Day 2: North Glacier Pass to north Twin Island Lake

This was our most difficult day, for sure.  We got a late start, which was fine because we wanted to hit the snow after it had softened.  We could have started a bit earlier, though, and still have been fine as it was a fairly warm day.  We missed out on some photo opportunities by sleeping until the sun was up, but an early morning bathroom adventure did give me an opportunity to see Mt. Banner lit up by the dawn alpen glow.

After breakfast and packing up, we took off toward the low point between Banner and Davis, which is pretty obvious.  There's also a well-defined use trail.  It was remarkable how much smaller Thousand Island's inlet stream had gotten overnight.  It went from a raging white torrent to a crystal clear stream.  There's no need to cross it until you're quite high.

The path to the base of the pass is easy walking through meadows, steadily uphill until you reach a broad flat area where the creek is wide and cobble-stoned.  In this area, where American Pipits and Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches play, stood a lonely grave.  This is an unusual sight to see in the Sierras:

But what a place to rest!

This, surprisingly to us, was the busiest day of the trip as we saw many other hikers.  We met our first people of the day descending North Glacier Pass.  They said they were coming from Twin Island Lakes, and had hoped to make it to Blue Lakes Pass, but had been stymied by a steep waterfall.  We think they may not have made it that far, as the really difficult waterfall to pass is the one below Lake Catherine.  We exchanged news about the World Cup, and then we were on our way.

We headed for the snow fields, which was the right thing to do, as the alternative is talus.  We stayed on the snow fields until we mounted a ridge we thought was the pass.  That's the "pass" just above Libby's head in the image above.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be a false summit.  The rest of the approach was snow pock-marked with talus, which is always a bit scary, or talus.  We opted for talus and took a direct approach toward the low point of the pass.  In retrospect, I think if we had headed up the talus to the right and then traversed into the pass, that would have been the least difficult approach.  We ended up mired in a long stretch of large talus.  Still, we made it.

There were a dozen other people on top of the pass, and it was blowing hard.  We took shelter in the rocks and ate lunch.  On the other side, Lake Catherine was still partially covered in snow and ice.

Lake Catherine has to be bypassed on the right over talus.  There's no alternative, so off we went.  At the far end, you drop down some easy terrain to a pretty tarn surrounded by snow.  From the tarn, the creek starts dropping precipitously in a series of cascades.  We crossed the creek above the waterfalls  on a partial snow/ice bridge and then started to descend the north side of the creek via a series of steep ledges.  This section had a couple of class 3 drops, but nothing dangerous.  The creek's descent is marked by beautiful waterfalls that sometimes drop 80' or more at a time.

The route follows the waterfalls until you can see a meadow off to its right, which is the route to the North Fork valley.  At the meadow, we headed off gently up and to the right along a fault into another canyon with a different stream.  Traversing over to this stream, you hit a use trail that takes you down to the old site of a linarite mine.  I picked up a couple of samples for Grandpa and we took some photos and had a snack.  It was already quite late by this point, after 5:30 pm, I think, but after some deliberation we decided to continue on to Twin Island Lake.  There's an unmaintained trail from the mine that leads down into the valley of the North Fork.  We followed it down partly buried switchbacks and then headed west in a traverse that led us to another little prospect.  From there we went up some faults and hit a nice flat area that led into another fault that went over the ridge to the lake.

Unfortunately, the only flat spot in this area is well above any good water source.  We considered dropping to the lake and then traversing toward the outlet, but the large intervening bluff appeared to fall off too steeply to comfortably circumvent below.  Instead, we continued up some cracks and then found another way to down climb pretty steeply to the outlet of the lake.  At that point it was too late to continue and we set up camp.