Day 64
Start: Evolution Meadow
Finish: Sallie Keyes Lakes
Daily Mileage: 13.5
PCT Mile: 864.9
Link to Andrew Skurka’s Over the Top route discussion and gps track
Link to Andres Skurka’s Sierra Creek crossing and bridge outage alternates
To download the GPS data, on the Caltopo page, click the folder icon on the left side of the screen, click export, then select your GPS format of choice, likely GPX. Or you can copy this map to your Caltopo account if you have one. Either way, you will have to have an external mapping program like Gaia or Caltopo (both subscription) to navigate with this data offline. There may be some other alternatives.
Today was a day that I had been anticipating or wondering about since before I started the trail. Last year was a record snow year, and snowmelt destroyed the bridge over the South Fork of the San Joaquin River. This river flows pretty well, so it is dangerous to ford early in the season, as some hikers just found. I had been planning to do an alternate scramble that Andrew Skurka proposed to get around the bridge by avoiding the crossing of the river as well as Evolution Creek. His route is marked unproven, but I’ve heard that a number of hikers did it last year, and at least a few more this year. However, there is still very little information on this “Over the Top” route other than a few sentences here and there in Facebook posts. I couldn’t find any pictures or GPS tracks of actual travel on this route. Cookie Monster and I successfully completed this route, and I will use most of this post to describe the route, since it is possible.
Disclaimer: I am very comfortable with off-trail navigation, route finding, and scrambling. I’ve done the Hayduke Trail, Bailey Range, and other routes. This route is suitable for anyone who is also practiced in these areas. If you or someone in your group aren’t experienced with these, you probably should not do this route. Also, you should download Andrew Skurka’s GPS data for the route and all of his Sierra alternates in general linked above. I used both Gaia and Caltopo on this route, and found slope angle shading particularly useful in deciding where to steer the hike, since the provided data is theoretical only. Farout is not sufficient to safely do this hike. That data is exceptionally poor even for on-trail travel. With that said, I had fun on this route and enjoyed all of it. I never felt exposed, and feel it is quite doable for a competent hiker with the above skills. However, others have said it scared them or they would never recommend it. You can only decide for yourself, and I bear no responsibility if you take this route and have a bad day.
Cookie Monster and I camped near the start of the scramble, so there was just a half mile of warmup before we hit it. The scramble starts with a 800 foot climb up boulders and slabs. The angle is comfortable, and we found many places where there were almost natural switchbacks in the cut of the rock that you could walk up. We kept our poles out for the entire scramble, and only put hands down a few times.
The ascent is pretty straight-forward, and there is much latitude to pick your own path up with whatever route you are most comfortable with.
At the top of the ascent, there was an obvious large bench with trees and patches of grass. It was quite easy to know when you reached the top of the ascent by getting to this area. Here the traverse part of the scramble starts. There were a few snowmelt streams running over the course of the traverse, so you didn’t really need to carry water unless they dry up later in the season.
The traverse had grassy or forested benches in several areas along the traverse. You can see these some in my GPS data overlaid with the nominal route. However, they are easy to see on the route.
The traverse started off with mainly boulders and benches, but quickly turned slabby. In these cases, we were always able to find a bench or a flatter area to traverse without much effort. In no case did we traverse any steep slab. There was always an easy alternative. Some of the slab had water flowing over, so that would not have been fun to traverse.
We worked our way across the traverse seldom looking at the actual nominal GPS route, but mostly just looking at the landscape and what would be easiest to traverse, but also what was ahead with slope angle shading. It is obvious that Andrew Skurka put the route together using slope angle shading, and there are a few areas of the traverse where the slope gets steeper. His nominal route may work, but a few times we went above or below his nominal route where it made more sense based on what we were seeing and the lay of the land. For the most part, the landscape pushed you in the correct direction without needing to correct with GPS info. However, you could still get in trouble if you didn’t keep eyes on the slope angle for the upcoming terrain and ended up too high or low.
We worked our way across the traverse and apart from some occasional corrections, the route worked well and we quickly finished the traverse portion of the scramble.
I was most apprehensive of the descent since it appeared steepest on the topo data. There is a good size stream that we descended just prior to hitting, but there were several smaller water flows running in the area we were descending. This made things potentially slippery when descending, but there were usually 2 or 3 ways you could actually go downward, so there were options.
It was briefly steep going down, and there were a few times where we had to sit to slid down to the next level Nothing we had to jump down for though. We had to stay close to the nominal route since the bigger stream was on our right and it was cliffy to the left. You really need to make sure you are on the right track from the descent. However, with that said, I never felt it was dangerous or exposed Just pick away at it and the steep portion is quick.
After the steep portion of the descent, the slope eased and turned to dirt and rock which wasn’t too difficult, and then dropped down to a flat area. However, you aren’t down yet. Traversing the flat area, you pick up a flowing stream and follow it down. We decided to divert slightly left from this stream since the slope angles looked better and the rock was wet around the stream and we didn’t want to slip.
Diverting left put us into another small gully through fields of manzanita. However, there were bear trails through the area you could pick up with some light bushwhacking. And then we were down and back to the PCT! It took us 2:40 to complete the route with a distance of 2.91 miles and 921 feet of gain. I did track my route to compare to Andrew Skurka’s route, but I will not be sharing my GPS data since there are many ways to get through this area potentially better than the route we took, and I don’t want someone to get tunnel vision thinking they must follow our route exactly. Andrew Skurka’s generalized route works and is available for download.
Now then, it was still morning and we had more trail to cover after our main challenge for the day. We were dumped out next to the South Fork of the San Joaquin River, just downstream of the bridge that was removed. The trail followed the river downstream for a few miles. It was quite a river with good flow, and I can see how it could be challenging to cross.
It was a pleasant and easy hike, and it flew right by. Soon enough, the trail started to level and diverge from the river. The level turned up through good forest with some enormous trees as we started our ascent to Selden Pass.
The day had been getting quite warm, and the climb had a good slope to it. I did have to put on an audiobook to help me up it, but I kept driving forward and soon patches of snow in the forest helped quell the heat somewhat.
There were a few good stream crossings up top, and I somehow managed to keep my feet dry through all of them. As you can see here, Cookie Monster did not have the same approach.
There were some quite wide stream crossings and flooded meadows, but the snow and ice helped keep me dry. The snow increased as we rounded the top of the climb, but there were still some dry patches so we pushed on figuring we would be able to find one to camp.
The snow was getting quite soft, and by the time we got to our first lake, we were close enough to Selden Pass and our resupply tomorrow that we called it before we went too far and I needed to camp on snow. The rest of the snow will be much easier to cover tomorrow morning when it resolidifies.
The scramble was definitely the highlight of the day today, and it was great fun to get off the beaten path and do something that made you think some more. Or at least I enjoy that.
7 comments
Thanks for sharing!
Hi there, this description is awesome and I’ll plan to take the Over the Top bypass going NOBO in late July. Is there a way to get your track or Skurkas’s on All Trails?
I have never used All Trails, but assuming it can import GPS data, see the instructions under the links at the very top of this page to export Skurka’s data.
Thanks a bunch for the helpful beta! I’ll be in the evolution area around the end of June. Best of luck to you on the rest of your hike
Awesome work!!! Thanks a ton. Now I can do Over the Top NOBO with confidence. It looked doable, but so many people were against it. Now I know I was reading the maps and contours correctly thanks to your excellent reconnaisance work.
Excellent info, thanks. I’m confused by the ref to 864.9 at the top. Per the topo map included it looks like you re-entered just north of the old bridge outage which is at 854.5. Any chance you meant 854.9 instead of 864.9? (Or perhaps I’m just not keeping up).
I don’t see reference to me reentering at 864.9. That is where I camped for the day. I reentered just after the bridge per Skurka’s route.