Final Thoughts
(really, the final thoughts… after this I’ve pretty much exhausted my ramblings for this trek)

What to say…

I did it!

Not everything went as planned. It took longer and I hiked further that I had thought I would. But that’s nothing new. The secret to successful backpacking is to expect the unexpected. Shit happens and you just have to be ready to deal with it or find a way to abort out of the wilderness if the shit gets too deep.

But being able to do this long trek will encourage me to do more longer hikes. So far the only ones that come to mind is to hike the PCT northbound from Tuolumne Meadows (how far north is still an unknown), maybe part of the Colorado Trail next year, and a longer stretch of the Japan Alps (if not the entire north and south Japan Alps) in 2022.

So, I’m not done yet.

Would I do anything differently during this trek if I had the chance?

Yes, but then it would have been a different experience and might not have been as successful.

There are plenty of times that I wished I’d pushed myself a little harder to reach certain spots for a campsite that might have had a better view. But since every day is connected, stopping too early or pushing to reach a particular spot may have caused the trek to extend out even longer than it did. And each changed stopping point would have caused the next day’s stopping point to shift as well. I could have ended up with an entirely different experience that skipped some of the best campsites that I camped at (some by chance and some by pre-trek research of good camping areas).

I probably shouldn’t have taken a whole zero day at Muir Trial Ranch. In retrospect it was too long. Maybe I could have stayed at Marie Lakes for night 12 instead. That would have still gotten me to MTR mid-day for resupply on day 13. I could still have enjoyed the hot springs and a single night camping in the area.

But changing the timing and length of my stop at MTR could have caused me to NOT camp at McClure Meadows on night 14. THAT would have been a major blow against my enjoyment of this trip.

And if the timing of previous campsites had led me to continue past Muir Pass to camp at Helen Lake or beyond? Sure, that could have allowed me to miss camping at Wanda Lake in the middle of several thunderstorms, but then I’d have missed the great views around that lake for sunset and sunrise.

The next spot I’d have hated to miss camping at was Lower Palisade Lake. Getting to camp at Marjorie Lake would have been nice as would staying at Rae lakes. Getting closer to Forester Pass before camping would have given me some nice sunset and sunrise enjoyment.

But every time I try to second guess my decisions that I made on the trail, I find that it would have been hard to still stop at some of the campsites I thought would be great places to stop (either based on pre-trek research or of what I discovered when hiking the trail) AND then still be able to stop at some of my favorite camping spots that I did stop at.

Every day led to the next and every choice of where to stop and camp led to the next day and the next choice of where to stop. And so on and so on…

And the final major choice not to try to be on the summit for sunrise could have ended badly if I had tried to stay overnight at the summit or if I had tried to hike up to the summit before sunrise.

My choice to prioritize finishing the entire JMT over seeing sunrise from the summit allowed me secure the ultimate goal for this trek.

The summit is still there and I WILL return to Mt Whitney to enjoy it’s beauty and challenges again.

I’ve already penciled in doing the JMT AGAIN, but this time northbound. Not next year, though. 🙂

And I can use the southbound trek as reference to pick and choose places to camp. So consider this a research trip for my northbound JMT trek. 🙂

And since I won’t be worried about ‘completing the entire JMT in one trek’, I can take as long as I want and just abort if I get bored of the scenery. Not too much chance of the later. 🙂

My Body

I was pleasantly surprised at how well my 54 year old body held up to 25 days on the trail with over 260 miles added to my odometer.

My feet had various aches and pains over the course of the trek (and for a few weeks after), but never had any major problems. I did have to make a point of getting off my feet at the end of the day to help give them a break.

I never really had any major problems with calluses, bunions, or skin peeling from my feet. The very bottom of my big toes did have a small amount of peeling skin, but it never expanded or exposed more skin as the trek went on.

Around the middle of the trek, I did have some skin rubbing on the back of my left heel. I used some bunion band-aids and boot adjustments (tying them a little tighter) to help prevent any serious problems.

My little toes did get squished into the toe box in my boots during some of the steepest descents. This caused my toenails to crack and cause some pain. Besides clipping the nails as short as I could and wrapping some small band-aids around them several times, they didn’t cause me any further trouble.

I did notice sometime after MTR that the bottom of my feet were noticeably ‘flatter’. The flesh on the bottom was compressed to the point where instead of rounded toes, they were flat on the bottom. The heal and the ball of my foot were noticeably flatter, as well. They returned to their usual rounded shapes after a week or so back in the real world when I was only walking around a half mile a day. 🙂

I attribute a lot of my success in keeping my feet in good shape to using Injinji liner socks under my SmartWool thick hiking socks. The liner socks have individual toes that wrap around each toe and prevent a lot of rubbing against each other and the outer sock. In the 4+ years I’ve used them, I have rarely had any problems with bunions or calluses. And what I have had were very minor in comparison to what I used to have to deal with.

I had gotten some special first aid tape that thru hikers use for protecting their feet, but I ended up never using it on this trek. I actually only used some to help seal some leaks in my water filter system, so bringing it wasn’t a complete loss. 🙂

My knees have been a trouble spot for me on long hikes, especially with lots of climbing and descending (which there was a LOT more of during this trek than even on Kilimanjaro).

I usually wrapped sport tape around my knees to help stabilize them. I’ve found that helped a lot to minimize the pain and keep my knees moving. But over 21+ days that would end up using a LOT of sports tape.

So I looked for options and started using some cloth slip on fabric knee sleeves which had plastic braces on the sides. They helped stabilize my knees and helped support my legs to take some stress off my knees. After they worked well in Yosemite, I was confident in using them for my JMT trek.

And they did work great! I just had to slip them on every morning and forget about them. I did have to rinse the dirt off them a number of times, but beside that there was really no maintenance or problems with them (unless I put them on backwards, which I might have done once… or twice) .

I used NO sports tape at all on this trek. NONE.

Of course, my legs and knees did get tired and sore during the trek. No magic solution to that when you’re hiking 10+ miles with a full pack almost every day).

But once the day’s hiking was done, I made a point of laying down in my tent on my air mattress to take the weight off them. I’ve found that sitting on a rock or my bear canister around camp doesn’t always allow my legs to really relax and recover. That’s one of the reasons I try to set my tent up somewhere with a great view.

I also made a point of soaking my feet and legs in cold creeks or lakes when I could.

I did have a problem with the skin around my fingernails cracking pretty badly. At first, I thought it was just dirt buildup, but as the trek went on, the cracks were definitely getting bigger and causing me some discomfort. I did my best to keep my hands clean and used some band-aids on the worse ones, but didn’t have to do too much.

In retrospect, I believe the cracking was caused by the Sun. When I hike with my trekking poles my hands and fingers are in front of me with the sun shinning directly on them. I believe it was a form of sunburn.

Although I apply my sunblock lotion using my hands, I never really made a point of spreading it on my fingers and many times I would wipe the excess lotion off my hands when I was done. I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I do a long trek like this.

Speaking of sunburn… I never really had any problems with it. I did get pretty dark tan on my head and arms, but my sunblock lotion and spray seemed to keep me pretty well protected.

The only time I had any problem with the skin on my face feeling burnt or hot was after taking a long shower at Reds Meadow. While that could have been sunburn from a long day hiking down to Reds Meadow in the full sun, I think it was mostly due to me scrubbing a bit too hard and long in the shower. 🙂

It was fine the next morning and never really had any further pain on my skin for the rest of the trek.

I did have a challenge keeping my skin and hair clean. I took the opportunity to take short swims in lakes or creeks when I could, but the weather and the opportunity to have access to those only meant I had a half dozen chances to do a full swim to clean the surface dirt off.

I did do a morning ritual to brush my teeth and also soak a towel in water (when enough water was available) and use it to scrub my hands, face, and hair.

Every 3-4 days I also tried to use a 3 gallon plastic bag to get some water from a lake or creek and carry it away from the water so the soap and dirt wouldn’t flow directly back into the water. I used some biodegradable soap to wash my hair. My hair has always been oily, so normally I really needed to wash it every day, but that wasn’t always possible on the trail (and I rarely felt like doing it that often). So, I washed it when I could and hid it under my hat the rest of the time. 🙂

After the shampooing, I also used the soap and water to scrub down my hands and face (and to a lesser degree the rest of my body). I managed to get a lot of the dirt off, but it was usually short lived since I’d get pretty dirty soon afterwards.

And finally, I also used that soap and water to clean off my dirtiest and smelliest clothing. That usually was my two hiking t-shirts, my socks, and my underwear. Not necessarily in that order. 🙂

While quick rinses of some items at the end of the day also helped, the major soap cleanings kept me from passing out from my own stench. 🙂

The only major body pain I experienced that had me worried was when my right hip started to hurt badly starting on day 14. I took a little Ibuprofen for that for a couple of days, but the main thing that helped was adjusting the balance of my backpack as I hiked.

That was when my backpack was at it’s heaviest with 7 days of food, once the weight dropped down after 3-4 days I never had any more problems with hip pain for the rest of the trek.

So, while it was not free of pain, soreness, and overall tiredness, overall my body survived in pretty good shape.

I even lost 15 pounds over the course of the trek!!

Unfortunately, I put 4 pounds back on in the 4 weeks after I finished my JMT trek.

If only I could do a 266+ mile trek every month. 🙂

My Gear

Over all, my gear did it’s job, kept me safe, and got me through the whole trek.

The only two major gear failures that could have ended my trek early or caused me great bodily harm were my broken trekking pole and my troublesome water filter.

Since I went into detail about these two items in my JMT daily reports, I won’t repeat everything here.

Breaking my trekking pole on day 10 was a pretty scary moment. Thankfully, my trekking pole took the brunt of the fall and my body didn’t incur any damage.

My decision to repair it and trust it to get me to the Muir Trail Ranch and then to continue to finish the JMT with it turned out to be a successful choice in retrospect. It could have gone really bad, of course.

I probably should have gotten the heavier pair at MTR, but the weight of my equipment was a very big worry of mine at that point. I knew that with the 7 days of food I’d have to carry south from there that my backpack was going to be pushing 50 pounds.

Having 2.5 times the weight in my hands on top of that seemed like a bad choice. Having to get used to the feel of the different trekking poles and the extra weight led me to take my chances on the repaired pole.

My problems with my water filter could have also ended badly. I don’t think I ever thought I should abort the trek because of it, but after I found the workaround to squeeze the water through it using my backup squeeze bag and into my Camelbak and Gatorade bottle I did have to mentally accept the possibility that the filter wasn’t actually filtering the bad stuff from the water any longer.

But I thought that the chances of a water borne illness was still pretty low and at least using the suspect filter was probably a safer bet than dipping and sipping the water directly.

Life is full of risks and chances taken.

Other than those two major problems, everything else was (or seemed) trivial:

• A slow leak that developed in my air mattress caused me to have to blow it up a couple of times during the night (3-4 times by the end of the trek). I kind of wish it was a big leak that I could have found the source of. Instead, I duct taped all around the valves (since that was the most likely location of a slow leak), but that didn’t help.

• My backpack: I used a needle and thread to keep the mesh back pocket usable for the most of the trek. A clip on one of the straps on the backpack also broke, plus some other prior repairs started to come undone over the 25 days. So, I know I will have to retire the backpack now. I had been looking for a replacement earlier in the year, but could never find one that I liked, that was light enough, and that felt right. The search for a replacement will continue. Maybe I’ll try the new version of the Exos 58 after all.

• Loosing about a liter of Gatorade when my Camelbak cap didn’t seat right.

• A bad pepperoni stick.

• Patching a few holes in equipment with duct tape.

As far as clothing, I usually carry 2-3 short sleeved T-shirts and a long sleeved T-shirt to wear on my treks. That allowed me to rotate the T-shirts to avoid too much dirt and stench to build up. To save weight, I only had one of each on this trek. The smell was overpowering at times, but I also got used to it enough that it wasn’t a distraction on the trail. Back at camp they were the first things to be taken off, of course. 🙂

I did have both a lightweight and a heavyweight thermal shirt with me, but most of the time those were used to wear at camp and then to sleep in. So they didn’t get that dirty or smelly. I could have probably left the lighter one behind.

My convertible hiking pants served me well on the trail and quite often I’d have to take the legs off as the day heated up. I did have to sew up a few minor rips on the backside. Again, I had a lightweight pair of sweatpants and pair of heavy fleece pants that I used around camp and to sleep in.

Besides wearing two T-shirts on the trail in the morning, I didn’t have to layer my clothing during this trek. Fortunately, it never got that cold. Even in the mornings I rarely started hiking with my rain jacket over my T-shirts. So I might have been able to do with just the fleece pants to sleep in (it was usually cool enough overnight to need them), but having the lightweight pair to change into at camp was a nice change from the hiking pants.

I started with 2 pairs of underwear and got a third during my Tuolumne Meadows mini-resupply. I tossed the dirtiest pair at Charlotte Lake and finished with just two.

Pretty much the same for my socks: Started with two of each of my thick hiking socks and two of my liner socks and added a third of each at TM, plus adding one pair of liner socks at MTR. I also discarded two liner socks along the way as well as one of the thicker pairs at my final resupply. I credit being able to rotate the liner socks often during this trek as being one reason my feet held up so well.

My rain jacket got a good workout and in retrospect I didn’t really need my rain pants (despite the rain). Even on the days I had to hike through the rain, my hiking pants never got wet enough to justify needing the rain pants. So maybe it was a good choice to discard them at Reds Meadow to save on the weight, but that’s only in retrospect. BUT if I had any rain at Trail Camp when the wind was blowing me and my tent around, they would have been very useful.

I only used my down jacket for the occasional middle of the night trips to a bush, for my predawn photos and breakfasts, and occasionally to sleep in when it was just a bit to chilly for my sleeping bag alone to keep me warm. Before the trek, I actually briefly had the thought not to bring it when I was looking for weight to save. But it was a very brief moment when I thought about it. Since it barely weighs anything and I knew I would spend a good deal of time at high altitudes (most of the trek was over 10k and never got below 8k once I climbed out of Yosemite Valley), there was no reason not to bring it and all the reasons in the world to bring it.

I had three towels with me: A small cooking towel that I used to hold hot stuff, clean cooking gear off, and it had a scrubbing side to get any stubborn food of my cooking pot and spoon. A larger towel was used for drying me off after taking a swim in a lake, washing my hair, or wiping the rain off of myself after setting up camp. I actually didn’t end up using this larger towel much. When I took a swim, the sun would usually dry me off pretty quickly.

The final towel was a small towel that I used as a washcloth and a cleaning cloth on the trail. I attached it to one of my backpack straps while on the trail. I don’t usually carry one, but for this trek I wanted to keep my T-shirts as clean as possible. Which meant not using the T-shirts as a general washcloth on the trail (cleaning my glasses, wiping my face, using as a mask, and blowing my nose). That last item was why I started to call it my snot rag. 🙂 Backpacking isn’t always glamorous.

My tent held up great against all the storms, rain, and wind it was subjected to… until the last night. While the damage the strong winds that blew throughout the long night at Trail Camp wasn’t severe and would be easily fixed with some new paracord on the rain fly tie-downs, it was a bit annoying that it happened on the last night of my trek. But better than the first and even if it was earlier in the trek I had plenty of spare paracord to use to fix it on the trail.

My new MSR 1.3 liter cooking pot that I bought to allow me to cook instant Ramen without the water boiling over like it usually did in my old .7 liter cooking cup worked out well. Not only did it boil the 16 ounces of water I needed and cook the Ramen well, I found that it tended to allow me to boil water much faster than the old cup did. I think it’s the larger surface area on the bottom that helped heat up the water quicker.

This had the added benefit of reducing how much cooking gas I had to use during the trek. I had planned on bringing and using 2 100g Isobutane Canisters for each of the four legs of the journey, so 8 total. I only ended up using 4 altogether (and they never fully ran out before I discarded them at my resupply points). So while I always had a 2nd backup canister with me, it was never used.

Food

Food is very important to any hiker, even more so for thru hikers since you are very aware of how much everything weighs and the balance you have to make between bringing too much and not bringing enough.

I think I did pretty good on my planning.

I made a point of adding more to each resupply package than I thought I’d actually need during each resupply, knowing I could always discard any extra I didn’t think I’d need for the next leg based on how much I used during the last leg.

I ended up tossing a good deal of my trail snacks along the way. Mostly, they were pepperoni sticks and Clif Shot Blok Gels, but I do usually carry a package of bacon jerky I use when I’m rushed for breakfast or just need some bacon. I used 3 out of the 5 I had carried or put in my resupply packages. I also use the trail snacks for lunch, since I’ve never been one to cook for lunch on the trail and I never felt the need to pack separate lunch food.

Before my trip when I weighed the Ziplock bags full of white powder (Gatorade), I was a little surprised at how much they weighed (I’d never bothered weighing individual food items before this trek). Regardless of the added weight, I knew I needed that little extra kick Gatorade gave me on the trail and it was nice to have something to drink other than plain, filtered water. I used most of it along the way and even kept adding whatever small amount was left from the previous leg to the next leg’s supply. I think that was the only food item I never threw out any of during this trek.

For my breakfast and dinner meal, I stuck with what I knew from prior backpacking trips. I did have to scramble when Mountain House changed their Breakfast Skillet recipe. Fortunately, I found some of the older recipe so only had to eat the new stuff a couple times (since I had already packed and shipped the resupply packages when I finally found the old stuff).

I know a lot of people dislike Mountain House backpacking food, but having tried a number of different brands and types of food I’ve chosen what I like and that work for me on the trail. Still haven’t found any kind of pizza I could re-hydrate on the trail, though. 🙂 Well, I actually did find some small pizza slices that you could heat up years ago, but it didn’t taste good at all.

Stroganoff, lasagna, instant Ramen, breakfast skillets, scrambled eggs, and granola were some of my go-to meals. I also found some seafood chowder MRE meals a couple years ago that are very good as long as you get the water just right (12oz instead the listed 16oz). They do take up more space than most of the other meals, so I usually ate them soon after the resupplies. I hope I can find soem more to buy, since I’m almost out of the stock that I had bought.

In the end, I had a great time, saw a lot of great things, accomplished a major goal, and completed a trek that 10 years ago I would never had even the tiniest passing thought that I could do.

Heck, I only started backpacking 5 years ago because I had set my sights on climbing Mt Whitney and didn’t think I could handle a day hike of Whitney.

I still don’t know if I could do a day hike of Whitney… but I will probably try some day.

Trying is the first step of doing, after all.