Grinnell LakeLast year’s Silver Peak Loop was a loop of the western end of the Silver Divide. The counterpart to that loop for the eastern end of the Silver Divide is the Red & White Loop discussed here. For some background on why the Silver Divide is awesome here are some words excerpted from the Silver Peak Loop post: The Silver Divide is a spur of the Sierra Crest south of Yosemite and Mammoth Lakes in the John Muir Wilderness. Unlike the Sierra Crest which is oriented from northwest to southeast, the Silver Divide is oriented from west to east.  The divide is entirely under 12,500 feet ..read more

Marble Mountain from Peak 6,881Note: While I don’t get around to blogging about most of my adventures these days for various reasons, I’ll have a few posts coming up about summer and fall adventures from 2019! The Marble Mountain Wilderness is a 241,744 acre wilderness in Siskiyou County in far Northern County. The namesake feature of this vast expanse of wildland is Marble Mountain, which contains a combination of bright white limestone and black metamorphic rock giving the mountain a marbled look. It’s unclear where Marble Mountain starts or ends, but one could argue that it runs from Kings ..read more

It’s been awhile since I have posted on this blog but rest assured I have been busy with adventures virtually every weekend. This post provides an update on a project I started in 2018 to catalog the glacial lakes of the High Sierra (see here for more details on the project and why I started it). These lakes have wonderful colors that are modulated by the type and volume of silt contained in the runoff from the last vestiges of glacial ice in the Sierra Nevada. The lakes are almost exclusively  at very high elevations either near or above the tree line.  These elevations realized a much above ..read more

The north side of Kaiser Peak Kaiser Peak is the 10,310 ft high point of a 10 mile long ridge that extends west from Kaiser Pass. The ridge is unusually alpine for being so far west of the Sierra Crest and several small glacier-carved lakes are nestled on the north side of the ridge. Much of this area is located within the 21,986 ft Kaiser Wilderness, an island of wilderness separated from the contiguous wilderness that straddles the Sierra Crest. As the ridge is far removed from the crest, the summit provides a stellar and broad view of the central and southern Sierra region including the Cla ..read more

Ascending the Ventana Spires The Grand Ventana Traverse – Chews Ridge to Molera Beach via the Ventana Cones: April 12, 2019; James Bueno, Toshi Hosaka, Leor Pantilat, Sean Reedy Nestled deep within the 240,000 acre Ventana Wilderness is the most rugged coastal terrain in the contiguous United States. The peaks and points of interest within this region have been the source of many dreams and adventures over the years. A natural culmination of all of these experiences was the Grand Ventana Traverse, an aesthetic point-to-point trans Santa Lucia route that crosses the northern part of the mounta ..read more

Evening turquoise, February 10, 2019 It’s mid April and the window for snow on Cone Peak in Santa Lucia Mountains has all but closed. Winter (finally) came to California this year with a relatively intense 6 week period of storms lasting from early February through mid March. The result is quite a bit to talk about this season. However, half through January it was’t certain we would receive any snow. With strong high pressure in the forecast some very smart meteorologists and climate scientists had declared winter in California all but over predicting the high pressure would become entrenched ..read more

Sawtooth Mountain above Smith Lake Sawtooth Mountain is positioned in the heart of the Trinity Alps. As the name would suggest, the mountain is rugged from all directions and is almost entirely composed of the glacier-polished white granite that is characteristic of the region. While not the highest peak in the Trinity Alps (~100 feet short), Sawtooth Mountain is arguably the quintessential peak of the Trinities.  Its profile is instantly recognizable from surrounding peaks and the summit is remote and challenging to reach from any direction. Sawtooth Mountain’s centralized location affords a ..read more