The night was not as cold as we feared, or maybe we were better prepared. One of those two for sure because we mostly slept through the night before waking up to brave the cold for a cup of coffee in the morning. Even though we knew the air temperature was probably lower in the morning, the sunlight and warm coffee did wonders and we were eating breakfast and packing up before long.

The previous night we had researched a route to get from Bernice Lake to join the Yosemite High Route. I have an e-book copy of Secor downloaded onto my phone for exactly this purpose. We plotted three possible candidates: the easiest and least adventurous would be to drop back down the Lewis Creek Trail to the Isberg Pass Trail, follow that south to the Lyell Fork and then climb up Hutchings Creek, a second option was to again cross Vogelsang Pass and wrap around to Ireland Lake, cross the ridge of Amelia Earhart Peak, and join the route near Maclure Lake, finally the most direct route was to climb to the head of Lewis Creek to a pass with the very encouraging name “Hell Hole” then traverse across to Russell Pass and drop down to Hutchings Creek. Armed with only the descriptions in Secor and my previous knowledge of Russell Pass, we chose the last, most adventurous option. So, after our morning routine we packed up and headed up Lewis Creek for Hell Hole.

Bernice Lake from above under cloudy skies.

Looking across the Lewis Creek drainage at impressive Parsons Peak.

The travel was easy for most of the way to the upper lake just below Simmons Peak, with only periods of talus. Beyond there there were some more meadows before it transitioned to the rock-hopping we expected. The spectacular views more than made up for the tougher travel.

Shannon climbing towards Hell Hole. From just below we had spotted another group traversing the crest of the mountains. We had spied them just south of Simmons Peak scrambling over talus. They were atop Peak 12,480+ when we got to Hell Hole, but we needed a break so we waited for them to reach us so we could see what they were up to.

Looking across the ridgeline towards Yosemite Valley from Hell Hole.

The group of three traversing the ridgeline made it down to us and after some back and forth shared that they were attempting the Convoluted Bliss traverse, a 51 peak link-up connecting Emeric Peak with Quartzite Peak and all of the summits in between. This traverse has only been completed once before, so I was pretty surprised to hear they were attempting it in late September. But, they had already experienced some gear failures and needed some replacement shoes, so they said they’d duck off at Russell Pass and head for Tuolumne. They shared their beta for the traverse from Hell Hole to Russell Pass with us: it wasn’t mentioned in the guide so it should be easy.

Mount Maclure from Hell Hole. While we had initially planned to drop a little bit on the east side of the pass and cut across, we decided to climb to peak 12499 and traverse across instead.

Looking down the ridgeline towards Bernice Lake (obscured) and Vogelsang Peak, with an impressive morainal lake below.

The ridgeline splits just west of this peak, with Mount Florence, an SPS-listed peak that we hoped to climb the next day on the left.

Mount Maclure and the Maclure Glacier to the south.

After traversing a little bit towards Russell Pass, we thought we saw a shortcut down a chute to the lakes below us and started heading down. It quickly became quite steep and quite loose, so we climbed back up and crossed the ridgeline to continue traversing to Russell Pass.

Nearing the pass. The weather was threatening to do something, but seemed to be holding for now. When we reached Russell Pass we wasted no time before heading down to Lake 11572. This side of Russell Pass isn’t hard, but there are a couple of class 3 sections to negotiate. As we descended, some snow flurries began. We hoped it wouldn’t turn into anything more serious.

We soon reached Lake 11572 and were happy to be on easier terrain. We refilled water bottles at Lake 11572, accompanied by a flock of small birds who were enjoying the shoreline as well. Then, we continued heading down for Hutchings Creek.

First glimpses of the impressive timberline lakes along Hutchings Creek. These stunning lakes are rarely visited, so solitude is almost guaranteed, especially when snow threatens in late September. We found a campsite among the lakes, somewhat sheltered from the wind we anticipated to blow in from the west and did our evening routine setting up camp, filtering water, cooking dinner, etc. It was cold already, we figured the temperature hadn’t climbed above 50, maybe even lower today, and it was going to get colder no doubt.

Just before sunset, the cloud level dropped down and obscured the peaks around us.

Looking south at impressive Peak 12113 at sunset.

Looking up towards Mount Maclure (obscured) and the route we had followed around Peak 12358 earlier.

After dinner, a cotton candy sunset played out in the skies and I pulled out every trick in the book trying to keep warm to get some photos of it. The temperature was in the 20s maximum, and a biting wind was blowing from the west. I sipped whiskey, did jumping jacks and pushups, sipped some more whiskey, but I couldn’t make it through the end of the colors. Before the colors and cold had come out in force, I had boiled a full nalgene of water to help keep us warm in the tent on what we expected to be a very cold night, so just before sunset I joined Shannon in our 30 degree sleeping bag with a boiling water bottle tucked between us hoping it wouldn't be much worse than the previous night.