9/3/17
10 miles
104 miles hiked total

I sleep late- I guess I needed it? And we don’t start hiking until 8:15. I am deeply superstitious about starting hiking after 8, as in my experience this means that one is totally fucked, as far as miles goes. Oh well, I guess I’ll see how today pans out. I did need the sleep.

There are some cliff bands between us and our pass, an unnamed pass near Silliman peak, and we take on the puzzle with great enthusiasm, happy to be problem solving again. A little class four, a little handing up of packs, some huffing and puffing up slabs and and ramps and chunks of earth and then we are at the top.

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The cold rain comes again, clearing the smoke from the air. We’re on the tablelands of the Kings Kaweah Divide, which Skurka describes as “shockingly easy”. I would describe them more as “regular hard”- tilted chunks of stone, slippery from the rain, that one must make one’s way across/over/around, spreading in all directions on a broad plateau. The tablelands may not be easy, but they are beautiful in a soothing, otherworldly way.

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Thunder claps as it likes to do each afternoon, and we are on the most high and exposed place we can possibly be but oh well, there’s nothing to be done, and eventually the thunder moves on. We both get lazy with navigation and suddenly we’re way off route in that way that happens more quickly than it seems like it should, and getting back on route somehow takes a lot of time/frustration/getting genuinely cliffed out and having to backtrack. I start to feel like a fuckup, why can’t I go more miles each day on this route? Why did I start hiking after 8 this morning? Ah, PMS.

At last we’re back on the route and I feel kind of irritable and burnt from the effort but there’s plenty of opportunity to zone out in my head alone until I’m calm again as we choose our own lines and I’m up high traversing grassy cracks in granite slabs while Kodak is below, in a squishy basin. I like how we do this, sort of weave in and out, always (mostly) keeping within sight or shouting distance. It works for my introvert nature, as well as Kodak’s- it gives us time to rest and be alone with our thoughts as well as do whatever introspection we need to do. Our lines converge again at Lonely lake, which sits in a bowl beneath Horn col, and I’m feeling much better at this point.

Lonely lake is ringed in talus but there’s a good campsite up the bank a bit, next to a wee tarn that reflects the pink clouds of sunset. Kodak pitches the tarp in chill flat mode but as we’re cooking dinner some of the most brutal stormclouds I have ever seen begin to roll in, darkening the entire sky. Kodak re-pitches the tarp in storm mode and we crawl inside just as the last of the light is sucked from the earth and a heavy blackness envelops us. Then the wind rises up like a ghost, and rain begins to fall. I curl in my sleeping bag, listening to the storm arrive. Maybe it will wear itself out quickly, and we’ll be able to sleep?