Around the Rae Lakes Loop

The southern Sierra are more rugged and wild than what we were used to.

The granite domes of Yosemite (200 miles to the north) are imposing enough, but there is something soft and poetic in the monoliths’ smooth faces and regular geometry.

These southern mountains are just rough, and too damned high.

At King's Canyon National Park’s backcountry office, we got a permit for a kind of introductory package tour: a 6-day, 5-night trip around the “Rae Lakes Loop.” The loop starts and ends there at the Road's End parking lot. In between it climbs up the South Fork of the Kings River, then up its tributary Woods Creek, crosses a divide at 12,000 feet, then descends down Bubb’s Creek for the return trip. It’s about 40 miles in all.

What's great about a backpacking vacation

The truly great thing about a backpacking vacation – which alone would make up for any difficulty and discomfort – is that it demands, imposes, forces a complete break from everyday consciousness. Sure, you can start out writing memoranda in your head as you stroll down the trail. But pretty soon you’ll need to pay attention. You’ll need to figure out your way, or to adjust your clothing so you’re not so hot or so cold, or to balance yourself and that load on your back as you hop from rock to rock. And these things will distract you one by one until, by nightfall, as you are carefully washing the dinner dishes (using a minimum of precious water and dumping the residue somewhere where it won’t wash into the nearby stream) and sorting food for the morning (making sure you know where the coffee is so you won’t have to search for it through sleep-blinkered eyes) and setting up the sleeping bags (stuffing extra clothing into a sack and plumping it up for a pillow) you will have entirely lost your mental reference points. By the time you come back to your memorandum, it will be from a different perspective indeed.

Jennifer and I had a leisurely breakfast at the Cedar Grove lodge before parking and leaving the trailhead around 11 am. The day was already way warm, but we had plenty of time. After only an hour or so we stopped alongside the creek at one of those perfect spots where the aquamarine water splashes playfully over huge boulders.

Dropping the truck key in the stream

We stepped out onto a big flat rock in the middle of the stream. I emptied the pockets of my nylon baggie shorts – pocket knife, lighter, key to the truck – into my cap and set it aside before diving in. The water was not-quite-shocking cold, but I got out pretty quick anyway, plenty cooled off.

I reached for my hat without thinking – got to protect that bald spot, even though the sun feels good on it – and soon knife, lighter, and truck key were spinning gaily down the sloping rock toward the water. I managed to grab the knife and lighter. There was a little sploosh and the truck key disappeared in the water. “I’ll get it” I told Jennifer, not sure at all that I actually could. But on only the second dive – peering through the clear, but dark and roiling, water about eight feet down – I saw the outline of the key, felt it with my fingers, flipped it off the rock and into my palm, and shot back up to the surface.

Welcome to Paradise Valley

After a series of long, hot switchbacks – and one memorable stop with rare shade and a great view back down-canyon – we entered the flat, lush woods of Paradise Valley. The designated campsites were all in the woods, and buggy with mosquitoes, but we found one with a little use-path down to a sandbar alongside the stream. We set up the tent back in the woods, then carried our sleeping pads and cooking gear down to the stream’s edge. There, with a nice breeze blowing up canyon, we bathed, cooked dinner, and watched the light play on the stream and canyon walls. Neighbors showed up – a family from Massachusetts. He’d done this walk 25 years ago, and was bringing the wife and daughter along for a reprise. It seemed likely they wouldn’t make it all the way around. They came around once to borrow some mosquito repellent, and the daughter appeared a bit later to tell us there was a bear in their campsite. But generally they were pretty quiet.

The next day we hiked a couple of hours through Paradise Valley, stopped for another swim, and then started a hot, exposed, rocky climb up the Woods Creek drainage.

Exhaustion is a strange and elusive sensation. Is it only extreme weariness? A confusion, a loss of focus, a weakening determination? Or the simple but inescapable fact that one’s legs will not carry on? I didn’t quite find out that day, but I was aware I was staggering a bit by the time the Castle Domes were passing by, slowly, to the left of the trail. At camp, Jennifer did most of the chores as I sat and leaned back against an enormous tree trunk, completely enervated. Although there were other campers about, their energy must also have been spent – the camp was quiet soon after dinnertime.

Up to Rae Lakes

My strength returned at nightfall, and the next morning we were once again headed uphill – the last leg of a 6000-foot climb to the Rae Lakes Basin. The scene turned to alpine meadows and widely spaced trees, and we were soon circumambulating crystal clear lakes. The trail wound up, over, and down glacial moraine.

What is it about the subalpine environment? In human eyes, it holds grace, perfection. The trees twisted and stunted into bonsai, the rock-rimmed lakes clear and nearly lifeless, the harsh white sunlight gleaming painfully off rock and water, the heights, adorned only by snowfields, looming awesome and terrible overhead. It’s no place to live, even during these few weeks, in July and August, that it’s not covered in snow.

At the Rae Lakes campground, we found a beautiful site with twisted pine trees and flat slabs of rock stepping down to the shore. Across the lake rose the picturesque Fin Dome, a dramatic focal point for our view. We made the most of it, lying on the rocks all that afternoon and most of the next day, reading and snoozing. In the evenings, we stayed out on the rocks far into the night, snuggled down in our sleeping bags, watching satellites and shooting stars. The dark shapes of the mountains etched a rough rim around the black firmament.

The campground was crowded – and we were dismayed, the first night, to hear a group of six teenagers and two adults camp right behind us – but everyone was fairly considerate and we found plenty of private opportunities to skinny-dip in the lake.

Over Glenn Pass

On our second morning at Rae Lakes we rose early and packed quickly. We weren’t done climbing yet – we still had to gain the divide at Glenn Pass, 1,500 feet above. And we didn’t want to do it in the heat of the day.

The fens and alpine gardens soon gave way to bare rock, snowfields, and pothole tarns. There were occasional arrangements of wildflowers, each wedged in a crag as if stuck as if in a vase. Then we were climbing the long last set of switchbacks. At 10:30, we made the divide, walking atop a rock wall not five feet wide with a several-hundred-foot drop on either side. The air was perfectly calm.

On the way down the other side, we missed our chance for water. (We expected there would be another stream further on, and there wasn’t.) We ran out somewhere on a long trek across a dry mountain slope. It was pretty, but the dryness in our throats, the weariness in our legs, the heat radiating off the rocks, and the relentless sun kept us wishing that it would be over. We finally found shade, and water, just before the descent started in earnest.

We thumped our way down the mountain, facing a 3500 foot descent today, and that much again tomorrow.

People-watching in the wilderness

One thing I like about a (relatively) busy backpacking trail: you see some interesting people. Not that it’s like Central Park. I wouldn’t want to encounter more than a dozen or dozen-and-a-half folks in a day; that would get tiresome. But it’s a pleasure to come across a single man with his 10-year-old daughter, watching him enjoy her fascination with a little glade and stream, seeing him be patient as she dallies before putting her pack back on. Or to meet, on our way down, a couple of fellows in their mid-70s pushing their way up an impossibly steep incline, with plans to reach some god-awfully high and remote place by nightfall. And here comes an interesting man – in a white button-down shirt, sure-enough buttoned down in this heat, pocket neatly pressed, hair nicely combed, jeans a bit tight for this kind of heavy exercise, carrying a pack on his slim frame with a magically light step… “Don’t you just love this?” he says, with unreserved enthusiasm. “I just can’t believe how beautiful it all is.”

And we have to agree.

Jennifer and I were both feeling beat to hell by the time we got down to Junction Meadow. We were also a bit cranky and disappointed, because all the campsites had been previously occupied by horse packers. They’d been cleaned up OK – not too much horse shit lying around – but the ground was all compacted and denuded, and the place looked used.

Fire down below

And we had something real to worry about: a yellow haze rising from the canyon below. Someone we’d passed on the trail had said they’d walked through heavy smoke. And we didn’t know how exactly where the fire was, or how bad it might be.

As had become routine, Jennifer rested beside the packs while I scouted around to convince myself we’d found the best available campsite. As I strolled down the trail, a little wobbly but blissfully free of the weight of the pack, I met a man coming up from the canyon below. He introduced himself as Dan, and said he worked for the park.

“Trail’s closed a little ways ahead,” he said. “Would it be too impractical for you to turn around and go back the way you came?”

It would for sure. Fortunately, Dan had a backup plan. He said we should stay put until we were contacted by a park ranger named Lindsay, and she would escort us out of the backcountry.

Lindsay found me that evening as I stood in the middle of a meadow, trying to photograph the evening light playing on the canyon walls. She moved across the grass with a long, girlish stride. I soon found out she was an intern at the visitor’s center, on a few days off before she returned to her junior year at Michigan State University. But she had an NPS radio, and instructions to see Jennifer and me – and another couple camped a mile upstream – out safely the next day.

The Firewalk

At 9 the next morning, Jennifer and I were packed up and waiting in the meadow, and were soon joined by Lindsay, Richard, and Tracy. Lindsay set a young person’s pace, and we rocked and rolled single file along the trail, with hourly rest stops. I’d fallen into line behind Lindsay, and was chatting her up about her career plans – fisheries biology and education – when Jennifer, just behind, pointed out that we’d walked right past the pink tape markers and were headed into an area of billowing smoke.

We kept close together and moved slowly down the trail. The firefighters appeared out of the smoke. Assignments were being shouted. A helicopter was coming in with another load of water. One firefighter got the order to walk us through. Bushes and fallen logs were burning alongside the trail, and the heat was intense. We came to the campsite where the fire had started, burned over in ash. The haze and drifting smoke made a spooky atmosphere.

At the far end of the fire area, we stopped to watch a grounded helicopter take off, as another helicopter brought in one of the last loads of water. The firefighters, having completed their job, were preparing to move out.

Driving barefoot down to Fresno

In another three hours, after descending a seemingly endless series of switchbacks to the floor of King’s Canyon, we were at the backcountry office.

After six days in the backcountry, there’s something intolerable about the crowds and confusion in the automobile-accessible parts of the park. There’s the city, and that’s fine, and there’s the woods, but the city-in-the-woods is an abomination. We rolled up the truck windows, turned the air conditioner on high, and drove barefoot down to Fresno.