John Muir Trail – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Bobbie Surber

Six days into the John Muir Trail, solo from Yosemite to Whitney, the sun finally came out.

After days of cold rain, wet gear, and afternoon storms, Marie Lake at 10,551 feet felt like permission to stop. People were swimming, drying gear on the granite, stretched out in the sun like nobody wanted to move again.

I swam. Then I fell asleep on the rocks.

While I slept, the Sierra changed its mind.

When I woke up, everyone was gone.

The granite still held the afternoon warmth, but the sky had changed. The harmless white clouds over Selden Pass had darkened and lowered, moving fast across the ridge. I sat up too quickly, disoriented, alone at 10,551 feet with my boots still off and my gear scattered around me.

I knew better than to cross a Sierra pass in the afternoon in August. I had done it anyway.

The people I had been walking with that day were already gone. Two siblings and a father-daughter team. I still chuckle at the memory of them giving up their camp stove for camp chairs, living off bars and no-cook food the whole way. The daughter longing for a hot meal. You meet people like that on long trails. When you are lucky, they become part of your trail family.

Trail family on the JMT. Two siblings and a father and daughter, strangers who became familiar faces over days of shared miles. I am on the right with the maroon pack.

But they were gone now.

I packed up quickly and started up Selden Pass.

Marie Lake, 1:42 p.m. The storm was already building.

The last of the small trees gave way to open granite as the storm hit full force. Hail came first, then lightning, the kind that doesn’t stay in the sky.

Hiking poles went aside; metal in a lightning storm above tree line is an invitation. Crouching on top of my pack in lightning position, making myself as small as possible as hail drove into my shoulders and arms. Tank top and shorts. Nothing else.

There was nowhere to hide.

Terrified of the lightning and praying to angels or whatever was listening: just get me over the pass. Just get me through this.

Somehow, I made it to the top. The storm was still building.

I ran four to five miles down toward the tree line, alone, above 10,000 feet, with hail and lightning, barely dressed against the storm. I don’t remember most of it, only the granite slick under my feet. Moving and not stopping because stopping was not an option.

Orange through the trees pulled me toward it. A group of men camped just inside the tree line. They saw me come in, and one of them took charge immediately.

He tried to help me take off my backpack. I fought him. I was being difficult, argumentative, insisting I could do it myself. What I didn’t know was that hypothermia had already taken my hands. My coordination. My judgment. I didn’t understand why the buckles wouldn’t work. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t make my fingers do what I was telling them to do.

He knew. He stopped asking and just did it, manhandled the pack off me, got me into a tent, and used his own body heat to warm me while the others set up my tent and got my gear inside.

I don’t remember his name. I never saw any of them again on the trail.

I slept.

When I woke up, the light was going gold through the trees. I walked down to Sallie Keyes Lake and watched the sun set. The sky was doing what Sierra skies do after a storm, going pink and soft over the water.

As I sat in the lake’s peace, I felt a growing frustration with my own stupidity for getting into that situation. Then gratitude so large I didn’t know what to do with it. And then, quietly, as the last light went off the water, I came apart. I cried for a long time. Not the kind that passes quickly. I genuinely believed I didn’t have what it took to finish the trail alone.

The next morning, the trail was still there. And so was I. The same thing that would carry me over Muir Pass three days later was already at work. Not courage. Just an inability to stop.

Sallie Keyes Lake, 7:57 p.m., August 8, 2014.

I have thought about that afternoon many times since. About what fear actually does when it settles into your chest at 10,000 feet, in hail and lightning, with no one coming.

Fear wasn’t something I overcame.

I moved through it, because stopping was never an option.

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By Bobbie Surber

I started the John Muir Trail alone in August 2014 because I was afraid of solo wilderness travel and decided the only way to get through it was to go. Two hundred and eleven miles from Yosemite Valley to the summit of Mount Whitney, alone, in twenty-one days. I had walked several Camino de Santiago trails. I knew what my legs could do. What I didn’t know was whether I could trust myself out there with no one to defer to and no one to blame if it went wrong. About ten days in, somewhere in the Evolution Range, the trail stopped being hypothetical about it.

Evolution Valley has a reputation. Every hiker on the JMT knows the name before they get there, the way you know certain words in a foreign language before you have ever been to the country. Sacred. Iconic.

The valley floor opens at 9,500 feet. The green catches you off guard, Evolution Creek winding through golden meadow grass, the peaks rising above it all. Darwin, Mendel, and Huxley are named for the scientists who mapped the theory of evolution. The whole region carries their names. A pack mule grazed in the middle distance like it had nowhere to be. I wanted to stay for days.

What I remember is rocks tumbling along the shore and a sky boiling so close above me it felt like something you could reach up and touch.

On a trail this long, you keep running into the same people. Joan was a nurse, and we had fallen into step together enough times over the preceding days to know each other a little. Her hiking companion was difficult in the way that some men are difficult on the trail, controlling the pace, the decisions, the route. What I had pieced together over those chance miles was that before they left he had taken Joan’s wallet, her ID, and locked everything in his car. She had no money. No identification. No way out that wasn’t entirely on his terms.

The storm came the way they always do in the Sierra in August. Fast. Without apology. We turned back from the pass. The man looked around and declared a campsite near Wanda Lake.

Wanda Lake sits at 11,426 feet, the largest lake at the base of the pass. Rocks scattered along the shore, the surrounding peaks nothing but scree and exposed granite, the water grey-green under the storm light. No trees anywhere in the frame. No shelter. No dip in the terrain between you and whatever the sky decides.

Southbound hikers passing through said it plainly: worst possible place to stop. Death zone for lightning. The man didn’t move. Joan looked at me.
I packed up my tent and left.

Joan stayed. I thought about her the whole way down, and if I’m honest, most of the way back up too.

The trees had stopped somewhere far back down the trail and the world had changed. Granite slabs in every direction, pale as bone, thin fingers of grass finding whatever purchase they could in the cracks. Nowhere to step off and disappear. Nowhere to wait out the storm. Three or four miles of that back down to tree line alone, the lightning coming closer, the thunder hitting hard enough to feel it in your chest, past Sapphire Lake, past Evolution Lake, back through the point where granite finally gives way to trees.

Sometime in the night a young hiker asked for shelter. Her tent had flooded out. She came inside and we lay there listening to the lightning work through the dark, each strike closer than we wanted, praying it would move on without finding us.

By morning, the lightning had stopped. The sky hadn’t cleared, but the lightning had stopped, which felt like enough. Outside, the trail had become a gathering point. Everyone I had met on the JMT was there packing out. The mountain had called a meeting, and the vote was unanimous: hike out, trip over.

A man found me in the crowd, someone I had spoken to on the flight out to Yosemite at the very start of all this. A lifetime ago. His hiking partner had quit after three days. He had kept going alone. We agreed without much discussion to summit together and he went to break camp.

He came back without his pack. Wife. Kids. He was hiking out. He said I should come too. Every person around us had made the same decision. The sky above the pass was still doing things skies should not do. He wasn’t wrong to ask.

I stood there in tears while everyone packed out around me. The lightning was gone but the sky was still dark. The pass was still up there. I was genuinely afraid. Not the manageable kind. The kind where your breathing goes shallow, your stomach turns, and adrenaline floods your body until your hands shake.

Every rational thought said to give up and call it quits. Instead my feet turned uphill.

It was the same thing that had kept me moving on the first Camino when everything hurt, the bed was warm, the next town far. Not courage. Just an inability to stop.

The same miles back. Through the trees, past Evolution Lake, past Sapphire Lake, back into the moonscape. The sky was boiling. In monsoon season you just move through it and hope.

A hiker came toward me on the trail heading the same direction I was. He had been pushed back the day before, same storm, same decision point. Now he was going back up too. I asked what he thought it was going to be like.

It’s going to be a shit storm, he said.

He kept walking. So did I.

The Muir Hut sits at 11,955 feet at the top of the pass, a round stone shelter built in 1930, low against the mountain as though it grew there. The door was wood, dark and heavy, slightly open. I pushed through it.

That same hiker was inside. He had made it up first, sitting there with a camp stove and two cups.

He handed me one. Coffee.

The storm hammered the stone walls. The coffee was hot. Both my hands around the cup. Inside I was fine.

He said he was sorry for being such an ass. We laughed about that. Two people with no business being up there, sitting in a hut built to honor John Muir while the mountain made its point outside.

We walked out of the hut and the storm had passed.

Lightness and grace. After all of that, just lightness.

A few days later, Joan found me on the trail. We hatched a plan. I pulled the hundred-dollar bill tucked into my pack. Others gave what they could. We mapped her a route out. She didn’t hesitate. Some kinds of courage don’t need explaining.

Whitney was still days away. The tears at the summit were still ahead, the kind I hadn’t understood when other hikers described them. But coming down that pass in the running water, something had settled. I stopped and turned around.

The sky had gone clean and blue, a full moon already up over the granite, the trees black against the last light. I took a picture. I knew I would want to remember what it looked like when the mountain finally let me go.

I was going to finish. And Evolution Valley was still out there, waiting for a return trip in better weather. It still is.