Up at 5:30 again and on the trail by 6:30. Before we left camp though we met our neighbor…we didn’t get his name, but we had recognized him as a fellow from New York that another hiker had mentioned the other day. ‘New York’ appeared to be having a pretty rough time…we’d seen his pack the day before…it was huge compared to the average JMT’er…and he’d been complaining of having back pain. He’d been trying to make up time by traveling after dark, but had gotten turned around by taking a small unmarked trail off the main trail in the night and walked miles back and forth before finally plopping down next to our tent. When we left him that morning he was off exploring adjacent spur trails (with his tent WIDE open for all manner of critter to easily enter), seemingly unwilling to accept that the highway the rest of us were on was in fact the correct trail.
We felt great in spite of our long, hot 22-mile day and were making good time, but by mid-morning things took a turn for the worse. Without going into too much detail, lets just say I became violently ill, my stomach was a train-wreck, and I was running a fever by 10am. Becky slowed the pace, and we crawled along far slower than the day before. We reached Purple Lake by lunchtime. Becky made sandwiches and refilled our reservoirs while I fell asleep in the shade. Fortunately the handful of Aleve I took finally started to knock my fever down and we still managed to grind out 15.5 miles that day. The day’s hike ended with a hot 1000’ climb out of Tully Hole to Squaw Lake which only drove home how much we prefer to do our climbing in the cool of the morning.
The terrain we covered was really quite spectacular though, we briefly got above treeline into a rocky bowl filled with house-sized granite boulders, and passed by more amazing lakes. Lake Virginia was our favorite…not particularly big, but the most intense shade of blue with bright green meadows that ran right to the lakeshore which was rimmed with beaches of pulverized granite sand. We could’ve easily spent the day lounging there, but the downside to a two-week schedule is that we couldn’t just drop the packs and set up camp that early in the afternoon.
Squaw Lake was a great campsite though, and we rolled in to camp with enough sunlight left to soak our tired legs and wash our socks. It was Labor Day weekend and after several days of relative peace and quite, we were a little annoyed to have to share ‘our lake’ with campers who were way to noisy and boisterous.
I passed out early, trying to gather some strength for Silver Pass and the ten miles out to the water taxi the next day.
Mammoth Crest
Purple Lake
Lake Virginia
Squaw Lake
Dinnertime on the slabs at Squaw Lake
Fun with long exposures and a headlamp at camp
Lost crown AND a fever... what next?
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