Day 65
Start: Sallie Keyes Lakes
Finish: Vermillion Valley Resort
Daily Mileage: 17.8
PCT Mile: 875.7
Another chilly night with frost in my tent. My thermometer said 20 degrees, but I don’t quite believe that. I just bought it, but I think I will be leaving it in the next trash or hiker box since it seems wildly inaccurate.
We were camped not far from Selden Pass, and that was our first target for the day. Turns out we had camped in one of the last dry spots before the pass, so it was a good choice to stop where we did.
We started out hiking around a couple of the lakes that seem to congregate near passes. The first lake had some open water last night, but in the morning it had frozen enough that it was hard to jab my hiking pole through. Perhaps that is a slight validation of the temperature.
The snow was nice and hard after freezing up overnight, and it made for much easier walking than yesterday afternoon as typical. We climbed up several levels of rock to approach the pass, but the trail was non-existent under the snow, so I just walked straight up towards the pass. A pretty easy hike.
At the pass, the trail peaked out at a few places to guide the way forward, and the pass was quite short and easy. Only used my microspikes and no ice axe was necessary. Quite a quick trip to the top which opened up the next valley and layers of lakes.
Bear Creek was the next challenge; it is supposed to be a swift and deep crossing. Recent trail comments indicated it was waist deep and flowing well at the PCT crossing, though some people had crossed upstream with lower water levels. However, there was an alternate to not cross the west fork, and cross the east and south forks separately before all joined into Bear Creek.
This was a bit of a detour, and we decided to go with this concept, though descriptions had you go quite a bit out of the way to cross these branches closer to their sources. We opted to just follow the west fork down and cross the other branches as we came to them. Everything was still covered in snow, so this didn’t seem challenging in concept.
Rejoining the full Bear Creek at the official PCT crossing, it looked like it would have been quite easy to cross upstream or downstream from the trail crossing, but traveling downhill we couldn’t see that before we came to the other branches. We just didn’t want to commit to a PCT area crossing and have to backtrack uphill to do the separate fork crossing if it had looked too high. There was no right answer here, so what we did was perfectly fine knowing what we did at the time.
It was a nice easy hike following Bear Creek downstream where it continued to pick up more tributaries and became a raging torrent in places. A nice hike along the creek and through the woods snow free.
However, all good things must come to an end and we had to climb up Bear Ridge as an escape from the valley we had been traveling.
The climb started out pleasant but the trail didn’t seem to want to gain elevation until it realized it needed to at the very end. Then it just got it done. The day was getting quite warm so I had to take it slower, but it was quickly over and we arrived at the junction with the Bear Ridge Trail.
We were taking the Bear Ridge Trail down to Vermillion Valley Resort, a campground where we can resupply and get a hot meal. It was 7 miles down, and it was quite an easy hike on well maintained trail. However, there was nothing really exciting about the trail. It was just a walk through the woods, and food was on my mind.
We popped out at the trailhead and had a couple miles of dirt road under a dam and then along the lake it was holding back to get to the campground. Arriving, I was just in time to order a burger for lunch, and you are presented with the beverage of your choice, so it was nice to grab a cold beer after a week in the challenging Sierra.
There are three other hikers here, Yeti, Spätzle, and Woongsahn and we hung out, drank beer, and had lunch and dinner together for a relaxing afternoon and night.
