For the past three year’s I have been chipping away at the Sierra High Route (SHR) with three of my friends. It is a 195-mile trek through the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountain range from Kings Canyon National Park to Yosemite National Park and north. 100 miles are off-trail, demanding route finding, boulder scrambles, and blissful solitude (my count of the ratio of people on the John Muir Trail compared to the SHR is 30:1). We plan to complete the route next summer.
This past week we entered at Kearsarge Pass (Independence, CA), hiked up then down to Roads End (Kings Canyon National Park), then north on the SHR to Bishop Pass (Bishop, Ca).
A few highlights were:
- 5.5 climbing up Cirque Pass
- Watching a herd of deer below Frozen Lake Pass
- Daily alpenglow
- Jarrod’s deep 3-word statements such as, “I got deet!”
- Undistracted existence
* Originally posted September 2, 2016, on StraightTalk.com
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