Attacking Sam Mack Meadow

Today our hiking led us up the north fork of Big Pine Creek to Sam Mack Meadow. On the edge of the meadow is a geocache with a particular difficulty and terrain rating that I need for a geocaching challenge I am working on. It’s not a particularly easy hike, and I had originally planned on going alone. Karen, however, decided she would go with me. She does love the eastern Sierra, but was a bit intimidated by the description of this hike. The starting elevation is approximately 8,400 ft and the meadow is 6.5 miles away at just a little over 11,000 ft.

On regular walks, Karen’s natural pace is faster than mine. Even on our hikes along Rock Creek (over 10,000 ft elevation), she usually walks ahead of me. Today, however, she was slower. We are not sure if she was just having a bad day, or if the steeper climbing was a factor. By the time we got to First, Second, and Third Lake, she was tired.

From Third Lake, the trail climbed steeply to the meadow. We discussed her waiting for me at the bottom of the climb, but that was more disagreeable than the effort of hiking on. Even though I told her the GPS said the cache was less than 0.5 miles away, I’m sure she felt the climb was never going to end.

While Karen cooled her feet in the stream (right off the glacier), I hunted for the cache. I found it fairly quickly, although there have been folks who have been unsuccessful. It was about 2 pm when we started back—later than I had wanted it to be. I’m sure Karen was hurting, but we made it back to the trailhead by 6 pm. She says she will never do another hike like that, but she really had a lot of perseverance to push through her tiredness and discomfort.

The area is in the shadow of the Palisades, a series of 14K ft peaks, and just below the Palisades Glacier, the largest glacier in the Sierras. It’s all incredibly scenic, and I was surprised by the turquoise lakes fed by glacial melt water—very pretty. I’d like to go back and climb just a bit farther to get a good view of the glacier. We could not see it from the meadow.

I realize now I did not take many photos. I was just too occupied with getting us up the trail to the meadow. That’s another reason to return—to capture the beauty in photographs.

We got back into Bishop around 7 pm, and were starving. We went right to Whiskey Creek for a meat and potatoes dinner. Pretty good, although pricier than we usually do.