We caught a bus from Bishop towards trail and then got a hitch back to the mountains. I remembered that on the way down the Kearsarge Pass trail, I had been thinking how unpleasant or would be to walk back up it again, with a fully loaded bear can. I wasn’t wrong, but I was so excited to get back to the mountains that I didn’t mind. It was also exciting to see people coming down the pass, like Piglet, Kool-Aid, and Pigeon! It was cool to see how close people that I knew were to us. That night at the site, we listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Tinkle finally farted in front of us. It was a magical moment to end a good day back on trail.

The next section was purported to be the hardest on the trail, with the most mountain passes of the high Sierra, including Glen, Pinchot, Mather, Muir, Selden, and Silver Passes. We’d be truly in the wilderness. In a nice coffee shop in Bishop, we wrote out a neat and tidy little plan of how we’d do a pass, or occasionally two, a day. The reality was a bit different from how we’d imagined.

The first pass, Glen, was a bit steep going up the south side, but the frozen lakes we walked by were icy blue and beautiful. On the north side, a heavier snowpack made it impossible to find the trail and we had to guess at the best of a few possible routes down to the clearer trail. None looked very easy and we ended up scrambling over rocks and boulders, being careful to avoid postholing, loose rocks, and slipping towards a certain doom, down the mountain. I did lose my footing once on some scree and fell on my butt. I was very nervous about the descents and that fear stayed with me throughout the Sierras and beyond.

The other side of the pass, into the valley, took us by (and once, kind of through) Rae Lakes. They’d have been perfect for swimming, crystal clear and pristine, but for the mosquitoes. We had lunch in a swarm-light area and dried our shoes and socks. After lunch, we immediately had to cross an overflowing connection between two of the lakes and I got them soaked again. Tinkle and Daisy Dukes, with better forethought, had Crocs for water crossings. We had two more crossings, one that went well and one that should have been a pretty easy jump across a swampy patch of creek. However, as I jumped across, my heavy pack’s momentum made my foot slip out from under me and cause a comically flailing fall onto my butt into the muddy, marshy grass. Daisy Dukes and Tinkle, who were waiting for me and watching all of this, were the sole witnesses of this performance, luckily or unluckily.

That evening, just after crossing the 800 mile marker, we came across a water slide. There were a couple of people standing by it and I went to take a picture. We were confused to see a man across the water, on a tiny patch of rocks next to a fall of water and backed by a ten foot wall of rock. We couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten there or how he could possibly get back. We asked if he was okay and he said he was, but it didn’t look like an okay situation. Daisy Dukes and another guy, Michael, tried to yell back and forth to figure out what happened or if he needed anything. He motioned that he wanted to throw something. It was a piece of paper and rock in a bag that had obviously been thrown across the river and back a few times.

We eventually put together from the conversation on it that he had gone for water, slipped, fell in the raging waters, managed to use an eddy to get onto the rocky area, and that he had a friend who’d already contacted search and rescue (SAR). She showed up soon after and had a satellite phone, which she was using to text SAR. Apparently, they might not have been able to get to him that night. Daisy Dukes threw him some supplies that had been gathered, like an emergency bivy, sleeping bag, and socks. I was still worried, though. He was likely getting wet from the falls’ spray and it was getting dark. The nights were below freezing up there. I was relieved, so can’t imagine his relief, when we heard from SAR that they were 15 minutes away. The hum of a helicopter soon heralded their arrival and they made a few circles of the area and yelled over the loudspeaker that they’d be back again. When they did return, the rescue was simple. The helicopter hovered perfectly over the tiny patch of rocks, lowered a rescuer, who fastened a harness to the hiker, who was then lifted to the chopper, followed soon by the rescuer. They all flew off and we stood there, marveling that he’d survived the initial fall into the slide, which was truly terrifying. That night, we stopped just short of a difficult water crossing, a bit more cautious than we might have been a couple of hours before.