Dick's Adventures of 2026 - Part 3

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I've followed the old man's footprints. I've walked in the footprints of John Muir. On September 2 I set out to follow the footprints of Lew and Dick. All these footprints were made decades ago, and over a century in the case of Muir. Any actual footprints are long gone. But the route I followed with my friend Lew Koch in the late 1960's was still clear in my mind.

A bit of explanation is in order here. I was visiting Nelder Grove with my daughter Jennifer and her husband Rod. We had driven up what is now the Graveyard of the Giants Trail to where Nelder Creek crosses the road, and into an area with many large sequoias that is known as Nelder Basin. The road continued on, winding around the mountain to the highest part of the grove, where you find the Old Granddad Tree and several others. I had previously gone cross-country from the Basin up to the Graveyard by an ill-chosen route that found me bush-whacking through a thick patch of chaparral, but I had seen an elderly gentleman go up the hill from the Basin in a different direction. I reasoned that I could go that way, following a barely visible route that was probably an old logging road, and connect with another old road that led out past the Granddad to the main road.

We accomplished this more or less. It was not a great route, but better than being surrounded by an acre of chaparral, and I took some teasing from my young companions about following the wrong old man.

As to John Muir, he went everywhere in the Sierra, so anywhere you go, he was there before you.

Lew was working at KJEO-TV when I started there in 1966, and we soon started hiking together. One of our hikes was from the top of Kaiser Pass, in a southerly direction. It was not an official trail, but my memory was that it was fairly easy going. It had snowed, and in the morning we walked across big fields of crusted-over snow. Coming back in the afternoon the snow had softened, and we had to go around those patches.

But first, the cabin. This is actually a very nice A-Frame in a small development called Mile High, about three miles down Auberry Road from State Highway 168. With approval from Grandson Johnny & Brittany to spend two nights, I drove up on Tuesday, September 1, and just stayed around the cabin that day. There are some good opportunities for a nicd walk here. First I walked up Bald Mountain Road past the cabin to where it started downhilll, something I've wanted to do but never hve. Later walked the loop we call the Horseshoe, that leaves Bald Mountain a little above the cabin and rejoins it a little below. There are a number of houses along the way, as well as ponderosa and sugar pines, incense cedar, and seemingly acres of manzanita.

After breakfast Wednesday I drove out to the highway, up to Shaver Lake and beyond to Huntington Lake. Here the road starts a climb from 7,000 feet to the pass at 9,000 feet. A dirt road on the south side goes up to White Bark Vista where you have a magnificent view of the high Sierra, including the Silver Divide and the Ritter Range. I've been up that road many times, but it is very rough and I will not take my 2024 CR-V hybrid on it. Instead I walked up hill on the opposite side of the main road, as Lew and I had done more than 50 years earlier. In about 100 yards I entered the Kaiser Wilderness, and in about a quarter mile I had hiked above the trees blocking the view and had a vista of mountain peaks in three directions.

I observed a rock-covered slope above me, steeper than the terrain I had already navigated. Since I had gone past that spot in the past, I decided did not have to do it again, and rested on a somewhat comfortable boulder. In addition to a few wild flowers, I was surrounded by high elevation trees - lodgepole pine, fir and white bark pine.

After enjoying the view and the surroundings for a while, I stared back down. Since there was no trail, I was careful not to veer off to one side or another of what I thought was the correct route, and I was happy and relieved to find myself back by the Kaiser Wilderness Sign. From here it was a short distance down to where I was parked, and I was soon heading back to the cabin.

I'm not sure if I have ever reported anything about the road up to the pass. It's about seven miles from the lake to the pass. The first half of the road is a smooth, well-maintained road with a center line. The second half is narrow an winding with no center line, and many places where one car must pull off to let the other pass when two vehicle meet. When I originally went up this road in the 1960s, the entire seven miles was like that, and beyond rhe pass it is no better and often worse It's about 20 miles to either Edison Lake or Florence Lake, and both are part of the hydroelectric projects that were build in the 1920s.

Along the good part of the road, two or three miles up form Huntington, there is a view across the canyon of Rancheria Falls, where we've hiked a number of times. It's some distance away and the water is so low it's not obvious that in the right season it is a magnificent falls. 

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