Hiking Mt. Wanda and the Face Of Glen Pass

Good Friday, and our hills are in peak season green.  Grass is high, and most of the early spring flowers are at the very end of their bloom.  The utter lushness will be gone in a flash with the first week of hot weather, and then the buckeye will take over as the focal point for floral beauty.  Good Friday, and I just got back from an evening hike of Mt. Wanda with a whole crew of folks I didn’t know.  These were people who came out to view the proposed Alhambra Hills Development site, from the top of Mt. Wanda.  Thanks Jim for posting this as one of Five Things on Patch, as we had over twenty people show up for the hike.

We met at the end of Canyon Way and hiked through the tunnel and up onto Mt. Wanda from the entrance at the corner of Franklin Canyon Road and Alhambra Avenue.  As we walked up, our group passed a number of families out hiking that hill late on a chilly evening.  I was frankly quite surprised by the use it’s getting.  Given the theme of our hike, a view to preserving another gorgeous piece of open space within city limits, I thought this significant.  The need for open spaces in our urban and suburban lives is only growing, not declining.  

The first few years Mt. Wanda, and the Franklin Ridge lands were open to the public, nobody knew them at all.  I was always alone up there.  That’s no longer the case.  The word has clearly spread, and for a myriad of reasons, physical and mental health, natural beauty, calm, people are seeking out the forests and green rolling hills that are within the borders of our little town.  And they are beautiful.  

It’s a good uphill pull, but it is so worth it, from the lovely forested lower trail to the open grassy bluffs that are Mts. Helen and Wanda.  Named after John Muir’s two daughters, this is where he took them hiking when they were children. 

Tonight we were looking for a view.  I frankly didn’t know which hill was the proposed Alhambra Hills Development, or have any idea of just what it would mean for our enjoyment of Mt. Wanda.  From the top of Wanda, both peaks of Diablo spread out as a wide swath of mountain scenery and the Diablo Valley, with its urban sprawl of Concord, Pleasant Hill and Walnut Creek, are largely blocked by a large, forested ridge in the foreground.  The Northern end of that ridge is part of the proposed development. 

Grass and oaks cover these rolling hills.  Placed as they are between Reliez Valley Road, Alhambra Valley Road, and Alhambra Avenue, it is a gorgeous view shed from all directions, and the whole area is well worth preserving just for that.  The potential for recreational use as preserved open space is worth considering as this is very beautiful country.  

Brian Fitzsimmons and Tim Platt, of the Alhambra Hills Open Space Committee, organized the hike and made it to the top, answering questions all the way.  Tim described the rest of the group as “ enthusiastic, wonderful, energetic people on our first hike to view a hill that we hope will someday be open space.”  

If you would like to be informed of the next hike, and other activities, email the Alhambra Hills Open Space Committee at: Ahosc@att.net.  Their Facebook page, Alhambra Hills Open Space Committee, is filled with pictures, news and information about events and upcoming actions.  

Next week this column will be coming to you from the ADZPCTKO at Lake Morena Park, just north of the Mexican Border.  In lay terms, that’s the Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick Off, a weekend of trainings and reunions for PCT thru hikers.  I’ll be helping cook and do other Trail Angel sorts of things for the “Class of 2011” as they set out on the journey of a lifetime.  Without a serious melt off quick in the Southern California Mountains, and the High Sierra, this class of hikers face what could be the most snow ever met with on the trail.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the friends I hiked with last year, and helping out the Trail Angels who aided me, but who are hiking this year.  I just hope my myfi works. 

Pacific Crest Trail Stories

For those just tuning in, there were five of us, all Pacific Crest Trail thru hikers, who had banded together in early June last year, to hike what was, for that time of year, an unusually snowy High Sierra.  Several others had joined us while on trail, and on our descent from Kearsarge Pass, one of them, 16 year old Calorie, his trail name, slipped and fell out of control down a very steep snow face, crashing into a rock “island.”  He was lucky only to have gashed his leg open, as there was the potential for much worse, but he had to be airlifted to a clinic in Lone pine nonetheless.  

The rest of us took a zero (no mileage day) in town to critique what had happened, and to decide just what to do from there.  In typical “hiker trash” fashion, we found the best place to hold a meeting was under the cabana, poolside, at the Dow Villa Hotel in Lone Pine, with a smorgasbord of sandwich fixin’s and fruit before us.  But we all took it seriously.  Calorie, could easily have died in that fall, and the dangerousness of what we were attempting came home to all of us.  On the advice of Trail Angel Tom, Evan decided to pull out and hike later.  Shin, the Japanese hiker who had been with Calorie and his brother, Double Check, decided to stay with them, and wait at the Hiker Hostel for Calorie to heal up. 

The five of us who were left, our original High Sierra Fellowship, spent an entire afternoon looking at what had happened and maybe what we could have done differently, sizing up who we were as mountaineers at that point, because this was not your typical hike of the John Muir Trail/Pacific Crest Trail, this was real mountaineering.  We concluded that none of us could have changed what had happened to Calorie.  He hadn’t carried an ice axe, which we all had, and that may have made the difference in his out of control fall.  We didn’t dictate what gear other hikers chose to use.  Frankly, an accident could happen to any of us up there.

Where to go was the next item, and I found myself voting for a bus ride north to Yosemite Valley and hiking south through the High Sierra, with the thought that the snow would melt off a bit more over the several weeks the trip would take, and that the Northern section is lower in elevation than the Southern.  I was out voted, 3 to 2, and I suspect Little Engine only voted with me so as not to leave me as the solo chicken vote.  It was one of two votes our team took through this section, based on safety issues, where I found myself in typical Scout Master mindset, voting for what I thought was the safer path, only later to be glad I had been out voted by my fearless friends.  Heading right back at those daunting mountains was the best thing we could have done.  The next several weeks were to become the finest backpacking/mountaineering experiences of our lives.

Mango had sprung for a pizza feed for all of us when we hit Lone Pine, so the night before leaving town it was Chinese food.   Yes, there’s really good Chinese food in Lone Pine at a restaurant built into an old carousel building, right next to the Hiker Hostel.  You can’t miss it if you’re looking for a place to eat when you’re in town.  

If you’re ever traveling down Hwy 395, and you come to Lone Pine, give it a day or two.  From the drop dead gorgeous view of the Southern Sierra and Mt. Whitney, to the Alabama Hills, the movie museum, hiker/climber ambience and finally the very moving National Monument at Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp, its simply a fascinating, and very scenic little Western town.  

Next morning we took the bus to Independence and were met by trail angel Bryan who hauled us all back up to the Onion Valley Trailhead.  We were carrying the heaviest packs of the trip, 9 days of almost double rations for the 98 mile hike to Vermillion Valley Resort, our next resupply.  We were figuring on not much more than 10 miles per day over the deep snow.  

What a climb!  Smiles positioned herself in front of me, as I was still trying to get my trail legs back after 3 weeks off trail for a family wedding.  Man do I lose fitness and gain weight fast at this age!  She later told me that she set her pace by the rhythm of my heavy breathing.  When I got loud, she slowed down.  What a distinction.  She set a steady, slow gait, one foot after the other, and before we knew it we had passed the site of Calorie’s airlift, and were again on top of 11,760 foot Kearsarge Pass, looking into the heart of the High Sierra.

It was several miles to regain the JMT/PCT near Charlotte Lake, all of it on and off trail as we lost and found our way, repeatedly in the snowy woods.  Once out of the forest, the trail didn’t matter as we followed the terrain over vast fields of snow in the general direction of the next pass.  The wind was howling on Kearsarge, keeping the snow firm, and we made good time once we had a straight shot of snow on our way to Glen Pass.  Crampons and ice axes took us up, and from the top the view opened onto frozen, Rae Lakes.

These lakes are some of the most idyllic in the Sierra, and are famous with both fishermen and hikers.  Cradled in the laps of Black Mountain, Diamond Peak, and Fin Dome, they were scraped out of the living granite by the last glacier to inhabit this canyon.  In these High Sierra bowels, cirques and valleys, you can feel the weight of ice that gouged the landscape into being, and Muir’s intuitive understanding of glaciation becomes clear.  This scenery was not created by liquid water or earthquake, but by tectonic uplift, and the down stroke of an icy rasp, a thousand feet thick.  From the vantage point of the pass, you can feel the forces of world creation.

The Southern face of each pass we climbed was snowy, but seemed almost melted out in comparison to the North face we had to descend.  When we could safely glissade, this was a joy, just so much fun for a bunch of adults reveling in third grade behavior.  But when we had to walk down, it was dangerous.  Calorie’s mishap on just such a face had nearly cost him his life.  We knew we had to stay focused.  

The South face of Glenn Pass was a long, steep snow slope, down to the Rae Lakes Basin, and we could see a thin line of trail, descending the traverse.  It was always nice to have had someone else cut the first steps in these conditions.  A long way down the trail were two figures slowly coming up this track.  Really slowly, and then I realized I was only seeing their upper half.  They weren’t post holing up to their waists as I first suspected, they were on their knees crawling up the incline with great sticks in their hands.  We watched for quite a while as we waited for our own party to summit from the South, and they doggedly kept crawling up that track, like two penitents on their way to Mass.

We began our descent and stepping out and around them we could see they had no crampons, ice axes or hiking poles, and were each jamming a large branch into the snow to self belay, as they inched upward.  We learned that they were just out for a weeks backpack trip, and had no snow gear.  They asked about the conditions ahead, and we warned them of the continuous snow, wished them well, and continued on our way.  I couldn’t believe they kept going, on their knees, it was surreal.

While walking around the first of the Rae Lakes later that afternoon, I was surprised by a great roar and crash, and glanced across the lake as a boulder, bigger than a house, huge, just toppled over for no apparent reason and careened across the fisherman’s trail, finding a new place to be just on the edge of the lake.  Had someone been fishing, or hiking there at that moment, they would have been history.  That boulder wouldn’t have made the distinction between the trees and bugs that got smashed, and me.  So maybe a bit of penitence, a sense of my place in this impersonal, holy wilderness, was good to have.  I wasn’t ready to crawl just yet, but after the accident on Kearsarge, and the prospect of more snow for weeks, a bit of humility was probably OK. 

We camped near central Rae Lake on dirt, danced our dirt dance of joy at being off snow, and prepared for the summiting of Pinchot Pass the next day.  After that was Mather, the most difficult pass on the JMT/PCT in early season.  We’d heard a lot of stories about this one.  It wasn’t the highest, just the worst.

"In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks." — John Muir