Will aborted quest for 14ers abort 14er quest?

I’m writing this short post to wrap up my bachelor life here in California. Betsy arrives on Saturday!

Much of my time and about 99 percent of my energy since the last post has been devoted to reaching, but failing to climb, Mt. Tyndall and Mt. Williamson.

There are routes to the summits of both peaks that are, in theory, well within my capabilities and experience and I made an arduous three-day, 28-mile hike with an elevation gain of 7,500 feet carrying a heavy pack to reach the base of Mt. Tyndall at the top of 12,000-foot Shepherd Pass, which is steep and still covered in snow requiring crampons and ice ax to negotiate the final 500 feet of gain.

The Shepherd Pass Trail might be my most demanding backpacking experience ever.

But I got there in fine shape, the weather was great and I had plenty of food.

Yet I passed on the mountains. Turned around and went home empty handed.

I’m not sure exactly what my problem is. Age, anxiety, self-doubt?

It didn’t help that I talked to a 20-something kid that slipped descending on the slick snow near the ridge crest of Mt. Tyndall. He said he was well on his way to oblivion until he grabbed a rock ledge and stopped the slide. But he was ecstatic with having reached the summit.

“My first 14er,” he told me.

I had a very similar experience at very nearly the same age (on a Colorado 13er) and have never been comfortable on the steep snow climbs. Maybe it was his story and those memories that spooked me. Would Mt. Tyndall be my last 14er I wondered?

It also didn’t help that the handful of climbers that had used the weekend to get there left soon after I arrived leaving me as, seemingly, the only human being in the daunting vastness of the Pacific Crest. Maybe that was it?

Whatever the reason(s) for my discomfort it may well be that the sentence in my obituary will have to change from; “Mr. Pasley climbed all 75 of the 14ers in the lower 48 states.” to “Mr. Pasley climbed 70 different U.S. 14ers.”

Because I was, potentially, out for so long I tried to conserve power on electronic devices and did not take very many photos. But here are a few of the few.

One of the nice things about the Sierras in the summer is the bomber weather. Weeks pass without any hint of rain or snow. So why bother with a tent? I had hopes of making it all the way to the pass in one day but by the time I reached a place called Anvil Camp where there is water and shade and (compared to most of the rest of the trail) relatively few rocks I was gassed. So I spent my first night here.

Above Anvil Camp there are no more trees (or shade) and plenty of snow fields to negotiate.

It may not look like much but a trail through piles of rubble like this is a godsend, especially with a heavy pack.

Most of the carcass of this deer was half-buried in the snow field a few hundred yards above this point and someone may have moved the severed head here. An omen? On a positive note I also saw several live deer at various points along the trail, and on other hikes.

This is the start of the final ascent, about 500 vertical feet, to Shepherd Pass. It looks a lot steeper when you are standing there...and much steeper when you are standing at the top on the way down!

Believe it or not this is Sequoia National Park. The eastern boundary of this vast park adjoins the even more vast Inyo National Forest near the crest of Shepherd Pass.

That's Mt. Williamson.

This is Mt. Tyndall. The "easy" route ascends the rib on the left to the ridge crest, then left along the ridge to the summit. A lot of climbers used the snow just to the right of the rib. It's not that hard of a climb.

Descending back down the trail.

Still descending.

One of the things that makes that makes the Shepherd Pass trail arduous is that, about midway, it loses 500 feet of elevation to skirt some cliffs. On the return those 500 feet have to be regained to reach the Symmes Saddle which you can see in this photo.

The Owens Valley about four miles above the trailhead. The green spot out there is the town of Independence, the Inyo County seat.

Holding Pattern

I don’t have a whole lot to report but I do have some photos and a video or two that seemed worthy of posting.

Mountain climbing has been on hold, waiting for the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada to melt down some and for the weather pattern to improve and stabilize before I'll be comfortable attempting the 14ers here.

So I have bided my time trying to stay fit and acclimated by hiking the open trails at lower elevations (8,000 to 12,000 feet) and doing a little sightseeing.

I’m moving the trailer to a new RV park in Bishop tomorrow and Betsy will arrive here next week.

Because of the slow pace on the 14ers we may extend our stay in California to the end of July before moving to Colorado.

The RV park here in Lone Pine occasionally offers some great views of things in the sky...

...and, occasionally, some not-so-great views of things flapping in the breeze.

I've stopped to smell the flowers a few times...

...and to look at the trees. Big trees. Really big trees. This is a Giant Sequoia that was planted nearly a century ago in front of the Inyo County Courthouse in Independence.

The sequoias are typically found on the wetter, west side of the Sierra but they seem to be doing pretty well over here on the dry east side too.

Looking north up the Owens Valley, between the Sierra Nevada range (left) and the Inyo Mountain range (right).

This is a view of the Sierra from Bishop.

This is a view of the Sierra from Lone Pine.

The historic Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery played a key role in saving the Golden Trout - the California State Fish - from extinction.

The Alabama Hills just outside of Lone Pine have been used as a backdrop in hundreds of movies and television shows.

I expected to see this at the Mule Days Celebration in Bishop on Memorial Day weekend.

But I was not expecting this!

One of the features of Mule Days is the 20-mule team, a replica of the famous vehicles used to transport tons of borax out of Death Valley. If you are interested here's a short video (click here) of the team and another of the handlers turning them in the arena (click here to view the second video).

Looking west toward the 14er Mt. Willamson from the Symmes Plateau.

Temple Crag on the North Fork of Big Pine Creek.

The creatively-named Fourth Lake on the North Fork of Big Pine Creek.

Look at me: I'm hiking the Pacific Crest Trail! (To be more accurate, it was about 4.5 miles of the PCT)

This guy is a real PCT hiker, from Illinois. He took a break from the trail to attend Mule Days in Bishop (and resupply)!?

Cottonwood Pass SW of Lone Pine.

My drive to and from the RV park where I'm staying to the Cottonwood trailheads is less than 20 miles but gains (or loses, depending on your perspective) more than a mile of elevation.

Looking down on the well-named High Lake from New Army Pass at 12,000-feet-plus.

I may have had it backwards but it sure looked to me like the other bird buzzed the bald eagle, rather than vice-versa?

California I am here!

Robert Burns was prophetic. The best laid plans of mice and men do, indeed, often go awry. And such has been the case for me on this trip.

So, spoiler alert, I did reach the summit of Mt. Shasta – my 70^th 14er summit – on Sunday, May 13. That was my primary goal for May and I’m thrilled to have this tough mountain in the bag and to have reached this milestone. However, a lot of the other plans I outlined in the first post – i.e. climbing Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood – did not happen.

With that journalistic nod to the hierarchical inverted pyramid, I will now revert to a chronological recap of my wanderings to date. In so doing it may be useful to note for readers that a primary purpose of these blog posts is not only to inform you, dear reader, but also to later serve as the backbone of a document – sort of like a scrapbook – that Betsy will compile to help us recall everything that we have seen and done on what will likely turn out to be an extensive and expansive trip this summer. As you might imagine, we are compiling quite a collection of these journals and this blog post will eventually become part of another.

In preparing for this trip we tried something new by setting up the travel trailer at an RV “resort” in Boerne and then driving up there to pack up. This approach has the advantage of not having to bring the trailer to the house (and into San Antonio traffic) and we don’t have to leave it parked overnight in the street which allows us to pack at a more leisurely pace. The disadvantage of course is having to put everything in the car/truck and haul it up to Boerne to put in the trailer. However, it seemed to work out okay and we stayed in the trailer Sunday night, April 29; going out on the town for both supper and breakfast the next morning.

After breakfast Betsy went home and I hauled the trailer about 400 miles to Lubbock; checking in to a modest KOA on the outskirts of town. It was very windy, 20-25 MPH, but thankfully it was a tailwind, and the drive was uneventful.

From there I ventured into New Mexico, which I have found over the years to be a pretty weird state, and not a particularly easy one to drive through; especially when pulling a trailer. One of the issues with New Mexico is the gasoline. Because we are hauling a 30-foot travel trailer with a six-cylinder, eco-boost engine that is heavily dependent on fuel injection technology for the outsized power (and gas mileage) that Ford has been able to squeeze out of it we have become very sensitive to both the quality and the octane rating of the gasoline we buy. Lower grades seem to foul the injectors under the strain of pulling the trailer.

In San Antonio we can get 93 octane gasoline but in New Mexico it can be difficult to find anything higher than 90 octane. So I packed up two five-gallon cans of good San Antonio gasoline, just in case. Unfortunately, what I discovered was that, even in far West Texas, the best I could get was 90 octane and the engine started to knock a bit west of Clovis. But once I reached I-40 east of Albuquerque I found some 91 octane and the knocking stopped. The next challenge was the wind, which had shifted to the west/southwest. So I geared down and fought through that and made it up and over the mountains that guard the eastern edge of Albuquerque without incident or significant angst.

Because it was a relatively short day and I got off to an early start (if you are staying in a KOA on the edge of Lubbock why wouldn’t you get off to an early start?) I decided, on a whim, to turn off the interstate and check out Petroglyph National Monument. For some reason, despite many trips down I-40, I had not previously realized how close this park is to the interstate, or that the park is on the edge of urban Albuquerque.

At any rate, driving around in unfamiliar parts with the travel trailer in tow is usually something I try to avoid but in this case it worked out fine. I got in and out of the parking lot of the visitor center with no problems and was able to watch the park video and get a good feel for the park for a future, longer visit. Apparently PNM has the largest known concentration of petroglyphs in the world.

From there it was only another dozen or so miles west on the interstate to an RV Resort that is part of a casino and truck stop complex on the Pueblo of Laguna Indian Reservation. It is, to say the least, an unusual combination but for my purposes it worked out great. First of all the complex is right off of I-40 and the “resort” really was, kind of sort of, a resort; featuring huge, flat concrete pads (in the RV camping world, an important metric) and all of the facilities were brand-new and pristine.

As far as pad sites go, in the RV world, it doesn't get much better than this; long, wide, flat, concrete. I should also note here that I was able to make it all the way to California without ever having to unhitch the trailer!

I went into the casino for a beer and several lung fulls of smoke before escaping back to the resort without losing any money (probably because I did not place any bets).

I-40 west of Williams, Arizona.

The next day was spent entirely on I-40, grinding west for 400-plus miles. I felt a bit like a postman because the drive featured rain, sleet and snow and it was downright cold (40s) when I arrived at the Blake Ranch RV Resort & Horse Motel.

Seriously, that’s the name of the place. It was more of a “resort” than a Resort but it was fine for my purposes and, once again, close to the interstate and adjacent to a truck stop with Shell (our favorite brand) 91 octane gasoline. So, basically, a perfect stop.

The only glitch at this stop was that, just as I arrived, I got a never-before-seen message from the truck’s computer that the electrical connection between the truck and the trailer had “failed”. Not only does this affect the lights on the trailer (turn signals, etc.) but, more important, it prevents the activation of the trailer’s brakes, which are designed to work in tandem with the truck’s brakes.

However, I fiddled with the cord a bit and restored the connection and decided to press on.

Everything was fine until I got to the top of the long, long, long steep, steep, steep grade that comes out of the Colorado River basin on the Arizona/California border in the middle of the remote Mojave Desert. Fortunately, there was a pull out for – ironically – trucks to check their brakes. As the 18-wheelers whizzed past me I fiddled again with the connection and once again got it restored. More fortunately, there were no more problems as I pressed on through Barstow to U.S. 395 and then north to my destination, the Boulder Creek RV Resort three miles south of Lone Pine.

Looking west from the Boulder Creek RV Resort near Lone Pine, California.

This will be my home base for the month of May. In June I will move 60 miles north to the larger (and nicer) town of Bishop to await Betsy’s arrival.

Over the next several days I got settled in and took some day hikes at altitude to get myself acclimated. The plan, of course, was to try the lower altitude mountains in Washington and Oregon and work up to the 14,162-foot Mt. Shasta toward the end of May.

However, when I checked in on the Forest Service website it said the time to climb Shasta is now! There is a relatively narrow, Goldilocks window between avalanche season and the summer snow melt when conditions for climbing Shasta are best. In 2018 that window had apparently narrowed and come earlier than usual.

So I scrapped my plans for St. Helens and Hood and took off for Lassen Volcanic National Park, which is en route to Mt. Shasta, with the intent of climbing Lassen Peak to further assist with acclimating prior to taking on Mt. Shasta.

Although I did not reach the Lassen summit because of wind conditions on the summit ridge it was essentially mission accomplished because I got some good crampon work in to get within about a mile of the summit and it was good workout at relatively high altitude, including some snowshoeing, while also camping and sleeping two nights at altitude.

Thus it was both a beneficial and a beautiful stop.

There is a trail leading to the summit of Lassen Peak that includes several interpretive signs. However, as you can see, in mid-May the trail and most of the signs are still buried in snow. I should also note that this has been a LOW snow year in the park. The park road is expected to open sometime this month. In some past years the road has not opened until July!

The blue waters of frozen Helen Lake. I snowshoed over to the lake from the Lassen Peak Trailhead where I had camped. I should also note that there are at least three Helen Lakes in California that I have seen. This lake, a lake on the John Muir Trail and the lake on the slopes of Mt. Shasta that will be mentioned later in this post. One of John Muir's daughters was named Helen and I think that is the genesis of some, maybe all, of these names.

Then it was on to Mt. Shasta City for a night in a motel, some final packing and preparation and I was off to my base camp at a Sierra Club-owned outpost on the lower slopes of the mountain called Horse Camp (elevation 7,810’). I got there about 3:30 p.m., set up camp and prepared for the climb the next day.

Stakes don't do much good in the snow.

After a fitful four to five hours of sleep I took off from Horse Camp at 12:55 a.m. and reached the summit at about 10:35 a.m.

Starting out the snow was perfect, firm and crunchy and I made it to Helen Lake (10,500’) at about 4 a.m. without crampons. That’s where the real climbing begins and I was not alone. There were reportedly about 100 climbers camped at Helen Lake and the long, steep slope from the lake to a collection of rock outcroppings known as the Red Banks was festooned with the dots of headlamps from a conga line of climbers inching their way up the steep, snow-slick hill.

It was a beautiful, clear night and I could look back down the mountain to see the lights of Mt. Shasta City and the ribbon of lights on The Five (California speak for Interstate 5) snaking the through the valley below. There was no point in trying to take a photo in the dark; but it is a beautiful sight, much like being in airplane.

The sun came up as I ascended the slope toward the Red Banks and I made it through the cliffs to a relatively flat area at 12,500 feet a little past 7 a.m.

From there I slogged on up a slightly less severe slope to reach a feature known as Misery Hill, now at over 13,000 feet.  The name comes in part because there is a false summit that entices you to think you are close only to discover when you get there that you still have a ways to go. Shasta’s true summit does not come into view until you reach the crest of Misery Hill. 

Fellow climbers slogging up Misery Hill.

By the time I got to the top of Misery Hill I was gassed. Even though I had read the route description I was surprised by how much real estate I still had to cover to reach the summit, which is a pile of red rock covered in hoar frost.

Finally, nearing 14,000 feet, I was climbing onto the summit block where there are several vents emitting the classic rotten egg smell of sulphur.

It’s a relatively flat and roomy summit and even though there was a constant but fairly-well spread out line of climbers making the same slow grind to the top I had a few minutes alone at the top.

Then came the hard part; getting down without killing myself.

I did some glissading (sliding on your butt and using an ice ax to keep from sliding too fast). I don’t care much for glissading but it beats slipping and falling on tired legs and sliding down the hill out of control.

I very thankfully reached the relative safety of Helen Lake a little before 3 p.m. It had warmed considerably during the day and the snow on the section from Helen Lake to Horse Camp had turned to mush making for a slippery, post holing slog home. But it was all downhill and I finally got there and crawled into the tent about 5 p.m. where I went to sleep while the sun was still up and did not come out until the sun had re-emerged Monday morning.

I packed up leisurely and hiked out to the trailhead and then drove back to the Shasta Inn where I pounded down my third (in a four-day span) three-quarter-pound Big Mountain Burger with onion rings and French fries.

Big Mountain Catering's Customer of the Week.

Big Mountain Burger; I couldn't have done it without you!

On a tip from the caretaker at the Horse Camp I picked up some Vietnamese spring rolls at a downtown farmers market for supper, did some laundry and poked around town a bit.

The next day, Tuesday May 15 I drove the beautiful 500-plus miles home to Lone Pine, crossing the Pacific Crest from the Cascades to the Sierra. At the suggestion of a park ranger at Lassen NP I took the time to stop along the way at Burney Falls State Park and made several stops along the spectacular U.S. 395 for photos. I got home to the trailer in Lone Pine a bit before 10 p.m.

U.S. 395 runs nearly the length of California east of the Sierras and Cascades and is, IMHO, one of America's prettiest highways.

That's Mono Lake out there in the distance, on the western edge of the Great Basin. Mono Lake and the Owens River that flows from it have been the subject of epic, decades-long legal battles in state and federal courts pitting the City of Los Angeles - which gets much of it's water from the snow-fed Owens - against environmental groups.

Since then I have been resting and making plans for my final four (new) 14er climbs of the summer, all them with trail heads that are thankfully just a short drive from here (albeit to be followed by long hikes and relatively difficult climbs).

In the interim I am trying to take some fairly robust day hikes at altitude, every other day or so, to stay in shape.

The view on one of my day hikes in the John Muir Wilderness, only 25 miles or so west of the RV park where I'm staying.