Virginia Canyon to Matterhorn Canyon

After our typical late start in the morning, we made our way merrily down Virginia Canyon, pausing now and then to ooh and ahh at the beautiful streams and dramatic avalanche swathes flowing down from Excelsior Mountain.  One particularly attractive spot was a point just before we met the Pacific Crest Trail where Return Creek plunged into a granite fault for few dozen yards.

 

 Then we turned left, or north, onto the Pacific Crest Trail.  And we went up.  We spent the rest of the morning climbing fairly steep switchbacks through hemlock and lodgepole forest.  We had our first interesting water crossing, too, at Spiller Creek.  The water was only a bit above calf-deep, but it was fast and wide.

A neat feature of the trail were old blazes made by the United States Cavalry when they were in charge of patrolling the park back around 1900.  It made me think about how old these trees were, to stand there, scarred, for a hundred or so years.  How long had they been standing before that, and how long will they linger?

 

Of course, we were hitting snow in the upper reaches of the climb.  We took a moment to rest, and Dad and I climbed a little promontory to get a view to the south, where we think we saw Ritter and Banner!

 

I'm not too familiar with the mountains around Tuolomne Meadows, so I'm not sure what else we were looking at.

Oh, along this stretch, we were meeting some PCT thru-hikers.  They zipped along quite a bit faster than us, of course.  And we got to Miller Lake, the first still body of water we'd encountered since Summit Lake the afternoon before.  We stopped to pump water, and Libby and I pulled out the head-nets for the mild swarms of mosquitoes that gathered to welcome us.

 

You can see in the photo that the meadow is still brown, and the water still high from the recent melt. Miller Lake was nearly the highest point we reached during the day, and not far past it we were standing on the dramatic edge of Matterhorn Canyon.  We drank in the view, appreciating the craggy heights of the Sawtooths, Finger Peaks, several large waterfalls cascading down the far side of the canyon, and that heady feeling you have when you look down on verdant meadows a thousand feet below.

The route to said meadows was a bit difficult, with snow obscuring much of the trail.  That meant we weren't able to take advantage of many of the switchbacks, but instead scrambled around and down duff, snow and dirt.  At the bottom, we turned up Matterhorn Canyon to leave the PCT and find a campsite.  It didn't take long, and we found a nice big one near the creek.

That night we enjoyed a fire, I tried fishing the stream, unsuccessfully, and we were visited several times by a very friendly deer.  All in all, a very nice day.  There are, of course, more pictures.