John Muir Trail

Happy to report that I summited 14,505-foot Mt. Whitney August 21, capping off a 208-mile hike of California’s John Muir Trail.

The JMT, which starts in Yosemite National Park and ends atop Whitney, was one of my most challenging backpacking expeditions ever, requiring more than 40,000 feet of climbing over 22 days. But the spectacular views along the trail were always more than reward enough for the effort.

One of the trail’s biggest challenges for a lifetime sea level resident like me was the elevation. Fortunately, I was able to acclimate before the hike during a three-day camping/fishing trip with my brother in Mammoth Lakes CA. The center of this mountain resort town is 7,800 feet above sea level, and the surrounding areas are higher.

Also fortunately for me, I scored a permit to hike the trail southbound from Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows. This enabled me to work my way up more gradually through some of the trail’s higher passes—including Muir, 11,955 feet above sea level; Mather, 12,068; Pinchot, 12,090; Glen, 11,926; and Forester, 13,153.

By the time I reached Whitney, its elevation was really not a problem.

One of my bigger blunders was to bring fishing gear. As it turned out, I was too tired to fish after hiking, and so I shipped the gear home during one of my resupply stops.

The closest I came to disaster was almost stepping on a timber rattler, which was apparently napping in the trail. I didn’t see it. Fortunately, the tapping of my trekking poles awakened the surly beast, which rattled and struck repeatedly in my direction but moved off the trail.

One of the more interesting people I met on the trail was Chris Haaland, an engineer whose company—Canyon Bridge Co.—was replacing a critical trail bridge across the South Fork of the San Joaquin River. The original bridge was severely damaged during the heavy snowfalls of 2023. By the time I passed by in August, Haaland and his crew had installed a temporary suspension bridge across the river, and the permanent bridge was being prefabricated in Bishop.

Haaland hoped the permanent bridge could be installed by early September, depending on the availabilty of a helicopter large enough to transport it.

Haaland

Two of the nicest people I met were Craig and Kathy, a father/daughter team that was preparing to summit Whitney. My tent was designed to be set up with two trekking poles, and I broke one of my poles on Whitney. They loaned me one of theirs for my last night on the trail.

Craig and Kathy

The most impressive duo I met during my adventure were Tom and Crazy Jack. Tom gave me a ride from Whitney Portal to my hotel, the historic Dow Villa, in Lone Pine. Both regularly vacation in the Whitney area. Tom says he has climbed Whitney 25 times, often via the Mountaineer’s route. Crazy Jack, who lives in San Diego, says he has done 212 ascents. On some occasions, according to Tom, Jack has done daily doubles from the portal. A single lap is 22 miles. So that means 44 miles in a 24-hour period. Tom told me Jack has also done laps starting from Lone Pine, which is 13 miles down the mountain from the Portal and is 4,023 feet above sea level. So one lap to the top of the mountain is 48 miles and climbs more than 10,000 feet.

Pretty amazing. I’m a slacker by comparison.

Tom and Crazy Jack

 

Traffic jam on Mather pass

Llama express

Via de la Plata

Early start for Laza

While hiking Spain’s 624-mile Via de la Plata pilgrimage route this spring, I loved visiting with other peregrinos and exploring the remote landscapes, medieval cities and Roman ruins along the way.

But if you are tempted to try this path yourself, be forewarned: It’s more challenging than the three other more popular caminos I’ve sampled—the Frances, the Norte and the Primitivo.

Indeed, I would describe the Via more as a quest than a long hike, requiring what my Finnish friends call sisu—the never-say-die, stoic determination that the Finns proudly say describes their national character.

Part of the reason that the Via is harder than many of Spain’s other caminos is it’s longer. The Camino Frances, Spain’s most popular peregrino route, by way of comparison, is more than 100 miles shorter.

The Via, which links Sevilla in the south to Santiago de Compostela in the north, also has fewer services on it than the other more-popular caminos, requiring pilgrims to carry more of their own food and water. The scarcity of services also requires pilgrims to hike farther between resupply points and the albergues or other places to sleep for the night.

Due to these features, relatively few pilgrims attempt the Via route, and the resulting lack of potential companions is a turnoff for some.

Santiponce

In addition, because the Via follows a less-traveled path, English speakers are harder to find on this route than on other caminos I’ve hiked.

But for me, the remoteness and unpopularity of the Via were positives. Although I’m not antisocial, I prefer to hike solo at my own pace. Besides, I often found plenty of company, including an English speaker or two, at the albergues I checked into in the evenings.

Among the things I loved about this ancient Roman trade route were the shadeless, barren landscapes that characterized much of it.

I also enjoyed exploring the beautiful Catholic churches along the way.

During a torrential rainstorm, I was the only visitor inside Zamora’s magnificent cathedral for an hour one morning, and I was moved by the experience, as a huge, 16th century Flemish tapestry hanging from the ceiling fluttered beside me.

Zamora cathedral

I also thought the 10th Century Romanesque church in Santa Marta de Tera was amazing. There, at 8 am on the spring and autumn equinoxes, sunlight shining through an oculus in the stone wall behind the altar illuminates a stone carving of what I was told was a martyred saint being carried to heaven by angels.

The rear exterior wall of the church also includes a stone carving of what is said to be the first depiction of Saint James, or Santiago, in Europe.

The Roman ruins in Santiponce, Caparra and Merida were simply awesome. I walked an extra 10 miles around Merida one afternoon and into the evening, just sightseeing. I also loved the castles and walled cities, and particularly those in Puebla de Sanabria.

In one of the odder coincidences of this trip, I ran into David Landis, a Facebook friend I had never met in person before, in a small bar in Campobecerros, a dusty little town in the middle of Spain’s remote, shadeless outback.

I was drinking an Aquarius (similar to Gatorade) con hielo (with ice)in the bar when David walked in, his short-billed cap identifying him as a cyclist. He ordered a burger and joined me at my table.

It was not until he told me he was from Harrisonburg VA, 120 miles west of my Virginia hometown, that I recognized him from his Facebook photo. I had been following him on Facebook because he and his wife publish camino guidebooks and he had developed a trans-Virginia gravel cycling route I was interested in.

Turned out that, while I was hiking the Via, he had been riding his bike north from Morroco and just happened to stop at this little Campobecerros bar while I was also there. What are the chances? Not sure how you would even begin to calculate the odds of this meeting happening.

Landis

One of the attractions to hiking Spain’s caminos for me is its affordability.

The pilgrim-only public albergues I usually stayed in this year, which offered a bunk and a shower and maybe access to a communal kitchen, ranged in price from €3 to €15 per night. The menu del dias served by many restaurants along the caminos—three-course meals that generally included a starter, entree, dessert, bread, wine and/or water—cost anywhere from about €10 to €15 (or a bit more in the larger cities). 

Among my favorite albergues this year were the Albergue de Peregrinos in Fontanillas de Castro, the Albergue de Castilblanco de los Arroyos and the Albergue Casa Leiras 1866 in Dornelas.

Southern Spain gets too hot to hike safely in the summer. So spring and fall are the go times on the Via.

I ate the whole thing

While I was walking between March 13 and April 24, the temperatures ranged from the low 30s in the mornings to the 80s in the afternoons. So fortunately I was carrying warmer layers for the mornings, including gloves (and a sleeping bag for the often-unheated albergues at night)and a broad-brimmed hat for the afternoons.

Alas, with my March start, I got caught in the tail end of southern Spain’s rainy season. In the early going, it rained off and on for more than a week, flooding parts of the trail and turning other sections into muddy quagmires.

At times, the trail conditions were so bad that I had to walk paved highways to get around the arroyos in the bottomlands and the worst of it.

Wading one crossing

Though English speakers were harder for me to find on the Via than on the more popular routes I’ve hiked, I was able to communicate adequately with my rudimentary Spanish. Other pilgrims who spoke little or no Spanish seemed to get along fine relying on the Spanish-translation apps on their phones.

During the trek, I took one rest day, in Zamora.

The farthest I hiked in one day was 23.6 miles, between Fontanillos de Castro and Tabara, according to my iPhone app.

One of the most exhausting sections for me was the 59.3 miles over three days between Puebla de Sanbria and Laza.

Relying on the route’s official mileage as the measure, I hiked an average of 15.3 miles per day.

In the Aesop’s fable about the race between the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise wins by proceeding slowly but surely. And the game plan I have used to complete all of my caminos thus far is to emulate the tortoise.

A lot of the hares—the overly ambitious folks who try to hike too far too quickly too early in the going—seem to end up dropping out altogether or taking taxis or the buses between stages due to injuries.

Blisters and other foot and leg injuries seem to be key problems that sideline them.

I had zero health issues on the Via, hiking mostly in my usual Chaco sandals. Butfor this camino, I alternated between the sandals and a pair of Altra Lone Peak running shoes, which offered more protection on the muddy trails and on the cold,rainy days.

This one was too deep to cross so we turned back

 

 

Santiago

Last supper on the trail

Juha's blisters

Juha has sisu

Gerard

Elizabeth

Pilgrim's blessing from Padre Blas

Dagmar

Roman arch at Caparra

Zamora castle

Merida aqueduct

Merida amphitheater

Merida's Temple of Diana

Colorado Trail

Snowy morning at Baldy Lake

After 353.1 miles, more than 65,000 feet of climbing, and a week of hard frosts, hail, sleet and even a bit of snow on the Colorado Trail, I had had enough.

I called an audible and headed back into civilization on Tuesday 9/19, after a particularly memorable 21-mile trek that took me up through the 12,611-foot pass below San Luis Peak, then sent me in a mad dash down the other side of the mountain and up again through the 12,383-foot continental divide in a largely unsuccessful effort to avoid a series of icy thunderstorms.

I originally had been toying with the idea of hoofing it the whole 28 miles down the mountain to the silver-mining town of Creede that night. But I didn’t want to deplete my headlamp battery in the dark, and I was cold and wet and concerned that I was flirting with hypothermia. So I ended up pitching an emergency trailside bivouac to escape some of the worst of the evening’s final storm.

Hard frost

Too much winter had arrived too soon for me. 

The mother of all my mistakes on the trail was seriously underestimating how hard the route would be for me.

Where I had planned to hike 20 miles in a day, I often could only manage half of that or, on one particularly enlightening occasion, a total of six miles.

As a lifelong sea-level resident, the trail’s elevation was a major challenge for me. During the first two weeks of my adventure, I often had to rest after as few as 25 paces at the higher elevations, to let my fluttering, oxygen-starved heart recover before it exploded. Over many of the uphill sections, I was lucky to average one mph. It wasn’t until Day 15 that I started feeling reasonably comfortable hiking at 11,000 feet.

Seriously frozen zipper

I also often found some of the trail’s steeper downhill sections to be almost as difficult and slow-going as the uphill ones. Many of the descents were boobytrapped with loose rocks and slippery, Grape-Nuts-sized granite gravel. Much of the trail surface has been tilled by years of foot, equestrian and mountain bike traffic. My trekking poles saved me many times as my feet regularly slid out from under me.

The harsh reality was that the distance I could travel in a day was inversely proportional to the trail’s elevation and to how steep it was. And much of the trail is elevated and steep, yo-yoing between 9,000 to up to more than 13,000 feet above sea level.

 Bear Grylls answer to frozen shoes

 One of the key consequences of overestimating my hiking prowess was that the trek was taking a lot more time to do than I had anticipated. I also ran short of food between resupply points on several occasions. There was enough of a calorie deficit that I lost 15 pounds during my trek.

Another more serious blunder I made was underestimating how cold it might get on the trail. It was almost 100 degrees on August 17, the day I started my SOBO hike in a Denver suburb.

But during the final days of my trek in mid-September, the nighttime temperatures regularly dropped below freezing, so that my tent was regularly sheathed in ice in the mornings. I wasn’t really equipped to cope with this sort of cold. At very least, I should had a warmer puffy jacket. In retrospect, I would have had a lot nicer weather window if I had started the hike at the beginning of August instead of the middle of the month.

One smart move I made was to trade my Chaco sandals for a pair of trail runners in Salida. I walked the first 253 miles of the trail to the town in the sandals (thus the trail name Chacoman) but decided to switch to the shoes after learning that it had already begun snowing at higher elevations.

Another smart move was to buy a serious Gore-Tex raincoat during a rest day in Frisco. I donated the paper-like Frogg Toggs raincoat I had been using previously to the hiker box at my motel. I decided to upgrade after a firehose-like torrential downpour flooded my campsite one night. Serious storms require serious rain-gear. I ended up wearing the Gore-Tex raincoat during most of rest of days of my hike. It not only kept out the wet but helped keep me warm.

Carrie, Tulsa, was borderline hypothermic but declined help

One of my dumber moves, considering how much precipitation there was during the final days of my trek, was forgetting to bring my rain kilt. Cold, wet legs and feet are no fun.

My glove liner/shells were very handy, though, so to speak. So kudos to me for remembering to bring those.

After my icy, mostly sleepless night on the slanted lumpy side of the mountain, I was exhausted when I finally arrived in Creede the following day.

As I checked into the Creede Hotel on that sunny afternoon, I knew I had taken this path as far as I was going to take it, at least for this year.

Saddle below San Luis Peak

But I was glad I had been able to add the 353.1 miles of this trail to my catalog of bucket-list adventures.

This was my first real backpacking adventure in more than 30 years, where I carried my water, all of my camping gear and up to eight days of food at one time (maybe 40 pounds total), and I learned from the experience.

One of my key takeaways was that for a high-altitude route like this it would have been better to have budgeted time to get acclimated before I started hiking. That would have saved me a lot of on-the-trail grief.

Trailside bivouac

The next time around, I also think I would try to do a better job of minimizing the weight of my pack.

While climbing up to 1,000 feet per mile, I could feel every ounce on my back and shoulders. Some of the stuff in my pack I never used. I should have left it at home. In the future, I don’t want to carry more than I absolutely have to.

My most picturesque campsite

New storm approaches over Continental Divide

Moose with calf ahead