Big Pete Meadow - Lower Palisade Lake

I always reckoned my main enemy on the JMT would be altitude. It’s a strange sensation to draw in breath without feeling satisfied. Your muscles don’t have as much fuel to work on, you move slow and think slow. Tasks take longer, and you can’t do massive mileages because the strength just isn’t there. But as of today, our new top toil turned out to be all the more consuming (no pun intended).

Hunger.

Trying to fit 8,5 days of food into a Bear Vault 500 proved to be a thankless task at VVR. Yesterday I only had a meagre Kind bar for lunch (if you have seen the pathetic size of those things you are likely shaking your head in sympathy now). However creative you get with packing, there simply won’t be room for food to compensate for your exertion.

Snacking constantly is good to combat altitude-induced nausea, but with a metabolism on acid it leaves you feeling even more deprived. Today’s menu: one packet of almond butter scraped thinly across two tortillas, a Clif bar (I can still remember years later that it was a berry pomegranate chia one…), and a handful of dried apricots in addition to dinner.

Definitely not the first time these guys went on a camp safari.

Thank goodness LeConte Canyon blessed us with relatively undemanding terrain. We fantasised constantly of food. Adrian was already on the slim side and worried he would be seriously underweight by the end of our hike.

I had long forsaken any ideas of a toned trail body, and spent hours daydreaming of grocery stores, bags of beef jerky and burgers. Always burgers. Give me a hiker who doesn’t dream of burgers at least twelse times per day.

Ever since the JMT, I’ve been hesitant to recommend long-distance hikes to couples. I’m very aware that plenty of people do it – I’ve met several doing a thru-hike for their honeymoon – but in general it isn’t a particularly romantic activity.

Never mind the dirt and the smells, but for our part – we were so zoned in on our immediate needs that we devoted basically no time to connect. Hiking while hungry isn’t great for the mood, and we would squabble over meaningless things like sunscreen application.

LeConte Canyon was lush with aspens and plenty of curious wildlife; but baking hot in the sun. I could cruise once I got my head in the zone, but I’d still be thinking semi-constantly fuck I’m so hungry. That deer looks tasty. If we found a dead animal, would I eat it? Hell yes I would.

Looking back down into LeConte Canyon and the northbound trail

I must have been in the middle of one of these drooly daydreams when I almost bumped into Adrian, who had stopped dead on the trail. Looking past him, I could see why. The whole level ground narrative was over. We had to crane our necks to look up at the wall in front of us, the notorious Golden Staircase. A rock massif almost 700 m high, it takes ages to climb and there are no water sources. To be fair, it offered splendid views of the canyon below, but it was two winded Norwegians who crawled over the top. I’d also paid for my pee-break with about 45 new mosquito bites.

Heading up the Golden Staircase. You can’t tell how steep it is, but the camera angle is pointed almost straight up.

Finally we beheld Lower Palisade Lake. It would be our camp for the night. As we traced the edge of the lake, stormy clouds gathered, and I lay down the line for any higher altitude camping. Tomorrow morning we would face one of the most dreaded passes on the JMT: Mather Pass. The north side is steep and slippery, the snow would be icy in the shadows. We will be doing one pass per day until our next resupply. We lay in our tent, starving and scratching our bug bites, as the hours towards an appropriate dinner time ticked by.

It feels strange typing this out from the comfort of my kitchen after all this time, because my memory of the trail is one of absolute splendour. You forget the hard stuff, only the shining lakes and majestic mountains remain. But reading my journal notes from this night, I recall understanding that getting to Mt Whitney would be a fight. Black dirt lined every crease of my hands, I’d never gone this long without a shower. The harsh beauty of the Palisade Lakes was a sight to behold, but I was absolutely smashed. And then there was the race to fall asleep before I grew hungry again…

Camp at 3230 m, all by ourselves this time.