Day 58: Wallace Creek - Forester Pass - Vidette Meadow/Kearsarge Pinnacles (mi 770-786)

Finally, a sub-20 mile day to look forward to! What better way to celebrate than sleeping in! An earned, lazy AM with an easy crossing of Wallace Creek led to a nice climb up to the Bighorn Plateau, which was crowned on all sides by massive stone cathedrals. I shot a dizzying amount of photos, and we dropped to Tyndall Creek for a snack before our climb over Forester Pass, the highest point on the PCT. We climbed from the forest, to above tree line where alpine meadows and bogs covered the landscape, to a nearly barren landscape of rock and water at the base of an immense wall. Marmots poked their heads out of the plentiful crags and nibbled on the sparse vegetation. Rock wrens and crows were the only birds I saw. The lakes were secret alpine gems, hidden from below by cliffs from their bench like precipices. The route the trail takes is almost impossible to pick out from the base at 12,300 feet, so you just start climbing and have faith that it will continue to be there. It was manageable, despise climbing the near-vertical wall, and only had an exposed 30-foot runout across a snowy chute to tangle with. The view from the top was incredible, but that doesn't do it justice. South, you see back towards the bighorn plateau and the encircling peaks. North, the perfectly U-shaped, perfectly narrow and steep, Bubbs Creek Valley with the Kearsarge Pinnacles running north of University peak. We descended the pass easily, the north slope gentler than the south, and took lunch at a sapphire lake beneath Junction Peak. The crux of the day complete, we had a beautiful and lazy descent down Bubbs Creek to camp. We went from rock and ice back through meadows, subalpine, and into conifers again. Waterfalls cascaded from the heights where glaciers sheared vertical faces at the headwalls. We actually arrived in camp at 6:30, a heretofore unheard of hour due to the miserable heat of the desert and the pressures we put on ourselves for mileage. No more, at least for now, I smoked a cigar to repel mosquitoes, cooked an angel hair-curry pasta with pork and mushrooms for Smiles and myself, and we dined by the alpenglow on the Pinnacles to our immediate east.