New 200-mile trail across Sierra beckons avid hikers

Sierra backpackers looking for a hard-core alternative to the well-trodden John Muir Trail now have a new challenge. It’s called the Sierra Grand Traverse.

Like the JMT, the 200-mile traverse wriggles through the granite peaks between Yosemite National Park and the Mount Whitney area. And in fact, the route overlaps with the JMT for about 25 miles. But the new route hews more closely to the spine of the Sierra Crest, staying above the treeline between 9,000 feet and 12,000 feet in elevation, and leads hikers off-trail across boulder fields, up talus slopes and over 41 mountain passes.

The traverse is detailed in a new guidebook authored by a pair of globetrotting Australian backpackers who spent several months of the past four years exploring the Southern and Central Sierra.

John and Monica Chapman, 69 and 64, respectively, live in Melbourne and travel about half the year — usually to mountain ranges unfamiliar to them. They have co-written 16 guidebooks, but “Sierra Grand Traverse” is their first foray outside of Australia, and in it they offer a fresh look at an iconic wild landscape that attracts millions of hikers from around the globe.

“We’ve hiked many of the world’s mountain ranges, and this is by far the prettiest range,” John Chapman said. “There are other places that are as pretty, but not day after day after day.”

The Chapmans want to be clear: Their route is “not an easy backpack along well-defined trails (and) is best suited for experienced hikers with strong navigation skills,” they write in the guidebook introduction.

“People who have done the John Muir or Pacific Crest Trail, and who want to explore a little further and challenge themselves perhaps more in a different way, could have a completely different experience than what they’d get on the trails,” said Monica Chapman.

Stretching between the Oregon and Mexico borders, the 2,600-mile PCT overlaps with the John Muir Trail for about 180 miles between Yosemite Valley and Mount Whitney. Both are bucket-list destinations for longdistance backpackers that have exploded in popularity in the past decade.

Apart from those established trails, the Sierra supports an assortment of more rugged trekking routes designed by fervent mountain lovers for their passionate ilk. The most notable is probably the Sierra High Route, a 195-miler created in the 1970s by legendary California mountain man Steve Roper that parallels the JMT.

The new Sierra Grand Traverse is the latest in that lineage, and the Chapmans sought to offer a fresh take on Roper’s concept. The idea was to capture the most scenic parts of the range’s highest heights and draw a path for those seeking solitude even from thru-hikers on the JMT and PCT. Apart from a leg through Mammoth Lakes, the authors say the trail is half-aday’s hike from the nearest road.

After mapping it out, the Chapmans completed the whole thing in 43 days in 2019 without ice axes or crampons — notable because that was a historically high snow year. The route features many lake basins and includes plenty of scrambling but avoids steeps that require climbing.

Seattle nonprofit publisher Mountaineers Books prints both Roper’s guidebook and the Chapmans’ new book. The company doesn’t expect the Chapmans’ to be a best-seller — Roper’s isn’t, said acquisitions editor Emily White. But there is perennial interest from people looking to devote what White called “deep time” to the mountains.

“The appeal to us is to put out another book that inspires more of a dream trip,” White said. “You have to work for it. It’s not an easy outing to pull off.”