Evolution Valley loop - August 2014

At the start of the trip. Good one, Lisa.

Frank, Laurelle, Garrett and Lisa set out one day on a walk in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They took a boat across a lake, walked through a meadow, traversed a gorge, swam in a lake and took lots of pictures. They climbed up and down. Five days and 45 miles later, the four returned to "civilization" - a little foot sore, but much better off than when they had started.


That's one way of telling the story.


Another way would be regulation travel blog post, with lots of maps, photos, facts and chronological order. Our route is mapped out here. I've stalled almost two months before beginning this blog post, perhaps because I don't want to sully a beautiful experience by taking it apart and looking at it too hard.

So I'm just going to share a lot of pictures with you, and hope you enjoy seeing some of the images we chose to record.

We spent most of the trip on the John Muir Trail.

The South Fork of the San Joaquin River was our trailside companion for two noisy nights and several days. It's a friendly river. It rushes down canyons, swirls around boulders and deepens into pools. I soaked my feet in it. I submerged myself in it. It made me cleaner.

I drank its cold, sweet water thanks to my handy new Oko water bottle. I was grateful many, many times.

This bridge got us across the river. There's a nice rest spot on the other side, and a camp in the trees just downstream.

Lisa and Garrett are great hiking partners. They are the most positive people you'll ever meet. Really. They sing a lot. The two of them somehow survived on half the food Frank and I ate. Honestly.

We ascended Evolution Creek on Day Two and were rewarded by stunning falls.

We were now in the Evolution Valley and around 9,500 feet elevation.
We stopped at the most perfect granite waterslide for lunch. I could have stayed there forever. But we kept on walking. Even more amazing places awaited us.

Evolution Lake

We ascended another thousand feet to Evolution Basin. It looks fake. It's the landscape of my imagination. I can't imagine life without it.

Lunch at Evolution Lake was followed by a bracing swim. I put on all my clothes afterward and warmed myself like a lizard on the in the sun. Nothing better.

Intrepid travelers.

Making our way around Evolution Lake. Our path will take us up through the gap at the far end of the lake and up almost as far as you can see.

We ascend into a landscape of rock and tundra.

Sapphire Lake - 11,000 feet - looking back the way we came.

Late afternoon heading toward No-Name Lake.

Tired. Cross country towards Camp Three - found for us by Frank - on the shore of No-Name Lake. I could climb no further that day.

Wind protection among the rocks at Camp Three - 11,300 feet. It was to be our only frosty night giving us frozen water bottles and 22 degrees Fahrenheit on Lisa's thermometer the next morning.

Alpenglow lit up the peaks before bedtime.

We ascended to Wanda Lake the next morning, our highest point in the Evolution Basin before going off trail for the next day and a half. The John Muir Trail continues over that saddle at the end of the lake and up to Muir Pass.

Garrett looks back over Wanda Lake as we began climbing over the pile of talus that divides the Evolution Basin from - what? - Davis Lake Basin? The headwaters of North Goddard Creek?

Tarn among talus at the highest point of the trip, a saddle at almost 12,000 feet.

Frank slowly descends over talus blocks, our difficult terrain for the rest of the day. The turquoise lake is unnamed and shallow, fed directly by snowfields glistening high on the dark peaks above. 

Lunch break on the way down to Davis Lake. We'll pick our way through the talus around the left side of the lake and across a finger-like peninsula, barely visible in the picture.

I took this photo of Frank, Lisa and Garrett ahead of me on "the trail," as they kindly waited for me to have a little meltdown. After hours of talus under foot, I was basically done. Somehow I kept wobbling along for another hour or so....

Davis Lake is on two levels. The upper level flows through this creek across the peninsula to the lower lake.

This is where we ground to a halt, dumped our packs, soaked our feet and made camp just behind the photographer. The clear lagoon was also the site of my bath before dinner.

Somehow everyone felt a lot perkier the next morning. Looking back the way we came, you can see the peninsula dividing upper and lower Davis lakes. We traversed the steep scree slope to get around the lakeshore on the left side of the picture. The divide leading back to Evolution Basin is visible at the far end of the valley.

Still off trail, we wound around the top end of Loch Davis before climbing over a saddle into the North Goddard Creek canyon.

We descended North Goddard Creek, criss-crossing several times.

Frank's and Garrett's expert and intuitive navigational skills enabled us to find our way back to an actual trail - the Goddard Canyon Trail - by mid afternoon.

We had to go the long way around this waterfall section.

Somehow Lisa and Garrett managed to look as fresh near the end of Day Five as they did at the start of the trip.



At the trail junction where we ended the loop and began retracing our steps, Frank and I looked a little less fresh, but we soldiered on to Camp Five near the steel bridge that evening. The four of us made it back to the ferry at Florence Lake by 2 p.m. the next day.

Planning for summer 2014 Evolution Valley backpack

Here's the hillmap.com map of our route into Evolution Valley from Florence Lake. I can't figure out how to save the map on hillmap.com, but with any luck the route I plotted will magically stay on the site!

Egyptian walking onions: a how-to guide

I started gardening in my current location in the Methow Valley just outside Winthrop, Wash., in 2005. I've learned, and am still learning, many things about pests, wind, moisture, soil, frost and freeze in my garden location, which is buffered from many of our climatic extremes by Studhorse Mountain to the east and sheltering trees on three sides.

One thing I have learned is that many vegetables - especially those in the onion tribe - will overwinter at temperatures below zero without any protection at all if they are robust enough on the fall to become dormant at their own pace.

Blooming scallion or "green onion" in June

For example, I almost always leave some scallions, or green onions, in the ground every fall, and they green up pretty fast in the spring and may be harvested for a few weeks before they start blooming. I let the overwintered plants send up a flower stalk, or scape, and go to seed every year. I collect most of the seed by shaking the inflorescence, or flower head, into a paper bag once I can see a black speck inside each tiny flower. Some seed always spills onto the soil as I go along, germinates within a week or so, and "voila," I have a self-perpetuating scallion patch.

It should be noted, however, that the scallion plant dies after it blooms in the second growing season, classifying it as a biennial.

A perennial onion - one that lives year after year after year - goes by the name of Egyptian walking onion, or tree onion, or top-setting onion.

Walking onion patch in June

These onions are different because they create top sets - a cluster of bulblets - on top on the flower stalk instead of traditional flowers with seeds.

They are said to "walk," because as the bulblets develop and get heavier, if left unattended the whole stalk will topple over and the bulblets will plant themselves 12 to 18 inches from the "mother plant."

After a few years of this you might have nothing but walking onions in your garden, so I leave my clump of mother plants in the ground and snap off the bulblet clusters each summer once each bulblet reaches marble size, or so.

Clusters of bulblets

The clusters can easily be broken apart, leaving you with individual bulblets. Some people peel and pickle these, but I have not tried that.

I think ahead to early next spring - April - when harvesting anything from the garden is a real delight.

Sometime around mid summer I prepare a little patch of soil by loosening it with a fork, punch holes an inch or two apart with my index finger or a stick, and drop a bulblet - pointy side up - into each hole and cover it.

They sprout up pretty fast, and you'll have small green onions by fall.

A new walking onion patch in late August

You can harvest some in September or so, but wouldn't you enjoy them more after the snow melts in the spring? Give them a couple weeks to straighten up and start photosynthesizing, and you can start harvesting your green onions to use in salads or stir frys or add to soups or burgers or whatever.

Freshly dug green walking onions in April

I carefully dig them with a hand trowel, rinse them off with the hose and bring them into the kitchen to trim them up. Cut off the roots with a paring knife and peel off the brown outer skin.

Beautiful green onions! They will keep, wrapped in a paper towel inside a plastic bag in the fridge for several weeks.

Green walking onions ready to eat along with overwintered baby kale

I have found that I can leave them in the ground and harvest them as needed until around June 1, when the young plants try to form their own top sets and start getting "woody."

I've also observed that out of my mother plants, side shoots sprout which can be broken off below ground level and used like leeks in early spring.

Anyone nearby who wants to start a patch of Egyptian walking onions can contact me from July-August for bulblets to plant in your garden.

Four Corners U.S.A. 2012 - Part Two

We drove across part of the Navajo Nation to get to Hovenweep National Monument, definitely off the beaten path and definitely worth the effort. Here, the ancestral Puebloans did not create cliff dwellings, but whole towns on canyon rims. Sleeping Ute Mountain in the distance is an important landmark.

Skilled masons built Hovenweep.

We camped along the San Juan River near Bluff, Utah - an area we will definitely return to some day.

Up onto Cedar Mesa and Natural Bridges National Monument. By this point of the trip we were already on the return trajectory, but I felt like I never wanted to leave those desert canyons.

Descending into the paradise of White Canyon on our other favorite trail of the trip - Sipapu Bridge in Natural Bridges National Monument.

Sipapu Bridge

In White Canyon

Wandering the canyon bottom

We said goodbye-for-now to desert ratting in Capitol Reef National Park.

Four Corners U.S.A. 2012 - Part One

Frank and I chiseled out three weeks of October to take our camping rig - dubbed "Truck-a-mo" - to the Four Corners region: where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet in a perfect cross.

As often happens with us, our grand expectations of what territory we would cover shrunk, as we realized that to really absorb the country we travelled through, we would need to see less to see more. Know what I mean?

So we mostly explored southeastern Utah.

Anyway, it has taken me this long to post pictures from the trip, and I have tried to be ruthless in my editing in order to select only the photos that tell the story. Frank has all the photos with me in them, so you will need to bug him about it if you want to see them.

We began by exploring Arches National Park.

Notice the guy atop the arch.

The view from our campsite along the Colorado River.

This road was built by uranium miners.

Island in the Sky District, Canyonlands National Park

A campsite on BLM lands near the Needles District of Canyonlands

The trails were challenging, varied and picturesque. One of our two favorite trails - this one in the Needles District.

Needles District

Needles District

We went to Mesa Verde National Park and learned as much about the ancestral Puebloans as we could absorb. Ask me about kivas.

A reconstructed kiva at Balcony House - sans roof.

A friendly national park ranger took our picture at Spruce Tree House.

(To be continued ...)