Day 50: Hike to Death Canyon

Date: Wed 6/6

PCT Start Mile: 709.5

PCT End Mile: 730.8

PCT Mileage for Day: 21.3

Total PCT Mileage: 730.8

The Highlights: Awesome mountain temps, a long climb, and epic views.

This morning’s wakeup was cold… the wind was blowing and I did not want to get out of my sleeping bag. Eventually, I rose and packed up. Brrr….

We warmed up as we started hiking. While I disliked getting ready in the cold, the cooler hiking temps were definitely preferable to the desert. We had changed from dry desert booger to snot rocket weather. Yassss….

The morning hike was a roller coaster of small climbs, punctuated by wide open meadows. The meadows opened to views of the beginnings of the Sierra, gently sloping mountains.

We took our first break after about 7 miles, along the south fork of the Kern River, where we also collected and filtered water. It was also nice to eat a Snickers that wasn’t melted before 9am.

Following our break, it was time to climb. Ahead of us, we had an 8 mile climb of about 2,796 ft elevation gain, topping out around 10,500 ft. We planned to tackle 5 miles before breaking for lunch at another water source and finish the remainder after lunch.

The climb started fairly gradually for the first 2.5 miles before climbing more steeply. Unlike the desert, this climb was mostly nicely shaded by tall pines.

The first mile or so after lunch was the worst of the climb, in my opinion, but some of this was due to post-lunch sluggishness. Eventually the trail hugged the mountainside with epic views of snow-capped peaks in the distance.

Topping out at 10,500 ft, we began our descent. The last 6.6 miles of the day would be downhill, followed by a gently rolling mostly flat grade into our camp area for the night near Death Canyon Creek. Quite the name, hopefully no foreshadowing. The site is at 8,959 ft, almost 2,000 ft higher than last night’s tent site.

We were happy to arrive much earlier in the day…a little after 5:15pm, with plenty of time to set up camp, relax, collect/filter water, and eat dinner before dark. I finally have the mini air pump for my air mattress and… blowing up the air mattress is still my least favorite camp chore. Shawn is also sad that he has no source for Jolly Ranchers, as neither of us have them on this leg of the journey. We are already excited for our next resupply at a real grocery store in Bishop. While the small outfitter in Kennedy Meadows had a nice selection for resupply, it was still a bit limited for options.

After our luxury dinners of ramens and Knorr pasta with tuna, we packed up our foodstuffs and stored our bear canisters a little ways away from the tent. This technically isn’t required yet, though will be starting tomorrow night, so may as well start now 🙂 You want the canister to be far enough from your tent so that a bear isn’t coming near you, but still close enough that if you did hear a bear investigating the canister, you can snap a good pic 😂 Or maybe it’s like 100 ft from your tent. The rules are fuzzy.

We were in our tents, tucked into our sleeping bags by 7pm, so much better than last night. Time to manufacture the Zzzz’s.