Lots of photos today! Clicking on each will enlarge it.
It rained during the evening and night. I stayed dry, but made no contact with others camping nearby due to the rain. I was slow to get out in the morning, but the climb up 800′ of switchbacks proved easy.
If I had a bucket list, seeing Evolution Lake in this lifetime would be on it.
Even just the name spoke to me as a someday-I-wanna dream when I last backpacked on the Muir Trail around 1973.
And indeed, words and photos fail to capture the beauty of Evolution Lake. It feels sort of akin to a journey to a fabled Shangri-La. I could only breathe ‘wow’ over and over, basking in the experience of simply being here to experience the majesty and the wildness.
Many backpackers will swap cameras to take photos for each other. I’m in the upper Evolution Basin.
In most of my photos on this trip I look more stern than I feel inside, which is increasingly joyous. I realize what I’m doing – I’m self-conscious about my bad and missing teeth, which become apparent (at least in my perception) when I smile broadly and show them. So I appear to scowl out of vanity. Hmmm… shadow stuff to work on.
The upper Evolution Basin, looking toward Muir Pass.
Stepping stones across the stream. By the fourth day my balance is good with the pack on.
Looking back where I had come, down the Evolution Basin.
At midday I’m well above treeline, climbing toward Muir Pass. I watch a runner approach and then pass me. Shortly later another came by, and up a bit they stopped and we talked. Colleen, the first runner, was 58 and her running (and life? don’t know) partner and she were day-running 35 miles. I took their photo and sent it to them, and learned that Colleen is quite an accomplished athlete (see http://www.tahoepeakendurance.com/about/). Both of them have run the Western States 100 race, and are the directors and organizers of the Auburn Triathlon.
The mountain runners
At the top of the pass is this stone hut, built 85 years ago as a storm shelter for hikers caught in sudden storms.
The Sierra Club Hut at the top of Muir Pass. The Tibetan prayer flags feel right in place here.
Interior shot. The fireplace has been closed up.
The inscription over the mantle
I shared the climb and a tough, rocky descent with Elizabeth, a lovely, open, and poised 22 year old north Texas college student who’s hiking 400 miles of the PCT solo and loving it. I was having left foot trouble after 11 miles – a large heel blister and pinched little toe – and stopped for the day a couple of miles down the pass, in a small campsite with trees along the steep descent, and she continued on – never got a photo to post, or more than a first name.
Looking south from my campsite, after Muir Pass
I got my tent up and my gear inside just in time to take shelter from a strong thunderstorm with plenty of hail. It stormed for several hours, and I actually napped through part of it. When I woke up, I could feel that the floor of the tent was in a puddle from the intensity of the storm, but no water got inside.
As I later learned, the thunderstorm had been very intense at Muir Pass. I was lucky (and aware) – I had been on the pass maybe two hours earlier and was able to be safely down off the summit and in my tent before the storm hit, with its intense lightning and hail. I learned that twelve people had spent the night in the stone hut at the pass, inside their tents because the stone roof leaked. Several more came down in the dark by headlamp after the night sky cleared. People up there had been scared, and some hadn’t been prepared for the sudden weather.