The Paiute Trail Project, Day 9: Getting High

Evolution Creek Wade to Wanda Lake, 10.2 miles, +2190

On Day 9, we got high. Specifically, we got to 11,426 feet at Wanda Lake.

Even though we’d been close to or even over 10,000 feet several times over the last week, 11,000 felt different. On the night of Day 8, it primarily felt awful, like being hung over. But by the next morning, and now in retrospect, it seems like Day 9 is the day the hike really began, the day it became a High Sierra trek. After breaking through the glassy ceiling of 11,000 feet, we found our legs and began to hike like the bad-asses we knew were in us somewhere, beneath a layer of subcutaneous fat that had most definitively burned off.

Flower in the rock welcomes us to Evolution Valley!

But that day, like every other, happened one step at a time, and while we were taking them it seemed like they’d never add up to anything. Evolution Valley, which cradles Evolution Creek as it winds past the McClure Ranger station and through McClure and Colby Meadows, is a gorgeous, paradigmatically High Sierra hike – alongside a roaring stream feeding chutes and pools, 360 degrees of peaks and outcroppings in shifting parallax, high white pines dappling the sunlight, and plentiful creek crossings.

Evolution Valley: quintessential JMT/Paiute Trail

But it’s also steadily uphill – we gained 800 feet without encountering a single noticeable hill or switchback. By midmorning, we reached the end of the valley, and it was time to climb up to Evolution Lake.

Except for the fact that it was sunny and pastoral, this was a Sucky Slope, a climb of endless switchbacks during which the top seems to draw further off the higher you go. You crest a promontory only to bring further promontories into view.

But eventually we reached the welcome flattening of the Evolution Lake basin; after winding past a couple of mud-green pothole lakes, we found the sparkling, ice-blue lake in which two summers ago we’d skinny-dipped. This time we settled on the north shore, taking shelter from the pinch-eye sun in a copse of stubby junipers. I hurt all over, especially my head. I just wanted to sleep. The Husband wanted to see Darwin Bench, a strenuous and uncertain endeavor I thought completely unnecessary. So the kids and I stayed by the junipers, moving as the sun did to remain in the shade, while The Husband took his side hike.

Bloated with rest and the bleachy sunshine, we resumed our trek shortly after The Husband returned. Sometime that morning, we’d begun to rubber band with the group we’d met at the leviathan rock in Big Pete Meadow: three young men, one of whom was pudgy, bearded, red-shirted, and camera-carrying. When we stopped to filter water alongside the rocky staircase that led up and out of Evolution Lake basin, we saw them approaching. We hurried on, though, crossing the freeway-wide outlet between Evolution and Sapphire Lakes on a long string of boulders like lily pads.

Then we got high and higher. The terrain started to change: more shattered rock, thin sky, and icy chattering water replaced serene pines with their carpet of warm humus and gold needles. Water seeped straight from a crack in the rock. Sedge formed strange rounds in the hard dirt. Pinhead flowers as trembled in the heath around us. We walked on and on and on.

By the time we got to Lake Wanda, The Husband and I were destroyed. We took a site tucked into a boulder formation – almost like Joshua Tree – at the head of the lake. We swam and rinsed our clothes.

The incomparable Lake Wanda

We ate dinner like coyotes. We sat on the top of a massive boulder and basked in the view of the lake and Muir Pass, its iconic stone hut like a rock giant perched in the pass’s saddle dangling its legs and looking back at us.

That night we meadow-crashed, only to be stirred in dreams by smoke from the Ferguson fire that hazed the sky, up until then bone-bright with a full moon.

We were so in it – day by day, we’d gotten there: 11,000 feet, the fire censing the high valleys, trail-grimed, ropy-calved, and hungry. We would hit five passes in the next five days — Muir, Mather, Pinchot, Glenn, and Kearsarge — and by virtue of having brought ourselves there, we were ready for them.

You get where you point your feet and walk. It doesn’t matter when you start or even how fast you go, but it does matter whether you stop. You have to start and keep going to get there.

Family selfie.