Day 21 - One More hurdle

Friday, August 6, 2010
Stats for the day: started at Twin Island Lakes (9,662') at 7:30 - ended at Tarn below Blue Lake Pass (10,897') at 3:00. Total ascent 2757'. Total Descent 1857'. Total Distance 6.58 miles. 4 hrs 9 mins walking.

Another day in Paradise!! Started the day with a scramble along the cliffs on the shore of Twin Island Lake to it's outlet. I have been thinking about this outlet since the trip started as one of the crux points of the route. The outlet must be waded and is reportedly knee to waist deep. No big deal. The clincher? About 15 feet downstream from the crossing the stream tumbles down a labyrinth of rocks in a cascade. From the descriptions it sounded like a

couple of missteps and you would find yourself hurtling down the outlet to your death.

When we arrived at outlet the sun was just peeking over the mountains. What the descriptions did not tell was the part you ford was still part of the lake so the water is hardly moving, in other words, very little current.

We dropped our packs, stripped to our underwear, donned our Crocs and forded the stream without incident. It was slightly more than knee deep.

Now the route finding began again as we contoured around the end of the ridge, then began a gradual traversing ascent to a basin 350' above us. Along the route we were hailed by Marty, a lone SHR traveler we had met two weeks ago at Cirque Pass. We have been playing leap frog with him. We passed him during our Bishop resupply and the lightening storm at Muir Pass. He passed us at our layover day at Bear Lake. We passed him at Mono Creek when he went out for a resupply and today he passed us, hoping to reach Tuolumne before noon on Saturday before the post office closes so he can pick up his resupply. We won't be into Tuolumne until Monday morning when we meet Karen and Matt. We bid Marty safe traveling and let him get ahead of us far enough that we felt we had the route to ourselves again.

We traversed out of the bowl angling upward slightly, crossed a rock rib and then descended 400' into Bench Canyon, an utterly delightful U-shaped valley with meadows, trees, flowers everywhere and a meandering, singing stream at the bottom. We joyfully walked it's shores up canyon, taking pictures and enjoying the beauty.

We stopped for lunch at the upper end of the canyon, and put map and compass to work in locating Blue Lake and Blue Lake Pass, our two objectives on this portion of the route. We had been anticipating our having to turn west and scaling a slope, but we found the valley had already bent west and we needed to stay our course straight up the valley to reach both. The lake lay a mile off and 560' above us, the pass another half mile plus and 700' above the lake.

Upon reaching the lake we searched the headwall leading up to the pass and found an awesome series of ledges to follow in our climb to the pass. We gained the bottom of these ledges and had to do a bit of Class 4 climbing to get on them. Once on them they afforded delightful climbing.

Once at the pass we sat for half an hour enjoying the view, both west and east. Tried to get cell service to call home, but none available.

We descended the headwall across shattered stone and slabs, eventually reaching the tarn at it's base. Gary suggested we camp here rather than down at the Lyell Fork in the trees, mosquitoes and people and Andy and I readily agreed it was a grand idea. So we perched ourselves on the horizontal, smooth rock slabs for the night with a magnificent view down the Merced drainage with the Clark Range behind, watched the sun set and smiled ourselves to sleep. Only nine days left. May they pass slowly.