John Muir Trail Part 2: The Silver Staircase

I’m one of those type-A individuals who loves, like really loves, spending hours studying maps and guidebooks when preparing for a trip. However, no matter how much planning I do for a trip, the terrain and features I’ve been staring at on a topographic map can never truly animate until we start to experience them. 

As we drove on the windy road leading us to the beginning of our trek the scenery hardly looked real. The front windshield was a TV screen into a landscape that was just out of reach. As the car glided through curves tracing the edges of canyon walls up to our last high point, the terrain awaiting us was revealed. The abrupt peaks reached high before steeply diving down into the earth.  As we floated down to the canyon bottom, we traced the course of the river which led to Land’s End, our final destination by car. All of the planning I had done by looking at maps and elevations profiles suddenly became three dimensional. I had one of those “holy shit” moments as we said our goodbyes and thank yous before embarking on our longest and likely most challenging trip yet. 

We left the canyon bottom at an elevation of 4,800 feet. That first day we slowly made our way up another 4,800 feet, continuing to trace Bubb’s Creek, a tributary to the South Fork of the Kings River, which we had driven adjacent to. Eventually settling into our first camp at Lower Vidette Meadow for a fitful first night of sleep, something I always experience for the first couple nights at elevation. Glen Pass, our first one of the trip, awaited us the next day at 11,926 feet. 

By our 4th day on the trail, the 4,000 feet descent to the Middle Fork of the King’s River from our camp at Mather Pass only to immediately begin another 4,000 foot climb to the top of Muir Pass had become routine. As we walked up Le Conte Canyon through areas of meadow and forest, I was relieved to be lost among plants and trees. We stopped briefly to speak with one of our trail companions a few times and observed that, while the naked landscape of the high elevation passes and lakes are beautiful in a mysterious, alien way, we couldn’t help but feel like trespassers. Each time we reached these places we lingered in awe, but felt a gravitational pull downward. When we finally arrived near rivers or canyon bottoms among trees and forest duff, we felt an inherent sense of belonging.

The miles following the river up this canyon toward Muir Pass felt gentle, affording us the ability to stop multiple times along the river’s edge and watch the water crash over rocks or slowly inch its way through wide meadows. My guidebook alerted us that wild blueberries grow in this canyon and, while we did not see any, the evidence of their existence was scattered in little blue and red droppings left by the many birds along the rocks. A few miles from our endpoint for that night, we crossed paths with the group we had met a few days earlier as they made camp at one of the final flat patches of dirt along the river before the trail started ascending more steeply. We hoped we would see them again, but knew that we would likely begin to outpace them from this point onward. I had allotted some shorter days at the beginning of our trip, but we would need to cover more ground every day for the remainder. We said, “see you at the top of the next one!”, but we wouldn’t cross paths again.

We emerged from the trees and began climbing up the side of the canyon through large boulders before finally reaching what my husband dubbed “the Silver Staircase” -- a short section of trail that had been dynamited out of a sheer granite face adjacent to a waterfall. Water ran along the obviously man-made path, where algae created slick patches of rock. At the top of the staircase, we found our campsite among a stunted grove of trees on the edge of the shelf above the waterfall. We were tired and happy to be there, overlooking the canyon we had hiked that day. 

I had accepted the state of my feet at that point, but still took the time to tediously care for them each night. Only two days away from our resupply, I burned some extra fuel to clean the wounds with warm, soapy water. The feeling of the warm water on my feet was ecstasy. Perched on my rock, I focused intently on nurturing every crevasse of each of my toes. When my feet were clean, I gently patted them dry with my bandana and slipped them into my dry sleeping socks before preparing dinner. 

Reflecting back on this spot, one of my two favorite campsites on our whole trip, part of what made it so special was it’s isolation. Being a popular trail, this was one of only two nights on the entire trip that we would have a campsite entirely to ourselves. A number of times, we intended to hike just a little bit farther to a more isolated location, but often didn’t have the motivation to continue beyond our planned stopping point. 

The next morning we woke to a thin frost on everything and a slightly more difficult time opening our bear canisters, which had frozen shut overnight. We broke camp and enjoyed the brisk air as we made our way up the last 2,000 feet to Muir Pass. We climbed up a short distance and emerged on the next flat to see a perfect reflection of the mountains looking up at us from a still, glassy lake. This mirror reflected the surrounding mercury-colored cliffs pristinely. When you approached, you could gaze through the topaz-blue water to the granite sand beneath. I have rarely seen this blue in nature and there is something remarkable about it. The summer prior, on our last day of hiking toward Sonora Pass north of Yosemite at a similarly high elevation we saw a pool of snow-melt that was entirely this bright blue color. One of our friends on the trip yelled forward to us, “You guys! This is where Gatorade Ice comes from!”. It was not an eloquent descriptor, but it perfectly described the tint. 

This moment, 100 feet back from my husband, watching his silhouette stand outside of time in front of this unnamed lake is one of the moments that appears in my mind often looking back on the trip. Had we arrived at this spot at any other moment in time - if the low pressure weather that brought the cold and stillness of that morning was different - the lake would have just been an unmarked pool at 11,000 feet on my map somewhere in the four miles between Starr Camp and Muir Pass, demarcating that we had another 1,000 feet to climb to get to the top. 

Regardless of all the hours I have poured over those maps and guidebooks, these moments, where I get to truly transcend myself and feel the immensity and beauty of this incredible earth, are inherently serendipitous.