Decision time...we were waiting
until this morning to see how Pete’s back was and then figure out what to do.
He really didn’t want to pull the plug on the trip before it had even started,
but the Aleve was barely putting a dent in the pain. Mica graciously offered to
take any unnecessary gear with her when they returned to North Lake that afternoon.
In the end Mica took the camera tripod and Becky offered to carry the SLR while
Pete carried the compact camera. No night photography on this trip, but
it would be nice to still have the big camera around.
We decided to keep going. The SHR
runs east of and high above the Muir Trail, but it was relatively easy to
access the JMT at many points along the way. If Pete’s back was still bad a
couple days from now, we could depart the SHR and hit the Muir Trail and cover
the relatively easy trail miles to our resupply point at Red’s Meadow Resort
outside of Mammoth within a couple days, and from there we could catch a bus to
Tuolumne and retrieve our car. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to bail
though.
We hugged our friends goodbye and
set off towards our first pass, Puppet Pass/Carol Col. Easy travel
through the grassy, rocky Humphreys Basin brought us to the pass by
mid-morning. Most of the passes we’d encounter on this trip were easy to
access on the south aspect, but considerably rockier and steeper on the north
aspect. Steve Roper recommends traveling from south to north, and we
appreciated that despite the passes being tough, at least we were down-climbing
them rather than spending hours scrambling up the north sides.
While looking for the best route
down, we met a friendly Bishop local who was waiting at the pass for a friend
to catch up. It was welcome to get his regular shouts of route information as
we descended to keep us on the most stable boulders and ledges. It took us
about 30 minutes to descend through the worst of it to Puppet Lake below. The
descent wasn’t that tough, but we now knew the passes would be a time-suck as
we expected. Lots of scrambling over car-size rocks, stepping on scree-covered
benches, avoiding steep drop-offs - generally unpleasant stuff. Once in the
Puppet Lake basin, we took a bearing on a waterfall across French Canyon to the
north and began our descent through meadows and open forest to the canyon
below.
The swimming holes in French Canyon
were inviting and the heat of the day was on us, but we needed to cover some
ground towards our next pass. We were briefly on the French Canyon trail for
all of a half-mile before we headed out cross-country again up towards Merriam
Lake. Supposedly there is a faint trail, but the best we could find was an
occasional boot-print in dirt that confirmed someone had gone this way before.
By early afternoon we’d climbed
back to treeline and had views of Merriam Lake to the west. We
didn’t want to tackle another pass that day, so we climbed towards La Salle
Lake just below Feather Pass. We only met one other party that day, a group of
three traveling southbound. We chatted briefly, but afterwards realized that
we’d completely forgotten to ask for any beta on how the next couple passes
were.
The afternoon was spent reading,
washing socks, and as would become the regular routine, Pete would find a big
flat rock slab and do a ton of back and leg stretches trying to keep the back
ache manageable.
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