South Fork of Kings River (mile 811) to Middle Rae Lakes (mile 794)
Total PCT miles hiked: 1395
Due to our early start Keith (Starman) and I arrived at the Sierras when there was still a lot of snow, and decided it wasn’t safe to attempt a crossing given my skill level. We elected to flip up to northern California and hike southbound (SoBo) back to where we left off near Lone Pine – giving the snow a chance to melt out. During this flip the PCT milage will be counting down, but I’ll include a tally of our total milage hiked so that you can keep aprised of our progress in a linear fashion.
I can hear the airplane before I can see it, the low metallic rumble so foreign in this landscape. Red and white the passenger airliner banks low and fast overhead, it’s engines filling the valley with their noise. Before we’ve gone a hundred meters another commercial airplane roars overhead. Making it’s presence known first by sound and then by flashing it’s red and white belly at us before it disappears over a ridge. I wonder why these planes are off their normal route, flying lower and further north than their standard flight path. However, on the trail there is no way for me to figure out this information. Best case scenario is that I’ll remember to Google it once I’m in town, but that’s so unlikely that I simply write off the experience as one of life’s many small mysteries.
But you know what’s delightful? How sometimes life surprises you from your normal reverie.
Around the corner I can see the reason for the low flying rerouted planes: a massive roiling storm cloud, rising up behind the ridge on the far side of the valley through which we’re currently waking. The beast reaches tens of thousands of feet into the sky, a boiling plume of white which dominates the skyline, dwarfing the 13,000 foot mountains before it. Captivating as it grows wrathful and gargantuan, forming and spreading upward as we watch it. The speed and fury with which the thunderhead arcs into the sky is unmatched by any other I’ve ever witnessed. Deep in a quietly knowing part of my brain something chants not a cloud, not a cloud, not a cloud. During the time it takes us to hike the final mile into camp this chant works it’s way to the fore of my brain until my conscious mind begins to piece bits of information and memory together into usable form. I think about a summer trip to visit my parents in Colorado just a few years ago. How on my penultimate day in town my mother and I took a drive up Trailridge Road, just to hang out and see the view. How from a pull out along the road we could see down into the Eastern farm lands that run right up to the rolling foothills where in an angry white plume spearing into the sky marked the start of a forest fire. As another plane rumbles overhead I say to Keith “that’s not a cloud, that is a fire.”
Keith is not inclined to believe me. He points to the edges of the titan plume as evidence that what he believes to be a cloud, is dispersing. The plume is changing in shape, but it’s not dispersing, it is spreading. The edges tinged with the sad brown orange of smoke. By the time we finish setting up camp the entire southern and eastern sky is a grey smear of smoke. It would seem there is a forest fire standing somewhere between us and the pass we planned to exit over tomorrow.
And that is all we know. Rainbow, a fellow thru hiker messages his mom on his In Reach and she relays that the fire is near the town of Independence and that people are sheltering in Bishop. But we can’t find out anything about the trail, or even how close to town or the backcountry the fire is. There is nothing to know and even less to be done. The only exception being to plan a possible alternative exit strategy which would have us backtracking and hiking out over Baxter Pass; an unmaintained trail which would dump at us a dirt road trailhead, requiring an additional six miles to get out to a road where we might hitch. It is an option we’d rather not take.
We go to bed with a ribbon of smoke wafting overhead tinged pink by the setting sun. To the south burns Shrodingers fire, through which we either will or will not be able to pass.