Mount Davis

I woke up at 3:45 for an attempt on Mount Davis the next morning. The hike in had taken more out of Holly than she expected, so she opted to stay at camp and sleep in while I made my summit bid. I had already made coffee the night before and filled an insulated water bottle, so I was on my way out of camp within 10 minutes of waking up. The moon had set and hiking in the dark along the shores of Thousand Island Lake under the Milky Way was truly incredible, with a half dozen shooting stars falling over North Glacier Pass as I hiked west. There was an excellent use trail running the length of the lake, and I made my way to the base of North Glacier Pass about 45 minutes from leaving camp. The trail became a bit more difficult to follow and I lost it at a stream crossing, which was running surprisingly strong in the early hour. I wasted a good amount of time trying to find an easy place to cross three separate streams in the dark before I could start making any real progress up the broad drainage leading up to Glacier Pass. It wasn’t long before I encountered my first patches of snow. I did not have any traction with me, but it looked like I could avoid most, if not all of it, based on pictures from camp the evening prior. At first, avoiding the patches of snow was fairly easy, and the few times I needed to cross snow were fairly low angled. But as I ascended, the grade increased and I had no traction on the rock hard ice aside from my trekking pole which could barely bite into the hard surface. I was only a few hundred feet below North Glacier Pass (which sits at about 11k) when I ran into 100% snow/ice coverage. Although the section was short, I had no means to climb the steep ice and had to scramble to the right on loose class 3 above the snow. Just as I was finishing with the loose scrambling, the sun had risen just enough to no longer need a headlamp, and I was able to see a snow free line the remaining distance to the pass. I took my first break of the morning at the pass, with Lake Catherine still half frozen in early September, and the glacier heading up to the Ritter-Banner Saddle looking in way better shape than my climb up Banner last year.

The route up Davis swung on to west facing slopes, and even with the warming temperatures from the rising sun, the snow was still off limits with a rock hard crust over the top. So I continued to scramble above the snow, finding plenty of viable options that avoided the ice and kept me off anything too loose. Although Davis has been described as a bit of a talus slog, most of the rock was pretty solid, and I was able to hop boulder to boulder at a pretty good pace. I angled up towards a notch to the summit plateau and breached the summit ridgeline with the sun now shining brilliantly over Thousand Island Lake below.

The appearance of the ridgeline on the map was a bit deceptive, with a number of false summits and a shallow, snow filled basin just below that I needed to continue to avoid. Traversing beneath the false summits was a bit looser and more tedious than earlier in the route, but I was soon pushing up the final slope to the summit. The views from the top were outstanding. Mount Ritter and Mount Banner dominated the view to the south, with sun reflecting off their glaciers. To the east was Thousand Island Lake among the various other lakes east of the Sierra Crest. Immediately to the north and north-west were some of the most remote summits in Yosemite National Park including Lyell, Rodgers and Electra. Although there were a number of fires to the west, I could pick out parts of the Clark Range and even some of the higher summits in the western Sierras near Shaver Lake.

It was about 7:30 AM, taking about 3.5 hours from camp, a good deal of it wasted scrambling over the snow. I had told Holly I would try to be back by 9AM, and if I had any chance of meeting that goal I needed to descend. I looked for a shortcut down the east face but found only icy cliffs and continued back the way I came. At the notch that brought me onto the summit plateau, I stayed a bit more to the west, utilizing a series of solid granite ledges and slabs that I could work down quickly with decent traction. Although there was a run of snow separating me from Glacier Pass, there was a small section that had melted out which I was able to cross. A bit more inefficient scrambling brought me back to the pass 35 minutes from the summit, but still with a long way back to camp. I started working down the talus again, initially avoiding the upper patches of snow. The drainage was west facing and had already had 2 hours of solid sunlight to soften it. So I tentatively stepped onto the snow and was pleased to find it the perfect consistency to boot ski down, just soft enough to keep me from sliding uncontrollably down to the rocks below. A number of groups were on their way up for the day, most headed for either Mount Ritter or Mount Banner.

Reaching the bottom of the snowfields I picked up the use trail that I had lost in the dark, taking me to far easier stream crossings and back to the main trail along the shoreline. I didn’t reach camp until almost 10AM, Holly beginning to grow nervous by my tardiness. We made a late breakfast of dehydrated eggs and I rehydrated, packed my things, and took a very short dip in the ice cold lake before heading out on the trail.

With 10 miles between of and the car, the conversation very quickly turned to beers and food at the brewery in Mammoth, which would become an obsession the rest of the hike. We made reasonable progress back to Clark Lakes where we took a short break before the long and dusty switchbacks back down to Rush Creek. When we did reach the creek, we stopped to soak our feet once more.

My shoes had gotten pretty wet on the snowfield, and my feet were looking like prunes, crammed in the wet boots for hours. At the junction near Crest Creek we filled up our water bottles for the remaining 5ish miles back to the car. I was happy with our time, and it seemed like we would be done in about another 2 hours. But on the hike around Gem Lake we both hit a wall. The trail was undulating quite a bit with numerous ascents and descents of ~100′ as it rounded every bend. Couple that with the increasingly exposed sun, and we were both bonking by the time we reached the Gem Lake Dam.

Despite being only a few miles from the car, we were both overheating and needed a break in the shade before continuing on to Agnew. The last few miles were the most painful, completely treeless and exposed, the car coming into view near Silver Lake yet still being almost two miles away. We walked a very short section of the cable car tracks to shave off a switchback or two, then I sped up ahead to the car to get our food out of the bear lockers and refill the waters. I had just finished loading the car when Holly reached the trailhead, and we peeled out of the June Lake area straight for Mammoth Brewery before heading to camp for the night just outside of town.