Epic

Traveled through the initial parts of the High Sierra with great wonder and relief to finally be in "real" mountains...familiar subalpine with frequent creeks and lakes. The refreshing scents of pine wafting on the warm breeze wafting up from lower, more sweltering elevations. The mountains are certainly home to me....though one cannot always stay there as the act of me writing this post attests---we have to live in the valley, but you have to climb the mountain to find your way back home-to express the simple Truth spoken and written by countless people before me for thousands of years.
Hiking beyond the Whitney Portal junction and merging the PCT with the JMT(John Muir Trail), I began to see more what appeared to be like terrain I was familiar with in Colorado. In fact, there is a 'notch' in a ridge at 13k ASL that is eerily way too similar to a 'notch' I've guided clients over on trips in CO (for those that know, I'm referring to the Waterloo Gulch crossing into the South Fork Clear Creek drainage). Bizarre. Anywho, I had run into a couple of cool dudes the night before that I ended up hiking with for a couple of days. We approached Forester Pass (13,200), hiking a typical alpine meander through and around various snowfields following a cairn or rock duck now and again. I kept looking up at this familiar notch, and knowing that the nearly vertical chute several hundred meters to the West of it was, according to the map, our pass....but there was just no way this positively nasty couloir and legitimate mountaineering route(as opposed to backpacking trail) could be the way for us to go...I was confused, but I pressed on scanning the vertical rock face ahead for any signs of human activity...there was none I could detect from my current position. Once at the base of this thing, we began ascending an endless series of switchbacks that are, in places, literally cut out of the face that appears nearly flawless from a less lofter perch. up, up, up we went, and I more in awe of the feat of human engineering and growing sense in my wonderful imagination that this scene could have easily come straight out of Tolkien's Sillmarillion--The Fall of Gondolin, or the Hidden Way....something fantastical and almost so incredible it was hard to believe it was actually real, though it definitely was VERY real. It was like a puzzle unfolding it's solutions to its problems with each successive series of steps and scrambles up some of the more occluded slopes(I could definitely see why, in a heavy snow year, or early season climb why one would wish to have an ice axe on this pass)...I'll post pics of the area in a couple of weeks when I am able to upload to the flickr page.
Once through the tiny cleft in this lofty and precipitous ridge of knife-like granite pinnacles and gendarmes, we descended on fairly significant snow fields softened by the afternoon sun---not ideal conditions to do so, but it went well, and saw, curiously enough, large cat tracks in the snow. There were a lot of sun cups, and in places small sections of Nieve Penitentes (grown up sun cups)....bathed briefly in Bubbs creek (Crazy COLD, but refreshing--one of my traveling companions is an experienced cold water swimmer, and lounged in the cascade of a falls like it was a hot springs for probably ten minutes with no sign that it might have been frigid--amazing). East Vidette Peak to the West rises on a vertical smooth granite slab for a sheer 1500 feet minimum with an almost impenetrable North ridge....I almost tripped several times gaping at it's sweeping East face.
Hiked 20 miles even that day to the East end of Bullfrog lake...was wiped out. Hiked out Kearsarge Pass the next morning to resupply in Independence.