Yeah most trail crews are friendly people, I have been checking USAjobs.gov constantly so I can apply for one of these back country crews for next season. 6 months in the wild getting paid to work on trails sounds like the right thing for me.
The Guyot Desert is a different name for the "Guyot Flat" which is on the North side of Guyot Pass on the PCT.
Reaching the
Soldier Lakes was an interesting place to be since David and I had failed twice to reach this area, once due to the fact that he and a friend of his after dropping me off at the trail and returning to Lone Pine had taken the wrong trail and were missing for nearly two days while I waited for them at the Cottonwood Lakes and another time by extreme weather coming in but here we were and frankly I was unimpressed, I had become spoiled by grandeur and the Soldier Lakes seemed little more then another charming high alpine lake.
The area had a crew camp which I explored wondering if anyone was home and although the camp showed signs of recent use such as recently used food items that were not stored no one was home. I learned later this was the primary base camp for the Rock Creek crew I ran into.
The next day climbing New Army Pass was no trouble at all and we found the area had just hordes of people! The trip down was easy past all the sights both of us had seen so many times before. Reaching the parking lot luckily for me David was ok with the idea of going to Lonepine and getting food so after eating and spending another 70 dollars in the grocery store we went back up onto the mountain and just camped out on flat ground by the Cottonwood Pass camping area since it was completely full.
This would be my last resupply and I had planned this section to be 9 days yet my family pushed back the date they wanted to pick me up so it left about 3 extra days to burn which was no problem for me as I was not looking forward to going 17 miles to Lake South America with 8 days of food.
At this point I sent home my fishing gear and lost my knife so I was down to minimum gear and on a good day I could get up, eat breakfast and be on the trail in 45 minutes. I did debate sending my tent home but it had risks involved and it only weighed 10 ounces so it came along.
Despite the heavy load I also put 3 cans of Pepsi and a full bag of chips in my pack and hit the trail solo once again.
This trail proved to be how Doug once described it as a dirty, dry, sandy horse route. Other then crossing
Cottonwood Pass and some high views of
Big Whitney Meadow and
beyond the trail was mostly viewless and even at places was like walking through sand dunes. The only source of water between the trail head and Rock Creek which is 14 miles in was the outlet of Chicken Spring Lake.
Reaching Rock Creek I visited the trail crew once again and talked with some of the other people in the area which included the head of Sequoia National Park and some high ranking officials from Edwards Air Force Base as they were on a back country trip discussing the impacts of the jets flying over these mountains and the possibility of rerouting their flight paths.
As I cooked dinner though the female ranger I had talked to before came over and wanted to discuss the fire we had when we were here before. She said that foil was right on top of the ash and that it was so hot at 5PM that she burned her hand as she tried to pick it out and she was double pissed because her two year old she had out here also almost picked it up and burned himself. At first I was a bit dumb founded as I could not recall what was done on that fire because it was not mine (sort of) David built a fire in the morning which I never do and then he burned trash on it and I didn't even think about what he did to put it out but of course it is no excuse because it's your camp and you have to watch out for what others do also. Then I went on in what I realised was an asinine argument about how I know Aluminum melts at about 1200F trying basically to argue that when I burn trash I do it right and I don't leave foil in fire pits but that's asinine to argue because burning trash at all is illegal lol. So after allot of bad chat she left saying she was going to think about this more and decide if she was going to fine me for it but she never came back.
Heading north once again was pretty uneventful until I spent the night at Wallace Creek chatting with backpacking.com forum members that I knew but when I woke up in the morning another man was camped near me that must have come in late at night since I never heard him. I was all set to hit the trail when he woke up and I began talking to him about a number of subjects on hiking but then branched into deep discussions on politics, life and whatever the hell else because by the time we both hit the trail it was 3:30PM! As I made my way for Lake South America in fading light and the
building storm I felt just so pissed off about more things then one, after all one of the reasons I was out here was to forget about politics and people like him in general and I couldn't help but feel how much of an idiot the guy was.
So pissed off, freezing cold and mentally tired I pushed on passed
Tyndall Creek and as I left the nice class 3 trail to class 2 then it turning into more of a class 1 trail as I crossed the small pass to the lake which just began to really annoy me how a map will just show trails all the same despite the fact that it can be class 1. I think I was more annoyed at the thought that having such a poor trail you can get lost on could really screw allot of people that cannot handle such navigation.
So I reach the lake at about 7:30PM and had just enough time to set up my tent before no light was left. The wind was blowing hard and chilled to the bone. I got in my tent and tried to cook from bed but I could not even get my fingers to strike the lighter until I warmed them up enough, some snow flurries began to fall and I noticed my water in my bottles were already freezing. I tried to boil water but it was no good, it simply was too cold out with the heavy wind blowing for it to boil so I settled for the warm water and made dinner, ate and cocooned into my sleeping bag knowing I had a hard night ahead of me!
I have a solid 10 degree Western Mountaineering bag and I could just barely get warm with any movement bringing back the cold. At some unknown point of the night my feet were only getting colder so I put my top shell over my feet but they never warmed up again all night. This was the sort of night that unprepared hikers die in!
After one of those nights were you don't know if you ever fell asleep I see the light coming and was so thankful to see it and I decided right then that I was not spending my layover day up here freezing my ass off and I would go down to the Kern Hotspring and spend it there.
Getting up the wind was still blowing hard and it did not feel the sun was doing much to warm up this landscape. I took me twice the time to pack up my gear as it was so cold my entire mental function was being impaired and every task was a bit of agony but nearing 10am I hit the trail...
