This trip report covers a 10 day hike of the Southern Sierra High Route that my wife and I undertook in mid-to-late August, 2020. This route is described in great detail, and a free guide is provided on Alan Dixon’s website. With this trip report, I’ll try to offer my experience of the route, add some additional details that I feel are missing from Dixon’s description, and of course share some photographs. I hope you enjoy reading about my trip!

This was the biggest backpacking trip of the year for my wife and I. We planned carefully to be able to take a full week off of work in mid-August of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic raised some questions about the feasibility of this trip in the spring, but by early summer it seemed pretty reasonable to go hiking in California.

We considered a few options for this trip, but it boiled down to basically another exploratory trip to the Wind River Range of Wyoming, or one of the three documented High Routes in the Sierra that I had yet to hike: The Sierra High Route, The Southern Sierra High Route, or the Kings Canyon High Basin Route.

The Kings Canyon High Basin Route was ruled out because we were interested in exploring the highest mountains along the crest of the Sierra. We didn’t have time for the full Sierra High Route, or want to deal with the logistics of a section hike from Roads End, so the choice was between the Southern Sierra High Route and a section of the Sierra High Route north of Bishop Pass. We chose the former for the higher, more impressive terrain.

The Southern Sierra High Route (SoSHR) is a roughly 100 mile traverse of the Sierra Crest between Bishop Pass and Horseshoe Meadows that mixes sections of the John Muir Trail (JMT) with sections of off-trail hiking. Alan Dixon (a.k.a. Adventure Alan) provides a detailed route description and guide on his website. The route is marketed as an alternative to the Sierra High Route or John Muir Trail.

Briefly, the route starts at the Bishop Pass Trailhead and crosses Bishop Pass before following the Sierra High Route section through the Palisade Basin, down to Palisade Lakes, and over Mather Pass. From here the route follows the John Muir Trail for 30 or 40 miles to just south of Junction Meadow (S), the low point between Glen and Forester Passes. There’s an alternate in this section that leaves the JMT just south of Pinchot Pass and rejoins it just north of Glen Pass. South of Glen Pass, the route is largely off trail, traversing high basins and criss-crossing the Sierra Crest just east of the JMT. It summits Mount Whitney via the Mountaineer’s Route and follows the Whitney Trail south past Trail Crest, before leaving the trail again to cross Discovery and Crabtree Passes and enter the Miter Basin. It rejoins the trail at Rock Creek and exits to Horseshoe Meadows via New Army Pass.

In total, the route is 90 miles climbing 31,000’ and of course losing the same amount. Of those 90 miles about 44 are off trail (using the Mount Baxter Alternate), though that’s measured with CalTopo so one should assume it’s an underestimation. The route summits Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States, and there are ample opportunities for additional summits along the way - we added two more. Dixon’s website points out that the SoSHR has 14 passes over 11,000’ in elevation, compared with the JMT’s 4, and the SoSHR crosses the Sierra Crest 8 times, compared with the JMT’s single crossing. In all, it’s an impressive line along the highest part of the Sierra Crest.

As you’ll see, the conditions on this hike heavily influenced our experience. Going into the trip, we expected little impact from lingering snow or mosquitoes as it was late in the season. However, the weather forecast for the beginning of our trip gave us a bit of concern. A decaying tropical storm moving in from the Pacific was expected to bring unstable weather over California, with good chances for thunderstorms over the mountains and beyond. Meteorologist Daniel Swain tweeted “Major fire weather threat…” on August 15. If only we had known back then. But, all the information we had at the time was that we were likely to see some thunderstorms for the first few days on our hike, an easy enough hazard to avoid in the Sierra.

We were able to head to Mammoth Lakes a week before our hike to help acclimatize. We worked the whole week and benefitted from sleeping at 8,000’ and running and hiking in the evenings at 9,000’+.

In spite of this, we didn’t start our hike on the fittest foot. The day before we were to start, I came down with a bout of food poisoning and spent most of the day resting. While it would have been nice to delay our start a day, anyone who backpacked in the Sierra in 2020 knows this wasn’t an option due to the restrictive permitting process. Fortunately, I felt progressively better all day and was well enough to walk the next day. We did decide to sleep in the next morning to give me a bit more time to recover, which led to a late start on our first day.