Trip Report - Minarets and Sierra High Route

[esrice]

Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/77651700@ ... 5099981328

July 9
Superior Lake, 9,360 ft

The climb up from Devil's Postpile (2,000 feet or so) was more unpleasant on my soft quarantine body than I had rather hopefully expected. I thought that making it up Cone Peak two weeks ago with little trouble meant I would be fine on this trip, but apparently there's less oxygen up here or something.

But what a joy to be back! My conifer knowledge is a bit rusty, but nonetheless, what could be better than sleeping in a grove of hemlocks and (I think?) limber pines? Or climbing in the shade of red firs? Or wandering amongst the wildflowers, just as varied and vibrant as I remembered -- five good ones at the campsite alone. Or watching the alpenglow fade on Silver Peak in the distance? Mosquitoes are out in full force, but I'm well-prepared, with treated clothes and a head net, so they don't bother me much. Spending time with an old friend after almost no in-person socializing for almost four months is rejuvenating.

Trees:
Tsuga mertensiana
Pinus lambertiana
Abies magnifica
Abies concolor
Pinus flexilis

Flowers:
Dodecatheon jeffreyi
Castilleja applegatei
Castilleja miniata
Penstemon rostriflorus
Penstemon newberryi
Lupinus sp.
Cistanthe monosperma
Phyllodoce breweri
Tiny little white five-petaled one I have not yet identified

July 10
Minaret Lake, 9793 ft

Today is the first day I've ever spent completely off trail. It went pretty well I think. Not terribly ambitious, but I never had trouble figuring out where I was, where I was going, or how to get there. Talus hopping up to Nancy Pass from Superior Lake was mentally and physically demanding, but never felt undoable. There was some pretty gnarly large unstable talus on the way down, but with time and patience and good planning it was not so bad. The route was nice and deserted; didn't see anyone all day until we arrived at Minaret Lake. There was lots of interesting granite, such as smooth marbled tops with jagged edges, veins of every color imaginable, etc.

As we were making our way to the second pass of the day, if it can even be called a pass (Deadhorse Pass), I kept my usual personality traits of being too lazy to lose any unnecessary elevation, while my companion dropped down a bit. We were not more than a couple hundred feet away from each other, until suddenly I realized I could no longer see him or have my shouts returned. The south side of the pass is forested and it's not easy to see the top until you get there.

He being both more experienced and more fit than I, I figured he must have already made it up. He wasn't there when I arrived, so I left my pack and spent an hour wandering around the ridge, which was beautiful, lush with lots of small ponds and dried-up snowbanks. When he still hadn't arrived, I became somewhat nervous---while he is faster than me, it didn't seem likely that he wouldn't stop at the pass to wait for me, and he couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes or so ahead. I backtracked a ways and still couldn't find him, so I decided that the best meeting point would be Minaret Lake since we had agreed to camp here tonight. I contoured around the base of Reigelhuth Minaret, trying not to get distracted by the lovely little pockets of greenery amidst all the granite, and thankfully he was here. He explained that he had made a navigational error and went around the ridge instead of over it. All good, but I'd prefer not to get separated again, or at least to have a set plan of where to meet in case we are.

All this confirms my deep-seated preference for backpacking alone. My companion is about as good a traveling companion as I could hope for: pleasant in conversation but comfortable with silence, patient with my occasional sluggishness, agreeable on matters like routes and campsites. And his company is especially refreshing after so many months of limited contact with anyone outside my household. And yet, human communication is always fallible, leading to stressful situations like today's. And being alone with my thoughts is still something I miss.

Trees and shrubs:
Pinus contorta
Pinus albicaulis
Tsuga mertensiana, with some fantastic groves
Lots of Salix
Artemisia tridentata

Flowers:
Monardella odoratissima (best smelling thing ever!)
Sedum obtusatum
A white five-petaled thing, perhaps Leptodactylon pungens based on the spiky leaves, although Laws guide says this doesn't form mats, and this one seemed pretty mat-like.
Veratrum californicum
Streptanthus tortuosus
Sedum obtusatum

July 11
Minaret Lake, 9793 ft.

Today we climbed Volcanic Ridge. From our campsite by the lake, it looks imposing and not at all doable, even just to get to the saddle underneath from which you approach it. After climbing it and looking back, it still looks that way. It was steep, and certainly a slog, but not at all exposed. The final scramble from the saddle to the peak was a little sketchy because the talus was so loose, but it turns out we took a much more difficult route than necessary.

The view from the summit was just as impressive as advertised. Perhaps the best view I've ever had from anywhere in my life. The whole Ritter Range was laid out across a deep valley but felt so close from that vantage, especially Banner and Ritter. To the South, our route from Nancy Pass was visible in the foreground, with seemingly the entirety of the Southern Sierra behind it. West, we could see right over the Mammoth crest to the Owens Valley and White Mountains. And even Mono Lake to the north.

As we paused for lunch a little ways below the top, a woman suddenly appeared and made me jump a little as I wasn't expecting to see anyone else up there. She had come up from Ediza Lake. Much more intrepid than we, she had climbed up some rather serious snow fields to get here without even an ice axe or mountaineering boots, and we watched her glissade back down again.

Roper suggested making a loop by following the ridge to the northeast until it became feasible to drop down into the valley containing the Minaret Mine, so we descended easy nice-sized talus along the ridge until we reached a ledge with precipitous drops on three sides. The ridge continued after a gap, but this gap was fairly deep and had sheer walls on both sides. Secor, for his part, suggests that the whole ridge from Volcanic Gap to the summit is Class 2, but this was nothing of the sort. After wandering around for a while trying to figure out what we'd done wrong, we gave up and worked our way back down to the saddle, along a much more stable route than the one we had taken up. The northern slope of the saddle was covered in a long and steep snowbank, so we gave up on the loop idea and came back the way we had gotten there.

After a bracing swim in Minaret Lake, we ate dinner and retired. It was a demanding day, with significant elevation gain over difficult terrain and some route-finding problems as well, but the view was well worth it. I admit I was somewhat concerned when the route guidance from both Roper and Secor seemed impossible. The only possibilities seem to me that we royally messed up on navigation, although I don't know how as there was no other ridge going north east from the summit, or that the gap in the ridge is newer than the books. I'm ready to go home tomorrow, despite today being only day 3, compared to the sixteen I spent on the JMT without a break two years ago. I suppose expectations of length of time in the mountains have a strong effect on mental durability.

Flowers:
Cassiope mertensiana
Primula suffrutescens

Lichens:
Xanthoria elegans

[balzaccom]

Thanks for this nice report...I'm impressed with your knowledge of flora!

[SSSdave]

There are significant numbers of backpackers that when off trails don't always keep together just as they don't when on trails where getting out of sync is much less likely to cause becoming lost from each other. Many prefer to hike so instead of doing so in a group. Especially those that by habit make it an unspoken game of who is most fit that tends to be common with peakbaggers. Off trail one can develop a way to separate from others, but such requires careful attention to detail about where to re-link up if separated and it is better to know habits of one another versus doing so with those one does not. For years I hiked and backpacked with another who was also a landscape photographer and climber of many Yosemite walls. We separated a modest amount of times but never lost each other because our communication was excellent.

I just read what Secor wrote about Volcanic Ridge. Doubt he did the ridge himself but rather like significant amounts of info in his book relied on others. Some climbers when asked, tend to relate routes that are class 3 as class 2 because they don't want other climbers to think it was that difficult for them. Same thing in Roper's book.

I looked at the 7.5 USGS topo and it most definitely didn't look class 2 in more than one spot. Then looked on Google Earth 3D and it looks worse like the arete the map shows. The wise approach is to take information like that with a grain of salt unless it is repeated elsewhere. Anyone with any experience of using topographic maps in the Sierra would upon looking at what the topo shows, never go across the top but rather from the 3320 meter saddle descend the easy canyon from to the northeast that leads to the mine and then at maybe 3140 meters traverse around to climb up the 200 feet or so to the saddle.

[esrice]

Thanks for this nice report...I'm impressed with your knowledge of flora!

Thank you! I just carry the Laws Guide around religiously: https://johnmuirlaws.com/product/the-la ... -nevada-2/

There are significant numbers of backpackers that when off trails don't always keep together just as they don't when on trails where getting out of sync is much less likely to cause becoming lost from each other. Many prefer to hike so instead of doing so in a group. Especially those that by habit make it an unspoken game of who is most fit that tends to be common with peakbaggers. Off trail one can develop a way to separate from others, but such requires careful attention to detail about where to re-link up if separated and it is better to know habits of one another versus doing so with those one does not. For years I hiked and backpacked with another who was also a landscape photographer and climber of many Yosemite walls. We separated a modest amount of times but never lost each other because our communication was excellent.

I just read what Secor wrote about Volcanic Ridge. Doubt he did the ridge himself but rather like significant amounts of info in his book relied on others. Some climbers when asked, tend to relate routes that are class 3 as class 2 because they don't want other climbers to think it was that difficult for them. Same thing in Roper's book.

I looked at the 7.5 USGS topo and it most definitely didn't look class 2 in more than one spot. Then looked on Google Earth 3D and it looks worse like the arete the map shows. The wise approach is to take information like that with a grain of salt unless it is repeated elsewhere. Anyone with any experience of using topographic maps in the Sierra would upon looking at what the topo shows, never go across the top but rather from the 3320 meter saddle descend the easy canyon from to the northeast that leads to the mine and then at maybe 3140 meters traverse around to climb up the 200 feet or so to the saddle.

Thanks for all this feedback. On the subject of getting separated, the experience certainly taught me about communication, which as I said I'm not used to since I usually travel alone. Re: Volcanic Ridge, also a learning experience and will hopefully help me develop a better intuition for translating a topo map to understanding physical reality. I guess I just thought that two sources said it was doable, and the map didn't show the route crossing that many contour lines in that short a distance, so it must be fine! Now of course it's obvious to me that a given slope along the spine of an arête is naturally going to be much more challenging than the same slope on the way up to a saddle, for example.

[SSSdave]

The way a topo vertical contour line shows on a map where a line bends more acutely needs to be interpreted as potentially steeper than lines shown parallel. Narrow ridge lines on snowy ridges have a tendency to be steep on both sides of a glacially formed divide due to the way vertical gravity downward pressures of glaciers carve rock landscapes. Additionally prevailing winds blowing snow during winter on one side causes cornice build ups to erode vertically due to snow and carried rock avalanching eroding downward that make those sides even steeper.

Consider a pyramid with base angles of 40 degrees each and a top angle of thus 180-40-40 = 100 degrees at the top angle thus the side slopes have 40 degree slopes that any skier can relate is expert steep. Lets say the elevation that is the altitude of the triangle is 115 feet tall thus there would be two lines 40 and 80 feet. We might label points for the left base of the triangle A, B for that slope's 40 foot line, C for the 80 foot line, D for the top, E for the right side 80 foot line, F for the 40 foot line, and G for the right side 0 foot base.

On the map, if the horizontal distance between each of those two slope lines is 5 units of distance, the distance between the two end points A and G of the base would be 5+5+5+5+5+5= 30 units. However because the 80 foot elevation line is the same on both sides of the pyramid top and there is no additional line at the top because the peak is less than 120 feet for another line, a topo would show the distance between lines C and E as twice as wide as that between any of the other adjacent lines. So for a person interpreting the map, it would appear the top is more rounded. Lacking knowledge of the true elevation of the top it might be only one foot higher between C and E or 81 feet quite flat, or there could be any manner of irregular bumps less than 35 feet between dips that don't reach below the 80 foot altitude including a set of mini cliffs. Most often due to geological processes, such slopes are continuations of gradients below however such is never certain. Additionally the very crest top when both sides are steep is often jagged with huge boulder blocks and gaps.

Another location where this same kind of conservative interpretation is required is the geometric inverse, at the bottom of narrow stream canyons where lines converge. A map may show the very bottom with a greater line width versus higher up the slope on either side. However for the same reason as the above that is unlikely to be true, especially since water tends to erode vertical sides.