Cathedral Lakes

---

We woke up to the ceiling of our tent covered in condensation. At first I thought our tent leaked and then Chris explained basic science to me. Oh yeah. I guess we ARE in a lush meadow instead of on a dry peak. We tried to maneuver around the tent without making it rain on our heads. I didn't actually leave the tent til I was sure Billy and Joy were awake. None of us wanted to deal with the mosquitoes any longer than we had to. Flying bastards. At least the ones where we camped weren't as aggressive as the ones in Long Meadow. Those bastards will die trying to bite through seven layers of clothing. Once I was sure we were all wake, we all agreed to just pack up camp, eat some energy bars and trek until we found a more suitable place to eat breakfast. That's right... I started my day WITHOUT coffee. I ate a snickerdoodle protein cookie (these things are amazing but a lil too cakey and dry when backpacking) and a packet of peanut butter. Surprisingly, straight peanut butter is amazing- like a sugar protein boost.

We walked out of our little wooded area back to the trail and started our final day of trekking. We saw more backpackers today headed up and down the John Muir trail. I still can't figure out how people do such long distance through hiking. Just carrying four days worth of food is crazy. A dad and his daughter passed us back and forth a couple times- he dropped part of his sleeping pad somewhere. He tried to find it and eventually gave up. We climbed out of Long Meadow pretty quickly up and towards a giant rock precipice we decided what Thunder Mountain Railroad and The Matterhorn (from Disneyland) would look like if they had a love child. Next time I busted out my map I checked the peaks listed- turns out it's Columbia Finger. We hiked up and up for a little bit until we were just about at the top of our climbing for the day. Joy and I were already wearing out from four days of backpacking and not having had breakfast so we all stopped to eat. And drink coffee of course.

The fourth day really wasn't bad once we got through that initial climb. And that wasn't nearly as steep as the climbs the past three days! It was smooth sailing for the next couple of hours as we tramped along Cathedral Pass. It was fairly level, if not downsloped, as we hiked past Tressider Peak towards Cathedral Peak. The scenery in this part of the High Sierras was stunning. Rugged and sharp rather than the smooth granite of the past few days. The trail led us past swatches of green meadows, patches of white snow and tan dirt under a beautiful blue sky. I feel like every shot I took was a cover straight out of Backpacker Magazine. No wonder this trail is so heavily trafficked.

We descended down towards the meadow before Cathedral Peak and hit our largest patch of snow. Not large enough to lose the trail but it definitely made us question climbing over it at first. One by one we all went over, and I managed to catch a picture of Joy just as she fell through the crust. It wasn't deep! She just sunk down a foot or two!! We were laughing pretty hard at this. We passed the first Cathedral Lake and filtered water at a nearby stream. This would likely be our last filtering for the trip. We also spent some time taking a group photo since we didn't have one of all four of us yet.

We had most of our day's trekking behind us already. It was a half mile down to the Lower Cathedral Lake from here. We decided to all just take our packs with us instead of leaving them behind. I had read that people were finding the trail down to the lake sketchy from all the storm damage. This was, in fact, the ONLY time we lost the trail in four days of backpacking. We made a right at a water crossing instead of seeing the stacked rocks across the debris and water. It turned out well enough because we reasoned all we had to do was follow the water. And Cathedral Peak behind us was such a prominent landmark that getting truly lost would be incredibly difficult. We followed the streams until we ran into the trail again, which led down to a giant bog. It's probably normally a meadow but there was so much snow and water this year it was more swampy. We ran into a couple hikers who had tried to skirt the swamp by going left, following the trail, but it was covered in too much snow in that direction. They advised we go directly across in order to get to the lake. We noted, as we were halfway there, they did not take their own advice until they watched us cross first. The bog was crisscrossed with very deep runs of water (several feet) along with many patches of shallow pools. We picked our trail carefully and hopped across streams when needed. Surprisingly we made it without getting our boots soaked!

The lake was beautiful, and very cold for obvious reasons. We all dipped our feet in- none of us were crazy enough to dunk under. The mosquitoes found us once again so we didn't stay too long.

We headed back across the bog and up the trail back to the main trail. We only had a few miles to go before Cathedral trailhead, and it turned out to be all virtually downhill. Normally this would be a great thing but after four days and thirty something miles, I was just damned tired. Atleast it was down, though. And down seemed to take forever. We passed dozens of day hikers and backpackers on their way up from Tuolumne Meadows. It was such a steep climb and I didn't envy them at all. By about 2pm, we had finished our trek at Cathedral trailhead! It was a total of about 35 trail miles over 4 days, 9mi of which were without a pack. It was amazing!

We feasted on glorious pizza at Two Guys in Groveland on the way home. Mmmmmm!

---

Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Yosemite
Unlimited beauty