Laurabelle’s Blog

Back in August (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm behind) my college friend Maggie and her other half, Louis, came to California for a hiking trip with Jeff and me. The destination was the Rae Lakes Loop in Kings Canyon National Park. Our permit reservation was for entrance on the Thursday before Labor Day, and we planned to take five days (exiting on Labor Day itself). We were doing the clockwise circuit, up Paradise Valley, around to the John Muir trail, past the namesake Rae Lakes on day three, over a 12,000-foot pass on the fourth day, and then back down to the trailhead. The entire loop is 46 miles.

We drove to the park on Wednesday and car-camped overnight; the campgrounds were almost deserted. The next morning it took us longer to get going than we wanted (I don't know why it always takes so long!), and we didn't quite make it to the trailhead by 9am, the deadline for picking up our reserved permits. As it turned out, our lateness didn't matter after all; the rangers were detained elsewhere so hikers were directed to self-register.

The first couple of miles were flat but relatively shadeless and over reflective sand; even in the morning we became hot. That phase did pass, and presently we entered shadier environs.

I led the party, since I was the slowest hiker. I was plodding steadily in the "zone" when I heard a rattle on my left. I backed up a few feet to give the diamondback some room, and after a few seconds he uncoiled and crossed the trail. I was happy to let him have the right-of-way.

As we climbed further up the canyon, the cool shade gave way to hot open spaces, but the openness was not without reward. The views were awesome, and don't forget the waterfalls either.

The first day was a hard climb through a hot, rocky canyon. By the time we were sure that there wasn't much more up to go, I had long been ready to stop.

But the reward was more than worth it! I wish I hadn't been too tired to take some photos of Paradise Valley, where we stopped the first night; it was a lush green heaven after the granite climb behind us. We fell into almost the first campsite we saw and slept soundly all night. This was at about 6,700 feet, up from about 5,000 at the trailhead.

The next day we continued to the other end of Paradise Valley, where we had a snack and relieved ourselves at that campground. I took Jeff's hori-hori knife and managed to leave it on the ground; I didn't remember it until over an hour up the trail. Jeff wanted to leave his pack, go back for the knife, and catch up to us; I told him I'd just buy him another one. I didn't want to separate.

By that time I was having trouble slogging up the hill. Jeff, Maggie, and Louis divided a bunch of my gear between them, and that helped, but not quite enough. It didn't help that it wasn't easy to tell exactly where we were; at one point Jeff thought we had traveled several miles farther than we actually had. The truth was discouraging when we discovered it.

We did make it to the junction with the John Muir trail that evening and camped at 8,500 feet. I was not feeling well, and the next morning we decided that I had mild altitude sickness. I wasn't really ill, and I probably would be fine if we just rested at that altitude for a day, but of course we didn't have that time in our schedule. Maggie and Louis' plane would not wait. In the end we turned around and headed back down the way we had come.

This was not all bad; I took some great photos at Castle Domes. The morning light was clear and brilliant; it wouldn't have been the same if I had taken shots from the same position the previous afternoon.

Back in Paradise Valley, I picked up Jeff's knife on the way through High Camp. Middle Camp was our stop for the third night. The deer were out; we saw a doe and two fawns. I even managed to catch some springy fawn action on tape.

The fourth day we went down, down, down the hot canyon we had toiled so hard to climb. At Mist Falls our trail companions suddenly changed. For most of the hike we had passed only backpackers like ourselves, but as we came closer to the trailhead (and passed the pretty waterfall magnet), we started to meet Labor Day tourists. Most of them had flimsy shoes and little or no water; I'm surprised so many of them made it the six miles to the waterfall. It's not what I would call an easy hike, especially not in the heat.

In any case we made it out and found the parking lot teeming with humanity. The original plan had been to camp overnight again before driving back home, but we had exited early, in the middle of Labor Day weekend (it was now Sunday afternoon). What we all wanted most was a shower, but I also wanted my own bed ... and we weren't hopeful about the prospect of finding a campsite either. Louis still wanted to see giant Sequoias, so we stopped a little while at General Grant Grove (he said that was enough, he had seen big trees now) and hit the road.

For dinner we stopped at a little Mexican place that had obviously been a fast-food joint before these folks moved in. When we arrived it was almost pathetically empty, but it was a little fuller when we left. The menu was in Spanish and clumsy English (tripas was translated as "guts," for example), but the food was exactly what we wanted. The cuisine came from the Jalisco region; the taco truck near Jeff's work served the same yummy stuff.

It was nearing 10pm when we arrived in Oakland. Jeff was driving, mostly on autopilot; we were all tired and not paying particular attention to anything. Suddenly Jeff noticed that we were almost out of gas (as in, really almost out of gas), so we pulled off at the next stop and tried to decide which direction to turn. In hindsight we probably should have kept going for a few exits, since we were in east-ish Oakland, not an area we knew, and we didn't have a good way to find a gas station. At least we had a map! We headed toward MacArthur and headed northeast; after a few dark, apprehensive blocks (all the time thinking that we were going to end up stranded on unfamiliar Oakland streets with no gas) we saw a corner gas station and ducked in. I walked in and handed the cashier $10; Jeff stayed outside and pumped. The gates closed behind us as we left; we had gotten there just in time!

In fact we would not have been stranded (Louis had AAA), but I am glad not to have needed. We haven't succumbed to AAA yet, but we do now own a GPS, not least for this very situation.

Flickr photo set for this hike: Rae Lakes Loop - Aug 2008 .