My work schedule changed last minute and I ended up with a three-day weekend! So I decided to do a BP trip out of Mineral King in Sequoia NP, which is only about 20 miles away as the bird flies, but it takes a good 3 hours to drive there.
The Mineral King Road is the worst road I've ever traveled. It's 22 miles long, climbs 6,000+ feet, is at best a lane-and-a-half-wide. Most of it's paved, but it is not in the best of condition. There are at least 642 blind curves, no guardrails, very steep dropoffs, no signs, no center divider line, etc. In other words, by the time you get back to Mineral King most of the other tourists have given up. Actually, many of your average tourists don't even know about this area of the Park. The turn-off is outside the Park and is not very well signed. So most of the folks that brave the road and get back to Mineral King are locals and serious backpackers. Sounds like a great place, right?
So I left home on Saturday, showed up at the Mineral King Ranger Station around noon hoping to get a permit. Well, none of the trail quotas were absolutely full and because I was a party of one, I had my pick. They also did not charge me the $15 fee I've heard they instituted this year. Maybe they're just charging it at Lodgepole? Anyway, I decided to hike up to Franklin Lakes and base camp there for two nights. Certain places have had bear-boxes helicoptered in and Franklin Lake has two. This meant I didn't have to lug in a 2-lb canister :)
So I took the rest of the afternoon at a rather leisurely pace to get up to Franklin. It's about 6 miles and the elevational gain is 3,000 feet. But the trail is a remarkably nice one, full of switchbacks, so you gain the elevation gradually and no part of the trail is too steep.
I got up to the lake right as the sun was setting and setting afire to Florence Peak and the almost full-moon was rising above it. I got great pics of alpenglow on the mountains!
One of the coolest things about the Mineral King area, which the name suggests, it ain't all granite. Don't take other kinds of rocks in the Sierra "for granite"! There's slate and shale and marble and ??? up there. One peak to the north of Franklin lake is called Rainbow Lake - for a reason. It's a very colorful mountain.
I'd love to go hiking with a geologist up there. I know enough to say, "Um, something very interesting happened here. These are metamorphic rocks for sure," - but that's about it!
So the second day I dayhiked - scrambled is more like it - up to upper Franklin Lake. I think I found the southernmost patch of California snow in August! I had that upper lake to myself, swam, basked on a rock like a marmot, and scrambled back down in the afternoon.
The first night a group of three guys about my age camped near me. The second night another group of three guys, this time in their 40's-50's, camped near me. So each night I felt pretty safe from the bears. I feel much better having others close by! Plus, on the 2nd night those three guys offered me a cocktail. These were definitely not ultra-lighters. They each packed in aluminum lawn chairs and several flasks of liquor. I had some concoction of vodka and red gatorade. Needless to say, I slept very well that night
So I didn't see any bears, but I had quite a few other wildlife encounters. My campsite was right below the lake, next to the creek, in amongst willows and stunted foxtail pines. Several deer shared my site. The second night I was stunned as several doe and their spotted fawns came quite close to me. At one point a doe was on one side of my tent and me, her fawn on the other. Has anyone ever heard a fawn call to its mom? Sounds like a kitten! They were too cute.
A little later on a buck came through and joined his harem. I've never seen a doe let a buck get close to her fawn, but this one did. At one point the fawn and buck chased each other around and were playing. It was quite idyllic. I felt like I was in the middle of a Disney movie!
I also saw quite a few marmots and pika. Also saw a raptor of some sort, I'm tempted to say golden eagle because it was so huge, twice swoop down and catch a pika!
Well, the time came to hike back down out of my idyllic glacial bowl. 5 miles down and only one more to go, and the last one is basically flat, and my last stream crossing, and, yep, you guessed it, I slipped and fell. Face plant into the stream! Crash-landed, splash-landed, whatever you want to call it. Ouch! I dragged myself up and surveyed the damage. I tore the left leg of my pants and underneath was a nice big, relatively deep cut. It wasn't bleeding much, however, so I sat for a little bit, applied pressure to the wound, put a band-aid on it, then limped out the last mile. It was a painful mile! I'm not sure I could've made it without my hiking poles...
Drove to the ranger station, got out, and said help! Bud, a LE officer and apparently trained in wilderness first-aid, helped me clean out the wound a little better, iodined it and steri-stripped it. Then asked, "How long has it been since you got a tetanus shot?" "Um, 8th grade?" So I proceeded to drive down the long winding road and stopped in Visalia at a walk-in clinic and got the shot.
So now I have a sore leg and a sore arm!
Ah, well, it could've happened 6 miles back and 3,000 feet up, I should be thankful it happened in the last mile
On the way down I picked up three bacpackers needing a ride down to Three Rivers. They were very nice and we swapped recommendations of where to go on our next bp trips! Anyone want to attempt Sawtooth Peak?
They also pointed out a couple of Model-T's that went over the edge a whiles back and are still down in the canyon! Did I mention that the road is dangerous?!?
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