The John Muir Trail. Alan Castle
the more adventurous do a day-hike or two from Yosemite Valley or Tuolumne Meadows. For those with a head for heights the ascent of Half Dome is a very popular day-hike from Yosemite Valley. But only a tiny percentage of Yosemite’s visitors venture deep into its wilderness. You are to be one of these most fortunate people who will cross the wilderness of Yosemite, experiencing this most awe-inspiring of mountain landscapes.
Today Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks in the southern Sierra share a boundary and are administered as one park. However, they were set up by separate acts of Congress at different times, and a little of their history will help to make clear their importance. In the mid-18th century this land was seen as ripe for commercial exploitation and attracted timber barons who came to fell the mighty and ancient trees that grew here. But such enlightened and influential people as John Muir worked hard to obtain protection for this special wilderness area.
In 1890, very soon after the creation of Yosemite National Park, the second US national park was established, the relatively small Sequoia National Park, 50,000 acres of protected land. Just a week later a third but very tiny national park (2500 acres) was designated as the General Grant National Park (named after the American general and 18th president of the US, who had died five years earlier in 1885). At the same time more land was added to Sequoia National Park, tripling its size. The continuing efforts of conservationists over the years led to further expansion of the two parks, until in 1940 General Grant National Park took in land around the South Fork Kings river and changed its name to Kings Canyon National Park. As late as 1965 Cedar Grove and Tehipite Valley were added to the park.
The combined Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks amount to over 1300 square miles of mountain and forest wilderness. The elevation range is from as low as 1500ft in the low foothills of the west of the parks to the high mountains of the Great Western Divide and High Sierras in the east. The highest point in continental America (or the contiguous states), the 14,496ft-high Mount Whitney, lies on the border of Sequoia National Park.
By far the majority of the park lies within the Sequoia and Kings Canyon Wilderness Area; so, as in Yosemite, few of the 2 million annual visitors to the parks reach the heartland of this stunning area. The parks are famous for their Sequoias, the world’s largest trees. The best examples are to be found in the north of the parks area, in the Giant Forest plateau. Here can be found the tallest of the Sequoias, the 275ft-high ‘General Sherman’, whose trunk has a ground-level circumference of 103ft and which weighs an estimated 1385 tons.
John Muir Wilderness
In honour and recognition of the life’s work of America’s best-known conservationist and father of the national parks a large tract of land in California has been designated the John Muir Wilderness.
Located in the Inyo and Sierra national forests, the 581,000-acre John Muir Wilderness is the largest wilderness area in California. Some of the most spectacular mountain scenery on earth is to be seen there, and it is perhaps not surprising that it is the most visited wilderness in the state of California. This unspoilt backcountry is characterised by mile after mile of high snow-capped mountain ranges, countless sparkling alpine lakes, tarns, waterfalls, rivers and streams flowing with crystal-clear pure waters, and vast stretches of native forest. This is all high country, with elevation ranging between 4000 and 14,000ft.
Both the John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail pass through this wilderness. The JMT first enters the John Muir Wilderness at Red Cones on Day 7 of the trek, leaving on Day 12 when Kings Canyon National Park is entered, soon after leaving Muir Trail Ranch. The very last stages of the hike, Days 20 and 21, from Trail Crest down to Whitney Portal, also cross the John Muir Wilderness.
View of the summit crags on Mount Whitney (Day 20)
Ansel Adams and the Ansel Adams Wilderness
The John Muir Trail passes through an area known as the Ansel Adams Wilderness (on Days 5, 6 and 7, from the Donohue Pass, where the Trail leaves the Yosemite National Park, to Red Cones south of Reds Meadow, where the JMT enters the John Muir Wilderness).
Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of America’s foremost landscape photographers and conservationists. Born in San Francisco at the beginning of the 20th century, Ansel Adams rejected a conventional formal education, but showed an early interest in nature and the Californian wilderness after a boyhood trip with his family to Yosemite in 1916, just two years after John Muir’s death.
Adams’s early inclination was to become a pianist, but his interest in photography deepened, and by the late 1920s he was beginning to be recognised as a landscape photographer of outstanding talent. He is particularly well known for his photographs of the national parks of western US. He used his photographs to further his work on conservation, persuading politicians that the great wilderness areas of the US were worth protecting. He served on the board of the influential Sierra Club, founded by Muir in 1892, for nearly 40 years. Ansel Adams died at the age of 82 in April 1984.
His life’s work in landscape photography and conservation has been honoured by the designation of part of the Californian High Sierra wilderness as the Ansel Adams Wilderness.
The Pacific Crest Trail
The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is the father or perhaps the very big brother of the John Muir Trail. The US has three great ultra-long walking trails that stretch from north to south across this huge country. The Appalachian Trail in the east was the first to be established in 1937. It starts in the southern state of Georgia and heads north for 2100 miles to finish in Maine near the Canadian border. The newest, longest and hardest of the three is the Continental Divide Trail, which runs between Mexico and Canada along the watershed of the United States. But perhaps the most impressive in terms of the grandeur and diversity of its scenery is the Pacific Crest Trail, which also stretches from Mexico to Canada, but through the three western states of California, Oregon and Washington, a total distance of 2665 miles.
Pacific Crest/John Muir Trail signpost just outside Tuolumne Meadows (Day 4)
Although the PCT coincides with the JMT for much of the length of the latter, there are sections where the two long-distance paths go their own ways. In particular the JMT and PCT do not coincide at the northern end of the JMT (ie. between Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows) and at the southern terminus of the JMT (the PCT leaves the JMT a little before Crabtree Ranger Station and omits the traverse of Mount Whitney). In all about 175 miles of the JMT are coincident with the PCT.
The PCT is a trail of extremes, as it passes through six of the seven ecological zones of North America, from near sea level to over 13,000ft in altitude, from the ferociously hot deserts of southern California to the High Sierra mountains, from the temperate rain forests of the Pacific North-West to the volcanic peaks and glaciers of the Cascade Mountains. The highlights include the Mojave Desert; the Sierra Nevada including Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks; Marble Mountain and the Russian Wilderness in Northern California; the volcanoes of the Cascades, including Mount Shasta and Mount Hood; Crater Lake; Columbia River Gorge; Mount Rainier; and the Northern Cascades.
Every year around 300 or more of the world’s best long-distance backpackers gather at the end of April for the now traditional send-off party near the Mexican border, and the following day take their first steps northwards on a truly marathon hike through the US to Canada. Many of these ‘Thru-Hikers’ fail to complete the PCT in one season, but the determined few make it to Canada by early October.
Nearly all PCT Thru-Hikers head north because the logistics of walking north to south in one season are unfeasible. Most head through the High Sierra country through which the JMT passes during the month of June, so they have to contend with much more snow than the summertime JMT walker, and river crossings can be extremely hazardous as the many streams are swollen by melting snows high up in the mountains.
The chances of a southbound JMT hiker during the summertime encountering a northbound PCT Thru-Hiker are therefore pretty slight. However, for every Thru-Hiker there are many hundreds