My View of the World Around Me

On day thirteen Molly and I had the pleasure of hiking over Muir Pass and past the splendid lakes that lie in it’s shadow to the north.  Wanda Lake, named for John Muir’s eldest daughter is home to a rare treat, frogs living at 11,500′.  As we walked past Wanda lake we were startled by the plop, plop, plop of frogs jumping into the lake as we passed by.  We stopped to admire the frogs living in this relatively inhospitable environment.  Check this post for more on the Mountain Yellow Legged Frog.

Muir Pass was in my opinion one of the easiest 12,000′ passes along the trail, the final ascent from Evolution Lake is just 1200′ and it is a very gradual slope all the way up.  While I was reminiscing about the Muir Pass summit experience I began to realize that more often than not I felt that reaching the summit of each of the eleven passes was relatively easy.  Why were they “easy”?  I think it has a lot to do with the strategy we used while hiking the trail.

Like most others who hike the JMT we had an itinerary planned long before we even set foot on the trail.  That itinerary remained unchanged for exactly one day before we modified it for our hiking strengths and weaknesses.  Pretty early on we decided to attack the big climbs in sections.  The basic strategy is to look at the passes and plan to hike up approximately half of the required elevation on one day, then camp and hike up the rest the next day when you are fresh and relatively full of energy.  But like the saying goes hike your own hike and follow a strategy that works for you!

8-8-2009
Once again I woke up with a sore throat and felt weak much of the day.  I tried sleeping without socks last night and that did not work very well, my feet froze.  We had only a 1200 foot ascent to Muir Pass but every foot was amazing.  The lakes were a gorgeous teal blue that Molly said looked unnatural.  The Climb to the pass was easy and the descent was long but not too difficult.  In my mind Silver Pass still holds the record for worst descent.  We are camped near Big Pete meadow and are taking advantage of the altitude with a warm campfire.

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