Here is the 13th installation of my PCT trail journal (about 1 week off the present timeline as a safety precaution).

The Sierra certainly is a distinct part of the Pacific Crest Trail! Beautiful in its own, austere sort of way, with its sheer granite faces, scraggly trees holding on for dear life to the wind swept cliffs, exceptionally high altitudes, and an abundance of water features. I am a little bit spoiled, having grown up backpacking in the Sierra, so for the most part this isn’t new to me, but I still find it beautiful, and now I am looking at it as an adult, with better knowledge of the surrounding world, and the ability to appreciate it in new ways.

Follow my thruhike in section-by-section blog posts, or in daily posts on Instagram or Facebook (@JustAGirlAndABackpack.Blog). Please attribute all spelling/grammar errors to autocorrect and exhaustion at the end of the day.

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Statistics for the second part of my journey are as follows:

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PCT 2021 Series: Friday October 15, mile 786.8 to mile 788.5, +7.5 to onion valley campground, +1 in Independence (10.2 miles, day 14)

The PCT and JMT take a brutal turn uphill in these 1.7 miles. For some reason I had a flashback to the last time I was on the JMT, when I was a kid backpacking with my dad and sister. I wonder if we actually did this section?

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I had decided not to make my peanut butter burrito and just to get ready quickly and eat a bar for breakfast as I walked. I saved probably an hour! I’m going to do this more often, I think.

I shot by a group of four who were still waking up and then turned off into the 7.5mi Bullfrog Lake/Kearsarge Pass Trail, which would take me to Onion Valley campground where I was hoping to find a ride. This trail was 3 miles uphill and 4.5 miles downhill, with switch backs both ways and hard on the knees. It was also one of the most beautiful stretches of trail I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t even in the PCT!

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If you’ve ever been on I70 between Eagle County (Vail) and Summit County (Breckenridge) in Colorado during fall or spring, the way that the rocky caps of the Rocky Mountains are dusted in powder sugar snow was very similar to what I was seeing, except instead of a forest there was lake after lake after lake. So lovely. Took me forever to get to the top because I was taking pictures every four steps.

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“After them I saw no less than 50 people coming up and down the trail: day hikers, runners, weekend backpackers, fishermen, people walking their dogs, people walking their kids, people walking their grandmas…”

Slowly Dying

Once over Kearsarge Pass I met some weekend backpackers who stopped to chat for awhile. After them I saw no less than 50 people coming up and down the trail: day hikers, runners, weekend backpackers, fishermen, people walking their dogs, people walking their kids, people walking their grandmas, etc. So many cute dogs 😭

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When I finally arrived at the campground where there were a million cars, I walked up to the first people I saw and asked them if I could catch a ride into town. They were a nice couple, Tatiana and Jimmy, with three dogs who had sold their farm in Tennessee and decided to travel the country in an RV. They also happened to be the cousin of the owner of Mt. Williamson Base Camp Motel, which was where I was headed.

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“…for the first time I took from the hiker box instead of giving…”

Slowly Dying

This place is sweet because it’s owned and operated by thruhikers. I got the last room in the place and after showering I used their loaner clothes and gave them my laundry to do. They also have no less than 8 five gallon buckets full of hiker food backpackers had left behind (their version of a hiker box); for the first time I took from the hiker box instead of giving, since the town only had gas station convenience stores for resupply. I got 6 days of all kinds of random food, some of which was new to me like homemade freeze dried chili and stroganoff that someone had made. Emmaleigh and Lauralynn were very good to me!

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I went out to get amazing tacos from the taco truck and then went back to my room because I was tired. That was my first mistake, which I didn’t realize until the next day: I should have gone to the library for a few hours and gotten my blog stuff done, and I should have gotten extra food for dinner and the next day, because the Google and Guthooks hours for the library and the taco truck said they’d be open Saturday, but it was a lie. I did go back out into town to get a pint of ice cream though; but who puts nutmeg in ice cream?? No me gusta.

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PCT 2021 Series: Thursday October 14, mile 774.7 to mile 786.8 (12.1 miles, day 13)

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Ok so, two tortillas with almost 500 calories worth of Skippy’s peanut butter (and some dried fruit) is simply too much to eat. I was eating it for hours. At one point I set it down on a rock for a break, and a chipmunk came up and nibbled it! Sorry friend, that’s not good for you.

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While I was getting ready in my tent, I heard some sounds that were vaguely human (zippers and a ziplock opening), so I crawled out to investigate, hoping that I wasn’t going to find some very advanced bear. I wasn’t disappointed: there was a woman with long braids squatting, bare-assed, doing her business. I quietly got back in my tent and pretended I hadn’t seen her.

I spent the morning scanning the mountains for guanacos, transported back to the Atacama desert, where the rocky mountains tower above the nearly barren, shrub dotted landscape. I finished the Tale of Two Cities and was heartbroken to realize that the kindle app only allowed one audio book to be downloaded at a time. Even though I had bought and downloaded 3 other audio books, they weren’t actually downloaded 😭. So instead I listened to music and decided to start making a playlist of songs that are either good to hike to, or whose theme is relevant to my journey.

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It was a long hike up to Forester Pass, the highest point on the PCT at 13,200ft, past about a million alpine lakes and through a labyrinth of boulders.

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There was still snow on the ground in some places, almost an inch thick on the trail. The sun was surprisingly hot, the wind biting, so I was somewhere between hot and sweaty, and freezing the whole time. The trail was decently straight and decently slanted uphill until the switchbacks started up the face of the rock wall that I had been working towards all morning. For some reason I could strongly smell honey on that ascent, although I couldn’t hear anything to indicate a beehive (and three weren’t enough flowering plants to warrant one). The drop-off was eerie, especially since I could see where the trail had been formed by loosely stacking rocks.

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“…the trail passed under precariously balanced mountains of rock, which clearly had a history of tumbling…”

Slowly Dying

At the top, the only way to go was down. And down. And down. For the rest of the day. I crossed so many streams, and saw some beautiful waterfalls. At times I was worried for my safety, since the trail passed under precariously balanced mountains of rock, which clearly had a history of tumbling, since I was waking through the graveyard of the previously fallen. As we know, downhills are my downfall. They hurt my feet and my knees. So this was particularly brutal, and I was ready to be done long before I ought to have been. It really didn’t help that I was waking on baby heads all day (thruhikers call trails made of fist sized rocks that dig into your feet and turn your ankles “baby heads”).

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After I got back into the treeline, I saw a small black bear ahead of me on the trail. It immediately ran off when I loudly said “Hello!” That answered my question of whether or not the bears had turned in for their winter hibernation yet. I decided to turn in early before complete dark and leave a few more miles for tomorrow.

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PCT 2021 Series: Wednesday October 13, mile 760 to mile 774.7 (14.7 miles, day 12)

“The rather impressive visages of Mt. Chamberlin–whom I had spent the day skirting, Mt. Hitchcock–less impressive but for the fact that it was completely bald and made up of a lot of boulders, and Whitney–granite slabbed faces peering over Mt Hitchcock as though trying to catch a glimpse of a spectacle”

Slowly Dying

My body seems to know it needs to pee to stay warm, because I never used to wake up in the middle of the night to pee until now…unless I’m just restless from sleeping on the ground, so I wake a little, and then notice I have to pee, and my conscious mind knows I should go asap so that I can sleep warmer…that’s probably it.

Once the sun started hitting the tent in the morning, it was nice and cozy in here. I started stripping layers off! I made two packets of hot cocoa with marshmallows to go with my burrito; the thickness of all the chocolate was delish.

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I saw 2 families of deer after breakfast, just munching grass in the meadow across the river.

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At lunch I realized that my permit was only valid through mammoth lakes area, so either I messed up or the ranger did. I’ll need to get a permit for the northern end of the Sierra. I found that a whole roll of Ritz crackers is too much for one sitting. Some regrets.

The views I saw today: The rather impressive visages of Mt. Chamberlin–whom I had spent the day skirting, Mt. Hitchcock–less impressive but for the fact that it was completely bald and made up of a lot of boulders, and Whitney–granite slabbed faces peering over Mt Hitchcock as though trying to catch a glimpse of a spectacle. (Something to note, I’m not certain that these are the correct mountains, but from what I could read on the map, they were certainly visible).

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On the remaining snow on the ground, I saw lots of little critter tracks: mice, chipmunks and bunnies, I think!

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There is a lot of water in the Sierra, in the form of lakes and creeks and rivers and streams.

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PCT 2021 Series: Tuesday October 12, mile 750.2 to mile 760, +3.8 from parking lot (13.6 miles, day 11)

“The dead bristlecone pines, with their red wood and deep swirling fissures, gave the impression of ancient, wrinkled beings watching out for the mountains”

Slowly Dying

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I had another big buffet breakfast before we hopped back in the car to head back to where they had picked me up at Cottonwood Lakes Trailhead Campground. As we approached the mountains from the monotonous plains of the desert, we could see the snow that still hadn’t melted from the day before, dusting the high peaks and anywhere still shaded. It was Cold with a capital C at the parking lot (only 35°), which was the lowest elevation I’d be at all day. Thank you for everything Andrea!

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It felt great to be on trail again, so with a smirk on my face and heavily panting from the altitude (can only two nights at low altitude make you lose acclimation??), I started up the switchbacks. I stuffed my face with a bagel and cream cheese, then a cliff bar, trying to load up on calories. There were only a couple of centimeters of snow on the trail in some places, and melted puddles in the sand in others, but it was a visually interesting change.

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I had decided the night before that I was going to nest my 10° quilt in my 15° bag (or vice versa depending on which is warmer), so I had to carry both; one was hanging where my foam pad used to below my pack, and the other barely squeezed into the pack, now with down booties, 20,000 calories worth of food, and blow up pad taking up more internal space. My bear can was also full, with my layers, mittens, beanie, and neck tube. And the mesh pocket was overflowing with snacks and food. I was in all ways more overloaded, except with water, which becomes quite ubiquitous in the sierra (thank goodness).

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“The golden color of the willows was a lovely splash against the rather colorless granite, and some of the boulders had interesting erosion patterns that gave them a scaled look”

Slowly Dying

The golden color of the willows was a lovely splash against the rather colorless granite, and some of the boulders had interesting erosion patterns that gave them a scaled look. Lunch was half a roll of Ritz crackers and a flavored tuna packet. The dead bristlecone pines, with their red wood and deep swirling fissures, gave the impression of ancient, wrinkled beings watching out for the mountains; some were occasionally blackened, most likely from summer lightning strikes that only affected single trees, instead of burning the whole, scattered, forest down.

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I forced myself to eat a bag of strangely flavored pistachio, nuts at this point not enjoying all the food in me. At one point, I crested a ridge and had a towering view of Chicken Spring Lakes on ones side, and the river valley far below on the other side.

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” A weathered looking man appeared out of nowhere, nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness in his earthy colored gear, wild hair, and dirt smeared face”

Slowly Dying

A weathered looking man appeared out of nowhere, nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness in his earthy colored gear, wild hair, and dirt smeared face, and I surprisedly burst out “oh, hello!” We chatted for a bit: he appeared to be on a shorter adventure than I, having done several separate trips throughout the last couple of months. He begged me to remember a nearby place that looked good as a campsite, since he was tired and ready to set up camp. I had luckily noticed a good spot, somewhat sheltered from the wind, with duff and flat ground to camp on, no more than half a mile behind me. Here I ate a bunch of peanut mnms, the decided snack because I wasn’t hungry but knew I needed to keep eating.

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“As the day wore on, the temperature dropped. And dropped. And dropped some more. Leaving me with 5 miles to go, fading sunlight, and a brisk chill settling into my fingers and nose. “

Slowly Dying

As the day wore on, the temperature dropped. And dropped. And dropped some more. Leaving me with 5 miles to go, fading sunlight, and a brisk chill settling into my fingers and nose. I put on some warmer clothes and pushed on, watching the peachy gleam of the alpen glow creep up the forested mountain across the valley from me, glowing like firelight on the miniature trees. Now I was working my way through two pop tarts, regretting the winter need for extra warmth.

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I suddenly slid to a halt at a nearly frozen creek crossing and new I was nearby my desired campsite from the signage. Full dark fell before I finally made it, my campsite in the duff between some trees, probably 200 yards from the rushing creek. I put on all my layers, set up the tent and threw down the sleeping pad and sleeping bag and quilt, and then heated up a couscous and veggie dinner. I took a break from eating with my already full stomach to start backing my bear can, then continued eating, took another break to blow up the pad, then finished dinner. I forced myself to eat a couple of Oreos , and then cried “no more!” It was cold out, my breath quite visible, and the quarter moon was just becoming visible through the trees. I slid into my quilt, then my sleeping bag, and added my electronics and clothes to the foot box to stay charged over night, realized I hadn’t stretched, then went to sleep.

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Thank you so much for reading! What was your favorite part of this post?