The mountains are calling, and I must go…

John Muir

The Sierra High Route is a two-hundred-plus mile trek that takes one from Kings Canyon to the upper reaches of Yosemite National Park via that timberline wilderness along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, which John Muir called the “Range of Light”. The route is mostly cross-country with relatively few trail miles, keeps an elevation between 9,500 and 12,500 feet, and traverses steep terrain over high mountain passes, fields of snow and talus, scree-covered mountainsides, massive granite slabs and alpine meadows.

The route has been suggested as the “hardest hike in America” by Wired magazine. While we are not much for superlatives, there is no doubt that endeavoring the High Route is HARD.

The purpose of this site is to share with you a small piece of our experience in making this journey, recount a few anecdotes and give some context and support for those considering whether to undertake a similar experience.

We decided not provide a day by day recount, which would sound monotonous. Neither is it meant to allow for a plug n play experience. While those resources do exist, you will get what you put in. The price of a genuine and lasting experience here is respect and hard work, both planning and en route. For those willing to commit, the payoff is oh so sweetly worth it.

Thanks for reading. We certainly had fun writing it.

Colleen + Tom
September 2020

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Experience

There is nothing quite like the Sierra Nevada. It is a treasure. In the backyard of California’s massive industries – tech, entertainment, agriculture – lies this range of mountains: so accessible, yet in many ways so isolated. In this huge and gorgeous region where for nearly 200 miles no road traverses the range, and very few otherwise do, are the public lands of Yosemite National Park, Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, the Devil’s Postpile and Giant Sequoia National Monuments, ten national forests and 26 wilderness areas.

While difficult to separate elements of the dynamic and undulating landscape that the High Route follows, Steve Roper, who originally scouted the route, divides the trek (and his book on it) into five sections. From South to North: Cirque Country, Whitebark Country, Lake Country, Headwaters Country, and Canyon Country. Each of the five can be said to have unique character if only to make such vast scale and complex ecosystems more mentally manageable. I cannot begin to elaborate with words and believe these can only be approached visually.

We have hundreds of photos but added only a portion of them here to give a sense of the character of each “country”.

Conservation

We brought with us a deep respect and conservation mindset. Everywhere we trod we felt like guests in the wild, welcomed and tolerated by the locals. And feared as the apex species; disrupters in chief. I think the adventurous soul who chooses to subject themselves to the rigors of the High Route must see themselves in this lens. The great outdoors deserves of the visitor a healthy respect without fear. Through history mankind has feared the unknown and tended to see nature as something to conquer, aggressively meeting the challenge. Wild beasts to tame, resources to claim, peaks to bag, fastest-known-times to achieve. Maybe for good reason: nature was harsh (still can be), wild animals were real threats to our 10,000 years-ago selves. Be that as it may, let’s agree that we won. Nature is no longer something to be conquered, and humanity’s role is no longer that of underdog.

Having dominated the natural world, we now have a responsibility to protect and nurture it. Everywhere we strode the landscape and its vast ecosystem of denizens seemed to plead with us. Let us breathe. Keep the air and water clean. Come and visit us, see us and experience us, but please don’t trample and burn. Our world is fragile and it is in our hands and this is how we felt.

Why do this?

It was April 2020 when we decided to embark on the High Route. COVID lockdowns kept us in our house far too much for active people. We wanted to plan an experience where we could find solace in the natural world, breathe deeply of the clean air, and see a part of the Sierras that for several years we had wanted to explore further. We had heard of and read several accounts of the High Route and we immediately honed in on it as we are both captivated by the grandeur of the Sierras and were excited about the prospect of getting off trail and into the less-traveled backcountry.

We felt that 20 days gave us sufficient time to explore without setting a frantic pace. I was adamant on this point, preferring to stop early or come off trail rather than have it turn into a speed test or twelve-hour days of forced marching. We figured that averaging around ten miles a day is a good balance. It is not necessary or common to attempt the entire route at once. Roper himself advocates for taking it in several sections totaling 30 days, accounting for approaches to/from each section.

On the other hand, we read numerous accounts including one from a popular influencer who had proudly completed the whole thing in nine days. Nine days! Now I recognize the “FKT” goal of achieving fastest known times, but can only feel sorry for someone whose goal is to spend the least amount of time possible in this extraordinarily beautiful and serene environment. If that is the price to be paid for speed, I’ll play the tortoise any day.

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Our Route

Weather and Wildlife

In the summer the high Sierras are hot in the day and cold at night. But the record heat and our engineered-for-warmth sleeping setup meant we were never too cold even at night.

Despite the minimal traffic on the High Route, the effects of climate change on these ecosystems was at times painfully obvious. The days felt hotter compared to past Sierra excursions. The long time Sierra hikers we encountered confirmed this anecdotally. Tin Man (see below), having tramped through these mountains for 30+ years, commented it was the hottest year he had ever experienced. And on August 16th, a week into our journey, a weather monitoring station in Death Valley recorded 130º F, which if confirmed would be the highest reliably recorded air temperature anywhere on Earth, ever. Naturally this kind of heat created the conditions for the concurrent massive electrical storms throughout California that week and the dry forests that became fuel for the flames.

Everywhere we walked across dried brown streams and lake beds, on several occasions noting that our maps put us smack in the middle of a blue spot, identifying what would have once been a permanent body of water. While not exactly a shortage, especially so close to the snow melt sources that provide most of California with its water, we were surprised to see so much was dried up.

In traversing the wonderful upper Bench Canyon we expected to see what Roper described as a “fairyland setting” with glistening brooks and “more wildflowers than the mind can comprehend,” though given the late season we anticipated these may not be at their fullest. In reality the creek had largely dried up by the time we passed through, we observed scarce wildflowers, and by that day the smoke from the California wildfires had blown in, obscuring the long view of Ritter Range we had expected from Blue Lake.

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Animal life is suffering too. The water ouzels, birds which flit and dip across the lakes and streams, are deprived of their habitats. We saw only a few of them, as well as rare sightings of amphibians; lizards, frogs and toads whose habitats are also disappearing as temperatures rise and water levels drop.

Much of our high altitude time was spent among an at-risk species called Pikas. These small, herbivorous, conspicuously cute mammals related to rabbits live solely in rock fields. Our constant companions, they were shy but curious, always watching us and communicating with their high pitched calls. They chirp and dart among the boulders collecting grasses that they batch cure in the sun before storing it all in underground chambers to consume throughout the winter. While they are adapted to withstand extreme cold, they will die in hot weather and so their habitat has been steadily pressed to higher, cooler altitudes with less vegetation. We encountered them often at and just under high mountain passes. Rising temperatures will at some point leave them nowhere else to go.

Frustratingly, others at times seem selfishly oblivious to some of these realities or to any sense of personal responsibility. On our night in Tuolumne, we stayed in the backpacker’s campground, which was still open to wilderness permit holders. As the big campgrounds always are, it was a rude awakening after our tranquil backcountry nights. A group of five or six had set their tents near ours. Apparently intent on getting a real wilderness experience these grown men decided that making a fire in their firepit was part of that and proceeded to scour the forest for anything that would burn. They spent the next half hour bashing and hacking at dead and living trees to remove a branch or two in their objective, which turned out to be a large pit fire. The same night hundreds of thousands of acres of forest were burning across California. Adding insult, the whole effort was just for show as we noticed them actually cooking their food on a small jet-boil stove. Thankfully their fire stayed in the ring that night though I woke up around midnight with the smoky smell still lingering even inside our tent.

It was not all doom and gloom though and the route remains full of life. Lodgepole pines give way to Whitebarks at higher altitudes, joined by Mountain Hemlocks as the route winds North. Red Firs are occasionally seen and some magnificent Sierra Junipers dwarf their surroundings along a stretch of the Yosemite portion.

Even in August, well past blooming season, innumerable wildflowers were on display, from unique fuchsia-colored Paintbrush and yellow Monkeyflower dotting boulder covered meadows, to Lupine and Goldenbrush at higher elevations. Campion, Fireweed, Pussypaw, Columbine, Alpine and Explorer’s Gentium, Mountain Strawberry, Sorrel, and myriad others caused Colleen to frequently stop for a photo.

The first day was the most exciting for fauna. In our first half hour of hiking we came upon a rattlesnake reposing in the sun next to the Copper Creek trail. It rattled and we stepped around. Just a few miles later we were walking near Lower Tent Meadows, which is the first camping option out of Kings Canyon but undesirably situated just five miles above the trailhead and in active bear territory. Sure enough two bear cubs and then their mother, with a gorgeous cinammon coat, uncaringly passed just in front of us on the trail as we halted and made noise to let them know we were there. While the concentrated excitement of that day’s encounters did not continue, we regularly noticed tracks and scat from bears, bobcats, mountain lions and others. To our disappointment and despite peeled eyes we did not sight any of the elusive bighorn sheep.

Encounters Along the Way

In the Nick of Time

In the thru-hiking world there is a saying “the trail provides” and it does. There are hallowed individuals called trail angels who hold a special place. Volunteers with volunteer budgets, they do magical work like providing rides or lodging to hikers or walking a stretch of the JMT/PCT with food. That’s right. Think of hiking for days with no expectation of real food for a hundred miles or more, when how amazing it would be to see someone walking toward you with a “Señor Muir’s Taco Hut” t-shirt, hands reached out to offer you a taco and a cold beer!

Like all the best angels, ours came just at the right moment and not on a formal mission. On Day 5 we had our first real obligation to keep. We had hired family-owned Rainbow Pack Outfitters to deliver our first resupply, six days of food and sundries that we had shipped to them in the weeks prior. The rendezvous was on Bishop Pass where a mule and driver would meet us at “mid-day” as we had been told. Even being a city dweller I know what time the sun is high in the sky but I also have no idea what mid-day meant in terms of waiting around if we were late. When does it turn into afternoon, or late day? 1pm, 2?

Due to a particularly long approach to Cirque Pass we camped short of our intended destination the night before. Only an air mile away but another pass and a high saddle lay in between. The real concern was that short-cutting up to Bishop Pass was not part of the High Route, so we would be going off book and over unsure terrain, skipping Knapsack Pass and instead cutting North over another pass right at the base of the Palisades, a series of fourteeners and nearly-fourteeners (stack some rocks on top of a few and they qualify) making it one of the highest ranges in the Sierras. We called the pass in question Thunderbolt as it is situated right under the eponymous peak. We did not know if it was passable, or if in attempting it we would spend more time than we would just going over Knapsack and circling back the long way by trail to Bishop. I was fairly confident it would be doable, having seen someone else’s tracks online, but I had not read anything else to support that nor was I sure we could do it and still keep our “mid-day” time. If for any reason we did not get our resupply we would have to come down into the town of Bishop and either do a serious shopping trip with no logistic support or end the trek.

In hindsight I should have studied this part much more carefully given it was not explicitly scouted by Roper and now it was playing a key role in our food drop. Having seen nary a soul while off trail, we certainly did not expect to get any help. Our plan was to move fast, scout the approach from the saddle prior and make a final decision when we had a look from below at the shore of Barrett Lake. Before doing so we used the inReach to message Paul, who was supporting us from home, and asked him to contact the outfitter for us. The pack office told Paul they would not be able to reach the driver and that he “might” wait for us an hour or so. Paul’s advice: “Hurry!” So we did.

From the saddle to the South the pass looked possible. Steep talus on the right, smooth but steep granite on the left. From the maps we knew there was a gully in between that we couldn’t see yet and crossed our fingers that it would be our ticket. Luckily, on the way down we spied a small trio of hikers coming from the West. When they disappeared behind a ridge where the gully would be I realized they were headed up Thunderbolt ahead of us. So I hurried down and around Barrett Lake before they got out of earshot, hailed them down and called out whether they knew it was passable. They said it was; in fact they were experienced in this area and one of them had crossed this pass fifteen years prior. We climbed up to greet the trio, a couple in their 60s and a guy in his 20s, who had been cross country hiking for a few days doing their own circuit though at a much more leisurely pace of about five to eight miles a day, which at that moment sounded like the perfect agenda. These were our trail angels.

Thunderbolt Pass turned out to be much easier than we could have hoped and we were up in no time via two or three routes among the five of us. Terrain matters, as their ascent was slightly less taxing than ours for having gone up the benches rather than the obvious route up the gully and across stable talus. One of our trail angel trio described their ascent as a one and a quarter class, and then explained the system like this: Class 1 is hiking, 2 is when you need to use hands, 3 is hands but with consequences, and 4+ is ropes required of course. We’ve seen the system defined numerous ways before, and we both laughed later that “with consequences” was the most perfect and succinct we’d ever heard.

This quick ascent saved us a good two hours versus re-routing over Knapsack. Adding to our relief, the trio informed us that Knapsack was actually a more difficult and time-consuming pass than the one we had just done. Whew! At about 11am we topped the pass and chatted briefly, learning that in the heat of the day before they had inflated an air mattress and used it to float on one of the more beautiful lakes in the basin below. We filed that tidbit away for later. In better shape but still behind, we said our goodbyes and heartfelt thank-yous for showing us the way and hauled ass down the north side of Thunderbolt Pass.

The descent started over a short but steep moraine with talus that can be simply described as: big, sharp and loose. Stressed out and stumbling for the millionth time as an angled piece of rock shifted under my step, I asked myself “man, can it get any nastier than this?” In cosmic response, a delicate blue butterfly emerged at that moment from under the stone I had just dislodged, briefly hovered around me and fluttered away. I took a breath, remembered why we were out there, and tread more carefully.

Over nearly two miles of traversing cross-country we hustled toward Bishop. Cross country is slow going and traversing high across the steeper, looser terrain is the worst. Though Roper seems to favor a good traverse, we will usually prefer to descend and come back up and pay the elevation loss/gain tax. But here we traversed, seeing the slope was mild and below looked about the same anyway. While it felt like forever, we made good time and by noon we came upon the pass trail. Not knowing whether aiming toward the indirect but faster-paced trail or ascending directly cross-country to the saddled pass would get us there faster, Colleen and I split up the last half mile, agreeing to meet at the top. She arrived first around 12:30pm and went over to the other side to the designated meeting place. In another nod to ambiguity, the location had been described simply as “150 feet below the pass”. That meant elevation in this case. The guy (mule man, muleteer?) was there waiting and we thanked our lucky stars. And butterflies.

Turns out our guy probably would have waited much longer. We learned he was a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) doing this as a summer job. When he had first seen the ad he thought the job was carrying backpacks for hikers, but had been fine with it when he quickly learned otherwise. His jeans were all ripped up from use and he was dusty as hell, clearly loving the cowboy lifestyle. He told Colleen she looked like Anne Hathaway and she beamed. I was reminded that being out here spending your days like that gives so much freedom compared to the military academy life, and especially the Marine Corps job he was headed to.

When pressed, he was uncomfortable saying how long he would have stayed, but was firm that he would not have left before 3pm. Another lucky break for us to get a courier with such strong integrity and respect for completing the mission. He was studying Arabic and I guess he will probably be shipped off to the middle east on graduating. Being a Navy brat and having briefly attended military school myself, I felt a connection. His eyes lit up in recognition when I mentioned the P-3 Orion planes of my dad’s career. He almost walked away before I realized that we should probably tip our mule driver. We paid enough to the outfitter, but I’m sure this kid wasn’t getting much of that. All we had was exact change for the drop-boxes at our planned campgrounds and a few hundred-dollar bills as emergency cash. So I gave him a hundred, and I’m sure we both felt pretty good about it.

In a huge irony, our cadet told us he had come up from LeConte Ranger Station that morning to meet us. Our jaws dropped on hearing that. Our route would soon take us through LeConte, and had we known earlier we might not have had to detour to Bishop Pass at all!

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Sailing the High Seas

On Day 7 we crossed the Glacier Divide, a major range extending for 11.5 miles mostly above 13,000ft. Named for its numerous glaciers on the northern side, it is steep and difficult to pass and no trails do so. In fact, the John Muir Trail diverts for miles around it rather than attempting a permanent pass despite the luxurious country on either side.

We had been on trail for the last two days since Bishop Pass, including the JMT for fifteen miles, the longest trailed section of the entire High Route. After coming over Muir Pass and traipsing through gorgeous Evolution Basin, we would leave the trail when it switchbacked down and West to Evolution Valley. Then we would head over the Glacier Divide via one of two routes: either traverse West across several miles of benches and woods to Snow Tongue Pass, or head straight North through Darwin Bench to Alpine Col. Roper selected Snow Tongue Pass for the High Route, we suspect due to the climbing history behind it as the route chosen by James Hutchinson for the first ascent of Mount Humphreys. But Alpine Col is generously included in the book as a well situated alternative. We chose Alpine Col so we could spend the early approach walking through glorious Darwin Bench with its bubbling brooks of golden trout, grassy benches and granite boulders. It evoked in us a feeling that perhaps this was how one could imagine the Garden of Eden.

After passing this small magical world we ascended the next several miles across acres and acres of increasingly large, loose and sharp talus surrounding several high altitude lakes. We moved slowly through this along the “shores” of the lakes – which here just meant slightly less steep talus that had already fallen and settled and was more stable. This meant hopping, scrambling, climbing and often maneuvering under the melt of snowfields that still crept nearly up to the lakes’ edges. The approach and final ascent to Alpine Col was not particularly difficult, just long miles spent on talus where every step was a chore and we could not lose focus for even an instant. It was a test of endurance. On the other side we were greeted by much the same for a descent which felt just as tedious as the ascent.

By the time we got down to the second talus-bound lake on the northern side, we were willing to try anything to avoid more talus-hopping. Perhaps half-delirious and inspired by the tale of our trail angels floating their air mattress breezily on the summer lake in Palisade Basin, we wondered if we could just as well take to the seas but for passage rather than leisure. So we hatched a plan to lash our packs together on Colleen who would lay on the air mattress and use her hands to steer and paddle while I got in the water and propelled it forward by kicking like on a paddle board. The water was pure glacier melt, very cold, but the sun was so hot that I actually welcomed it. Plus I pictured my mom, a lifelong swimmer, saying that a cold pool is a fast pool. Because we have a unique two-person air mattress, we figured it would get added stability from width and act like a catamaran with its independent air chambers making for two “hulls”.

We had it all ready to go. But our gear was all pretty lightweight stuff intentionally, so our “hull” was not really meant to stand up to sharp talus at the water’s edge. (Gear designers, are you paying attention? The best ultralighting gear always serves more than one purpose!) On our test run with just Colleen paddling around next to shore we sprang a pinprick of a leak, easily patched with a square of Tenacious Tape, and we called off the adventure and slogged out the rest of the descent the old-fashioned way.

I’m still convinced this would have worked, and been a ton of fun (despite us imagining a sinking raft in the middle of the lake). But it was probably for the best because within the next half hour, we came into Humphrey’s Basin and the weather started.

All is Chaos

Sierra storms are famous. The range creates its own weather patterns. As the fronts driven inland from the Pacific cross the central valley and slam against its high walls causing complex downdrafts and short outbursts, most precipitation falls on the (south-)western slopes. That the eastern side sees very little makes the range a significant contributor to the desert climates in Nevada and eastern California.

Humphreys’ Basin is situated with high mountain ranges on three sides, including the wall-like Glacier Divide to the South and massive Mount Humphreys to the West. The latter is a magnet for thunderstorms which happen in the summer on a continuous cycle lasting four or five days.

In fact our last weather experience had been five days ago where we had worked quickly to set up next to an otherwise quiet mountain lake just under Windy Ridge before Gray Pass when thunderstorms and high wind had developed quickly. In the light of morning we had noticed that nearly all the trees on the northern side the bowl we had camped in had been split from lightning damage. Gulp. The trees on the southern side where we had camped were intact, though on the way up to Gray Pass we climbed over what seemed to be a freshly downed pine.

So when we came into Humphrey’s Basin we were probably due for another event. Although we didn’t recall the passage from his book until later that afternoon, Roper describes a singular weather viewing experience available if you are in the right place at the right time, which we were. Actually we weren’t in the right place for the show, rather we were right in the middle of the show. On both sides of us, over the wide-stretching Glacier Divide and behind the hugely dark and foreboding Mount Humphreys, rumbling rain clouds became full-on lightning storms. The fronts seemed to converge again and again, sparring with thrusts and parries while we quickly moved across the several miles of eerily-lit yet gorgeous high timberline plains in the middle. With these two systems battling over the peaks around us, we experienced the tremendous noise as feelings almost like deep tremors in the ground and saw lightning in either direction, though oddly enough our only contact was rainfall and minor bouts of pebble-sized hail. We were filled with both frightening awe and an exhilarating sense of invincibility. Knowing at the same time that while the peaks and ridges around us were much higher, we were also on the high plains and remained exposed.

Roper’s beautiful description, which before the trip we had assumed was overly dramatic, captures it just as we experienced it:

“Following a period of perfectly clear weather, the opening of a thunderstorm cycle is marked by randomly scattered clouds that appear in midafternoon and dissipate by sundown. During the succeeding afternoons the clouds appear ever earlier and loom ever larger before vanishing impotently. The major outburst, reserved for the fourth or fifth day, allows hikers to witness an event not soon forgotten. (Do not watch this show from a summit or a ridge, or the day might turn into a shocking experience.) On this day wispy cumulus clouds, absolutely white and insignificant at first, materialize late in the morning. A few hours later the thickening masses magically coalesce, and thunderheads shoot upward with amazing rapidity to altitudes as high as 35,000 feet. The temperature drops abruptly, a brisk wind springs up, and the sun disappears behind the seething gray shapes. Thunder growls in the distance, and then the heavens explode. Tendrils of lightning lick the nearby summits. An eerie darkness contrasts with the glistening hail pelting the earth. Crackling ripples of thunder foretell of impending detonations that echo forever off the cliffs. The gods seem to have lost control of their domain, and all is chaos.”

Ultimately we walked through the afternoon storms, a bit cold and mostly drenched from waist below our waterproof jackets, came over Puppet Pass and set up another quick camp at Puppet Lake just before another round of thunderstorms that lasted through the night, with only the briefest of breaks allowing us to see a spectacular sunset between outbursts.

This was August 15th. Completely unbeknownst to us, California had just had their first night of what was to become days of unprecedented electrical storm activity with over 12,000 lightning strikes recorded, igniting more than 500 wildfires from the Bay Area all the way to the Sierras. The videos we saw of that lightning activity are simply incredible. Perhaps what we experienced was an early part of this? I think it had to be. However it was not much grander than Roper’s description of the usual five-day cyclical development in the area so I’m not fully convinced. Either way it was a perfect storm and we made it through without the “shocking” experience.

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An Inspirational Encounter

On Day 10, after camping below beautifully situated Laurel Lake we left early (7am; early for us anyway) and ascended the relatively short but steep Bighorn Pass, a beautiful 900ft climb up grassy slopes, granite boulders and twisty whitebark pines. On the other side, after traversing a high talus and slab-covered cirque and climbing another few hundred feet we reached our second pass of the day: Shout-of-Relief Pass, named by Roper as a tribute to the exclamation of joy reported by the original summiteers of difficult Red and White Mountain upon first seeing the easier terrain down the Northwest side. So we were fully prepared to give our own shouts of relief (Colleen had planned to yell “Of Relief Pass!” at the top of her lungs), when we realized we shared the summit with another climber.

Going by trail name “Tin Man”, the other climber we learned after some discussion was a supremely experienced hiker and climber originally from New Zealand, who had been living near and exploring the Sierras for over 30 years and was on his own off-trail circuit linking up several passes. Though we guessed he was in his seventies, he proudly told us he was 81 years old! Colleen and I later agreed that when you have the fortune and fortitude to meet people on high altitude off-piste mountain passes at the age of 81, you damn well announce your age!

A lifetime adventurer, Tin Man was a decorated Royal Air Force pilot, flew ski planes into Antarctica, associated with famed explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, mountaineered all over the world from the Himalayas to Denali, and had hiked the John Muir Trail 15 years in a row before giving it up to focus on the high(er) Sierras; among many other feats. He authors a blog on his experiences at HighSierraKiwi.com and FlyingKiwiUSA.com.

We only spoke for thirty minutes before it started to lightly rain and we all decided to begin our descent, us moving faster ahead. We debated whether to lag a bit to ensure Tin Man came down ok but quickly laughed away that notion, knowing he was far more capable than we.

In the short time we spent on Shout of Relief Pass, we were left with two pieces of enduring wisdom from this inspiring figure.

The first, as we discussed weather safety, was when he casually mentioned he had turned away from more peaks than he had ever summited. There seems to be supreme wisdom in this ratio as a key to longevity and success. Including knowledge of what “success” is for you. Achieve on your terms; love the climb, not just the summit. Be willing to turn back short of the peak, and climb again.

The second was that Tin Man mentioned he would often be asked how he kept it up for so long, to which he would respond that the answer is in the question: keep it up. The moment we stop moving, challenging ourselves, getting unbalanced from time to time is the moment when fragility finds a crack to seep in. At 81, having never stopped, Tin Man seemed at the top of his game.

And why the trail name? He went with Tin as shorthand for Titanium, which after two knee replacements (one just 5 yrs ago), is what his knees are made of. Incredible.

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Damage Done

While the experience was far more rewarding than taxing, we did not escape without a few bumps and bruises.

Altitude

The High Sierras are high. Most of the route is between 9,500 ft and 11,500 ft elevation with several passes climbing above 12,000 ft. The southern end at Copper Creek trailhead is 5,500 ft above sea level, and the trail climbs pretty much straight up from there until reaching “cruising altitude” at Grouse Lake (10,500 ft), which is the southernmost place you can reasonably camp at timberline, i.e. out of the woods.

It is possible to reduce the initial elevation gain either by doing a shorter first day or going from North to South. However, the former solution involves camping the first night in very active bear territory, and the latter gives only minor elevation relief while being a much more significant logistical shift that introduces its own set of issues.

Altitude is a serious impediment for some, and should not be taken lightly. We know of a group who attempted the High Route and – quite responsibly – came down early when a member of their trio developed altitude sickness.

Most nights we camped above 11,000 ft. Though we live at sea level, Colleen and I have often spent time at high altitude. This experience has contributed to us understanding and identifying our own symptoms better and with each foray to high altitude we anecdotally notice that we can acclimatize to higher altitudes more easily the next time. It’s worth noting that just because you have done something at high altitude doesn’t mean you are immune to problems. Sometimes you just have a bad day and altitude reduces the margin of error for that.

I wore a Garmin Fenix 6x watch which has sensors to measure environmental and biometric data like altitude, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, etc. There is even a program to calculate acclimatization for high altitude performance training, which showed that I acclimated to about 9,400 ft in the first five days. But the curve flattened thereafter and I did not “reach” 10k acclimatization until Day 15 or so. While this analysis felt too conservative to me, it was valuable to have the various other measurements to compare with what I expected to see, particularly heart rate and blood oxygen.

While Colleen had no issues, for the first few days I had a constant subtle headache, which is the way mild altitude sickness manifests in me. I remained cognizant and carefully monitored it, using Advil in the daytime and Diamox at night. I don’t like to take Diamox during the day as it only eases symptoms and I prefer to feel the discomfort and recognize my limits rather than risk masking any potential developing issues. I felt fully acclimated after a few days spent at the 10,000-11,000 ft level and ascending/descending 12k+ passes.

Sun

Up there the air is thinner and the sun burns hot in the daytime. We took strong sunscreen, layered it on every exposed patch of skin and still came away with significant tans (and tan lines). I was constantly fidgeting with my sun hood, taking it off to hear Colleen and my surroundings, reattaching it to keep off the sun.

Our hands were the worst. We both use trekking poles, and the constant movement of the wrist straps wears off even the best applied lotion so we came away with noticeable sun damage: leathery texture, peeling, some blisters. Colleen looked for lightweight sun gloves on our zero day in Mammoth but did not readily find what she wanted. Those will definitely be included in the future.

For relief we used a trick we developed a few years ago. We packed a small container of our favorite homemade salve – a cannabis-infused coconut oil which we applied to burned areas to relieve pain and itchiness. We also rubbed this on our feet and other sore muscles each night. While not psychoactive when applied topically, the full spectrum THC/CBD combination works wonders for these types of muscle pains. Or maybe it’s just the coconut oil, or the placebo effect… Who cares? We feel better.

Feet Pounding

We both have office jobs. We sit in chairs specifically designed to keep us comfortably off our feet all day. So eight to twelve hours a day of walking is not an easy feat (not easy on the feet). Repeating that kind of day for weeks is a painful challenge of any thru-hike. Add in the vertical up and down, the talus walking-and-hopping and other off-piste steps and you’ve got a recipe for some very sore feet. While you can avoid blisters with the right foot care, sore feet are unavoidable at least for the first few weeks. Well maybe if you work in nursing or the service industry and stay on your feet for multiple hours a day you may not feel it. We did.

Also my knees have always ached on big descents. My doctor says I need to strengthen my glutes more for better alignment. I tried KT Tape for the first time this trip. Colleen used it successfully to wrap her feet for blister prevention and I thought it could be a lighter, more manageable alternative to a knee brace. After buying several rolls of the stuff and applying it carefully in exactly the configuration their videos showed, the only noticeable outcome was some fashionable X-shaped tan lines on my legs when I ripped it off a few days later, pain unmitigated. I do not recommend.

Fingertips

On most of the passes and steep approaches we needed to use our hands. Poles are great for trekking, but can be awkward when the terrain gets more complex as they keep your center of gravity too high and get in the way when hands are needed. With all the clamoring over rough granite, slate, metamorphosed volcanic rock, etc – our fingertips got some minor cuts. I didn’t wrap mine right away so they got dirty and a couple times they got infected, after which I wrapped and treated regularly with alcohol and iodine. Not a big deal, but unexpected so I was glad Colleen brought enough stuff in the medical kit.

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Logistics

Route Planning

To prepare and plot our route, I pored over all the information I could find online: maps, blog posts, gpx data, photos, etc. The landmarks described by Roper are sufficient to navigate the route. After days of sorting through all the noise I landed on an approach. I plotted our route at home using paper maps by Tom Harrison (you need the five of them: Kings Canyon High Country, Mono Divide HC, Mammoth HC, Yosemite HC, and Hoover Wilderness). These are excellent maps – waterproof, easy to read yet presenting a good amount of information. Unfortunately their 1:63,360 scale is too high-level to use in the field as a technical mapset. So you could skip this step and go straight to digital, but I find that laying out the big maps gives scale and context and always feel more comfortable when I can see the bigger picture.

I found the best way to plot the route was to read through Steve Roper’s book (Sierra High Route: Traversing Timberline Country) with the big Harrison maps laid out and go point by point marking the map based on the narrative description. The main waypoints are mountain passes, lakes, trail crossings, and various topographical features which are all readily apparent on the map. I highly recommend plotting things out yourself for any cross-country trek, as it has the effect of drilling in the route and its surroundings more than relying on someone else’s tracks or pre-packaged data ever would. In fact I would say the more you think you need the pre-packaged info, the more you probably need to sit down and work through it yourself.

After doing this carefully over a few nights and getting comfortable with the route, I manually copied the waypoints into CalTopo and overlaid it on the USGS 7.5″ quadrangle maps which I edited slightly to improve contrast and slope shading. These are old school maps, but very good for the field. Beware of the newer “US Topo” layer from USGS as they are clean to the point of minimalist; very pretty but lacking much of the useful data found in the older set.

From CalTopo I printed them out double-sided on 11×17″ waterproof paper and downloaded the highest resolution layers on their iphone app. We did the same with the Gaia GPS app. For off-piste navigation I prefer CalTopo, but often looked at both because as I really like that Gaia includes the NatGeo Illustrated Trails map layer which shows a lot of trails that do not appear on other map sets.

We also bought a downloadable package of data (prepackaged maps, waypoints, distance table, etc) for $25 from backpacker Andrew Skurka, who sells these kinds of things. While this gave a bit of confidence in the planning as I checked my route against his and even added a few of his points to our map, we ultimately found it unnecessary. Our own maps were better and the key waypoints were more reliably recognized using Roper’s narrative. We had thought the distance table would be uniquely useful, but we quickly recognized it had been backward engineered and was rarely accurate.

Training

As it had been a couple years since our last thru-hike, we wanted to get our endurance up to cover the miles we needed. Our daily routine was to walk about three to five miles each morning on the street and through the hilly trails in the park near our house. Then nearly every weekend for the preceding three months we did a 10-15 mile trek somewhere in the bay area. This included many laps on our favorite training hike, a 12 mile there-and-back from Rodeo Beach to Muir Beach in the Marin Headlands with over 3,500 ft of elevation gain/loss. On weekend hikes we loaded up water bottles and bladders into the packs to simulate the heaviest they would be, around 25 lbs.

About six weeks before our trek, we did went up to Desolation Wilderness near Lake Tahoe for two nights in the back country as a dress rehearsal. We always do this before a big trek to field test our stuff and work out any kinks while we still have time to make pre-game adjustments.

It was in Desolation that Colleen, having developed blisters over just 30 miles or so, decided to commit some major attention to her feet and bought the book Fixing Your Feet by Jon Vonhof, which she soon read cover to cover. Vonhof must be a kind of foot god, because this book is like the bible on the subject. In its 6th edition, it must be hitting the mark. Colleen became a loyal devotee, following much of the ample advice on preventing and mitigating the shear that leads to blisters. Following this book religiously on the High Route, she had a completely blister-free experience.

Gear Philosophy

Many hikers will de-focus their gear choices and just bring whatever they already have. I think it is usually a mistake not to be very considered about gear. If a trek is equal parts planning and perseverance, a good portion of both includes the equipment you use. Decades of advances in materials and product design have opened up an opportunity space for us to do more with less, and leverage to our personal taste and enjoyment.

Our gear philosophy continues to evolve over time but we stick to two main themes.

1. Be smart about weight. We generally tend toward ultralight principles, but not to the point of obsession and we make plenty of calculated decisions to trade comfort for weight. Even when we don’t choose the lightest option, weight is always top of mind and usually a key starting point to making decisions. We often identify the key functional attribute of a product and then compare as a ratio to weight to help us make choices. For example: calories/ounce in food or volume/weight in a bear can. We have tested a lot of things to find what works for us.
   
   We see people with packs weighing 40-50 lbs or more who seem to have brought everything except a philosophy on pack weight, and figured that was the price of admission. That’s crazy. Bill Bowerman, famed track coach and co-founder of Nike, recognized this in the creation of running shoes: removing a single ounce would lead to a reduction of 55 lbs of lift for each mile. By that math, a 200 mile trip would be spared 11,000 lbs. of lift per ounce cut. Given Bowerman used a running stride length of 6ft, this is uber-conservative when applied to the shorter gaits of hiking. More likely it is 20,000 lbs per ounce. Still want to carry two pairs of nail clippers and that camp chair?
   
2. Don’t skimp. Budget is a highly personal decision of course but here is a framework for consideration. We budget for our hikes by thinking of them as any other type of vacation. In this case, a twenty day vacation away from home would have cost a fortune next to what we needed to set aside for a backcountry experience. With this mindset, price can give way to acquiring the gear that best meets your needs.
   
   Using this mentality also frees us from the forward concern of longevity or whether something will be suitable for future hypothetical trips. The vast majority of gear will endure through many excursions, but we accept that if something gets us all the way through this one, even if it falls apart on the last step, then it has fully met our needs. We already owned most of the gear we brought, and in fact our largest expense turned out to be boarding our dog Pablo at his favorite “hotel” for the trip.

Gear List

Our gear list and some of the considerations for major choices are below. I will be finishing this in the coming weeks and adding a full list:

Backpack. I used the ULA Circuit. It is not the absolute lightest out there, but this bag is tried and true, made in Utah, durable and comfortable. I have put about 700+ miles on this bag. It is surprisingly versatile too. A few years back while on Mt. Shasta I was able to readjust some straps and clips to convert it into a lower volume “summit pack” for the ascent up from basecamp.

Colleen carries the minimalist Hyperlite 3400 Porter, which she swears by. The Porter is a single compartment bag made entirely of Cuben fiber, one of the toughest lightest fabrics around, and Colleen has modded hers with some attachments and bungies. Something like this might be my next bag too.

Tent. We brought the Nemo Hornet 2P. Nemo has been pushing the envelope of tent design and the Hornet is a great tent for thru-hiking. With dual side doors and winged vestibules, it uses the space under the rain fly to create more head and elbow room. Its size is perfect for us, though we have heard others say that it feels cramped for two. We prefer tents with integrated tentpole systems rather than the lighter rigs that use trekking poles. The speed and ease of setup is worth the weight for us. We often don’t use the footprint but we did on the High Route given the rocky terrain. Note that Nemo makes a Hornet “Elite” model which uses lighter materials to cut even more weight, but I found it dangerously fragile and was not comfortable trusting it to twenty nights in timberline country. One downside of the Hornet models is that they cannot be pitched fully standalone as the front corners and rain fly must be staked or weighted, nor can it be pitched with just the rain fly and footprint (whether for tarp style camping or to set up the tent under the fly if it is already raining), given the jake’s feet attachments needed to integrate both are on the tent itself.

Sleeping Bag & Pad. We went in an experimental direction on this trip in doing a kind of “queen bed” set up. We got a double wide, dual-chambered sleeping pad (Duo from Exped) and a custom sleeping quilt for two (Accomplice from Enlightened Equipment). Colleen has used an EE quilt for a few years and loves it. The quilts are open on the bottom, relying more on the heat rating of the pad than a bag’s down filling, which the thinking goes is much less effective when compressed by your body anyway. The quilts are flexible, allowing one to kick out a leg when hot, or cinch up tight around the body and close up a draft collar at the head for that cozy mummy feeling. This combo was not a direct weight savings, but the warmth of two bodies, stability of a wider pad and comforter-like topper helped us sleep much better at night. The extra few ounces was more than worth it for well-rested mornings

Shoes. I wore the Ultraventure by Topo Athletic. Previously an Altra devotee, I examined several of their newest models this year. I loved Altra’s Timp 1.5 that was recently discontinued in favor of the inferior built Timp 2.0. Altra unfortunately seems to be following Hoka One in a quest to make disposable shoes. Trail running shoes are going to get chewed up in severe terrain, but compared to boots they are way more comfortable to cruise in on long treks if they can last for the duration. Despite my love of Altra, I could not find it in me to trust their latest models to hold up over High Route terrain. Luckily I learned of Topo Athletic, a relative newcomer picking up the torch in offering low heel drops, secure cushioning and wider toe boxes. The Ultraventure served me well as the midpoint of their lineup, balancing comfort and responsiveness – perfect for such a long hike. For shorter mileages I admired and will consider the Topo Athletic Mtn Racer, a very similar but slightly more technical, model.

Colleen wore La Sportiva’s TX3 which is billed as a hybrid hiking and approach shoe. With all the durability and responsiveness of an approach shoe, it is a bit stiffer than a trail runner but a comfortably wide toe box and a uniquely natural feeling lacing system make it suitable for long distances.

Food Prep

We both love good food and so have put a lot of thought into how we eat when outdoors. Variety, nutrient ratios, cleanup, weight and volume all factor into food selection and prep. A few years ago we started using a system we are pretty satisfied with. For dinners and breakfasts we eat hot meals at camp, and lunch is broken into several snack breaks throughout the day while hiking.

The hot meals are all dried or dehydrated and can be re-constituted with water. For instance breakfast was always one of several oatmeal choices. We have a few good recipes ourselves but this time around, in an effort to support small businesses, we bought everything from a few outfits. After sampling quite a few new choices and old favorites at home, we narrowed it down to a small menu:

• Picky Oats – Matcha Oatmeal and Dem Apples Oatmeal
• Stowaway Gourmet – Spiced Oatmeal with Pear
• Food for the Sole – Pumpkin Apple Pecan Oats, Triple Peanut Slaw and the Stir Fry
• Mary Jane’s Farm – Mushroom Couscous, Bare Burrito and Fiesta Rice

At home we repackage (and often re-apportion) our hot meals into individual sous-vide bags and vacuum seal them. Sometimes we add ingredients like coconut oil powder for taste or calories. At camp we just boil water and pour it directly into the bag to “cook”, saving big on cleanup later. A lightweight disposable Gladware container serves as a bowl frame for the bag to sit in and we dig into it with our sporks. We drank tea in the mornings and often a hot chocolate mix (from Tcho) fortified with coconut oil powder at night.

Lunches are an assortment of Pro Bars, homemade trail mix (I like to add cheddar goldfish), cookies or chocolate like Snickers or Reeses, and various electrolyte drink mixes (my preferred is DripDrop). This trip we added various flavors of Heathers Choice packaroons to the mix for a fun addition to our usual lineup.

Resupplies

Resupplies are a complex but necessary logistical consideration for any thru-hike. It just doesn’t work to pack all your food from day one, nor would you want to carry the weight. Our food weighed about 1.25 lbs per person per day, and volume-wise we could only fit about 10-12 person days of food (5-6 days total for the two of us) in the bear can at a time.

Each of our resupplies set us up for the next leg with food (including an extra meal or two), paper maps, toiletries and replacements for any medical supplies we may have used from the kit.

1. Bishop Pass. We hired Rainbow Pack Outfitters to resupply us via mule on Day 5. The rate was $350, their daily rate as Bishop Pass is a full day there and back for them. We shipped them a standard 5-gallon plastic bucket with our resupply, and separately a check for the fee and received the unopened bucket at the pass (see story above). For an extra fee we also had them bring us a fresh can of isoprene fuel, which cannot be shipped.
   
2. Red’s Meadow / Mammoth. Red’s Meadow pack station is a classic rest point for JMT/PCT’ers as it is midway through the JMT, just a mile or two off trail, abutting the Devils Postpile National Monument. Furthermore, being at the terminus of one of the East-West roads that penetrates deep enough toward the route to meet easily, it provides easy access to the superbly fun resort town of Mammoth Lakes. After a hundred miles or more of walking the immodestly priced burgers and milkshakes ($11 for the latter as I recall), while not objectively that great, are savored and revered as up there with the most delicious meals ever. That’s how we felt anyway.
   
   A store, restaurant, cabin rentals, and several campgrounds in and around Red’s make it easy to skip Mammoth and move on quickly after a brief stay. But other than trail access, Red’s is not the greatest situated these days. Yes there is a nice meadow, but to the South are steep hillsides where the hot sun beats on acres of burned out trees standing erect and gnarly like used matchsticks, leftovers from fires of recent decades. The lodgepole forests to the North are suffering terribly from bark beetle, with seemingly every other tree being dead or dying and innumerable fallen.
   
   We came into Red’s on Day 11. While our original plan was to skip Mammoth, pick up our pre-shipped 5-gallon bucket and try to rent a cabin at Red’s as we had done two years before on the JMT. In the end, we elected to spend one of our pre-budgeted Zero days in Mammoth with real food and bed, which was a good rest after the first long leg of our route.
   
3. Tuolumne Meadows. Stunningly bucolic and peaceful, with rolling meadows, wide meandering streams, gently sloping rock domes and big skies, Tuolumne Meadows is one of the major areas of Yosemite Park. It is accessed by the Tioga Pass Road, the first road that crosses the Sierras for nearly two hundred miles southward, and the only one that must be crossed at all on the High Route. In normal summer times Tuolumne is home to busy campgrounds, “real” lodging options, a restaurant, small store, a post office and a swarm of tourists. The post office can usually be relied on for the shipment and collection of resupplies and is another key stop for those on the JMT/PCT.
   
   But 2020 was not a normal summer and the COVID crisis meant that the Tuolumne area, in fact the whole pass road, was limited to those with permits. All services were closed, unfortunately including the post office. This meant drastically fewer tourists, but also no beers and burgers from the restaurant, no bed in case we would have tried to stay at the lodge, and no shipping ourselves a resupply.
   
   Luckily our friends Rachel & Richard, who we hike with regularly, agreed to help us out and made a getaway of their own out of it as well. So they came up to Tuolumne a few days before, secured our resupply in a bear box, and spent the weekend hiking a backcountry circuit that put them over four passes in three days, averaging a hard 17 miles per day. Pretty impressive! When we saw them they were beat, and we all agreed that 8-10 miles per day is pretty much the sweet spot whereby a shorter hiking day makes for a far more enjoyable experience. Which is, after all, why we do this.

Stats

Below is our actual daily progress chart. We deliberately have chosen not to publish our full tracks or gpx data, and we debated whether to share even this chart, as we do not want other hikers just to copy our route, leading to noticeable campsites establishing over time that would spoil the wild nature of many of these places. But ultimately, we felt the route is big enough and everyone’s days will be so different from ours that the info won’t do harm and could provide useful decision criteria for others.

Day	Distance (mi)	Gain (ft)	Loss (ft)	Passes	Start	Finish	Trail Mile*
1	10.4	5,453	0	0	Copper Creek Trailhead	Grouse Lake	10.4
2	11.6	2,933	2,677	2	Grouse Lake	Gray Pass	22.0
3	8.3	3,244	2,326	3	Gray Pass	Frozen Lake Pass	30.3
4	10.7	3,113	3,018	3	Frozen Lake Pass	Glacier Creek (lake)	41.0
5	9.4	2,027	3,018	4	Glacier Creek (lake)	Dusy Basin	50.4
6	19.0	3,763	3,674	1	Dusy Basin	Darwin Bench	69.4
7	10.8	2,608	2,270	2	Darwin Bench	Puppet Lake	80.2
8	11.4	2,877	3,149	2	Puppet Lake	Brown Bear Lake	91.6
9	13.0	2,588	3,743	1	Brown Bear Lake	Laurel Lake	104.6
10	15.6	3,638	3,326	2	Laurel Lake	Duck Lake	120.2
11	11.9	1,702	4,340	2	Duck Lake	Reds Meadow	132.1
12	0	0	0	0	Zero Day	Zero Day	132.1
13	11.3	4,186	1,666	2	Red’s Meadow	Cecile Lake	143.4
14	8.3	2,788	2,043	3	Cecile Lake	Lake Catherine	151.7
15	7.0	2,454	2,890	0	Lake Catherine	Blue Lake	158.7
16	12.9	2,818	4,083	1	Blue Lake	Florence Creek	171.6
17	13.8	1,722	2,306	2	Florence Creek	Tuolumne Meadows	185.4
18	13.9	3,818	2,230	1	Tuolumne Meadows	Cascade Lake	199.3
19	6.2	2,552	2,578	1	Cascade Lake	Stanton Pass	205.5
20	8.5	1,128	4,721	2	Stanton Pass	Twin Lakes	214.0
Totals:	214	55,412	54,058	34
Avg/Day:	11.3	2,916	2,845	1.7

Photos from Five Countries of the High Route

Cirque Country: Kings Canyon to Dusy Basin

Whitebark Country: Dusy Basin to Lake Italy

Lake Country: Lake Italy to Devil’s Postpile

Headwaters Country: Devil’s Postpile to Tuolumne Meadows

Canyon Country: Tuolumne Meadows to Twin Lakes

Dirty, tired, happy.