Thurs. Sept. 8            Miles today: 27.4          Total so far: 2,057.4               Sierras Section K

Without Bill’s watch alarm clock, I kept waking up and checking my own watch by headlamp (while staying well-burrowed in my sleeping bag–it was COLD!).  At 5:30 am, the stars were beginning to fade, so I woke Bill and we got up.  It was still a bit dark when we started to hike, but Icould see the trail OK.  We headed down from Peak 8235, crossing varous jeep roads, and got to Richardson Lake, where I’d planned to get water for my platypus.  But when we got there, I didn’t like the looks of the water (Bill said I was being too picky, but I didn’t want to risk it), so we pushed on till I could get some much better water at Miller Creek. 

Then it was basically a climb through the forest on a nice DIRT trail, up to Barker Pass, where we met three people and a dog getting ready to backpack as far as I-80.  Besides them, we met only one other person all day.  After Barker Pass, the PCT really climbs up to the crest, and the views were awesome.  We had lots of opportunities to look at “Big Blue”–Lake Tahoe–in the distance.  We could just make out the sailboats and powerboats.  While we were stopped for our noon break, along came the folks with the dog.  “What happened?” they asked when they saw our sleeping bags spread out on the bushes.  “Did you get wet last night?”  “Nope,” we told them, “we always air our sleeping bags every day.”  Meanwhile, I had to chase the dog away from our food bags.  (That made 2 days in a row of shooing animals–the ground squirrel yesterday, and now a dog!!) 

After that, the PCT began what the guidebook called “a classic crest walk.”  And indeed it was–five miles of walking a bare, narrow, very volcanic Sierra crest, with amazing rock formations (wish I had pics!) and views of Alpine Meadows ski resort far below.  We passed a lot of bright orange “ski boundary” signs.  The only difficulty on this otherwise wonderful trek was the wind–it was blowing very hard and cold.  A lot of clouds were blowing in with it, which worried us.  And, there was NO water.  But in the end, 16 long switchbacks (I counted!) took us down to Five Lakes Creek AND out of the wind.  At the creek crossing, there was a little pool and a whole bunch of trout in the pool.  We could literally have caught them with our bare hands if we wanted to.  The poor trout were frantic when we stood and watched them.  Lucky for them we’re not set up to cook trout!

Then we began the climb up to Granite Chief Mountain, which included a step-across ford of the headwaters of the American River, and on through acres and miles of steep gravelly hillside covered with browning/yellowing/brittle-leaved “mules ears” plants.  I’ve never seen so many mules ears in my entire life!  As we climbed higher, the mules ears were replaced by acres of another plant that had already turned a bright autumn red.  It was very pretty, especially when the sun went lower and shone through the red leaves. Finally we reached the shoulder of Granite Chief, with several trails down to Squaw Valley.  Man, did “Squaw” have a LOT of ski lifts, buildings and fences way out here in the “back country”.  And all of them looked very well-maintained.

With a gorgeous sunset now overhead, we hurried down some sandy switchbacks and camped among the trees near Squaw Creek.  Even though the sunset-lit clouds were lovely, there were an awful lot of them, and looked like they could maybe turn into rain.  We didn’t cowboy camp tonight–we rigged the tarp, and rigged it well in the cold and windy evening.  When I did our mileage math, we cheered–we didn’t think we’d made that many miles today with all the ups & downs!