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Manzanitas and Mayhem - The Sisters, Sweetwater Range, NV - CA · Off You Pop!

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: This is Off You Pop, the podcast for hikers and adventurers who want to be epic in just one day.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_04: Straddling the stark windswept border of California and Lyon County Nevada stands a mountain range that refuses to fit in.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: To the west lies the jagged granite wall of the Sierra Nevada.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_04: To the east the arid expanses of the Great Basin.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: Caught in the middle is the remote sweetwater range.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_04: While off-roaders and peak baggers often set their sights on the massive volcanic flat top of Mount Patterson, the northern skyline of this range is dominated by a fierce hidden triad of peaks.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: They are collectively known as the Three Sisters.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: They do not have a single manicured, heavily traffic beaten trail.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: They are independent isolated sky islands.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_04: To face them is to gaze upon a trio that scales up in brutal geometry.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: East Sister at ten thousand four hundred and four feet, Middle Sister at ten thousand eight hundred and fifty nine feet, and the high formidable crown of South Sister soaring to eleven thousand three hundred and thirty nine feet.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: Today we're telling the story of these specific peaks, a story carved by ancient molten magma, fueled by the desperation of gold rushes, and wrapped in the resilient embrace of a shrub that refuses to die, the Manzanita.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_04: This episode isn't about conquering peaks, it's about stepping into a landscape where geology, history, and solitude all braid together.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's about the sisters.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_04: Three volcanic summits that watch over Smith Valley, the ghost town triangle, and one of the least visited corners of Nevada.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_04: This is the Sweetwaters, and this is Off You Pop.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_04: To look across the Three Sisters is to look at a literal war of geology.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: They stand side by side, but they do not share the same birthright.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_04: If you climb East Sister, the highest independent mountain located entirely within Ly County, Nevada, or its neighbour Middle Sister, you're stepping on ancient Cretaceous granite.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_04: These are massive deep earth plutons pushed up to the sky over millions of years, offering long, gruelling boulder scrambles.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_04: Middle Sister is so unique that its northeast ridge actually holds the official county high point for Lyon County, but look just one mile south and the Earth completely rewrites itself.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: South Sister is entirely different.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_04: It was forged in fire, carved from what geologists call the Relief Peak Formation.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_04: South Sister is made of thick andesite brecchia.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_04: These are massive hardened remnants of Lahars, prehistoric violent volcanic debris flows that violently surge across the landscape towards the Miocene epoch.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_04: This geological split creates an unforgiving terrain.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_04: Hikers attempting a full cross-country traverse must battle a shifting landscape, ascending a crawling brush band on East Sister, tackling a raw 700-foot scree run down the north slope of Middle Sister, and navigating the isolated, cliff-ridden, long off-trail approach to South Sister.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_04: The peaks are highly technical, rarely travelled, and utterly untamed.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_04: As you ascend the lower canyons flanking the sisters, navigating the dirt tracks of Risu Canyon or Little Smith Valley, the desert sagebrush thins out.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_04: Suddenly you find yourself pushing through a dense tangled barrier of smooth, polished, dark reddish brown wood.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_04: This is the white leaf manzanita.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_04: While the alpine summits of the sisters break into barren wind scoured rock, the lower slopes belong to this master of drought survival.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_04: In the blistering heat of a Nevada summer, the Manzanita executes a brilliant tactical move.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: Its levery leaves tilt perfectly on edge.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_04: By standing vertically they avoid facing the sun head on, drastically reducing water loss and preventing evaporation.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_04: Like the volcanic ashfields under South Sister, the Manzanita thrives on chaos.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_04: Its dense resin heavy wood burns with a terrifying fierce heat, but it actually relies on wildfire to survive.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: Its seeds are locked away in thick, bony holes that can sit dormant in the soil for decades, waiting for the intense heat of a mountain fire to crack them open and trigger new life.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_04: The manzanita is the perfect botanical mirror to the sweetwater range, beautiful, hardened, and forged in fire.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_04: When you brave the final brutal cross country ridgeline of East Sister, scaling past ten thousand feet, the ecosystem completely shifts.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_04: Here, clinging to the wind blasted granitic cracks, stand the Great Basin bristlecomb pines.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_04: These are not mere trees, they're the oldest living single organisms on planet Earth.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_04: Up here on East Sister, the soil is alkaline, nutrients are scarce, and the winters are vicious.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yet the bristle comb thrives precisely because the environment is so hostile.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_04: They grow with excruciating slowness, sometimes adding just one hundredth of an inch of trunk girth per year.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_04: Their wood is so dense, resinous, and tightly packed that boring insects and rot cannot penetrate it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_04: Even when a branch dies, it doesn't decay.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_04: The mountain wind and flying ice simply sculpt and polish the exposed wood into smooth, ghostly white torsos.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_04: Think about the timeline here.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_04: As you stand on the summit of East Sister, you're looking at twisted, multicoloured wooden sentinels that may have been samplings when the pyramids of Giza were being built.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_04: They've spent millennia absorbing the violent thunder snows, the droughts and the lonely silence of the sweetwater borderlands.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_04: The Manzanita fights the mountain with rapid fire and resilient leaves, but the bristle cone conquers East Sister simply by standing still and outlasting time itself.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_04: Where nature leaves volcanic fractures and granitic plutons, humans inevitably look for fortunes.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: To understand why men threw their lives away trying to mine the jagged cracks of the three sisters, you have to look further north to the colossal silver strike that rewrote the West, the Comstock Load in Virginia City.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: The Comstock was an engine of pure greed.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: It demanded an impossible volume of resources, draining the surrounding mountains of their timber just to support the massive cave-prone underground square set systems of Virginia City.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: In the 1860s, the first lumbermen pushed into the Sweetwater Range to feed that monster, logging the dense pine canyons to shore up the silver tunnels up north.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_04: But you cannot keep a prospector from looking down.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_04: They noticed that the Sweetwaters shared the exact same structural signature, part of that grand Comstock Gold Silver Belt running along the spine of the range.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_04: By the late 1870s and early 1880s, the rush was on, the Patterson Mining District exploded into life right on the steep flanks of Mount Patterson and the sisters.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: Almost overnight the silence of the Alpine tundra was shadowed by the construction of high altitude ghost towns like Belfort, Star City, and Clinton.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_04: Belfort was built at a dizzying lungs on fire elevation of ten thousand two hundred and ten feet.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_04: And the miners who lived there?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_04: They were a different breed of rugged.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_04: To haul heavy stamp mills, iron boilers, and black powder up to these pigs, men had to forge roads through near impossible obstacles.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: Look no further than Sweetwater Canyon, a steep rock wall throat cutting into the heart of the range.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_04: Miners manually blasted wagon trails out of the sheer basalt and granite cliffs.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: They braved horrific grade angles just to drag timber and machinery into the clouds.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_04: Deep in these isolated valleys, you can still find the legendary Nugent Cabin, a hand hewn historic lodge structure that still features its original bunks and wood burning stove, a surviving monument to the bone chilling loneliness of the frontier.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_04: But the sweet waters do not tame easily.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_04: The district was a flash in the pan that played itself out with brutal swiftness.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_04: Between eighteen eighty and eighteen eighty four, the mines yielded roughly five hundred thousand in gold and silver, equivalent to over thirty million today.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_04: But the geology played a cruel trick.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_04: The veins were rich but they pinched out quickly, fracturing into the complex volcanic forts.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_04: Worse than the geology was the climate.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_04: Trapped at over 10,000 feet, the miners faced apocalyptic Sierra Nevada blizzards.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_04: Stories tell of winters so severe that camps were entirely cut off from the main supply post down in the Sweetwater Valley.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_04: For months on end, miners were forced to burn their own cabin furniture and eventually the structures of timbers of their mine shafts, just to keep from freezing to death in temperatures that dropped way below zero.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_04: By 1888, the boom was dead.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_04: The high transportation costs of hauling ore down the canyons, combined with the vanishing veins, broke the miners' wheels.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_04: The towns collapsed into ghosts, leaving the mountains to return to their natural state.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_04: Today the mines are silent, but the sisters remain fiercely independent.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_04: Because the range requires strenuous cross-country navigation, high clearance four-wheel drive vehicles, and pure mountain grip to access, it remains one of their most isolated spots on the border.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's a place where you can hike for nine hours straight and not see a single other soul.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_04: Only the breathtaking, clear views stretching towards Lake Tahoe and the White Mountains.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_04: The three sisters stand as silent witnesses.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_04: They watch the ancient Plutons rise, they watch the Miocene mudflows reshape the pigs, they watch the miners dig for gold, and they watch us now.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_04: They remind us that humans are just a brief whisper in the long epic lifespan of the mountains.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_04: Now let's get on the pop.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_04: So today we're gonna walk through the sweet water range and our trip across the Three Sisters.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_04: I'm joined today by a special guest who's Ben, who came and joined me on the hike.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a bit of a different experience.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: So Ben, just introduce yourself.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Ben Confer.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Been hiking for backpacking for about six years now, six and a half.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: A buddy took me right after COVID started to the JMT and and so met this guy, met met Philip on a midnight hike, Mount Rose.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: I got there a few minutes early from Mount Rose, I think, Philip.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you guys rolled up and I come walking up to your truck.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Say, who's this guy walking up?
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Are you here for the are you here for the T5?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, I'm here for Mount Rose at midnight.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta work in the morning.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: So um Yeah, that's how it started with us, man.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_04: So we were really pummed that somebody showed up for us trying to, you know, take on the Tahoe Fire Pigs challenge and somebody actually showed up uh like at midnight to take on like Mount Rose in the dark.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, I I was really grateful that Ben was there, sort of he was a great cheerleader for us and even agreed to meet us later, even though we sort of bailed on him a little bit because we failed.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: But it was uh it was really great to have your enthusiasm on the trail.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_04: I really wanted to go hiking with you again.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_04: And when I was thinking about doing the sweetwater range, I was aware, one, it's in the desert, and two, it's August, and three, it's super isolated.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_04: So I I love a solo hike, but once in a while I'm like, you know, I should probably take somebody with me.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_04: And I thought that was the sweetwaters.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_04: And just after your experience out there, do you do you agree with my decision that it's probably not the best thing to do solo?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I for sure I agree with that.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Although the the last two ended up being solo for me, right?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's true.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: We'll get into that.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: There was a couple scary, yeah, a couple scary moments, but yeah.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_04: So the sweet waters are range that sits on the border, the Sierra Nevadas and the Great Basin.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_04: So it's really in the desert.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_04: And that means you get the dry desert air, and it's really isolated.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_04: There are very few people hiking this mountain range, and so it's very rugged, there are no trails, the wildlife out there is real.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_04: And in the desert in the middle of August, you know it's gonna be hot.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_04: So I'd I'd been thinking about this hike for a while and decided this was a good weekend to do it.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_04: But I wanted to do all three sisters in order to do that.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_04: That means we're climbing three mountains over 10,000 feet.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_04: And it's about a 12-mile traverse.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_04: But if you make it a loop, you do it solo, you end up doing 18 miles.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_04: In the middle of August, I did not relish the idea of having to hike back through the valley in the heat of the afternoon after climbing you know three mountains over 10,000 feet.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_04: So Ben kindly agreed to come along and I sort of changed the plan a little.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_04: So we did a shuttle, so we did a point-to-point, and that really was the start of the day.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_04: So we met up in a town of Minden.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's one of the last towns before you go down into Smith Valley and down into the into the range.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: And it's about an hour, wouldn't you say?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_04: 45 minutes an hour to get from Minden, and you're just going through nothing.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it was dark, it was 4 30 in the morning when we started, you couldn't see, but afterwards when you're driving back out, you can tell you are in this big open desert valley with nothing around, basically.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I I had been on the PCT a lot in the Sierras, but I'd never turned.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm used to going south on 395 and then turning right, but this was south on 395 and turning left in the dark.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew we were going towards the desert.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_04: So it was it was definitely uh it was definitely different.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_04: So you sort of you come down into the valley and you you turn off the road, and basically you're on the trail.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_04: What we were planning to do was set up one car at the far south of the range and then drive back to the north of the range, start a hike back to the starting car.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_04: So we get down there, it's dark, we're in the in the in the sort of the dry player, and we we get off-road, and it's all right to begin with.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_04: It's pretty it's flat.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_04: You're you're going through the flat desert, it's a little bit rocky, there's you know a few little puddles here and there, but it's nothing much to talk about.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_04: But you're getting closer and closer to the mountains.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_04: And we'd arranged to go up Sweetwater Canyon and and leave the car there.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_04: So so we would be collecting Ben's car immediately after descending from South Sister.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_04: So we're trying to get as close to the ascent as possible.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember it's still dark, and we pull up, and I get to a barbed wire fence.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_04: I went, oh my god, we're still a couple of miles from the from the canyon and the drop-off point.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: And then I remembered it's really common in the Great Basin that farmers will use barbed wire to control the cattle, and what they'll do is they'll put a gate across to stop the cattle getting from one side to the other.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_04: And you you have to go out and basically unhook the fence drive through and then re-hook it back up again.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_04: So we had to do we had to do that to begin with.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_04: But initially I'm like, oh no, it's blocked off.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_04: And then I'm glad I remembered that that's the way things work in the in the desert here.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: So did you know, Philip, when you went through that gate, that that was we're allowed to do that?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's not private property.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Did you do research on that?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, most of the Great Basin and Range is BLM land.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_04: There's very there's not a lot of private land.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_04: And if you're an active landowner who has private land, you tend to put big signs saying it's private land.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_04: But I'd been uh I've been up north of the city in a very similar environment, desert, big plier, trying to get to this spot.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_04: And I came to a fence and I was with another buddy who lived in Nevada for a long time, and he knew, oh, you just have to unhook the fence and then hook it back up again.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_04: Otherwise, you think you're beating like this physical, physical barrier.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_04: So I remember we get through the fence, and I'm I'm driving in my Jeep, and you've got your long wheel-based truck, and suddenly you get to the base of the mountains, it does sort of a switch back on you down into the canyon.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_04: I thought this is gonna be a bit tight for Ben getting round.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_04: But the problem after that is it got real rugged once you're getting up the up the canyon.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_04: I started getting a little bit worried because I, you know, I got a Rubicon and it can handle a fair deal.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_04: I wasn't sure how you were coping back there with your truck.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I had asked you about about water, if there was any water up there.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, right after we go through the fence, before that switchback, there was that stream that was running like really well.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how you know.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've done enough summiting, walking up canyons to know when you get water when you get that m amount of water, it came it came from somewhere.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that amount of water means that there's a long canyon up ahead.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of lots of ascent, still snow at the top, right?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that was really cool to to know.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I got my water filter just in case I run out.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: We got we got water.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_04: So interestingly, I think that was the only place there was water, but it's true, right at the end of the hike.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, we I remember driving through and suddenly we have to go through the creek, and it's sort of a little sharp drop-off in a creek.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_04: I'm thinking, oh, hope Bam can can make it, he doesn't ground out.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_04: And I went through and I sort of was keeping an eye on you, following me in your truck and see that you made it through.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_04: And then it got real rocky and the brush started coming in.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm I'm chugging along thinking, at what point is this gonna be like too rugged and I should stop?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_04: And because it was single track and the bushes in, there's not anywhere to turn around, so I'm kind of committed until I can find a place where we can pull out and turn around.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm chugging along and suddenly going to this this like big muddy puddle and a big wave of dirty water comes over the top of the Jeep.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_04: Well, this is starting to get a little bit rugged, and uh I found the the spot where we eventually stopped.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_04: There's sort of a little glade and maybe a little campsite there and some pines.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_04: I thought, all right, this is enough.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_04: I've beaten Ben up enough.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_04: This is far enough.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was a perfect spot to park it.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so yeah, it was and it was just getting light, so it was pretty good timing.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_04: I remember we we got your stuff in my Jeep and then we headed back.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't uh for some reason it didn't feel quite so rugged going back down uh back down the track.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know why, just maybe it was because it was downhill and I'd already done it, so I'd I'd already mentally prepared for it.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: I know what you're saying, exactly, exactly.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: The second time, it doesn't take long to get used to a road.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of when you're venturing into the unknown, it kind of feels right, what's around every corner?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of hold your breath, but once you're on your way back, you already know.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I think your mind just kind of naturally takes takes a break.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: It wants to conserve energy, right?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so we went back out onto the onto the highway and then probably it must have been 10 miles back on the tarmac because I know that's how long the range roughly is.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_04: And then we're back on the back on the dirt again to go and find the you know the start of the trail.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_04: And I'd done a fair amount of research, and I just recall from the research that the way you're supposed to ascend East Sister to get up onto the ridge is you go behind the range, and then you ascend from the west side.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm looking for a road.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not looking for the Ricky mine road, which is the road we should have been on.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_04: I'm looking from my perspective at the mountains and trying to figure out which road I need to take to get up behind the mountains.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: And so that we ended up going past the mountains and then past another another little ridgeline, because there wasn't a road before that ridgeline.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_04: We went behind this ridgeline, went, oh look, here's a here's a canyon that seems to go up behind the sweet water at the sisters range.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_04: Let's go up there.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so we did.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_04: We started going up there, and suddenly I'm driving basically up a stream and thinking, is this is this even the road?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_04: It was pretty rugged.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_04: And I remember we got to a point where the the road kind of got a bit gnarly and a bit, you know, it sort of made a sharp descent down a mud, a mud bank, and that felt like that would probably be enough for your truck.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_04: And so this is where we're gonna stop and start the hike.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_04: And I know we got out and I said, We're gonna do it, and you started like stretching and stuff, and I'm just checking the map.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_04: I'm thinking, how do I get up up to the base of East Sister?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_04: And as I'm figuring it out on the map, I'm like, oh my god, this is wrong.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_04: In order for us to get to the start of the sisters, we're gonna have to climb over this massive ridge.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_04: It must have been a thousand feet to get up and over that.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: Ben's gonna kill me.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_04: We're gonna have a hell of a hike just to get to the sum of the and I took a closer look.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_04: You know, the issue was on the map perspective, I was using Google Maps to navigate there.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: And when we started the hike, I switched over to Gaia, which you know is much better for a hiking app, actually for off-roading as well.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_04: And it gave me a lot more detail and I could see where we were supposed to be and where we weren't.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, oh my god, I've gone too far.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_04: So I had to call you back in the car and we had to renavigate back to Ricky Mine.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_04: And even on the way back, I was trying to figure it out, you know, where we needed to go in.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_04: I couldn't see like Ricky Mine Road or wasn't clearly marked as a road on the trail.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm just trying to estimate the right road and get the lineup right.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_04: And we went down 22273.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_04: So I remembered it, Ben.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Very yes, you did.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly the that's the one.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_04: And it wasn't very gnarly, it was sort of in the in the in the in the pine cones, and we went back there and it kind of got a little sharp and gnarly, and we decided we were close enough.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's where we parked up and we began the trail.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_04: I'll tell you this, Ben, because I know you didn't do this, but I came back to the start of the trail and I found Ricky Mine Road, and we found Ricky Mine Road, and about 200 yards past where we started our ascent is the corrals that are mentioned in a lot of the hiking guides.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_04: So we needed to go one road over and then drive up to the corral, and that's where we should have started.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_04: So I think we added about 30 minutes of hiking because we had to bushwhack from one trail to the to Ricky Mine to get over.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_04: I remember we were having a debate about whether we can connect up to a ridge that we were hoping would connect to East Sister.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_04: Remember, we we started trying to climb the ridge, and then we decided it looks like we definitely have to dip down into that little canyon.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_04: And we just ate it basically.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_04: Went down into the canyon and lo and behold.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Which was the right decision.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it was the right decision because yeah, we went back into the into this little canyon, and there was Ricky Myan Canyon, and the Ricky Mine was on Gaia, it was sort of marked on there.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_04: Although I never saw it, and then we look back at the ridge, and the ridge just comes out into this dramatic outdrop with a dramatic like spree run below it.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: So that was a that was an interesting decision.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_04: So don't don't do that.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_04: Take a little bit more time and find find the Ricky Myan road.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_04: That's really where you want to go and go up to these corrals.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: You'll you'll see them as you're coming up there.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_04: The corrals are sort of these fences where they would keep livestock.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_04: Having hiked up into the canyon, you can't really drive much further than that anyway.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_04: The road just gets too too gnarly and too rocky.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but do not take what's the road.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: that we stopped at 66273 close 22273 22273 that's yeah not that one that's not the one you want to take no no absolutely not so these are the mile markers uh it's kind of a fun way to navigate those back roads right because if you oh sure and then if if you can identify where you're at based on those markers that that can be really helpful so and it was on the it was on the way back which was it was really important to me at the time so so we're standing now at the right place pretty much at the right starting point but then I've then it's gone out of my mind that I'm supposed to go behind East Sister to the west to make the ascent I'm thinking at this point how do I make the ascent of East Sister?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_04: I'd forgotten about the instruction to go behind it.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: And so we're looking up right and we're trying to navigate how do we go from this point.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_04: At this point we're on the road directly north of the range.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_04: So the range is right in front of us heading directly south which is the wrong way to go but keep listening and you'll find out why so we we we we pick a path right and it's really about this point the path of least resistance because there's a lot of shrub on that on that side of the mountain and it's a lot of manzanita.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_04: And so we're just trying to figure out the best way up and we can sort of see a lot of opening a lot of loose scree where there's not a not a bunch of bush that we're hoping we can pick our way through and so you took the lead and you took us up up the scree.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to describe that early that early part of of the ascent yeah through the manzanita right and we could see we could see 20 to 30 feet ahead at a time to to think that this was an acceptable route without having to walk through or over bushes.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess I kind of did take the lead I I didn't really intend to but that was the good yeah that was a good time man.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was steep right that was slow going one mile an hour walking I'm used to trails.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_04: You know I looked at the stats afterwards just for that first ascent and over one mile we did two thousand feet.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: That's how steep it was I mean that's that's super super steep.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_04: And it's this this matter of trying to zigzag your way up.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_04: So we're not even going straight up we are just trying to figure out how to get and pick our way through the brush and there's a fair amount of loose rock on it.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_04: So you're it's not super loose.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_04: It was fairly well consolidated at the bottom of that ascent but it's still loose and you've got to watch where you step in but just super super steep.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah actually as thank you for reminding me as we approached the mountain right as we approached East Sister you could see that there was a little bit of a scree run right where the bushes weren't and so you identified that from a distance and we ended up going up that exact route.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah yep and then up through up through the bushes and just kind of navigating our way.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_04: And I thought you know as we're getting higher and higher we start to see like the the top and you crushed my dreams and suggested it was a full summit.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_04: And I I also recognized it was likely a full summit based on looking at what altitude we were at I think we were a little under 9,000 feet.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_04: And then when we got to that point it was a little over 9,000 feet and I just didn't want to be crushed by a full summit.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_04: And in my mind when we got up there and summited over that crest there'll be an another similar like long slope went straight up to the top of the mountain because that's what it looked like from a distance right you couldn't you it's really interesting when you look at a mountain from a little bit of a distance you can't really tell the topography.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_04: So it almost invariably always looks like this straight up mountain but when you get into it's a whole different ball game.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_04: Oh it's layered yeah so you've gotten a little bit ahead of me and I and up to that full summit and I see you you don't attack it straight to get to the peak of it.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_04: You sort of go around the side of it and I thought well let me shortcut it and take the direct route but I'll tell you I was getting hot and I thought oh god I made a mistake now I'm just going up straight steep at it and I think you made the right decision to sort of sh make it a little bit more of a shallow ascent and go around the side of it.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_04: And at that point you were you were we were getting a little bit of the a distance between us and uh I got up to the summit and it was kind of blocky at that summit point.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_04: So it slowed me down a lot trying to pick my way through the rock.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_04: So you definitely made the right decision.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_04: And I get you to get there and you've uh you correctly identified we hit a false summit and then there's another false summit like right in front of us.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_04: You can't see the top of the mountain really at this point another false summit and you're sort of halfway up it already so I I I I broke for one minute just to get a bit of electro item I gotta keep Ben's Ben's found some energy he's chewed some gummy worms or something and he's off so I gotta keep up with Ben.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_04: So I climb up and I'm chasing you up that up that steep part of the mountain and I eventually make it up to the second fourth summit and then like the world opens up.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_04: Then you can see the top of of East Sister in the distance but it's in the distance and like what happened I thought it was like straight up all the way but between like that second fourth summit and and the true peak is this gnarly gnarly ridgeline.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't I didn't see that at all from the bottom of the mountain and it's I don't know what to expect because you know ridgeline can mean all sorts of things but there's no trail on here it's not like somebody's forged away across this this is completely wild completely exposed and you just got to make your way across and I see you you're up there way ahead everybody attacking it with some gusto and what did you feel like when you sort of made over made it over that full summit you're like oh my God I didn't realize it was going to be like this.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yep yep I just another layer right I think we even named the the uh the false summits yeah the first one after me the second one after you yeah that was uh Ben Peak and Philip Peak so watch out cartographers were gonna come and put our stamp on these four summits that's that's right that's right but Philip Peak was I tried to stay on like the ridge and walking I I think I showed you a picture of I had I had one foot my right foot was going off to the west and my left foot was going off to the east as I'm facing south there, right?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like right just a solid rock right on the crest.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Fun.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yeah so it's a lot of fun if you've got a head for heights and you're sure footed but I see these types of ridge all the time and I've seen people who are not experienced on them and it's it's scary watching them try to navigate.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_04: You see the fear on in their eyes and when they've got that fear it makes even more dangerous because they're being so tentative it it becomes dangerous for them.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm glad you were with me and that you got a little bit of a head for heights and a little bit of confidence a little bit of experience because if you were a little bit less experienced I would have been really worried about trying to take somebody across that ridgeline.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_04: I mean it wasn't like knife edge sort of Instagram worthy type almost semi-mountain climbing class five stuff but it was it was a solid class four in places for sure.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah it I mean it made me put my trekking poles in in my backpack right and just kind of make sure I had my hands available.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want my hands tied up.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah so I see you summiting along the ridgeline I think that's probably a smart move.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_04: If Ben's going there I'll follow Ben but I was dropping a bit behind you and as I'm coming across the ridge I notice there's a there's another little devil on the ridge that's making it even more difficult and that's the manzanita patches that are there.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_04: So you can't necessarily go straight along the the knife edge of the ridge you also have to navigate through this gnarly twisted like a solid but spiky manzanita you also have to figure out how to get around.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's not just where do I go on the ridge but how do I get through the brush I'm watching you a little bit to see how you'll navigate I and I see that the the ridge line sort of starts ascending and then it drops down to a saddle before the final ascent up to East Sister.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_04: And you can see the final ascent up to East Sister in the distance and it's like a a pretty prominent like almost like a cone structure.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_04: So it's another really steep sharp ascent that you have to go up to after you've navigated I guess a relatively flatter ridgeline.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_04: It certainly started to make its way up but then before that saddle it just drops off.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm starting to make my way and try and catch you catch up with you.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I think you know what I think Ben is is doing a good job on the ridge and he's getting a bit ahead of me but I can see that he's had to ascend and then descend back to that saddle what if I shortcut it and I'll just side hill the ridge so this is why I was so far behind you because I decided to side heel the ridge like maybe like like a quarter of the way across it I thought I saw a pathway where I could like keep the same like elevation and like shortcut it and maybe catch up catch up with you a little bit.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_04: So I start following what I think is a trail uh to side hill part of that gnarly ridge and what happens on that gnarly ridge is you get these segments that are these big blocky loose rocks that are kind of um like almost scree almost scree like run but they're much bigger but they're all very loose.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_04: I know if you've been on that really like large size rocks that are very unstable if you've been across that before not great.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_04: I always get this picture I don't know many years ago there was a guy who got his arm stuck in a boulder and he had to soar on his own arm.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yep I've seen that one too yeah I'm okay on it I'm feeling pretty steady it's some of it's shifting a little bit but it's not shifting too much.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm always cognizant about getting my ankle stuck in a giant rock or something.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_04: But then every now and then like from the ridgeline there's this big spine of rock that's sticking out like impeding my my travel and when I get to that that rib almost I have to rock climb around the rib to continue the side hilling.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_04: So the first one I get to it and I see this little sharp gully with a little climb.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_04: So I climb up the gully and there's like a maybe like a 10 foot wall where I'm like vertical rock climbing over and over the other side oh my god what have I got myself into now I get on the other side and then there's this another one of these real blocky scree runs and I see another one of these ribs and I kind of descend a little bit because I'm like oh it's kind of gnarly I think I see a way through and I find myself on this little ledge with a bit of a drop off but not kill you drop off but yeah hurt you drop off.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm following this ledge and then I got a rock climb around this other gnarly little spine and I get into another gully and I in this other gully it's not there's a there's some big rocky stuff but I get into a little a little gully that goes back up to the ridge and there's some flowers in it and the leaf isn't so loose.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_04: I think forget this I'm gonna get back onto the top of the ridge I made a terrible mistake so I slogg my way back up to the ridge line and then carried along the the way that you went just navigating along the top of the ridge so don't don't side hill some of this stuff is not always a good idea.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I I like how you called it the spine that that that that is a good description of if you don't side hill it right if you kind of stay on the spine or right on the crest I mean it it feels like the rocks are more stable in that area.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because it makes sense on on each side you've got the loose rocks that have fallen over time.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah that's sort of the solid remnant core of that spine is like right on the you know right on the top and everything else below it is sort of a bit loose it's broken off and the gravity's taken it down.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_04: The only trouble with saying staying on a spine I've found sometimes and unfortunately not on that that particular ridgeline is sometimes there'll be a big gap.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_04: And so you're going along the spine and there's suddenly a big gap between you and the rest of the spine it's like a big drop off it can be very dramatic.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_04: You can get you can get yourself caught up in like a couple of hundred feet drop off before you carry on to the spine in which case then you have to downclimb get around the drop off and then climb back up to the spine against you almost end up side healing anyway but fortunately on this ridge it was continuous which was great.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like so I've got on X backcountry and it's it's a 3D topography and and everything you can really zoom in and move around.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you can plot out your route really well so that you don't come across to place where you have to do some really weird descent or something.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_04: But like you say like you point out everything's it's always different once you get up there once you actually have boots on the ground right absolutely and some of those like renderings will don't don't get down to the level of detail of your human steps so they're not always accurate.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_04: So anyway I I I get back off the ridge and then you're on a saddle and but there's a fair amount of manzanities that have to pick your way through on that saddle and interestingly I kind of knew it once I got on that saddle if you look to the west out towards the Sierras back down into the valley you can see this sort of fairly smooth scree covered like descent that looks really nice and it goes down into this field and it connects back to Ricky Mine Road.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: So you know what we should have done is just follow the road come up behind the mountain and then come up this relatively easy to navigate sort of scree run that would have taken us up to that saddle it was fairly free.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_04: There was no manzanita on it would have been so much easier to go that way and start the proper way.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_04: So if you come here park at the corral follow the road up about a mile and a half two miles to come back behind the mountain and then you'll see the way up to the saddle to get up to East to do what we just did which was 2,000 feet in one mile then across a gnarly spine just to get to the that that saddle that was not the way to go yeah if you follow Ricky Mine Road you'll you'll gain another thousand feet altogether when I got when I came back I'll talk about that in a minute when I got back to that to the road coming down that street I think it was about 8500 when I got there 8500 of easy peasy not not where we started which was probably uh I would say about six and a half seven it was seven one because I remember you looking at your watch seven one forty it was seven one and we went up to like eight and a half nine in like less than a mile of some ridiculous terrain.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_04: We did it the hard way indeed we did it the hard way anyway so I get to the bottom I get across the saddle and I'm looking up at this really steep very loose terrain which is now like a forest right it's thin thinned out but there's a lot of pine there I just see you at the top you're you're making it just to the top and I've just started at the bottom I started up that ascent and I gotta say I was feeling a bit beat down after the the ridge and that ascent I was kind of moving pretty slow and that that last little bit is kind of tricky because it's really loose.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Did you find that going up at how loose it was that last ascent is just about a half mile over 500 feet elevation gain.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I mean it was really really loose.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah I think I got about halfway up and I found myself on my hands and knees for a little bit just trying to make sure I didn't slip back down the mountain.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah it was that steep absolutely yeah and so yeah I pop up and finally make it after you've taken a nap and a shower and you're sitting up there in your chair and I finally made it I get a little bit of a cramp in my leg.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_04: And so a beautiful view like once you get to that top it just get a complete 360 of the Sierras and then this the rest of the sweet water is just laid out before you the challenge ahead with middle sister and south sister and even I'm looking at my watch and we're like three and a half hours and we've done three and a half miles and covered 3500 feet in elevation and in when I planned the hike I thought it's 12 miles it's probably going to take us like five hours like using my my hiking brain forgetting entirely just how rugged this terrain was and how completely off trail it was and uh you you you caught it you said you know typically on this type of terrain I'm going at one mile an hour and that's what pretty much what we what we were doing.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_04: And so I I knew there was 12 miles to go and unfortunately I had a I'd planned this so I'd be back at like three, four in the afternoon thinking I had like five, six hours of hiking and I could I knew immediately that at that point that I if I carried on on a hike it would be a problem and I would be home very, very late.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_04: And you can tell me about that in a minute so you know we talked about it right I I didn't want to abandon you on the mountain.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_04: It's really rugged and challenging terrain but you feel pretty excited about continuing.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_04: So tell me about that decision.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was I think you saw it on my face you called it right I asked you I said well if we you know how how are we going to get to my truck?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And by this point, right, we weren't even halfway so I was thinking we were going to continue to my truck and you said no I'm just gonna I'm gonna turn around go back to my Jeep.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_04: And that's when I looked off in the distance and I said well that's a classic that the mountains are calling and I must go.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's it that's it yeah I'm I'm here right it was what 10 30 yeah yeah was was it 10 30 eleven?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah 10 30 eleven ish late morning.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah yeah so I mean I was thinking initially okay I'm gonna tackle a middle sister let's see how long it takes me to get there and then I'll kind of like reevaluate and and try to try to guess how long it'll take me to get to South Sister.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know kind of had an estimate I was thinking I'd you know at least get to my truck by eight so yeah just kind of a time evaluation water.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_04: Well you know that's a good thing to talk about you know you sort of fooled people by saying there was a a creek there is a creek by your truck but there's no other water on this trail whatsoever.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: That's the only the only water is at the end.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: So you know and it was a hot day.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_04: Let's not kid ourselves it was going to be like high eighties low 90s and we are in the desert so it's already dry and we're at altitude which then adds to the the dehydration potential.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_04: And so yeah I recognized that you were excited about finishing this and pretty committed and so I shared some some water to make sure you had a little bit more to get through the through the rest of the hike.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_04: We made a emergency contact plans like I would let Ben know when I got back back to civilization so he knew that I was safe and then once he'd finished he'd let me know that he was safe and if not I'd be driving back out there to come find her basically or vice versa.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_04: So uh what we weren't wasn't completely foolhardy we weren't making rash decisions we were making rational decisions at the time about our safety um you we we had a a a pretty good lengthy discussion about the risks of continuing and doing it solo and yeah I I had a high degree of confidence in your ability we'd already been up and crossed that really gnarly ridgeline and you've done it fairly confidently and competently and I'm never going to stop anybody doing what they want to do and living their best life and uh you know you've done GMT and other stuff so you're you're pretty competent.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_04: If if you'd just told me this is my first hike out in five years and you were done I would have made you get off the mountain.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not gonna have you to that gnarliness.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah yeah it's true it's true I would have been heading back to the Jeep.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_04: Oh for sure.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_04: So I'll I'll just finish up my my part of the hike because basically I just did East Sister and then then bailed a bit.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_04: So what I did like when I left you is just took a f a a little bit of time enjoying the summit since I made it up there and then started to make my descent.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_04: So went back down the the the steep scree try not to fall on my butt basically and got back to that saddle again and then I went back the traditional way that we should have done.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_04: So I went down that scree run and it was really open.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_04: So there wasn't a lot of foliage there was none of that manzanita anymore.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_04: It was just loose gravel for the top bit it was a really nice scree run because it was that sort of loose small grain pear ball that you could kind of sink into.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_04: So it was quite a lot of fun coming off the first I'd say the first two thirds of it is a ri is a real fun little scree run you could sort of enjoy going down.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_04: But then as you're getting closer you're getting into the desert scrub so low sage brush yeah and quite often the best way to get through that is to find some animal tracks.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_04: Well there weren't any animal tracks so you're just slogging through this like ankle ankle high like different bits of shrubs and flowers and things which are just like sapping the life out of you a little bit as you're trying to walk through it and navigate through it all.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_04: But eventually I made it down and I made it to back to the road back to the canyon and started slogging my way down the canyon.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_04: The problem was I guess it was about middayish by the time I made it back down there.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's getting hot.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_04: It's in the high 80s so I'm really starting to feel the heat of the desert making my way on my own back down the canyon and I always get this horrible feeling about going into canyons like this is mountain lion territory and they're gonna get me I don't I always it's just the enclosure of the canyon you know the walls closing around you but so I'm making my way down it's fairly obvious like nobody's walked this way in in in a while there's no footprints or anything but I can see some cattle prints on the road so I think they drive the cattle up to these high plains uh to graze and uh I found another one of the barbed wire fences I had to unhook them or re-hook that but I I can see I'm losing altitude when I hit the road at the top I was at 8500 I knew where we started was 7100 so I knew there's going to be a fair amount of descent but it's over a couple of miles so it it was never that steep it was fairly gentle.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_04: It's a a wide open uh trail it would have been a beautiful ascent if we'd gone that way it'd have been nice and easy we would have been not taxed at all before we started the real game.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_04: We would have been on an actual trail imagine that so eventually I get back to the point where we've where we started the ascent and I thought I'm not gonna like hack my way along the ridgeline again where we came from let me go a little bit further.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_04: And so I went like three four hundred yards down and there's the corral I'm like here's the corral and I just walk a little bit past it.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_04: I thought now I've got a bushwhack back to my car and try and hit 22273 after bushwhacking and my decision point came became pretty easy because as I'm walking down the trail there's a bunch of cows there and there's this big black ball looking at me looking kind of grumpy in the middle of the road I thought yeah I think I'll start bushwhacking here and because the day had dragged on and I was getting hot and like dehydrated and I was running out of water I start bushwhacking through and it's that feeling you get when you're coming towards the end of the trail where it just seems to take forever.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_04: You know it's never end the the closer you The further away it is, and I'm bushwhacking.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: I gotta try and find that road, the 22273.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_04: And you remember when we came up it, it sort of dissipated into nothing.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm trying to navigate to make sure I hit that road and hit that road before the car so I don't like miss my car.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_04: But eventually I hit the road, but it was kind of touch and go for a while.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_04: I feel felt like, oh god, I'm lost, I'm lost in the bush, and I gotta I gotta find the road.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_04: I did find the road, I'm walking down the road, and there's the Jeep.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_04: And it's just such a huge sigh of relief that I made it.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_04: And I got like a spit of water left in my hydration bag.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_04: I get to my car and I'm I'm sort of take a few minutes just to gather myself and then and and then drive off into the sunset, leaving Ben to his own devices.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_04: And so I wanted to make sure this episode captured the whole of the sweet waters, even though your humble host didn't do all of it.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_04: I got Ben here who agreed to come on, he's agreed to tell us the rest of the story of the ridge line.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm gonna I'm gonna pass it over to you, Ben, to take the lead.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna leave you at this point.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_04: I'm standing on the ridge and I see you hopping on another ridge because it's another gnarly ridge to get from East Sister over to West Sister.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_04: So why why don't you pick up the trail from there?
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Great transition.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: I thanks for sharing your descent down the screen.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: I can see where you went and where you hit the road, and yeah, really, really good description of what you experienced going back.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I I I ventured off, left, left my left my AirPods up there on East Street, by the way.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because I reached in my pocket at at a certain point.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, you saw me hopping along, kind of a spine, a ridge.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very nice.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was moving along just fine.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: I tried to stay to the right of the manzanita.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: I could tell that that they were off to off to the east there.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I did a couple switchbacks, and then eventually I'm going down the mountain, kind of on the right side, and I need to I need to I need to go right, but I I went too much I went too far right.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm looking over at the left, I'm like, okay, there's middle sister.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: I need to I need to turn back towards east, and that's where I ran into some manzanita.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_04: And it took me I read the description online by all the hikers and they said on the back side of East Sister, the Middle Sister is uh is where it gets kind of kind of gnarly with the manzanita.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Did they say that?
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, good.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's accurate.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm looking at it right here on on the map.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way there's no way around it.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: If if you want to go from East Sister to Middle Sister, you gotta go through it.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it it took me about 45 minutes to descend from 10,000 feet, 250 feet.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so yeah, I just had to pick my way through it.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that stuff, that stuff's as as tall as a person.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: You can't really push through it.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: The branches are tough.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they're really, they're really like solid and gnarly.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_03: You kind of like just brush them aside.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: They they push back.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: They push back, they'll stop you in your tracks.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I I I took one spill on the back side here, because eventually you just get tired.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I'm all right, I'm gonna walk on top of this big branch.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I hadn't learned yet that you can grab the other branches as you're standing on one, right?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: So all the bushes around you.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I think I took one spill here.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing serious.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I get down, finally get down to the bottom.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: It starts to open up a little bit more.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: There's a little saddle in between the two.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: Start to make my way up.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: You had told me you had said, make sure you make your way up because that's the Nevada, California border.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's right.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's the interesting thing about about Middle Sister is the high point of Lion County in Nevada is on the is on the shoulder of that that mountain.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_04: It's not the top of the mountain, because the top of the mountain is in California.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_04: But when you hit the exact border of Nevada and California halfway up the mountain, that's the high point with not east, sister, which is in Lion County, Nevada, but uh most of the way up to the top.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: I I stopped pretty darn close to there.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: I can see my little trail here where I kind of turned off to the left and paused.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: 10,450 feet maybe.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_04: East is like 10,300 feet, so you have to be a little bit higher.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, it's a little bit higher.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, right.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's yeah, it's the highest in la in Lion County.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think it took me an hour, 45 minutes was was all to get from East Sister to Mill Sister.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_04: And uh that's a pretty good guy.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_04: I know it's not very far, but it's that psychology I find of descending and then having to ascend again.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I started the day sharing that that my worst day in Yosemite in July was over 5,600 feet elevation gain and loss, 24 miles, and it was just this up and down, up and down, up and down.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how many canyons I went through.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: But every time you get to the top of one, you can look across and say, Oh, there's the trail.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta go all the way down and all the way up again.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that was the that was the same experience to Middle Sister, 10,8846.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: Spent about half an hour up there.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: Didn't take my shoes off this time.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking off in the distance at the next and biggest challenge, the furthest away, South Sister, from middle.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: So this time I'm I I I'm determined.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: I actually talked to my wife up here at the top.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I told her about my manzanita experience on the way down East Sister, and I said, I'm I'm not gonna do that again.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna I'm gonna plot this path in the and and we're gonna make sure that you know I don't I don't have to do this.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't want another 45 minute road trek through the manzanita.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the west side of Middle Sister is is pretty open.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: Loose rock, but you can again stay stay on a crest on on your descent.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit of manzanita making my way to South Sister, but not anything like what I experienced.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I get down to a little saddle, there's there's another little ridge.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_04: So you so you drop 700 feet and then yeah, I think you go up like twelve hundred feet or so to get to the top there.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_04: Then you're dropping back down again before you have to do the biggest climb.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_04: Was it a bigger drop off of west off of the middle sister?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_04: Was it a bigger drop that drop off than off of east sist uh east sister?
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Initially it wasn't.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still over 10,000 feet.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that that saddle is sitting at 10,000 feet.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: But you come to a a little, I don't know, a little bump in the road, and you can go either right around the west side of this little bump or you can go to the east.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: At some point I decided to go to the east.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_04: So you went on the desert side to get around that that outcrop.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's another manzanita patch that is kind of inevitable.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I go around the left side of this outcrop, and again, I'm in six foot high, seven foot high manzanita, just breaking branches, trying to find any dead branch.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kicking them, hit hit, hitting them with the trekking poles, just trying to break them.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: Another 45-minute descent down this little outcrop.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my goodness.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_04: I should have warned you.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_04: I thought I read off a middle sister, you stay west, not eastern.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: Stay west, yeah.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I could have had a little bit easier time if I would have stayed west.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I in in doing the research around the geology of this range, I feel like when you transition off of middle sister towards south sister, you should have noticed a dramatic change at some point in the in the rock underneath your feet.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_04: Did you experience that?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: A after this little bump in the road, I did.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: So once I cleared this manzanita, it opened up and it it it got into the scree, right?
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: That just that loose rock that a lot of your force is going into the ground and you're slipping.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: So so every step you're not making the kind of traction, the kind of gains that you're looking for.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, the first 500 feet, 400 feet, not not so bad because I didn't know what I was in store for.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: So from about 10,400 to 10, 8, and then that last 200 up to 11,000, that was really rough stuff.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: That was slow, slow going.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: I can feel the heartbeat in my, you know, in my throat.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm taking a break every 20, 30 steps.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: That last 200 feet before I get up to 11,000.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: It it's it's like every step I'm slipping.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to find any rock larger than, you know, a football that I can step step on that won't slide, and even those ones are sliding under my feet.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I did a lot of my own kind of switchbacks, just off to the right 20 yards, off to the left 20 yards, and just trying to make my way up that last 200, 200 feet.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, when you get into that sort of terrain where the the rock is loose like that and it's super steep, it actually does often make more sense to make the grave more shallow by doing like lots of little switchbacks.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I'll even do that on like a regular trail sometimes.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_04: If there's a little sh short, steep ascent, it's so much better just to sort of zigzag up than it is to try and power hike because you burn less energy because you're not like power hiking and burning energy and using the power in your legs more.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_04: You're sort of trying to maintain almost like more of a a shallow ascent, even though you're going up a very steep slope and you're going further distance.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_04: I I found you actually go faster, you get up it quicker, and you're you're less exhausted.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_04: But when you've got all that loose rock underfoot, that just drains it out of you anyway, anyway, you slice it.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, yeah, it does.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: It it does.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: Before the last 200 feet, I took a little break, wanted to get some rocks out of my shoes, and putting my shoe back on and tying it, my my hamstring gave me a little twitch.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: It gave me a little it's it's just a little cramp.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought to myself, okay, I got half a liter of water, the half a liter that you gave me, Philip.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna hang on to it.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna I'm not gonna drink it, I'm not gonna tap into it until I get to eleven, three sixty-two, right?
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Until I get to the top of South Sister.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: But you get to eleven thousand feet and you still got a good ways to go before you make it, because you gotta head west quite a ways.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_04: So you sort of almost sum it out, but then you've got an uh another probably two three hundred feet, but distance as well.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: But you have distance, exactly.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Once I get up to eleven thousand feet, it it it's like I don't know, three quarters of a mile probably until I get to the summit.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I've really start cooking there, right?
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: And at this point I can see down where my truck's parked.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: I can see down, I look down, I say, oh, Nugent cabin.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm gonna I think I want to see that, you know, when I eventually get down there.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: You can see where all the streams, dried up streams, all the scree runs are running down to the bottom.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm very confident that that I'm near water.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: I got, you know, I got my water filter.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: I got I got two, just in case one doesn't want to cooperate.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_04: Tell me about this feeling when you're doing stuff that is out there and it's off trail and you're self-navigating and you're not quite you know you're trying to make it back to a vehicle.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_04: Tell me about that feeling when you see your vehicle.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_04: It's like nothing else, isn't it?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's like nothing.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I stopped and I took a little video once I got because there's a road down there at the bottom, once you get down to the bottom after South Sister, and I took a little video when I got when I could see that road.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: And just the relief of having a trail.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: I knew I was gonna I knew I was gonna be making at least a mile every 25 minutes now, right?
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: Not in instead of one mile an hour.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the best, the best feeling.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_04: So so you're at the top of the summit.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_04: When I saw South Sister from a distance, it's black.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's a different mountain.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_04: It's definitely definitively different.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_04: Does it feel much more volcanic?
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_04: The the rock itself is much more angular on you than the other two peaks.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: That last three-quarters of a mile, it's kind of like you're on Mars.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: You've got rock that's coming up at almost a vertical angle.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: You can see the layers are like vertical, which, you know, I hadn't seen before.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no manzanita up there.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: Don't gotta worry about walking through any of that stuff anymore.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the geology is interesting because East Sister and Middle Sister are sort of the same geological type.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_04: They're subduction zone, deep mantle rock that's sort of intruded up.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_04: And then once you cross over into South Sister, and if you carried on up into Patterson and Wheeler, it's volcanic.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_04: It's explosive volcanics that's come out of the walk walker caldera.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a very different type of rock and a very different uh process that that made the igneous rock.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_04: And so you're moving into a completely different environment when you're up there, which is probably why it changed to this very loose, sharpen angular scree that felt miserable to climb up.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_04: It's no longer as consolidated, like no longer these big you know, boulders and outcrops that are typical of something that's deeply seductive.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_04: And that's sort of that eastern uh eastern middle system probably felt a little bit more like when you're walking up in the Sierras because it's a similar sort of uh geology, a geological process at least.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: I can see that.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's very interesting.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's very well said.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's you know, you can walk on these mountains and not and not understand those things.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: I certainly have.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for educating.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_04: So so tell me about the descent, because I'd read the descent is beautiful.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_04: It got some beautiful scree runs that take you right down into that canyon.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_04: So I'd love to see how you tackled it.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: So South Sister didn't have a you know how we found the little boxes where you can sign your name and the Oh yeah, they're in the register?
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: So South Sister didn't have one.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't find it anywhere.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe because there was no big rocks to hide it under up there.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: Possibly.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_04: It blew away.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it was uh it it was really windy up there.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: I actually got my my chair out and the cover for my chair blew out to the out to the east.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Right out of my hand, like a sail.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I kind of stood there and watched it and I did go down and get it.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't happy about going back the way I just come from.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I did, I got it.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then back up, sat in my chair for 15, 20 minutes, and then packed up and headed down.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: They take motorized vehicles up to the summit of South Sister because the descent was, you know, side by side wide, and it's so loose that these are pretty deep ruts from the tires.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it just kind of barrels down heading south, uh southwest, barrels down the side of of the scree.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: I could see that there were some cows off in the distance.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: There there's a saddle about 10,600 feet that I was aiming for.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the first probably 500 feet is pretty steep, and then it kind of gradually tapers off.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: Once I got to the cows, I had some cows look at me too.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um walked walked right in between two different groups, a bigger cow and then and then a calf size ran off to off and you know, joined the other group.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: I w I wanted to stay on the road.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: There was there was a road that came up from Nugent Cabin, but I I could tell that it was just a couple of a couple of layers over.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so I decided eventually to bail off down into the canyon.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very gradual descent in comparison to what I just done.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: Probably about just under 10,000 feet.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in a little, you know, a little runoff area, and there's some green bushes, so I wanted to get below those.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: I thought maybe there was some water, and sure enough there was.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I got I got two liters of fresh water coming right out of the mountain.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: I know nothing has touched this water yet.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so yeah, it was it was wonderful to fill up the smart water bottles and two and just kind of take a break.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: The sun was going down at that point.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, so I just continued to follow that down.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_01: Luckily.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: It it was pretty loose rock still, but once the sagebrush started to pop up, I kind of walked on the sagebrush just to make sure that my feet wouldn't slip.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that was nice.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: Crossed a little crossed a little gully down at the bottom, about 8,700 feet, point the water was running.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then side side hill, I did take a picture.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: I saw that there was remnants of a mine off in the distance on the side of a hill.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually approached it and I and I, you know, cautiously, I took some pictures of the old wood and the nails and the bolts that they had used to prop it up, and somebody had broken it down probably quite a while ago.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_04: You're now in the in a Patterson mining district, which was they kind of had a a a gold and silver mining boom from like 1880 to 1884, like off of the Comstock low, they started exploring out and they found gold and silver in pretty intense quantities in the mountain.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_04: But it sort of played itself out in those veins.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_04: You remember as we're coming out the mountain, I'm pointing out the different quartz veins.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_04: So they're digging into those quartz veins where all the gold and silver is, but because the mountain's so fractured and violent, they sort of, as they're digging down, they they're the veins kind of get fractured and displaced, and it's harder and harder to follow them.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_04: And so they sort of dug as much as they could, and just within four years, they they ran out and they it they gave up pretty much.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, okay.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_04: That makes sense.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_04: So you can almost you could almost guarantee that mine was from 1880 to 1884.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_04: I think there was a bit more a bit more uh activity a little bit later, but that was the height of it.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_04: That's awesome.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome to know.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: Those those nails that I was looking at.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, hundred and hundred and forty years old probably.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for putting putting context on that.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I continued down, no more manzanita, sagebrush, avoided it.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: I got I got to the point where I could see just just a clearing.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: I could see the road.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: Took a little video of just my excitement.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: Once I got on the road, probably a couple hundred yards, I crossed that creek.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: That creek's running up at the top of that canyon really well.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the I can only imagine the runoff when there's a lot of water coming down that thing.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, early spring.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: There were some turns that I mean the the road washes out where I crossed it, the road was completely washed out just above Nugent Cabin.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: By the time you get to the cabin, it's basically the end of the road.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's no more driving up that thing.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: Nugent cabin looked like it was occupied to me.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_04: Interesting.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's supposed to be a historic like an old landmark.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it could be, but there was a the front door was open, the screen door was closed, and there was all kinds of trinkets in the in the window that was kind of like the deck, but the the deck was uh fully enclosed.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I I kind of passed by without stopping, just in case there was somebody there.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't I didn't want them to think I wanted any trouble.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_04: You never know, in the mountains.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's true.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's true.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: Just downstream of the cabin there were a couple of fifty gallon drums that had many bullet holes in them that uh made me think maybe whoever's up there was just letting other people know that they were armed.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: A little less than two miles from from when I hit the road down the canyon, I found my truck right where we left it.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: From a distance, right, I hit the unlock button.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's always another thing that you think about when you're out there.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is my battery dead for some weird reason?
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: Did I leave a light on?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_04: Did I lose my key and not realize it?
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, I can't believe I haven't mentioned how many times I checked my pocket just to make sure my key was in there.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought to myself, Ben, you know better than this.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: You leave the key at the truck.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to take the key and then worry about it for the entire hike, right?
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, no, I didn't.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't I didn't leave my key at the truck.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: I actually took it with me this time.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: What a sense of relief.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_04: How far did you walk?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_04: How much elevation gain?
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_04: And how long did it take you in the end?
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_04: When did you get back to your truck?
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: I got back to my truck at seven.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_04: So we left at 7 30, so nearly 12 hours to do 12 miles.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's a long that's a long day.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was a long day.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it felt, you know, because you're in this canyon, eleven point six miles.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was just under six thousand feet elevation gain, which was a healthy day.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like five nine five, nine, seven, six.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_04: And that's not too far off.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_04: A Whitney day right there.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_04: And that's all on on a beautifully manicured national park trail.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_04: And you've just done that off trail.
• 1:04:19
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, that's good to know.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's good to know.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_04: I don't I don't think people really appreciate the the difference between going on trail and going off trail because it's a completely different animal.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_04: Now, when I go on trail, I think this is great.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_04: There's a trail, there's a trail, this is awesome.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_02: So easy.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_04: And you find yourself up in the street, semi-lost, on a knife edge, rock climbing, it's like a whole different beast.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: It is a whole different beast.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_04: And certainly not for people who don't know what they're doing.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_04: I don't want to promote like this is this is awesome, and it's it's like an excellent thing to do, and anybody should do it.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_04: You should not.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_04: This is this is sort of getting towards the pinnacle of what what you should be doing.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_04: You need to be experienced, you need to know what you're doing, you need to have confidence, you need to understand all the safety risks, you need to have to mitigate all the safety risks, you need to be doing things to keep yourself safe because this is this is really on the edge of of hiking and starting to get a little bit into mountaineering.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_04: Like on the on the very edge of that, think you're you're ready to go off trail.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_04: Keep walking on the trail for a bit longer.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_04: It's much harder than you think it is, and it's much more dangerous than you think it is.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_04: We we didn't really encounter any wildlife while we're out there, but quite easily you could come across a snake.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_04: I've I've come across snakes in the you know in that sagebrush type material or hiding under a rock while you're rock climbing.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_04: That's a real danger.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_04: The other big one out there, which is which I was worried about, is so isolated, it's so out there, and it's so it's so rarely traveled by humans that it's uh prime territory for mountain lions.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_04: They they love that range.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_04: I've heard a lot about it.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, my my neighbor is a big a Pete Bagger and does quite a lot of this stuff too.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_04: He said the only time he ever saw a mountain lion was on South Sister.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm glad you I'm glad you didn't get eaten.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: Me too.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: Me too.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: That that did cross my mind.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't worry about when I'm on on a trail like the PCT that, you know, there's there's so many people out there I don't worry about animals.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I it crossed my mind several times.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_04: I mean and nobody's coming.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody's coming up this trail because there isn't one.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_04: And you you maybe you could be like a hundred yards off the regular route and be invisible.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_04: Like even if somebody was coming up and trying that traverse and you you got injured, you know, if you fell down a little canyon and twisted your ankle, somebody could walk straight past you.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's true.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's true.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have my in reach on this one.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: I probably probably shouldn't leave home without that next time.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah I I think that's another great tip.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_04: If you're on the trail maybe not so much where you know there's a peop other people that are coming.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_04: But when you're out there in the wilderness and nobody know nobody's coming, you've got to take extra be extra cautious and take extra precautions particularly around communication.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah so we're not we're not glorifying what we're doing we're cautioning you that don't necessarily follow us if you are not already experienced at doing this.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_04: This isn't something you should like just think oh Ben and Philip could do it.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_04: Let's just go and do it.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_04: No don't don't do that.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_04: I don't want to bet I don't want that on my conscience that you you thought we we did it.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_04: We thought this was very difficult.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_04: I don't let's do the whole one to ten on a scale of one to ten this this traverse where would you rank it?
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: It it's probably it's probably an eight and a half for me.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm used to big days where I do a lot of miles so I never felt like my feet weren't fatigued.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: I had a little bit of knee pain but I could tell there was a lot left in like my knees and my joints.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: I did have a little bit of a muscle cramp there at at the end right before 11,000 but that went away pretty quick.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: I had adequate food I had plenty of electrolytes I didn't have plenty of water but but I had enough so I didn't feel I didn't feel too terribly taxed but it was it was definitely a strong day when I got back to Reno and got out of my truck it was hard to walk I was stiff there was lactic acid it was it was a great workout.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's I I go to be challenged I go for the if you're used to that if you're used to that then then I guess maybe an eight and a half.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_04: I could see I could see that ranking obviously I didn't do the whole ridge on that day but the piece I did felt felt pretty challenging.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_04: The the ridge itself was was gnarly it wasn't the worst I've been on.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't like there was a thousand feet drop off on either side it would certainly hurt you for sure.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_04: It was never sort of razor edge like hands and hands and knees but the elevation was real the isolation was was real.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_04: I will say the desert makes a big difference the altitude is real.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_04: You and I are probably fairly used to 10,000 eleven thousand feet but for some people that's a real that can become a real factor.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_04: Anything over 8,000 feet for people who are you know coming from the from sea level or from lower elevation that that becomes a real issue as you start getting up there.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_04: The navigation is right there in front of you right if you can see where you're going it's I'm going along this ridgeline and because of where we parked the car I didn't think that was necessarily going to be an issue unless you completely flumped it and completely missed the canyon.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_04: But we knew I told you where we parked right where we were so it shouldn't have been that challenging.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_04: Now if it gotten dark and you're only halfway through that might have been a different story.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_04: It could have been made it a bit more challenging.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah yeah I think I think probably the pack weight too for me probably contributes to why like my legs felt pretty good my feet felt pretty good.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm used to a 25-30 pound pack this was nice going up in this kind of elevation.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_04: Did you take enough water?
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_01: Nope I yeah I probably should have taken another liter and a half of water which I had in my truck and I should have just thrown it in there.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because that'd just be a little bit what three and a half pounds.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah I I I actually like that that traverse I like the experience for many of the same reasons you do you know it's a challenge it's a physical workout.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_04: I think I tell people I I I go hiking I think most of the time they think I'm just going for a walk.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_04: They don't realize what we're really doing out there is pretty I mean it's strenuous when you're going up a 45 degree slope and the three is slipping underfoot and it's like it's really like walking up a a a vertical slope in sand it's so so taxing on your legs and your joints and it's not easy to navigate when there's not a nicely manicured trail there.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_04: You're you're hot rock hopping and dealing with that manzanine is kind of miserable.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah yeah it absolutely is it's I mean that's a great tip right stay on trail see see how many miles you can walk in an hour on a trail and then imagine walking struggling to get one mile an hour.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah like that's that's what it is that's the difference to go from a trail to off trail.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a grind.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_04: And there there are other places out in the basin where I do a lot of off trail stuff up and down mountains and I I think what you don't realize is a little bit what we experience today is that the topography of the mountain is not what you think it is when you're looking at it from a distance.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_04: When you get into it it's a completely different animal you don't know what's coming I've I've looked at a mountain thought thought I know where I'm going and I've started to navigate once you get into it you get ridges you get canyons you get drop-offs you get outcrops that you can't see when you're that far out that become real impediments and real dangers to the navigation.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_04: I I I did a hike out in the pyramid lake on the on the lake range took me three times to actually get to the mountain because of the navigational issues trying to figure out how to get to the top like one one time I went straight at it and I thought it just goes straight up I'll just follow straight up.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_04: So I started going straight up in this really gnarly canyon at similar sort of like slog trying to get out of the side of the canyon follow the ridge up and unlike I feel like I'm like 500 yards from the top and there's just a chasm between me and the mountain it's like end of my day like 500 feet from the top and I just can't get there.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_04: It's just a huge I'd have to go all the way back to the start and and and go back again.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: No other choice turn around yeah yeah you have to make those you have to make those decisions.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah you have to be in control of your Yeah I can get super determined so yeah I definitely need a governor sometimes and that that yeah I'm glad you follow your intuition there when you come across something dangerous like that.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah I mean you you have to know your body on the day how you're feeling what you feel like you can achieve and then sometimes the mountain just says not today buddy come back another day and you've got to accept that because that's when that's when I feel people get in trouble.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_04: They they push through it and think they can do it and even though they know they're they're getting on the limit they'll carry on and that's when they get lost they they stumble they fall they get themselves in danger.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_04: It's just because they've gone too far that that day and they should have they should have like set themselves a bound a safety boundary.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_04: Wise words sure yeah well I really enjoyed this conversation with you I enjoyed the time we had on the mountain and hopefully we can do another gnarly ridge run again sometime maybe even before the hiking season's out before the snow hits and Sierras again.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes please I I'm I'm down my schedule just opened up a lot so I'm I'm very excited and and thank you so much for for this I don't normally process my trips this way what what a great way to re-experience and to kind of solidify the experience in my mind.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah thanks for having me on it's been it's been great reliving this thing.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_04: Well I really appreciate it man and maybe we'll have you on a again another day and you can share some other um your wonderful hiking experiences.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_04: Now off you pop.