Shannon and I had been planning to do a longer backpacking trip in the late summer. Unfortunately, some deadlines at her work got moved around and conflicted with our original late August / early September date. Then California’s wildfire season reared its ugly head and the Forest Service once again closed a vast swath of the state’s public land to all access in mid September. We hoped to get this trip in after the closure was lifted, wanting to visit either the Great Western Divide or the Evolution Region of the central Sierra. However, around the time of the forest service closure, a lightning storm swept through the southern Sierra and ignited the Colony, Paradise, and Windy Fires. By late September these blazes would swell to two 100,000+ acre fires (the Colony and Paradise Fires merged into the KNP Complex Fire), closing most of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and lofting smoke over most of the southern and central Sierra Nevada, depending on the wind direction.

At this point it was really becoming a game of whack-a-mole trying to slot a weeklong outing into a schedule increasingly consumed by personal obligations and natural disasters. That’s what vacations are supposed to be about, right? We thought about heading north or east to avoid the worst impacts of the fires, but by mid-September the Sierra are just about the only major mountain range that are still somewhat comfortable within a couple of day’s drive of California. So we cooked up a plan to try and get this trip done by threading the needle between fires to the north and fires to the south and wildfire season at the start and winter at the end. We planned to do a week-ish heading south from Tuolumne Meadows and doing the south loop of the Yosemite High Route with some time for side trips up some of the many SPS peaks in the area.

Anticipating this possibility, I had reserved a backpacking permit heading out of whatever trailhead I could get in Tuolumne Meadows (Budd Creek) for a couple of Saturdays in a row. September 25 was the date that ended up working out. So I set about packaging up all of the food and gear we’d need for a couple of days before so we could get going on Saturday morning.