August 2003 

 

...continued After a full day of work on Friday, we left San Francisco at 7:30pm for our 5 hour drive to Bridgeport on the east side of the Sierra Nevada.  We arrived at the Green Creek trailhead around 1:00 am, where it was drizzling lightly.  Not a good omen for tomorrow's two high pass crossings.  Despite the many "Camping Verboten" signs, we pitched a quick tent next to the car and promptly crashed out. The weather was still damp in the morning, and low clouds were blocking our view up towards Virginia Pass, our immediate goal for the morning.  Undaunted, we packed up our superlight overnight "daypacks" and set off on the trail.
Note:  clicking on any photograph will present a full screen version.
	Up Green Creek.  Dave on the lower reaches of the Green Creek trail, below Green Lake.  Virginia Pass straddles the crest seen way in the background.
	Green Lake.  Two miles in, you reach Green Lake.  Virginia Pass, the low point in the "U" on the horizon, is still three miles away.  A very good use trail follows the right-hand shoreline.  However, the trail sign for "Green Lake" sends you to the left shoreline.  If you are going to Virginia Pass, follow instead the signs for "West Lake", then branch left after about 1/4 mile onto the obvious use trail leading down towards the NW shore of Green Lake.  This use trail continues all the way to Virginia Pass.
	Above Green Lake.  Dave hiking up lovely Glines Canyon above Green Lake.  We found old mining equipment and an abandoned miner's cabin up here.  The trail is beautiful and quite atypical for an eastside Sierra approach.  Normally, you would be humping up a steep dusty trail from the desert into sharp granite spires.  Green Creek, however, involves hiking up a lush valley ringed by rounded, red metamorphic summits.  More like Colorado than California.
	Approaching Virginia Pass.  Hiking up the last few hundred feet to the pass, the trail winds its way through blocks of talus.
	Welcome to Yosemite.  The clouds lifted slightly as we arrived at Virginia Pass, the boundary between the Hoover Wilderness and Yosemite National Park.  Normally, the hiker is treated to great views from here down to the peaks of the Tuolumne Meadows area, but today we only saw the bottom of Virginia Canyon below the clouds.
	Virginia Peak.  This 12,000' peak looks very steep and forbidding from this vantage point.  It is much more mellow when seen from Twin Peaks Pass.
	Twin Peaks.  We made a long diagonal traverse down into upper Virginia Canyon.  Along the way, we saw several deer, including a large buck with a sizable rack.  Twin Peaks is apparently located somewhere in the clouds at far right of this photo, but we couldn't see it at all on this day.  Our goal was to cross over into Spiller Creek via Twin Peaks Pass, the saddle in between Virginia Peak and Twin Peaks (see here as the high ridge crossing at the center of the photo).
	Wildflowers.  We saw copious amounts of lupines, indian paintbrush and other wildflowers all along our hike.  Huge amounts actually, considering it was August already.

^{BACK               NEXT}