Not So SoSHR…

I’ll just quickly chime in that Jacob, Joe, and I made the decision Not to do the entire off trail portion of the SoSHR because of several factors :

1. we had a time constraint of 7.5 days
2. the half day spent off route on day 1 drained a bit of our energy
3. on day 3 a pattern of thunder and lightning storms began. Since we had no way to know how bad these would get, we chose to spend the remaining time on trail rather than on unfamiliar off trail terrain.

But all in all, the 3 of us had a great time together, thanks Jacob and Joe.

Great report.  Three of us did a similar trip last year and had to cut parts short as well.  We particularly enjoyed the section around Wright’s Lake, Lake Tulainyo, Boy Scout Lake, and up the mountaineers route.  We cut short by skipping the remaining section down to Horseshoe Meadows though and just exited at the portal.  We fortunately had a little better weather than you did.

Rad Jacob.  I’d love to get up there with you on one of the return trips.

Great pics and sounds like a fun trip!

I’m planning a SoSHR/partial SHR trip starting later this month – start at South Lake, over Palisade Basin, over Mather pass, (pick up southbound SHR here) up Frozen lake pass, Lakes Basin, Marion Lake, Grouse Lake, down Copper Creek trail to Road’s End (pick up resupply here), up Bubbs Creek to southbound JMT, (pick up southbound SoSHR again here) via Golden Bear Lake, over Junction Pass, Wallace lakes, Tulainyo Lake, to Upper Boy Scout, Whitney via Mountaineers’ route, down to Miter Basin, out Horseshoe Meadows.

We’ll see how the weather and I hold up……

As usual, great write-up and photos (on your site, not BPL, which seems to deteriorate by the day).

But I especially like your positive spin on the failure.

What failure? They saw great country, they did some off trail hiking, they had a good time. The ‘failure’ is just measured by what they had planned, which was entirely mental. The reality was a success on its own terms.

Jeffrey,

I appreciate your sentiment but the choice to use “failure” was mine, and was a deliberate one. Casey correctly picked up on the point I was trying to make, which is – failures don’t need to be looked at as negative things. People who set goals fail, it just happens and it’s ok. I have written my thoughts on the subject of failure before, and I am proud to wear my failure as a badge of honor that shows I at least tried.

Our goal was to hike the SoSHR and to add a couple of lofty variations to it. We failed to do that, and it’s totally ok.

Thanks to all who took the time to read the report.

It’s nice country out there and I think all of us got to see some new places on this one.

Craig, I will ping you when the occasion comes back up. I’m hoping to fit something in before the snow comes…

+1 with Craig, Jeffrey and Casey.