July 4th, 2022 by Jon
We woke up to the sound of cars on the highway about 150 feet away. We packed up pretty quickly and hit the trail right at 6:30. We crossed the road and pretty much immediately began our 8-mile climb up to the Sierra Buttes. The first half of the climb was shaded switchbacks in the forest. Back and forth, we went higher and higher. We really couldn’t see anything besides the trail in front of us, but the grade of the trail was easy enough that we slowly cruised our way up. I’m glad we decided to camp at the bottom because there was absolutely nothing in the way of camping for a very long time.
Eventually, we came out of the trees and found ourselves overlooking the valley below. The mountainside we were on lost its trees, leaving only bushes and loose rock. We hiked on the side of the mountain for a while before getting on a ledge to go even further along the side of the mountain. When I say ledge, I mean rock wall on one side, a 2-foot-wide trail, and then sheer thousand-foot drop-offs on the other side. Thankfully, it soon became less sheer, and instead, you would just shred your face on the rock that looked like a rockslide off to the edge.
We came across a stream that was essentially just water flowing down rock across the trail. To collect it, I climbed up 10 feet, set the lip of my water bag against the rock, and used my finger as a guide to pour the water into it. We stayed there for a while, snacking and filtering before pushing on. We had another 2.5 miles to the top, and the trail took us through a super pretty forest. The trees here have moss on them and a grand old quality that feels quite tranquil. We reached the top of the ridge, where there was an old dirt road, and admired the view of the bowl on the other side before descending into it.
We flew down the hill because we planned to stop at a primitive campground with pit toilets, potable water from a well, and picnic tables. Does that scream top-quality lunch spot or what? The trail down was quite rocky, and we basically did a controlled fall/run for almost the whole way. The trail switchbacked through the forest, and the trees here seemed much thinner and younger than those on the other side of the ridge. We hopped a creek at one point and had fun talking about some of the different hikers we have met on this trip, and got sad for the ones we miss who are off-trail now.
We got to the campsite at the bottom right at 11:00. We had gone 6.7 miles in 1 hour and 55 minutes, which I’m pretty sure is some of the fastest hiking I’ve done. That included the first third of it being uphill! Feeling rather proud of ourselves, we began eating our meal and enjoying the trail beer we had packed out from Sierra City for the 4th of July! Everyone else came in over the next 30 minutes, including Dirt Magnet, who we haven’t seen since Tuolomne! It’s always good to reconnect with hikers you haven’t seen in ages.
The picnic table was an amazing lunch spot, and we ended up staying for about an hour and a half because of how much fun we were having just chilling and chatting. Finally I decided more hiking should probably happen so reluctantly I got ready and the others began to as well. We left our little oasis and began the climb back out of the bowl and saw a bunch of day hikers headed back to the campground after spending time at the many lakes that are nearby. We got A LOT of questions about being thru-hikers and well-wishes when we told them we were walking to Canada. People were so genuine and nice.
Singsong and I hiked together for the rest of the day. We had broken it down at lunch into a few sections, each less than 5 miles long, and had breaks planned and everything. We walked through a rocky forest that undulated with the earth’s rises. We mostly walked down in the forest, but at times had a view of the lake basin below, where all those day hikers were hanging out. We later saw a map showing about 20 lakes of varying sizes within a fairly small area. It was pretty spectacular to get views of it from above as we hiked.
We took a short break by a small lake that was really more of a marshy pond, but it still felt good to take our packs off for a bit. After that, we climbed up the side of a pile of rocks and then back down through the forest, coming to a spring about 4 miles later. Biscuit and Dim Sun were there chatting, and we all decided to go another mile and a half instead of 3 and a half because we read there weren’t very many spots down at the next spring in 3.5 miles. We wanted a good site after last night’s spot, which was pretty uneven, and we were feeling pretty tired after all the uphill today. Tomorrow and the next day should have enough downhill, we can make up some of the mileage because we are trying to do the 75 miles to Quincy in 3 days.
Tomorrow, we will also start to enter the old Bear fire burn area, so we’re hoping it’s not totally devastated, but we will have to go look for ourselves.
That is a beautiful area!