The wind continued all night, but we broke out our earplugs, so it wasn’t much of a problem.

Mount Williamson from the Shepherd Pass Trail.

The hike down to the trailhead was uneventful. We passed a few groups headed up, most intending to climb Williamson. We reached the Shepherd Pass parking lot around noon to find no one around. Fortunately, we had prepared for this and knew it was only 3 or 4 miles to the much busier Onion Valley road. So, after a brief rest, we kept on walking down the road. We passed a crew doing work on one of the gauges on Symmes Creek, where we stopped to fill water, but they said they couldn’t give us a ride.

When we reached Onion Valley Road, there was enough traffic that it didn’t seem worth continuing walking. But it still took an hour or so until the campground host at Grays Meadow offered to drive us up that far, and then another hour-ish until a PCT trail angel stopped for us and brought us back to our car. At the end of the day, it took us about 4 hours to get from Shepherd Pass to Onion Valley.

We threw our things in the car and turned north, intending to use the seventh day we had budgeted for our hiking trip for some day hiking and hot springs in Mammoth.