Continued...
My goal today was a visit to Peak 8,213ft, a P900 on the east side of Bartolas
Country deep in the Southern Sierra. We had gotten to my other goals the
previous day and this last one had very little interest to Tom. We had seen it
from a distance the day before when we were atop Butte Peak and there was
little to get excited about - a tree-covered hill that was decidedly unpeak-like
and not much to look at. Being the highest summit between Taylor and Bartolas
Creek was hardly enough to get Tom to care much. "If it had 1,000ft of
prominence, I'd probably care," he remarked. "Really?" I replied, "You'll care
about 1,000ft, but not 900ft?" Just as quickly he shot back, "Yup, that's my
limit." Good to know what a man's price is, I suppose. Luckily, Iris, Matt and
Scott weren't all that particular and would happily indulge me. I need more
friends like them. Tom would join us for the morning effort, but then planned
to head out on his own after that.
Peak 8,195ft / Peak 8,308ft / Peak 7,940ft / Peak 8,025ft
The five of us drove in two vehicles about 9mi from our Poison Creek campsite
south through Big Meadow to Long Meadow where we a four mile loop.
It was
a very geometric arrangement, with a peak at each of four corners of the square
we navigated, a mile on each side. None were particularly outstanding, but there
were crowning each. The highest, Peak 8,308ft,
had the best summit, three in fact, with the middle one being higher. I went to
the first where I found a survey tower and figured I'd found
the highpoint until Matt, still down in the forest, pointed to a higher point to
through the trees. That proved to be the highest, though Matt
went over to further east to enjoy some additional
scrambling. There was some other fun as we descended the west side of the third
summit, Peak 7,940ft, taking us down with a tunneling
move to bypass a chockstone. In all we spent something over three hours on the
effort, rambling logged in decades long past, chatting
or enjoying the solitude as the mood fit.
Peak 8,213ft / Peak 8,170ft
Tom had had enough of this sort of random forest wandering and chose to start
back out the road for home, stopping to tag Cherry Hill on the way (more random
forest wandering, but "At least it has a name", he quipped). The rest of us
piled into Matt's car and headed east another 4.5mi into Bartolas Country. Near
the end of our drive we found a spur road not shown on the topo map heading
further in our preferred direction of travel, getting us another half mile
closer to our goal. From our , Peak 8,213ft was about
1,200ft above us and a little over a mile to the ESE. Though longer, the hiking
was much like what we'd done earlier, perhaps a bit more
open among the trees that cover most of the slopes. I was aiming for a large,
obvious overlooking the west-facing slope we climbed,
thinking it was the highpoint. The summit turned out to be much more mundane,
about a quarter mile to the northeast, almost lost . We
identified the in the area easily enough and
then went about climbing it from just about every possible side to make sure
we didn't leave any routes untried. The more interesting part of this hike was
the traverse we did next, heading SSW to Peak 8,170ft, a bonus peak a mile and
a quarter away. There were some modest along the way
and other outcrops overlooking the South Fork of the Kern River drainage to the
east. We paused as Matt headed off to climb , though we
weren't gracious enough to wait for his return before continuing on - he would
catch up soon enough. We reached before 1:30p, finding
it has better views looking over Bartolas
Country and the Kern River drainage.
We stayed only a few minutes at the second summit before starting down, having
lunched at the higher point earlier. We descended to the north and northwest,
following a combination of and
down through the forest before to Matt's Subaru by 2:15p.
Though we still had hours of daylight remaining, we called it a day since we had
lots of driving to do. More than an hour of this was just to return to camp at
Poison Creek and our other vehicles. Iris suffered another bout of motion
sickness during this time as seems her fate, growing increasingly nauseous and
quiet as the car bumped along, turning corner after corner through the forest.
We past by several vehicles enroute, the first we'd seen
all weekend. One was a Forest Ranger who stopped to ask us if we'd seen a guy
on an orange motorcycle. Seems he was out looking for a scofflaw but was likely
well off-track. After showering, I started on the long drive back to San
Jose, more than 6hrs all told. It had been a fun trip so was well worth the
trouble...
Matt's Video
Continued...