High Sierra Trail
Carey Davies heads to the Sierra Nevada to walk one of the great trails of the United States - and discovers a landscape tougher than it looks
Carey Davies heads to the Sierra Nevada to take on one of America’s finest long-distance walks
WITH OUR FIRST few steps on the High Sierra Trail, into the dappled sun of a mountainous pine forest, it was remarkable how simple everything suddenly seemed.
It had taken months of planning and preparation, a big chunk of money, hours of painstaking packing and 5,000 miles of travel to get here. But after all that stress and hassle, everything was abruptly pared down to a very simple task: follow the metre-wide path in front of us. The clamour of the world fell away completely, giving way to the rhythm of our footsteps, a drizzle of forest birdsong, and a feeling of enormous American stillness that seemed to envelop everything. It was a euphoric moment.
From our starting point here at Crescent Meadow, amid the spectacular groves of pine and giant sequoia (including General Sherman, the world’s ‘biggest’ tree), this path was going to take us on a winding route into the uppermost reaches of the fabled Sierra Nevada: land of the Gold
Rush, the giant tree and the glacier-sculpted granite dome; the world of golden eagles, black bears, mountain lions, glacial lakes, sprawling pine forests and wildflower meadows captured in John Muir’s rhapsodic writing. We would climb over mountain passes and trek through canyons, then
climb the summit of the highest mountain in the contiguous United States, before finally descending to the other side of the Sierra Nevada itself. It would take us most of a week, and we had everything we needed on our backs.
At that moment, setting out from Crescent Meadow, with my body fresh and the pack light on my back, I imagined the week ahead would carry on in this state of weightless bliss. Needless to say, the reality would turn out to be very different.
A WIDE-EYED BEGINNING
The High Sierra Trail can be seen as a counterpart to the more famous John Muir Trail, often thought of as one of the world's greatest trails of its length. In terms of mountain geography, the High Sierra Trail is no less impressive; indeed, by some people’s estimate – including this magazine’s backpacking legend, Chris Townsend – it actually has the edge, with its forest sections providing more variety. But the big advantage of the High Sierra Trail is that it only takes six to 10 days; well within an average mortal’s annual leave allowance.
Although the Sierra Trail runs through high, wild country, it is also a feat of human engineering. Started in 1928,
it was the first Sierra trail designed solely for recreation, and its builders tackled sheer cliff faces, high mountain passes and avalanche chutes to construct a route that racks up around 13,800 feet (4200 metres) of elevation gain over its 72-mile length. In other words, it’s not an easy stroll.
I had persuaded two old friends,
Jamie and Chris, to join me. Thanks to its associations with John Muir and the presence of the Yosemite Valley
(and, perhaps, the general cultural aura surrounding anything with a ' pioneer' whiff about it), the Sierra Nevada might be America’s most celebrated mountain range. It seemed like it would be a glorious place to go backpacking, and it had tugged on my imagination for at least a decade. I also had the impression it was always sunny, and I imagined this could only be a Good Thing. My friends didn’t necessarily share this sense of personal pilgrimage, but here we all were anyway, walking off wide-eyed into the wild together as the sun beat down.
We started out in the shadow of neck-craning lodgepole pines and giant sequoias, but intermittent breaks in the trees soon revealed a huge valley of pristine blue-green pine forest, dotted with granite domes, and the spectacular white peaks of the Great Western Divide in the distance. The heat was ferocious, but the shade of the forest provided welcome respite. Chipmunks hastily abandoned their huge, half-eaten pine cones as we approached along the path, and the occasional bird call and the white noise of waterfalls – from which we were soon drinking thirstily – only accentuated the silence.
After 12 miles or so, we spent that night at Bearpaw Meadows, the first of a series of minimal, virtually invisible campsites we would use. Campfires were permitted, so we made one; despite the day’s heat, the temperature would drop well into the single figures overnight. The firelight danced up the tall pines surrounding us, and the Milky Way glittered brightly above the canopy.
The next morning I was using a standpipe close to our tents when I heard a loud rustling. I looked up, toothbrush in mouth, to see a black bear and her two cubs nosing through the meadow next to me. A few bad encounters with the Scottish midge are the worst I have come to natural terror, so for me it was an exhilarating, pulse-quickening sight. But for seasoned American hikers, these kinds of encounters are much more routine; there’s a healthy population of black bears in the Sierra Nevada, and they pose minimal risk, only ever becoming aggressive if accustomed to human food, which strict regulations prevent.
A man in a nearby tent popped his head out to see what was going on. “There’s a bear and her cubs over there,” I said, breathlessly. “Cool,” he said, in a polite but uninterested way, then drew his head back inside his tent.
NOT FEELING GREAT
It was over the course of the following day that the wheels of my plan started to wobble.
We had walked around five miles in the morning heat, steadily gaining height and losing shade as we did so. At the sight of Hamilton Lakes, my heart melted; smooth shelves of granite sloped into an expanse of emerald water surrounded by domes and spires, including a mighty granite formation known as Angel Wings – exactly the sort of thing you can imagine Alex Honnold soloing up, or John Muir perching pensively on top of with a pipe. It was exactly the kind of place I had imagined arriving at over my years of Sierra dreaming. I swam out into the cool, blue-green heart of the lake, feeling the sort of freedom only these moments of mountain bliss provide.
In passing, Jamie had mentioned something about not feeling great, but I mentally waved it away. I was having too much fun.
After a while in and around the lake, we set off to take on the long climb over the Great Western Divide through Kaweah Gap. The tree cover thinned, and the full power of the early afternoon sun bore down on us; windless, dry, relentless heat. Even so, I stomped ahead enthusiastically, but as we climbed, the truth became increasingly hard to ignore: Jamie was having a Bad Time.
Multiple marathon-runner beanpole Jamie was by far the fittest of the three of us, but started complaining, to use the
medical parlance, of “feeling like shit”. Gathering in the shade of a solitary tree, we discussed the possible culprits: altitude sickness (we were at around 10,500 feet / 3200 metres), or heat exhaustion of some kind. We pushed a little further, slower this time, but the nausea, tiredness and general malaise persisted. Eventually he looked up at the climb ahead: “I just don’t have it in me”. There was only one sensible choice: we walked back down the switchbacks to return to the shore of the lake.
In retrospect, a night by Hamilton Lakes should have been our original plan. We pitched our tents, and with some rest and shade, Jamie came around. Then we had several spectacular hours to spend by the lakeshore. More swimming followed, plus a chat with another camper which revealed that a lone male hiker had a run-in with a
mountain lion a couple of days ago on the stretch of trail we had just walked. “It was coming straight towards him. He had to throw rocks and get pretty mean to scare it off.”
As the afternoon turned into evening, the pale peaks and domes soaked up the colours of the setting sun: vivid yellow, fiery orange and, finally, a lingering band of ember-red alpenglow. At night we laid on the ground in our down jackets and laughed and joked as we looked up into a starfield so densely crowded it made the constellations disappear.
“I CAN’T HANDLE ANOTHER DAY LIKE THAT”
The next morning we got up earlier to beat the heat for a second attempt of the climb. Happily, this seemed to work; Jamie
made it up to the Kaweah Gap without any problems, and on the way we marvelled at some of the most architecturally impressive sections of the trail. Under the ice-striped north wall of Eagle Scout Peak, we stopped for a swim in the turquoise
(and electrifyingly cold) waters of Precipice Lake, then descended from the rocky heights into the prairie and scattered pine forests of the Big Arroyo valley. We rested for a while by a creek then pushed on, over-optimistically, through the heat of the afternoon. We eventually made it to Moraine Lake, arriving to see sunsetcoloured mountains mirrored perfectly in the flawless surface of the water.
My feet were painfully blistered from the sand and sweat, and I was sunburnt, tired and sore, but my spirits were still high; the spectacular landscape which