Hot on the Trail: Golden Trout Wilderness

My three grown children didn’t say anything, but I think they were a little worried when I told them that my sister and I planned to spend a week camping in the eastern Sierra. Kathi and I love the Owens Valley, as had our parents and grandparents, and we’d been there many times over the years. But tenting in an unimproved dry camp with pit toilets and temperatures hovering near 100 degrees during the day? I had crept into my 60s and Kathi was not far behind.  Could we do this?

Determined to find out, we headed to a campground we’d loved as kids. Next to narrow, cold Tuttle Creek pouring down from the slopes of the Sierra, we pitched our tent-- two rooms, one for each of us, with inflatable queen size mattresses.  We might be camping, but we were going to suffer as little as possible.

Every morning the sun rose from behind the massive boulders of the Alabama Hills to our east, and in the evening it set below Mt. Whitney to our west. At night we reveled in the unbelievable canopy of stars overhead, and the intense silence, broken only by howling coyotes.

One day as I alternately read and dozed in my folding chair, set smack in the middle of the willow-shaded creek, I noticed a steep road switchbacking up the escarpment a few miles to the south. Consulting a map, we saw that it led to a place called Horseshoe Meadow, in the Golden Trout Wilderness, at 10,000’ elevation. Of course, we had to go.

As it turned out, the road that looked so inviting from the comfort of my lawn chair wasn’t for the faint of heart. Kathi’s truck wheezed up the 6,000’ climb, along a narrow two-lane road with no guardrail. Opting against joining the hang-gliders who were launching themselves off the cliff, we continued on and parked near the Cottonwood Pass trailhead. We walked through a grove of lodge pole pines, and spectacular Horseshoe Meadow opened in front of us.

What was it about that place?  I still don’t know. I was captivated by the wide flat expanse of the meadow, the mysterious empty sandy areas studded with rocky outcroppings, the meandering transparent stream (yes, there were golden trout!), and the magnificent surrounding mountain peaks.  There was something truly magical about it, and it’s still the place I visualize when I need to find inner calm.

One flat-topped mound of rocks was covered with hundreds of impressively large piles of scat.  I romantically imagined a pack of coyotes congregating here to howl at a full moon-- a Sierra Nevada version of Lion King.  But my wise sister pointed out that the leavings were more likely compliments of the small furry critters we saw darting in and out of the rocky crevices. 

After a few delightful hours exploring the meadow and the surrounding forest, we returned to the parking lot to enjoy some of the late-summer fruit Kathi had brought from her ranch in Sonoma.  Chatting with a handsome young man who worked with mules at the nearby pack station (one is never too old to admire male pulchritude), we asked about the piles of poop we’d seen on the rocks.  That’s from the yellow-bellied marmots, he told us. They’re not the most majestic creatures, but we were interested nonetheless-- a new animal for us to learn about.

Our mule-wrangling friend was hungrily eyeing our grapes.  We don’t get much fresh fruit up here, he hinted.  Happy to leave him with our Sonoma-grown bounty, we carefully navigated down that treacherous road to camp, where our dinner had been cooking in the solar oven all day and a pile of firewood awaited us.

Who's too old for camping?  Not us.