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Just days after returning from last year's 4-day, 18 mile trip in the Desolation Wilderness, I
started calculating what we could possibly do the following year. As it turned out, the trip
I found that best fit our range was yet another trip in the Desolation Wilderness, this one a
5-day, 32 mile lollipop loop. Despite being in the same general area, it would cover very little
of the same trail as the previous year. In fact, it would only share 0.3 miles of trail in common.
In March of this year, I got a postcard stating that Desolation Wilderness permits would now
be available online, and a month earlier than the previous year. So a few days later (in late
March), I made the permit reservation (for a fee of $26 for the four of us).
As soon as we returned from our Yellowstone/Grand Teton trip at the beginning of August, I started
making a list of all the things we needed for our backpacking trip. The first thing I did was
order a second bear canister, since I knew the one we had would not be big enough to fit food for
a family of four for 5 days - even if two of the backpackers were small kids.
We made a couple trips to REI to pick up dehydrated meals and other supplies, but really only
started packing in earnest about 3 days before leaving. In retrospect it would have been better
to start packing sooner, but I simply didn't have the time (contrary to what you might think, I
don't do this for a living).
In the middle of packing, I started to wonder about trail conditions. Normally, I wouldn't
even consider it to be a problem hiking under 10,000 feet in mid-August. But I knew that this
had been an extraordinary winter, with more snow than usual and also late snow. So a day or two
before we were supposed to leave, I started scouring the web for Desolation Wilderness trail conditions.
I checked Flickr (since you can search photos by date), but nothing of note came up. I found the
desowv.org Desolation Wilderness trail conditions page, which is excellent. It relies on trail
user reports and summarizes conditions for each zone (the wilderness is split up into 45 zones).
Every zone had a report, although most of them were from July. Since we were going in mid-August
and the snow was melting fast, I knew conditions would probably be better than the troublesome-looking
reports I was reading. For example, a July 31st report said that crossing the Rubicon River near
Camper Flat (which we would have to do) was not advised. I was beginning to worry that maybe we
should find alternate plans. But I tracked down a forum user on
www.highsierratopix.com who had been there more recently, and he said it was in fact easy. That
eased my mind a lot. Still, I couldn't find reports for every place we'd visit, so we'd just have
to be prepared for river crossings and snow and make the best decisions we could when we got there.
In retrospect, if I had thought about it a bit earlier, I would have started looking at trail conditions
a couple weeks before, and perhaps sent out some inquiries to see if anyone had been there.
A Tuesday night of packing turned into a Wednesday morning, and then Wednesday afternoon. We
finally left the Bay Area around 4:15pm, still not having completely packed, but with pretty much
everything we needed at least dumped into the car. We did make one brief stop at the REI in
Concord, as we needed to buy Jared some new Keen sandals (he'd outgrown his older pair). Since I
knew we'd be crossing rivers and streams, I felt it was a necessity for this trip.
We stopped in Davis for dinner, then checked into our Lake Tahoe hotel around 10:30pm. Lake Tahoe
is about 30 minutes past the trailhead, but it has the best accommodation options in the area. I
suppose we could have stayed in Placerville or Pollock Pines, but that would not have provided us
with an extra night of acclimatization to the higher elevation.
At the hotel, we tried to finish as much packing as we could before getting some sleep.
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