The way the permit system works is you fax in a request weeks (months even) before the actual trip. Then you wait for an answer by mail. Well, by the time the trip came up, the forecast said "Slight chance of light snow showers." I kept checking in the days before we would head out, as we are not prepared for snow hiking/backpacking. Snow adventures require much different gear than what we have. Reluctantly, we headed to Mineral King up that wretched winding road. We went for a walk that afternoon. The "light snow showers" were beautiful...
So we set up (car) camp in the snow at Cold Springs Campground, and enjoyed some BBQ'd sausages for dinner and s'mores for dessert. The sky didn't show signs of getting worse and we had planned an early start into the back country for tomorrow.
With the tarp "roof" Sam built us, and the fire going, it didn't even seem that cold.
Then came the longest most dreadful night of my life. I have never, to this day, ever been so cold in my life. The forecast said it was around 30. I would venture to say it was MAYBE 25. I know, east coast folks deal with that all the time. Well, I'm sure they have big jackets and socks and all kinds of things to prepare/deal with it. I did not even have wool socks--just regular old socks on my frozen piggies. I didn't want to keep Sam up, or let him know I was so miserable, but I was inside my bag sobbing, from lack of sleep, and just being in pain...inside my synthetic 40 degree crappy bag (don't worry, it got replaced after this trip). As soon as it began to get light again, I woke up Sam, still crying, begging him to go home. I did not sleep one wink, there was no way I was going backpacking..and if it was this cold here, I imagined it being worse the farther out and higher up we would go. Sam seemed to have slept fine in his down bag with his wool socks and didn't notice how cold it was. We new it must have started to snow in the night, so we opened our tent to find this...
So I'm no expert...but those don't look like "light snow showers" to me. How about "a foot of snow."
And it was starting to come down again. So we made our decision to head lower and try to go somewhere else not buried in a foot of snow.
This was the road we had to drive on. Good things we had chains!
We took one of the few permits left out of an area called South Fork. We had to car camp one night in the South Fork Campground (think bros, beer, and loud music), and the following night we could head out. Some of the spots were very overgrouwn with brush...and we thought for sure the guys next to us pounding beers and lighting a raging fire were going to burn the whole forest down. It was a self check-in kind of campground with no ranger, otherwise I would have went and complained to someone. I didn't take any photos of how close their fire was to the brush because it was night time and it wouldn't have shown...but I was half expecting to wake up to a forest fire.
Here are a few photos from that afternoon/evening...it was nice to see the sun.
Don't mistake me for a wimpy girl who just never saw snow. I grew up where it snowed in the winter. It's one thing to put on boots and mittens and head out to build a snowman. It's another to expect a low of 45 degrees and wake up in snow with nothing but a hoodie. Rookie move on my part when heading into the wilderness.
We ended up hiking about 10 miles or so in on the Lady Bug Trail (or was it Garfield Grove trail?) and stopped for one night among some beautiful trees (According to the map, maybe it was Garfield Grove?)
We had not brought a bear can because our original trip included stops where there were bear lockers, so we had to hang food...all we had to loose was the next day's breakfast and we had no other choice.
We actually managed to PCT it.
It was a great night in those trees. Sam even taught me how to build a fire:
Well, no bears ate our oatmeal, but we thought we heard something in the night that neither of us wanted to admit we both thought a bear. In the morning we had to hang the tent to dry. It was wet with condensation b/c we didn't steak the rainfly.
Moral of the story: Snow happens. Have wool socks. Read the forecast, and then ignore it because it's always wrong. Be prepared. Don't camp at South Fork Car campground unless you have to (or you like rude, loud, obnoxious kind of campers that may potentially burn down the place).
0 comments:
Post a Comment