Day 59: Vidette Meadow - Glen Pass - Woods Creek (mi 786-802)

Miles dragged today. We encountered lots of cobble, which beat up my feet. I am glad that the Brooks Cascadia shoes are coming to Mammoth, however I wish I had them now. We have two passes tomorrow, according to our plan. Contrary to the guidebooks Glen pass was not scary. That said, we weren't dealing with it in a high snow year. We encountered calico rocks of every size category between sand and boulder/slab. After descending from the pass, we were in the Rae lakes basin. The lakes were beautiful and filled with the most, and the dumbest,brook trout I have ever seen. Sadly I was without fishing tackle! I resolved O get a rod & reel in Mammoth - it would be great sport, and a great protein supplement! I started salivating just thinking of fresh fish... Very hot & muggy, and as a result very buggy, in Rae lakes basin. I wanted to swim but the icebergs in the other end discouraged me. Lots of mosquitoes too. Got sun-addled after lunch and proceeded to get destroyed by the long downhill to the Woods Creek suspension bridge. Beautiful and lush, with cascading water on all sides. Stark stone citadels on either side of the valley stood guard as we stumbled down the rocky trail. Some were decomposing pyramids, others fins of rock. We crossed a suspension bridge (very fun) then climbed past the 800 mark up Woods Creek to camp. We pitched in the dark, at 9,900 feet elevation, which had the fringe benefit of discouraging the evening mosquitoes. Per Viking an King Street's recommendation, I prepared ramen mit erbswurst (which nobody outside of Germany had ever hear of) for dinner. Tired. 

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.