John Muir Trail Day 23: She Said Don’t Let My Thorns Hit Yr Ass (mile 158.2/211 JMT + 10.5 TPT)

(The post title is a Blink-182 reference, pals)

I had only a mile or so left of JMT before cutting out on the Taboose Pass Trail. It was uphill, but non-brutally so. I chatted with another lady hiker on the way up, then said “oh this is my turn”. There was another missing-person sign for a winter traveller, then an east-turning, fainter trail signed for the Taboose Pass. I touched the last tree I’d pass on the JMT, said goodbye, and headed off perpendicularly. 

It was an easy climb to the Taboose Pass, the surrounding cliffs sunnier and holding less snow. Rust colours in the rock, and patches of bright red and yellow alpine vegetation. At the pass (a mere 11,417 feet of elevation), there was snow and pools and a rust-and-black jumble of rock pillars that looked like a more exciting Devil’s Postpile.

I met two Euro-accented hikers on my way up and over the pass. The first advised me that the Taboose Pass Trail was “not the best choice” for cutting east off the JMT and getting to town. It was lightly used; there were few cars in the trailhead, he didn’t think I’d get a ride on the holiday weekend. “I didn’t feel I had any other choices – I’m also out of food” I said. I remembered the time my Jetta started smoking and rattling in the mountain pass near home – I’d white-knuckled down to town thinking it better to break down in cell signal than up top. The engine, power and brakes all cut as I hit the intersection by the golf course, handbraked to a stop. A white knight in a pickup truck offered similarly helpful you-should-have-made-a-better-choice advice: “Well the problem here is that you’re driving a Volkswagen”. 

The second hiker I met up the Taboose Pass had spent two days hiking up from the trailhead – he seemed fit and strong so the legends of that trail’s strenuousness seemed to be true. He told me that there was no cell signal at the trailhead, but just up the hill from there you could get enough signal to make a call. He suggested calling a hiker shuttle from that hill. 

I ate my last lunch and started down the steep, crumbly-rubble trail. It was incredibly slow going, ankle-rolling and slipping on angles across screes of rock and boulder. Too close for comfort, the peaks that had shed the landsliding rubble towered over me. Giant Cadbury’s Flakes that would kill me. I was going hours per mile rather than miles per hour. I skidded on rubble a few times, I fell a couple of times but in lucky configurations that didn’t leave me properly injured. 

Dropping elevation, there was more vegetation. Thorny prickle-bushes encroached on and covered the trail – I halfheartedly swatted them away with hiking poles, but soon surrendered to having scratched lower legs. Then upper legs. Then I was pushing through bushes higher than my head, and the largest stinging nettles I’ve ever encountered. The Romans used to use them as fencing, allegedly. 

All the while, I could see the desert floor way down below me, my target for this slow, hard landing out of the sky. Its flatness, the sparse line of traffic on Highway 395 were miles distant and so different to the High Sierra landscapes where I’d become accustomed and acclimated. My ears popped and my ankles ached. The trail traversed steep landslides, switchbacked down to the creek. The descent was too steep and unstable for me to make good time – I’d naively thought the 7-odd miles from Taboose Pass down to the trailhead might take me only a couple of hours. 

To cross the creek I had to climb down a 6ft-high crumbling sandbank, hop across the rushing water on wet rocks, then figure out how to climb the corresponding 6ft crumbling sandbank on the other side (which had the additional bonus of an overhanging crumble shelf). I threw my hiking poles up onto the overhead trail. With hindsight, I could have thrown my pack up too before starting to climb, hands grasping for tree branches, toes balanced on gravel and sand. I got one knee up onto the trail, my backpack interacted with a tree branch and pushed me back down, one leg still overhanging the creek as my knee started to slip and slide on the grit. I kicked and pushed on sand and pulled on thin branches, squeezing my pack and my torso, then my legs, through the strangling branches to birth myself out on the south side of the creek and reunite with my poles. 

The trail this side mostly slabbed the edge of the hill, an inches-wide shelf going sharply down, down. I came to a mossy waterfall that crossed the trail; I drank deep cold water without any waiting for iodine pills to take effect. This was a lightly-used area. Down, down, another absent-minded grit slip and fall that added some abrasions to the area of my left haunch that suffered a laceration from a tree a couple of days ago. The trail wasn’t letting me go softly. 

Re-crossing the creek involved mincing down rocks in an active waterfall, overhung by more giant nettles. I told myself not to wince (and therefore slip and tumble to an embarrassing end) if stung. I plodded steadfastly down the slippery rocks, not deviating from my course when the nettles stung my entire left haunch. The creek crossing was a bunch of small branches/large twigs someone had laid across the white-water. I inched my way back to the north side of the creek, and continued descending. 

The trail here was a shelf on the brink of rubble, as we got into the last couple of hours of daylight. Clearly this was another area that had burned at some point in the past, charred trees finger-pointing at the sky.  But fear not, flora fans, all the thornybushes had already made a strong recovery, pushing onto the trail and pushing me towards the edge both physically and metaphorically. I saw lizards, lizards, birds of prey and the cliche wild-west prickle-discs of a real cactus. 

At dusk the switchbacks relaxed and the trail was a sandy-thorny ribbon through almost-flat desert. Half a mile from the trailhead I turned on my new phone and took it off aeroplane mode. A landslide of emails and messages and notifications, and enough signal to google-search and then call a couple of hiker shuttle drivers in the Eastern Sierra. I called two local gents – both were booked up for the next three days. They couldn’t help. I hung up more cheerfully than I felt, turned the phone off to save battery, and hiked down to the trailhead. There were a few, empty, pickup trucks and SUVs parked on the rocky strip of sand, some food stashed in the bear boxes with estimated return dates beyond Labor Day. I wanted to be in New York *on* Labor Day. 

There was a water source, a stream. I scouted around for a flat bit of land, and pitched my megamid behind a big sign warning about bears. In the morning I would do what one of the shuttle drivers had deemed “a terrible idea” – I would fill up on water, hike the 4 or 5 miles from the trailhead to the paved road, and then try to hitchhike on Highway 395 in any direction to a town, to transit, to an airport, then East. I would be out of food but well-stocked on desperate stubbornness. I could start before dawn to minimise the time spent in desert sun and valley heat.