packs up very small and light. Like all tents (I guess), it needs ventilation so that humidity and perspiration don't condense on the inside. So it's a good thing my sleeping bag is super warm because the tent can't hold much warmth.
Friday we got up at around 8 am when the sun rose high enough to light our tents directly. Well, Greg was up earlier to fish, but crazy people don't count. Greg did discover that the rock outcropping above our campsite warmed up early in the morning, though, so we dubbed it Lizard Rock. It turned out to be less useful later, though, when it was windier.
Greg made us some oatmeal porridge, which Andrea and I declared as not so tasty.
We left our packs and tents and took just daypacks for Friday's hike. We returned east along our trail, then turned north along the John Muir trail over an 10100-foot saddle. Directly on top of the saddle was an unmarked pond with no inlet or outlet. A small patch of snow continued to melt into it, but the pond had clearly receded over the summer.
From there we continued down to Garnet Lake at about 9700 feet. I managed to make it down just in time to stake out a good lunch spot on some rocks poking out into the lake before a group of 11 backpackers reached it. Greg spoke briefly with them and decided that their group leader was a jackass because he needed help finding the trail that we'd just come down. They said they were on their way to camp at Clarice Lake. (Foreshadowing...)
We had a compact lunch of hummus in pita bread and watched the clouds puff out over the mountains and then evaporate. Andrea spotted a clot of tiny white birds high in the sky wheeling around each other as they drifted with the wind. For the most part we didn't see many birds or other animals on this trip. One marmot, a few chipmunks, and lots of mosquitos, although the DEET did its job with them.
Garnet Lake is very large and has many little rock and meadow islands, but I guess not as many as Thousand Island Lake a bit further north. We decided to not push that far, though, and instead we continued northeast to the outlet of Garnet Lake, then turned southeast on a little used trail to Altha Lake. Although a trail appears on the map, the trail we found disappeared at some camp sites not far from from Garnet Lake, and so we dead reckoned our way up a saddle to overlook Altha Lake.
Altha Lake is a comparatively mid-sized lake. It has no inlet or (when we visited) outlet, and it's ringed by steep walls on all sides. We found a fisherman's trail to the south end along the east side. It involved some scrambling on the rocks to avoid having to wade through the lake.
Our plan was to continue south to Laura Lake, which meant traveling without a trail. Fortunately, the forest didn't have a lot of ground cover to impede travel, and we just needed to stay at about the same elevation while following the high ground on the west side. With three people, we were able to break all ties in deciding which route to take, and eventually we popped out exactly where we wanted to be.
Laura Lake again had no inlet or outlet, and it perches strangely above a huge drop down to the San Joaquin River. (Actually, the map shows that Altha Lake also perches above the same drop, but it has a ridge around it that is just high enough to seem a bit more believable to keep the lake in.)
From Laura Lake, we turned west to climb up out of one valley and head back to the valley containing the John Muir trail. We had a small goal of visiting Clarice Lake, but without good landmarks, we didn't put great hopes in finding it on our way by.
After struggling through thick brush up to a saddle the ground cover thinned out and we strolled on westward.
That's when we ran straight into... the same 11 backpackers still looking for Lake Clarice. Not 10 yards to the side. Straight into. In the middle of a trackless wilderness.
Once again, they wanted help finding Clarice Lake. Of course, we weren't sure where it was, but pointed out that we'd just left Laura Lake behind us. "Laura Lake?", they asked. Greg figures they're still wandering out there.
We continued on and quickly hit the trail, and from there it was an easy trip back to our campsite at Ediza Lake.
Dinner on Friday night was instant garlic mashed potatoes with gravy. Mmm, mmm, good.
This time it got colder even earlier, so we headed to bed before the sky had even completely darkened. This time I closed the windward vent on my tent. The lee-side vent was still open for adequate ventilation, and I was able to quickly get comfortable.
It's a good thing I did that because that was the windiest night, with gusts perhaps up to 20 mph. Most of that time the wind was fairly light, but occasionally I'd wake up to hear a roaring approaching through the trees, finally blowing the trees all around before descending to push in the side of my tent for about ten seconds before lifting and roaring away.
Friday night my lungs felt fine and I don't recall having an altitude headache, but I could still feel my heart pounding extra hard whenever I'd lie on my stomach.
Saturday morning Andrea and I had a smaller portion of oatmeal before we packed our stuff back into our backpacks.
Our plan was to head south past Iceberg Lake to Cecile Lake, and perhaps onward to Minaret Lake. There is no official trail along that route, but Greg and Andrea had a book that said that backpackers had worn a decent trail, and we found that to be true.
At around 10:30 we popped above a rim to find Iceberg Lake at around 9800 feet. It surprised me in being accurately named. Walls of unmelted snow on two sides were clearly calving off chunks of ice and snow often enough to have dropped five or six small icebergs into the lake. The biggest was perhaps twelve feet long at the surface. Another one appeared to have been formed when two crashed together and tilted up. That one gave me the pleasure of partially falling apart and tilting over while I was watching, making many of the same noises and splashes in miniature that you see in nature shows for the big polar icebergs.
Greg and Andrea's guide book said that the snow should be melted out of the way by late summer, but we could see that there was still some snow along our path. The best crossing spot could perhaps take advantage of a bare spot where some rocks poked out, although they were still surrounded by snow. When we arrived, there were some people checking the conditions on both the upper and lower ends of the bare spot.
We watched those people and then another group poke all around the side of that snow field before giving up and coming back. Greg checked with them and learned that the "snow" was really solid ice with no grip whatsoever.
The sun was just starting to shine on the snow field then, so we decided to give it an hour or two to soften up a bit. After about an hour, a group of three people without packs gave it a try. Two of them looked like dedicated hikers, wearing shorts even in the cold weather. The third was wearing a sweatsuit and didn't look very happy. We watched them in the distance as they carved a way out to the middle pile of rocks and then from there to the far side. It took them a very long time, and it looked like a fair amount of convincing was needed for the third hiker.
Then another group of dayhikers came and followed the direct route across the snowfield where the path went. They didn't take nearly as long, so we figured we'd go check it out.
Greg tried pushing his hiking pole into the "snow" as far as he could ram it, which was about a quarter inch. Although there were some depressions where people had carved footholds, they'd clearly melted and refrozen. We decided that risking a hundred foot slide onto rocks (at best) or into the freezing lake (at worst) wasn't worth the extra lakes that we could visit. Plus the climb out looked like a doozy.
So we returned to our packs and had a lunch of peanut butter in pita bread, then headed back down to Ediza Lake.
This time we picked out a different campsite that seemed more sheltered from the wind. Greg tried to make potato cheddar soup, and although the cheddar part came out better than he'd feared, the potato bits didn't cook through, so it was a bit crunchy. Luckily, after three days in the wilderness we were neither picky enough nor stupid enough to complain to the cook.
Although it was not at all windy, Saturday night was bitterly cold. Fortunately, the short Saturday hike and my improving muscles meant that I didn't need to move around as much, and I quickly zipped myself up and slept tight all night, with no problems at all with the altitude.
It was also fortunate that I didn't move much because I must have messed up the top vent on my tent. Although a light breeze continued to circulate coldly around the bottom of the tent, the top of the tent wouldn't vent, and condensation built up around the upper walls. When I accidentally touched them in the morning, they immediately started dripping like crazy.
Our new campsite lined up better with a notch in the mountains, so the Sunday morning sun came up close to an hour earlier. We greatly appreciated it. Greg reported that the edges of the lake were frozen, and even from our site a few hundred feet away we could see frost on the ground around the lake.
After another small serving of oatmeal, we packed up and retraced our steps back to the Agnew Meadows trailhead. Since it was still early, we took the shuttle deeper into National Monument to visit the Devil's Postpile. It's a pretty cool basalt formation.
Finally we took the shuttle back to the car, and we drove out to Mammoth Lakes, where we had a tasty dinner in an Italian restaurant served by a waiter with a fake Italian accent and way too much cologne. Then we drove home. And thus it ended.
