John Muir Trail- What's That?

 

In this post I’ll attempt to explain what the John Muir Trail is and how we’ll be hiking it. I won’t give you the history of the trail because I don’t want to plagiarize, if you’re interested I encourage you to google it and read all about it!

The trail is named after John Muir, who was among other things, a naturalist from Wisconsin! If you’ve never read anything by him, I encourage you to. He had a unique way of looking at and describing the natural world. Describing things like trees and animals with the words “glorious” and “majestic”. Very uniquely Muir. Muir played an important role in convincing Teddy Roosevelt to establish Yosemite as a National Park and spent a lot of time in the Sierras. He did a lot of other cool things too, like starting the Sierra Club. I can’t really do him justice. Google him.

OK, so the JMT. We’ll be hiking it from its northern terminus in Yosemite Valley, where the trail begins at Happy Isles, to its southern terminus atop the summit of Mt Whitney and then to the nearest trailhead which is Whitney Portal. The trail is about 220 miles, we’ll be hiking closer to 240-250 miles because of resupply locations. The trail follows the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California and passes over several 13,000 and 14,000 foot peaks. Mt Whitney, the trail’s southern terminus, is the tallest mountain in the lower 48 at 14,505 feets. The JMT differs from trails like the Appalachian Trail in that it has significant elevation gains and losses on the regular. Some days we’ll gain 3000+ feet of elevation and lose 2000+ feet all in one day. I think there are only 2 places along the JMT that are sort of flattish, where the elevation gain/loss is only a few hundred feet. I think the total elevation changes along the trail is somewhere around 80,000 feets!

We’re planning to thru-hike the JMT and resupply along the trail. Another way to do the trail is to “section hike”, where you hike sections of the trail, then return later to hike other sections and eventually complete the trail, by hiking all the sections. Some friends from the gym section hiked the trail in 4 sections over the course of 4 summers. They were not able to get enough time off of work to do it all in one go (aka thru-hike), so they did what they could in the time they had. Since we are not section hiking, we’ll need additional supplies along the way. We’ll have 4 total resupplies, all 4 resupply locations are near the trail, listed below in order from north to south and around which day we’ll arrive at that location:

Red’s Meadow (Day 7)

Vermillion Valley Resort/Lake Edison (Day 11)

Muir Trail Ranch (Day 15)

Mt Williamson Motel (Day 23)

A typical resupply consists mainly of food, but other supplies such as first aid stuffs, clothes, money, batteries etc are often included. Most resupply locations are located in sort of remote locations which require boat travel etc and they ask that you send your stuffs in a 5 gallon plastic bucket. It’s durable and will keep rain and critters out. So we will each pack one 5 gallon bucket for ourselves, 8 in total.

 

The resupply locations will pick up your bucket from the nearest town’s post office, transport it to their resort and store it for you until you come and pick it up. This service is of course not free. The price varies from $20-65 depending on which resupplier you use.

 

Here's a picture of the bear canister we'll each be carrying, the BearVault 500. More on the use of bear cans later, but all food and anything with a scent (sunscreen etc) must be kept in this canister. Thanks to modern day packaging, pretty much everything we'll be eating will need to be taken out of its original packaging and re-packed into something smaller, like a small zip lock bag. Otherwise, as you can see from the picture, we wouldn't even be able to fit 1 or 2 day's worth of food in it!

 

We’ll be carrying everything on our backs: food, water, shelter, supplies. Our longest stretch between resupplies is 8 days, our shortest is 4. Since we’re starting in Yosemite, we have a 6,000 foot climb out of the valley to start out our hike...we’re planning to get a few resupply food items in Tuolumne Meadows (which we will reach on day 3) so we don’t have to carry the extra weight out of the valley. We did the Mist Trail and the trail to Half Dome last fall with about 20ish pounds on our backs for when we climbed Half Dome and it was REAL. I can only imagine the fun it will be this time around with a pack nearly twice that weight! WOOT! Climber friends: the Mist Trail is like the CCC trail at Devils Lake but like 4 times longer and way steeper, and often times wet from the spray of Vernal Falls. The rest of the trail to Half Dome is kind of like the hike to Long Wall (aka Long Haul) except 4 hours longer and steeper.

So, we’re planning about 28 days to do the trail, which includes a few rest days (zero miles) along the way. Our longest planned hiking day is 12 or 13 miles, our shortest 5. We’ve tried to plan all of our rest days and where we camp each night at the prettiest places. There are hundreds of alpine lakes along the trail, beautiful views of the Sierras and countless meadows. All in all there will be amazing views every day all day, I hope the memory card for the camera can hold all the photos we’ll want to take!