Mark’s Photos #4

The highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail is Forester Pass at 13,153 feet. It is about 775 trail miles from the start on the Mexican border. We had camped near 11,000 feet, right at the timberline, and were roughly 5 miles from the pass. A 5 a.m. start the next morning was meant to get us over the pass before the frozen crust on the snow was too soft to hold our weight. If that happened, we would be postholing down through the snow on the other side, which is both extremely tiring and dangerous. I was hiking through the Sierra’s with John. John was a 55-year-old electrical technician I had met on the trail. We paired up to do the Sierras for mutual safety in this difficult terrain. This photo captures John at 12,500 ft as he hikes the upper reaches of the Tyndall Creek drainage in the high alpine moonscape leading up to the pass. This relative plane ends abruptly at a 500-foot-tall “wall” of semi-broken rock. The trail continues up the rampart, weaving among the broken slabs and snow chutes, climbing quite steeply to a cleft that is the pass. We reached it at 7 a.m. and descended the mile long snow field on the other side without postholing. See second image.