Aug 15: Wanda Lake -- Muir Pass -- Food Resupply at LeConte

On this day we had an appointment to rendezvous with a packer bringing us a food resupply by prior arrangement.

I shot some single shots of the sun rising over Evolution Lake (see sidebar). God, what a place. It’s too beautiful to leave, but we must. I shoot one last pano near someone else’s campsite.

Now seriously trailing the others, I slowly get moving out of this great place. A muletrain follows me until Sapphire Lake, where I stopped to shoot photos. We received word later on that this outfit was hauling a huge amount of gear for some college kids who were walking the trail without having to carry 30-60 pound packs like everyone else.

Some overcast was beginning to develop and midway in the ascent from Sapphire to Wanda Lake I stopped and shot another scene. I was dragging a bit here, partly from my cold and partly due to the sun getting blotted out.

I finally made it to Wanda Lake, which is named after one of John Muir’s daughters, and a nice guy asked me to take his picture. He was hiking with his daughter, and they took a picture of me here as well. I ate lunch here, and waited for the clouds to pass. Sure enough, they moved out of the way just long enough to get this scene in:

Wanda Lake was one of the more beautiful spots in this area, backed as it is by a glacier on Goddard Divide.

I finally said goodbye to the nice people and headed up trail. The sun hitting Wanda Lake got too beautiful though and I stopped again and shot another pano.

Then the long march up Muir Pass. Fortunately you could see the stone building at the top of the pass from the bottom of the ascent and it didn’t look too bad. It was harder than it looked as the altitude was almost 12000’.

At the top I expected to see D&S but instead there were some dead hikers. Actually, they only looked dead. So I climbed up the side of the pass a bit to get some perspective on the place, since the dead people were not moving. Later I found out why they were so tired--my descent, and their ascent, covered thousands of feet of rocky, steep, jagged trail.

Like many passes in the High Sierra, there was so much to see: Lake McDermand, Wanda Lake, Helen Lake, Mt. Huxley, Mt. Solomons, The Black Giant, and the dark metamorphic Goddard Divide.

The borrowed cellphone didn’t pick up any signal here.

I ate lunch and headed down the trail, thinking I needed to hurry up to meet our food re-supply guy at our campsite. When I got to Helen Lake, I had to stop -- it was just too pretty.

Two panos later, I headed downtrail with a stronger sense of determination to make up time. A mile or two later, I came to a point where you could start to see the beginnings of Le Conte Canyon, the other side of the Black Giant, and Langille Peak. Too beautiful, so I climbed up on a rock outcrop to get a better angle on it all. From Muir Pass to here there were quite a few people going the other way.

A mile further, and I sensed a waterfall a bit over from the trail, so I scrambled over to it. Wow! This was the grandest panoramic view I’d seen all day. Below me, Le Conte canyon stretched out to Big Pete Meadow and beyond; and above me, the Black Giant and the headwaters of Kings River. At my feet, a wonderful waterfall. I shot this hand-held.

I raced along the trail, feeling I was going to be late for sure. And I was. But fortunately David got there almost in time, and the resupply worked out great. We enjoyed a fabulous dinner. As twilight faded, I took our excess food over to the ranger station where there was a big metal barrel apparently for storing extra food. The ranger station was sort of spooky; there was a light on, and it looked recently occupied but there was no one there.

I set up with no tent again, and on a slope. But we saw no bears, despite hearing that they were often seen in this area.

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