Day 58 Monday

5.21.2018

Well, clearly the bears didn’t touch our food. After I finished blogging last night, I went out to pee, brush my teeth and that’s about the time the lightening began. Laura was pretty much still asleep but Andrew and I watch a bit of the lightening show before we closed the doors of our tents for the night. The snow was still falling and occasionally would let up to give us just enough hope that maybe that was all we were going to get. Nope, we were wrong. The snow (and lightening) continued through the night and into the morning. The loudest of the thunder was around 1:30am and I’m pretty sure we were all awake for a bit at that point.

With our alarms set for 5am for an early departure for Glens Pass by 6, we had hoped that whatever the system we were in would have moved on. To our dismay, this was not the case. The mountains all around us had disappeared in the clouds. We were completely fogged in with snow that continued to fall. We decided that heading toward the pass in those conditions wasn’t something we were prepared for.

***I should say this, when we left Independence yesterday the forecasts we’d seen were for “some snow accumulation” or “10-20% chance of precipitation” so we didn’t go in blindly. We knew there was a chance we’d get a little bit of snow. When we messaged friends (through our Garmins) we were told the storm may not let up until Wednesday.***

So, back to the tents, it’s now 5:05 and we are hitting the sidewalls of our tents to shake down the snow. Laura and Andrew (in their duplex) are well aware that it isn’t the best tent to have in these conditions and their shakedown has to be even more frequent than my own. We decide for the time being we’d remain in the tents rather than head for a steep and snowy pass–so back to sleep we went. After a few hours–and more continued snow- we discussed options of staying there for the entire day and waiting out the storm, going forward–which was obviously dangerous, or going back to Independence–which meant going back over Kearsarge one more time.

I will admit I caught up on some much needed sleep. I know slushing and sliding yesterday did some havoc on my body. So other than a random trip out to pee, I got some mean sleep in today. It was noon by the time we again discussed our options. By this time the sun had barely peeked out. We still couldn’t see the mountain around us and we knew going forward would be a lot of hard work just navigating the trail. No one had gone by our tent site since about 4 PM yesterday.

So we headed out. Back down that is, not what anyone of us really wanted to do but probably the best decision we could have made with what we had to deal with. It was shortly before 1 by the time we were back to the trail. Seeing as yesterday we came down in slush and wet toes, we had somewhat better conditions to hike in today but it still called for crampons and gaiters. We even put plastic bags over our socks to help keep the slush out. The crampons made a huge difference and the gaiters kept the snow out of my shoes. Both a wise purchase. We made it back to the top of Kearsarge by 345pm and to the bottom of the Onion Valley Trailhead by 545pm.

Andrew — has just enough cell service to call Strider around 5pm. He asked if we could stay another night at the Mt. Williamson Motel and if we could get a ride back down to town. She said she’d be there shortly. She is wonderful. She saved us from having to pitch the wet tents at the trailhead.

Once back down we went to eat at the one place in town that was open. The taco truck. It’s parked in front of an old gas station/car repair place so we sat around a table with the car hoist underneath. Darn…. you can’t see it in the photo. We ran into Green Lantern there as well. He’s been waiting out the storm too and will probably head home to Spokane. He says he’d like to return in 2 weeks once the weather passes by.

We’ve decided to take a bus to Bishop at 845 tomorrow, and from there we will grab another bus ride to Mammoth. We haven’t figured out yet where we are staying or for how long but that will come in time. I don’t like the idea of skipping ahead but from the beginning I knew it was a possibility. If any of us had more experience in these kinds of situations skipping wouldn’t be happening, but these are the wrong conditions to learn on. There’s only so many ways out of the Sierras and where we were was the best option at the time. Putting ourselves on a 8-9 day stretch from here could have been dangerous or just outright miserable. You just never know. Especially with how forceful storms hit the west side and diminish of the east side of the mountains, you just can’t tell what’s going to happen. I’m confident we made the right decision and we will figure out the rest from here. We aren’t done yet.