At the lower elevation, it was a warm night, and we slept soundly. After another meal of "that shit", we quickly broke camp and headed back across the river, as this was to be a busy day.
Our first order of business was to head over to the nearby Muir Trail Ranch and pick up our food shipment. The Ranch offers a wonderful service whereby, for a fee of $45 (steep but worth it), they'll receive a package at the post office at Florence Lake and then bring it into their backcountry ranch. Without this service, the post office would be five miles and a ferry ride away. The Ranch requests that all food shipments be packaged in five-gallon buckets (for mouse protection) and this, therefore, imposed an upper limit on the amount of food we were able to send ourselves. It was this limitation, in fact, that caused us to have to send a package to Red's Meadow, as we needed to pick up food for ten days. That's a lot of food, and though I repacked it over and over, I just couldn't fit it all into the bucket.
When we got to the Muir Trail Ranch, we checked in with the caretaker Russ and picked up one of Julian's high-capacity video batteries we'd left off there the night before for charging (the Ranch has a small hydroelectric generator running off the river). Russ was an interesting character - the amicable sort you'd expect to find at a backcountry ranch - and he told us some stories about his experiences hiking the JMT, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail, all in their entirety. That's a total of some 5,000 miles of trail, and it made our measly little 200 miler seem insignificant by comparison.
Since it had been well over a month since I'd packed the bucket, we spread all the food out on a picnic table at the Ranch and conducted a complete inventory. We did this in part to figure out exactly what was there in relation to what we were still carrying, but we also made a decision to jettison all extra food beyond what was needed for the allotted days remaining. We had been carrying an extra set of meals for emergencies, but we had both a weight issue and a bear storage issue with all the new food, and we finally decided not to carry more than what we needed. By paring down the food, we assured ourselves of only having to counter-balance food for two days at Evolution Valley, and after that everything would fit into our bear canisters.
With the addition of about fifteen pounds of food in each of our packs, we trudged up the dusty trail leading up the canyon toward the mouth of Goddard Canyon, which would lead us to Evolution Valley. It was nearly 10:00 by then, and the day was starting to warm up.
After about three miles of flat hiking, we came to a point in the trail both Julian and I had been anticipating the entire trip - the northern entrance to Kings Canyon National Park. This falls at the confluence of Goddard Canyon and Piute Creek, which drains out of Humphrey Basin, where we had hiked two years before. As beautiful as Yosemite and the northern reaches of the trail were, everything in the Sequoia/Kings region of the south Sierra is somehow bigger, more dramatic and even more thrilling to live in. In many ways, we'd paid our dues and the real trip could now begin.
As if an omen, Julian found a size 11 left men's running shoe within five feet of entering the park. His left foot had been giving him the most trouble, and the thing he needed most of all was a shoe that would give his poor toes some breathing room. This shoe fit perfectly, and we decided to bring it along.
The walk up Goddard Canyon was breathtaking, gorgeous, spectacular or astounding - take your pick. The trail winds along the edge of the riverbank up a twisting canyon that is punctuated by stark rock formations and old trees - an easy and picturesque hike.
After three miles, we stopped for lunch at a bridge just below the switchbacks heading up to Evolution Valley, then headed up the short but steep 1,000' climb. En route, we met Paul and Milly - both from Connecticut - who graciously agreed to call Julian's partner Kate (who would then call my wife Ginie) with a status report. We had both hoped somehow that there would be a payphone at the Muir Trail Ranch - a foolish notion brought on by too much time in the creature comforts of urban America.
I was eighteen when I first heard about Evolution Valley. It was the first summer after starting college, and I was working as a camp counselor at nearby Huntington Lake. During a day hike in the Kaiser Wilderness Area, a fellow counselor had taken me up onto a ridge, pointed to the east and told me of a place of extraordinary beauty called Evolution Valley. That remark has stuck with me ever since, and I had always harbored a desire to go there. Because of this, I walked into the Valley with extremely high expectations.
Our hike that day was only about ten miles, but between the weight of the new food, my back problems and Julian's swollen toes, we were very tired by the time we got to our camp in McClure Meadow. Paul and Milly had told us about a very special campsite at the entrance to the meadow, and we were happy to find it vacant when we arrived.
The camp was located in a grove of trees at the west end of the meadow. By stepping a few feet out into the meadow from our camp, a truly stunning scene was revealed before us. The meadow itself was made up of tall, yellow-green grasses, and down the middle flowed a nearly flat creek, which meandered its way from a point far off in the distance. The meadow was ringed by a set of high, jagged peaks which are all named after important figures in the science of evolution - Goethe, Darwin, Lemark and Mendel, and then punctuated by a single high, conical mountain in the foreground, which is appropriately named "The Hermit." To complete the picture, tall, perfect conifers sweep down the mountainsides on both sides of the meadow. The beauty was amazing, and we would find as we stayed there through the next day that the feeling of the meadow changed with the weather, the time of day and the light. Evolution Valley was everything I had been hoping it would be for the past 22 years.
As a fitting finale to our special first day in the Kings Canyon park, we had a clear sky that night, and were reminded that we were to have the privilege the following night of watching a full moon rise over the valley.
Photo: Evolution Creek
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