Day 6, Saturday: Piute Creek to Piute Pass

Blue skies cloud over. Two Japanese hikers are amused by my big camera. I wait out a storm in the trees. I hike across a meadowed high open plateau. I rush to capture a dramatic glow above the pass. Lightning and thunder stomp across me.

As the day dawned it seemed pretty clear that I was on schedule to complete my Plan B route, which was a big relief. The morning started with a mostly blue sky, and I spent some time on the granite right by the edge of cascading Piute Creek capturing an energetic image with my ultra-wide lens. It had rained a little in the night, so I spread my tarps out on the rock to dry a bit, ants be damned! But surprisingly quickly clouds began building, and a light sprinkle of rain fell. Time to hit the trail!

The day’s hike began with pleasant walking up through a forest of conifers. A couple of Japanese hikers boisterously hailed me from some distance away, and when we met each gave me a fist bump. Seems they hadn’t seen anyone else in some time, and had also needed to hunker down during the storm the day before. Super friendly guys—I thought to myself “Mutt and Jeff”, as one was quite tall and the other more diminutive in stature. They wondered what was in my chest pouch: I pulled out my camera and they both laughed, the tall one waving his iPhone at me in comparison to my beastly rig.

Leaving them I entered a sub-alpine zone populated with stunted trees, and then the thunderstorm began. Gritting my teeth I quickly covered some open ground, and then finding a copse of fairly homogeneous trees I crouched near my pack on my foam pad for maybe half an hour until the worst of it had passed. Starting up again I passed by another guy similarly suited up for rain—we said “Hey.”

After passing through a sublime forest of golden trunked pines (lodgepole pines?), the trail emerged onto the high alpine plateau west of Piute Pass (technically I guess this would be considered the southern extent of Humphreys Basin?). This was a beautiful wide open country of expansive meadows, lakes, and few trees. Mount Humphreys was a prominent broad peak to the north, and on the south the basin was fringed by the many jagged peaks of Glacier Divide. The trail wound out in front of me for miles, headed towards Piute Pass.

There was a persistent grey cloud ceiling, but no further rain. The cool weather was pleasant for hiking, and the soft ambient light made for some nice landscape shots. I imagined this country might be similar to what one would find in the Scottish Highlands (which I’ll soon be visiting, so I’ll find out!). A pack train of mules led by two horse packers appeared in the distance, and eventually forded a small stream in front of me, passing on my right.

Finally I crested the broad flat saddle of Piute Pass, revealing the view north down a canyon, ultimately back to North Lake. The expansive view down the U-shaped canyon included a meandering stream directly below me, and a couple of visible lakes. I descended a short distance down the trail, and dropped my pack in a nice spot a short distance from the nearest lake (really more of a tarn).

I set up my tripod atop a low granite bluff above this lake, facing west towards the pass I had just descended. I found a nice symmetrical composition, with the broad U-shape of the pass reflected in the lake, which has numerous small jagged rocks sprinkled in the foreground. The light at this point though was just flat and grey, and I wondered if it would light up at all for sunset? But I still had some work to do setting up my campsite a couple of hundred feet away up the slope, so I left my camera set up there on the tripod just in case.

Looking up from pounding in a stake I saw a magenta glow picking up above the pass—Shit! I ran as quickly as I dared down the various sloping granite ramps back down to the lake, then up to my tripod. The color was still there as I reached my camera, a bit out of breath. Affixing a neutral density filter to my lens, I guessed at a single two-minute exposure, thinking to smooth any ripples in the lake and blur the clouds a bit. I thought maybe I’d make another exposure, but by then the color was already fading. Chimping the capture it looked like I’d gotten the shot.

Settling in under my tarp after dinner it began to rain. This was shortly followed by the flicker-flicker of lightning, and the rumble of distant thunder. But it was getting closer, and I began counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder: “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…”

I definitely felt exposed so close to the pass, in a fairly open area, with my metal trekking pole for a tarp support. The counts got shorter. I had some sips of single malt, thinking about just how precious life is.

Then two or three blinding strobe-like flashes, filling my tarp with light.

“One—“ KABOOM!!!!

Eventually those angry god-like flashing booming footsteps began to recede, and I finally got to sleep.