Day 6 of the High Sierra Trail: Crabtree Meadow to Guitar Lake

Unknown's avatar
by meghikes
Comments 11

DAY STATS:
Date: Saturday, August 7, 2021
Mileage: 3 miles

Day 6 of the High Sierra Trail started in a certain type of mayhem that I’m sure all backpackers have experienced at least once in their lives. Around 5am, I woke up to the mayhem that it is an unexpected and immediate bowel movement. Like immediate immediate. I FLEW out of the tent, rummaged around for entirely too long in my bag trying to find my toilet paper and flashlight (that was the last time I made that mistake – always go to bed knowing where your TP is), and began my panicked sprint to the pit toilet. All fear of mountain lions was trumped by the fear of not making it in time, and after (what felt like) an entirely too long hike to the pit toilet, I finally made it and thankfully, it was available.

Moral of the story: always know where the TP is, maybe scope out where the Crabtree Meadows pit toilet is in advance, and remember that anything can happen when you have five days of backpacking food in your stomach.

Anyway, soon enough I was back in my tent after a very eventful start to a less eventful day.

We let ourselves wake up naturally since we only had three miles to hike, but since we had been going to bed so early after our long days, we were all up before 7am. We enjoyed a leisurely morning at camp before starting to hike out at camp before starting to hike out around 9. We had debated leaving so early – our campsite at Crabtree was extremely shaded and comfortable, but I remembered having trouble finding a campsite at Guitar Lake when I had hiked the JMT (no shade, not a ton of flat spaces, lots of campsites smelling like pee, and Guitar Lake being the staging ground for every Whitney hiker who is coming up from the back). We decided it would be more helpful for us to have a good spot at Guitar Lake in preparation for our summit, and decided to hike out in the morning.

The hike from Crabtree to Guitar Lake does actually gain quite a bit of elevation, but I feel like you are so filled with adrenaline that you don’t even notice. I had forgotten all elevation gain from my JMT hike, and as I write this blog, I’ve already forgotten all elevation gain from the HST. We arrived at Timberline Lake by 10am (sososo beautiful!!), and arrived at Guitar Lake by 10:30am.

We arrived to a few empty tents of hikers that were up on the mountain, as well as a few tents with hikers that were preparing to summit the next day, but for the most part, it was super empty. We snagged a spot that had a big boulder next to it in attempt to get some shade, but the effort was pretty futile. We had heard of a few tarns up past Guitar Lake that had water available, and debated pushing onto them, but we figured that we would set up “camp” now and explore without our packs. A fairly large girl scout troop had left Crabtree before us and there was no sight of them – we knew that they planned to go up to the tarns and we were a bit afraid there wouldn’t be much room if they were using those camps.

We set up our rain fly without the tent, which ended up being the best thing we could have done for shade. The breeze was able to flow through nicely and it kept us as cool as we could be in the hot sun. Our day was spent reading books, playing card games, and attempting to fill our water bottles. Without our sponge that we had borrowed the day before, our pump was back to barely filtering any water. It got so bad that Erin actually decided to use iodine tablets instead of wasting anymore energy on our pump.

Eventually, we looked up the trail to find the girl scouts coming back down the trail! We yelled out to them and they said that there was barely any water at the “tarn campsites” – the promised water was really just a seasonal trickle of water flowing over the rocks. They weren’t comfortable drinking from it, so they decided to come back down to Guitar Lake to make sure they had enough water for the summit the next day. We sure were glad that we didn’t make the trek up to the tarn!

We also noticed, slowly but surely, that the horizon started to get a bit hazy. Every once in awhile we would get a small smell of smoke as well. We were so glad that we had our GPS device that allowed us to text – we were able to text our family to confirm that there were no fires in the area. The smoke that was rolling in was from a fire all the way up in Lake Tahoe! I was so grateful that we had texting capabilities, as that would have given me mad anxiety for the rest of the day.

Eventually, all the hikers that we had camped with at Crabtree arrived at Guitar Lake. Some of them were planning on leaving at night for a true sunrise hike, but most of them were planning on leaving around 3am, like us, for an early morning summit. All of us were filled with adrenaline, and the buzzing energy was palpable.

After dinner, we hiked up a hill towards Arctic Lake for a beautiful sunset and some peace reminiscing on our journey that was so close to coming to a close – but not before one last sprint to the finish line.

Day-by-day Journal:
Day 1: Crescent Meadow to Bearpaw Meadow
Day 2: Bearpaw Meadow to Precipice Lake
Day 3: Precipice Lake to Moraine Lake
Day 4: Moraine Lake to Junction Meadow
Day 5: Junction Meadow to Crabtree Ranger Station
Day 6: Crabtree Ranger Station to Guitar Lake
Day 7: Guitar Lake to Whitney Portal

Planning:
Your Quick and Dirty Guide to the High Sierra Trail
My Complete Packing List for the High Sierra Trail
The High Sierra Trail on Film
Getting To and From the High Sierra Trail
Tips and Tricks for the High Sierra Trail