Barry was, as promised, up and out by 6:30am. He was determined to summit Mount Whiteney today, 26 miles away.
I was the second to leave the camp. Ryan opted to sleep in a little, taking it easy today, and Abid was getting up as I moved on.
The hike to Forester Pass was lush, green and steep. It didn't look too far away but once I hit the steep snowpack, I realized this wasn't an easy feat. I saw Barry's silhouette on top of the pass while I was at least a mile away, but the second time I looked up in his direction, he was gone. I never saw him again.
I didn't like Forester Pass. The snowpack, it turned out, had two footprint trails, a lower and a higher one and I ended up somehow on the higher one. Wind gusted strongly, too and I had to focus on maintaing my balance or else I'd tumble down hard on the boulders.
My camera was showing signs of live again, but the photos were still a blur of hues.
It took me three hours to make it to the pass. I was now leaving Kings Canyon and entering Sequoia National Park. In front of me now was another long, rocky valley of glacial erratics, but this time the peaks on either side showed harsh erosion and long swaths of rockslides. One can see where pine forests here had been destroyed by rockslides.
It wasn't really a pretty view and I wanted to get down from that windy, narrow pass.
This required a long steep switchback downhill that required me to take at least a 30-minute restbreak at the bottom of the pass.
An older man, Leonard, stopped to chat with me. Leonard was a northbounder determined to finish the JMT by avoiding as many people as possible. He had climbed Mount Whitney three days earlier. People, he said, ruined the feelings of solitude for him. I'm sure he would have no problems finding solitude if he kept away from crowded campsites and didn't stop to chat to anyone.
I was exhausted now. I kept stoppping and looking back to see if Ryan or Abid were catching up with me. Ryan eventually did catch up with me perhaps a half mile further, along a fairly level straight-away. We chatted a bit, stopped a few times to wait for Abid, but by 2pm we opted to start prepping for our final day on the trail. With Forester now behind us we had only Whitney to climb, and a directional sign announced Whitney was only 16 miles away.
And then 14, 12...
Suddenly I saw the end of the tunnel. I was going to climb Whitney! Getting to this point wasn't so bad afterall. Now thoughts of getting back to YNP to complete the northern terminus came to mind.
Ryan and I rested along Tyndel creek to wait for Abid. He was still nowhere to be seen. Others were passing us now, some who didn't speak English, and we really had no reason to wait for Abid other than the comeraderie we had developed in the last three days. I liked talking to Ryan, who at 23 seemed so much older and mature than he was.
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