Day 61
Start: Woods Creek
Finish: South Fork Kings River
Daily Mileage: 10.0
PCT Mile: 813.8
Last night seemed like it was going to be frigid. Wind was blowing straight into camp, and the temperature was dropping quickly. We all had wet shoes and socks from the stream crossings all day, so I expected to awake to frozen shoes that I would have to beat on a rock to get my feet into. However, soon after we went to bed, the wind died down, and the temperature stopped dropping. This morning it was just around freezing; one of the warmer nights we’ve had lately.
As with every day for this stretch of trail, we started the day with a challenge. We set up to attack Pinchot Pass with the firm snow of the morning. The snow was slightly soft still at our camp in the morning, so I was a little worried it didn’t set back up overnight, but as we quickly climbed, the snow became gloriously rock hard while having a rough surface great for traction.
We had to ascend 2,500 more feet to get to Pinchot. We had started the ascent yesterday, and it was nice to have chipped away at the total a bit. The trail climbed steeply and was soon into mostly continuous snow which we would be in for a while. The trail disappeared as usual under the snow to let me have my fun navigating through it.
At camp this morning, we were just below the cloud layer, but the clouds slowly cleared out as we climbed. This gave some scenic and dramatic views of the mountains swirled in fog.
The landscape quickly opened up as the trees disappeared and we were treated to a ring of mountains around us and the snow covered land dotted with thawing lakes and streams. We crossed several streams, but all on snow bridges except for one that had carved out a channel through the snow we jumped over. Everything was thoroughly enjoyable.
Then we were back to traversing lovely snowfields around covered lakes and streams over easy terrain. The snow was much firmer than it was on the long descent from Glen yesterday, for which we were infinitely grateful. It was just a walk in the park, and we were able to enjoy our beautiful surrounds instead of watching every step.
We crossed several streams on snow bridges and didn’t have to do any fording. We got back into the trees and had a descent and traverse to get to a river crossing. The trail was still nonexistent under the snow, so we made our own way. The snow was finally softening though, so we had to be more careful with our footing on the descent, and we had several falls even with traction.
We slowly picked our way down, and eventually hooked back up with the trail at the crossing to the South Fork Kings River. The PCT crosses this river twice and ends up back on the same side as it started. This is a decent river, and it claimed a PCT hiker in 2017. We therefore decided to take an alternate path just staying on the initial side of the river and never crossing it, though it looked fordable maybe just above the knees.
There were a fair number of footprints on this side of the river, so plenty of others made this choice as well. It would also save us some wet feet which is always welcome.
We worked our way up the right side of the river through snow and bare patches. The forest began to go away and there were few flat dry spots we were passing, so we stopped and set up camp around noon, about 3 miles from the approach to Mather Pass which we will hit early tomorrow morning.
We had the entire afternoon to relax, listen to the river, and look at the snow and mountains. Who says you always need to be moving to have an enjoyable time? None of us were complaining.
