A lot of clouds came in last night and before we’d finished breaking camp at 5:00 am, they started dripping. ( Nothing serious, as it turned out).  A minute’s walk took us to the edge of the Beck Meadow branch of Monache Meadows.  It’s an awesome sight–a vast green meadow with white Sierra peaks on the horizon.  As we entered it, the “bit of drip” from the clouds turned into hail!  I had my umbrella up, so just stepped under a tree to wait and see if the hail would become a problem (it didn’t), but poor Bill had stuffed his raingear way down at the bottom of his pack (he didn’t consider the bit of drippiness to be worth putting on a rainjacket) and it was a major project for him to rummage everything out, find the raingear and put it on, then repack.  By the time he was done, it had pretty much stopped raining!  

Our first goal was  “breakfast at the swallow bridge!”  so we chugged right along up and down through the woods, till we were out in the meadow again and could see the Kern River down below.  As I expected, when we got to the bridge, there were lots of thruhiker tents!  Camping by the bridge is not a bad idea, because so many swallows means there are NO mosquitoes!  We could eat our breakfast in peace and watch the swallows feeding their babies who were tucked in nests under the bridge.  Most of the other hikers were just starting to get up. 

The PCT took us out across sagebrushed meadows (no cows this time–we did see plenty of cows in 2005).  Huge yellow primrose-type flowers were blooming  along the trail.  We headed up Cow Canyon, where we got lost in 2005 because the cow trails and the PCT looked so much alike.  No problem this time–the PCT route was very distinct.  It does crisscross Cow Creek several times, and that was part of what confused us in 2005.   The creek was running well and was very pretty.  But oh, man, it’s a long, long climb, all the way up to 10,500 feet.  Our packs are so heavy that we had to stop and rest more often than usual.

Finally we reached the big downhill to Gomez Meadow.  The mountains here are very rocky and have many dramatic cliff formations  that look sort of like a mini-Yosemite.  We’d planned to get water at Gomez Creek, but oh bummer–it wasn’t a creek, it was a marsh, and the water looked gross.  We sighed and pushed on to Death Canyon Creek, which turned out to be a gorgeous place! Not only is the creek clean, but there’s even a “swimming hole” (well, bathtub size, actually) right near the PCT.  If it were a warm day, we would have jumped right in, clothes and all, but today has been cloudy, windy and chilly.   We settled for taking a nice Snickers break instead, and we took on 3 liters of water each–we were worried about dehydrating at this higher altitude.  I groaned when I put my pack back on and faced the killer climb out of Death Canyon, back up to 10,700 feet.

But even though the climb was hard, it was worth the effort!  The rock formations along the trail grow more and more impressive, and the trees look like enormous bonsais with reddish-brown bark.   Views at the top are unbelievable— thousands of feet down to the Owens Valley. We had to hike “overtime”— past 7:00pm— along the steep mountainsides before we could reach a saddle with flat places to camp.

 The mosquitoes were waiting for us, and the clouds looked a bit threatening, so we rigged both tarp and net tent.  It’s a nice quiet forest here, out of the wind, and not too chilly.  It felt great to be inside away from the mosquitoes, but I thought about the snow patches we’d started seeing by the trail and wondered what it would be like in lots of snow.  Tomorrow we also face our first “snowmelt creek” crossing at Rock Creek.  It will be my first High Sierra early season creek crossing, and I am a bit worried about it.  Boy does it feel good to be horizontal!  Bill and I are both totally tired out.

Walk to Lórien: Climbing up base of Redhorn

Tags: Death Canyon Creek, mosquitoes, Owens Valley, Sierras, Snickers, Swallow Bridge